The Disposition Problem in Urban Renewal

Abstract

The culmination of an urban renewal project is the improvement of the project real estate. This is true whether the improvement be renovation of existing structures, the simple replacement of old structures or vacant land with new construction, or the basic redevelopment of an entire area, including streets, utilities, and public services. Immediately preceding in the chain of events is the sale of the property by the Local Public Agency (LPA). Generally speaking, everything which has happened up until this point is of dubious public benefit unless it is followed by redevelopment. Filled-in low lands,' extinguished underground fires,2 and the like, stand apart from the usual clearance project in which, up until the time property is sold to a private redeveloper, the net result has been to dislocate families and businesses, scatter church parishes and neighborhood groups, remove property from the tax rolls, and leave in the wake of these accomplishments gutted buildings and rubble-strewn lots. If urban renewal stopped here, it would have few proponents.3 With this background one might think that urban renewal would be regarded as an assembly line, the beginning being labeled Preliminary Planning and the end Disposition. If automobiles were passing along such an assembly line, there would necessarily be a direct, absolute, and constant relationship between the speed with which material entered or traveled along any portion of the line and the speed at which the product came out at the end marked Disposition. The urban renewal program is more elastic, but the degree of the relationship that must exist on a national level between disposition and the earlier phases of the urban renewal program, and the implications of this relationship, have to a surprising extent been overlooked and misunderstood.