Definition
Urban renewal was the federal policy program, primarily under the Housing Acts of 1949, 1954, and 1965, that subsidized local agencies to assemble urban land by eminent domain, clear it, and resell it for private redevelopment. It ran in some form until the early 1970s, when its political legitimacy collapsed.
In its language, urban renewal was about replacing slums with modern housing. In its practice, it cleared neighborhoods of poor and often non-white residents, replaced them disproportionately with office towers, luxury housing, and institutional buildings, and produced very little of the low-income housing it had promised.
Why it matters
How it works
A federal program that pays for demolition and writes down land prices for redevelopment will tend to choose targets that are politically weak rather than physically substandard. Once a neighborhood is identified as "blighted" — a legal category any local agency can define — its residents have only weak procedural rights, while the developer who acquires the cleared site has the full backing of federal law.
The structural problem is not difficult to diagnose but is hard to fix without redesigning the program from scratch. The 1960s reaction — community-organizing, environmental review, historic preservation, neighborhood-impact statements — was precisely an attempt to insert the procedural friction that urban renewal had been designed to bypass.