nothin Urban Renewal, Re-Re-Re-Considered | New Haven Independent

Urban Renewal, Re-Re-Re-Considered

Lizabeth Cohen spent years studying New Haven’s fraught experiment in trying to wipe out poverty — and emerged with a lesson.

The lesson: What happened was more complicated than people believe. And as cities try again to tackle their challenges, government is part of the solution, not the problem.

Cohen, an American Studies professor at Harvard, arrived at those conclusions while researching and writing Saving America’s Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019).

She spent countless hours poring through Logue’s voluminous papers at Yale, detailing how he oversaw New Haven’s first wave of mid-20th century urban renewal as then-Mayor Dick Lee’s deputy.

Logue largely messed up in New Haven, thanks in part to then-reigning notions about architecture, urban design, demolition vs. historic preservation, and democratic decision-making, Cohen concludes. But the experiment was more idealistic than is understood, and not all of it failed. Logue went on to apply those lessons in overseeing the development of the new” Boston in the 1960s and then the rebuilding of the South Bronx in New York.

Kathleen-Dooher Photo

Lizabeth Cohen.

People have used the experience of cities like New Haven, which grew poorer after spending record amounts of federal government and private foundation dollars, to justify allowing private developers to call the shots in public policymaking, Cohen said Monday in an interview about her book on WNHH FM’s Dateline New Haven” program. That was the wrong conclusion to draw, she said.

You can’t trust private interests to protect the public good,” Cohen argued, quoting Logue. Cities have been beholden to what developers want to do for too long. We have to get people to have confidence again in government.”

One challenge back then remains today: How does government make truly democratic decisions? Logue and Lee believed in pluralistic democracy”: consulting with leaders of established interest groups, from the NAACP to the Chamber of Commerce. The collapse of urban renewal in the 1960s and early 1970s led to critiques about the limits of that approach, the wisdom lost when more parts of a community don’t get heard. But the subsequent emphasis on participatory democracy” has produced its own limits, in which certain voices of people who, say, show up at public meetings drown out what might in fact be more representative views. One result, Cohen said, is NIMBYism.

Whoever shows up at a public meeting — is that the voices we should listen to? If a group is neighborhood-based, how can they take the full city into account? And the needs of the city as a whole?” she asked.

I think the only solution is there need to be many people at the table,” and private developers shouldn’t be able to dictate high-impact public decisions in return for concessions like a set-aside of affordable housing or local hiring.

To hear Cohen’s full case, tune in Wednesday, May 12, at 6 p.m. when she speaks at an online event hosted by the New Haven Museum. (Details here.) For a preview, you can hear the WNHH interview in the above video.

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