Urban Renewal

Urban Renewal. Arising from more than a half‐century of slum clearance and urban housing reform campaigns, “Urban Renewal” was a federally sponsored and largely federally financed program that altered the physical landscapes of many American cities between the mid‐1950s and the early 1970s. Proponents promised to provide cities with funds and legal powers to tear down slums, sell the land to private developers at reduced cost, relocate slum‐dwellers in decent, safe housing, stimulate large‐scale private construction of new housing, revitalize decaying urban downtowns by eliminating “blight” (economically unprofitable districts), and add new property‐tax revenues to shrinking city budgets. Urban renewal, proponents argued, would also slow the departure of middle‐ and upper‐income whites for the suburbs.

Program implementation proved costly, complex, and controversial, and generally failed to accomplish the often contradictory goals. There were some success stories: the soaring “Gateway to the West” arch in St. Louis, Missouri, that supplanted blocks of dilapidated riverfront buildings, gleaming office towers and apartment buildings that replaced the slums bordering Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut; a “renaissance” construction of offices, luxury apartments, and a civic arena that restored the luster of downtown Pittsburgh's “Golden Triangle.” Such successes, however, often masked failures inherent in the legislation that established the program.

Title I of the Housing Act of 1949 defined “redevelopment” as encouraging private enterprise to meet public housing needs. It required local governments eager to acquire and refurbish slum neighborhoods to submit plans that focused on “predominantly residential” areas in order to qualify for federal assistance. The law did not, however, include any relocation provisions for dispossessed slum‐dwellers. Limited private‐enterprise participation, plus harsh criticism from housing advocates, led Congress to revisions in the Housing Act of 1954. “Redevelopment” gave way to “renewal,” with the focus shifting from housing toward the rescue of business districts. The 1954 act enhanced profitability for private investors by specifying that 10 percent of federal funds (expanded under continuing business pressures in 1961 to 30 percent) could go to projects in “nonresidential” areas while also calling on communities to submit a “workable program” of relocating the displaced population—a provision rarely enforced by any level of government. Between 1949 and 1970, some 500,000 more housing units fell to the renewal wrecking balls than government subsequently rebuilt. In Chicago and other cities, the stark high‐rise housing that was built for citizens displaced by urban renewal often became centers of crime, drug abuse, and other social ills. That low‐income minorities occupied most of the destroyed units lent weight to critics' fears that “urban renewal” meant “Negro removal.” Although well intentioned, urban renewal often caused more problems than it solved.
See also Cold War; Fifties, The; Poverty; Sixties, The; Slums; Urbanization.

Bibliography

Jewel Bellush and Murray Hausknecht, eds., Urban Renewal: People, Politics, and Planning, 1967.
Mark I. Gelfand , A Nation of Cities: The Federal Government and Urban America, 1933–1965, 1975.

Stanley K. Schultz