Book Club Week 3 Recap: Under the Magnifying Glass

Week 3 of our Book Club on Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law has us asking “how can something called Urban Renewal be so destructive?” To get started on this topic, we showed a magnifying glass map tool to look at neighborhoods that existed in the city before the Urban Renewal heyday of the 1960s. Then, the government used its power of eminent domain to declare neighborhoods blighted and razed them to make way for big redevelopment projects including highways. The favorite target of this policy: strong middle-class minority neighborhoods like Atlanta’s Sweet Auburn. It is by design that the highway hooks and cuts right through this neighborhood.

Perhaps, the saddest image to see under the glass is a once-thriving street grid full of homes, churches, trees, schools, and businesses only to move the glass and see it today as a parking lot. Nothing demonstrates the advantages we give rent-seeking and wealth-extracting players better than the support for this least productive of all land uses. Urban renewal and eminent domain eventually made it to white middle-class neighborhoods like New London, Connecticut. There, property owners sued the City for taking their land for private development that promised to create jobs and increase tax revenues. In 2005, the landmark Supreme Court case Kelo v. New London ruled that land could be taken for the purpose of economic development. To this day, the promised redevelopment projects have not happened.

In our small group discussions, we reflected, almost in memoriam, on the neighborhoods sacrificed in favor of projects such as the Atlanta Civic Center, Georgia Dome, parking lots, I-20, I-75/85 Connector, and Frankie Allen Park. These public-private partnerships of the 20th century extracted wealth from stable integrated communities in town and transferred that wealth to white only suburbs. And that wealth gap grows every day. We asked the question “what do racist and classist policies look like in the 21st century?” One participant summarized that today’s wave of gentrification is reverse white flight. Another pointed out the impact of coordinated government effort like in English Avenue and Vine City. Public investment, motivated by political will, desire to increase property values, and decrease crime, sends signals to the FIRE industry (finance, insurance, real estate) that the neighborhood is being readied for their capital. Public housing is demolished, real estate is gobbled up, rents go up, and money pours in all the while backed by public debt. Long before we notice changing economics of the neighborhoods, we are well on our way to repeating the same patterns of wealth extraction and displacement as generations before. Unless we do something about it. What are we going to do about it? Stick with the book club as we’ll get to that.

Today we live the legacy of policies put in place 100 years ago. This conversation with our neighbors inspires us. It gives us hope that we can learn together from our mistakes, make better policy, and hold each other accountable for decisions. Reconciliation is within our reach. At stake is the next hundred years. Will our City grow and change in an equitable way? What will Atlantans see under the magnifying glass in 2120?

Stay engaged!

Thursday 10/15 12-1pm: Chapters 9-10.

Thursday 10/22 12-1pm: Panel Conversation.

Another Color of Law book club chance Sunday 10/18 2pm with King Williams

Harvard Black Cast’s production of Lorraine Hansberry’s Play A Raisin in the Sun