There are few worse tragedies than ones that come about by our own hands. New York City has seen more than her share of tragedies, of all sorts, and so-called urban renewal has been one of them. These experiments are mostly over for major cities, but the impulse behind them still persists, plaguing others as it once plagued New Yorkers.
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In 1949, President Harry Truman signed the Housing Act, which gave federal, state, and local governments unprecedented power to shape residential life. One of the Housing Act’s main initiatives – “urban renewal” – destroyed about 2,000 communities in the 1950s and ’60s and forced more than 300,000 families from their homes….
New York City’s Manhattantown (1951) was one of the first projects authorized under urban renewal and it set the model not only for hundreds of urban renewal projects but for the next 60 years of eminent domain abuse at places such as Poletown, New London, and Atlantic Yards. The Manhattantown project destroyed six blocks on New York City’s Upper West Side, including an African-American community that dated to the turn of the century.
The city sold the land for a token sum to a group of well-connected Democratic pols to build a middle-class housing development. Then came the often repeated bulldoze-and-abandon phenomenon: With little financial skin in the game, the developers let the demolished land sit vacant for years….
