This week, Charlotte city council voted to support a highway expansion project through uptown Charlotte. It will have a devastating geographical, economic, and ecological effect on the surrounding area, though it will be a boon for a small number of builders and consultants. The I-77 toll lane project will not solve congestion, but it will allow the wealthy the opportunity to buy their way around it. However, the lengthy approval process included a $300M promise (one might say bribe) that would give long-marginalized communities the basic infrastructure they should not have to bargain their lives away for. I’ve written more about the project and its politics here and here.
I wanted to write about the decision, but I’m so angry and can’t afford to make more enemies than necessary at the moment. And also, I’m so sad. In part because of this result, and the effect it is sure to have on my city. And in part because of my own impotence, as an organizer, researcher, and writer. I think of Cassius, speaking to Brutus in Julius Caesar: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.”
Perhaps that is too harsh a judgment upon myself. The powers are arranged as they are, and a person of my inclination is unlikely to bend them too frequently. That the politicos saw the problems created by urban expressways and thought “we should do more of this, surely by making this problem bigger it will go away” is not something I can be individually responsible for.
All that is a long introduction to me saying that below is a piece I published a couple of years ago and am re-submitting into the world, with a handful of updates. I wish it did not fit the moment so well.
I’ve given a dozen or so talks about Our Trespasses over the past six weeks since its release. I’ve been thrilled to see people engaging with the stories and the theology in the book. I’ve gotten lots of questions and comments, some of them quite insightful. But one comment has been the most frequent–some variation on it comes up at almost every presentation I’ve made, either during Q&A or afterwards in my email. It goes something like this, usually via someone I know to be very nice: “I know urban renewal was bad, but without it we wouldn’t have the Charlotte we have today.”
Since the comment keeps coming up, I think it is worth a public response. Here it is:
“You are correct. Without Urban Renewal, we wouldn’t have the Charlotte we have today.”
The Charlotte we have today is the most difficult large metro area in the United States for children born poor to get out of poverty.1 Without urban renewal, things could be different.
The Charlotte we have today remains wildly segregated, both by race and by class. Urban renewal reinforced segregation in urban planning and architecture. Without it, things could be different. now
This morning it took me 25 minutes to move 4 miles across town by car. Using transit would have taken well over one hour.2 Without urban renewal, we could have had a city with reasonable transit alternatives.
It was 84 degrees on the first day of April, one of the growing symptoms of a climate nightmare. Low density urban areas like Charlotte are ecological disasters, and yet locally we have a city council determined to make density harder rather than easier. Urban Renewal, ironically, went hand-in-hand with building the massive suburban sprawl that characterizes so many American cities today.
So yes, without Urban Renewal, we would not have the American cities we have today. On the whole, I take this to be a good thing.
Here’s a photo of Cincinnati before Urban Renewal:
The same spot after:
Here’s one Kansas City intersection before:
And after:
(These photos are from this Twitter thread by the account culture_crit, which often has fascinating architectural photos.) [Update: I got off Twitter a while ago. I have no idea if that account still exists.]
“I know it was bad…”
It was not bad, as in, garden-variety bad. It was not bad like when you are hungry but the line at Taco Bell is long. It was not bad like when your favorite sports team is stuck with a losing roster and poor management. It was not the casual inconvenience of a fender bender or even the more significant but manageable problem of falling behind on your mortgage.
Urban Renewal was the violent destruction of people’s environments and institutions.
It was, in the image of Mindy Fullilove’s important book Root Shock, digging up productive gardens and then watching the plants struggle to thrive.
It was a solution concocted by people who had no clue what the problem was.
It was an enormous land grab.
It left scars on our cityscapes that appear permanent–though they are not. If you can build an urban highway, you can also tear one down. More permanent, though, are the scars on the minds and hearts of those displaced.
“We.”
Who is the “we” that is the subject of the statement, the we that has this magnificent city?
They are the descendants, either literally or figuratively, of the white liberals I carefully documented in Our Trespasses. The liberals were the ones who were so keen on accessing federal Urban Renewal funds to begin with. When early in Charlotte’s Urban Renewal the project was near failure, it was liberals who rescued it, kept it going, and then expanded it. When conquerors moved into a Black neighborhood seized by force, they thought of themselves as enlightened white moderates leading a multicultural future.
Things have generally worked out for that we, of course. There is a magnificent skyline, a giant stadium, a long string of neighborhoods with boutiques and fine dining. There are tall steeples with gorgeous stained-glass windows that obscure the suffering across town. There are symbolic acknowledgements of the giant land grab without having to give anything back.
That we has Charlotte, in the possessive sense. They own the place. The rest of the suffering masses are left to struggle for an ever-shrinking number of places and opportunities.
The genteel assumption that the violent destruction of hundreds of inhabited acres of urban neighborhoods was kind of bad, but ultimately defensible, testifies to deformed souls. That’s a perplexing kind of problem.
In “Discourse on Colonialism,” Amie Cesaire writes that the malformation of the souls of the heirs of conquest is an essential problem to understand:
“First we must study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism….” As the essay continues, Cesaire points to how the savage nature of colonial logic–and that is what Urban Renewal was–eventually leads to fascism. Which, if you haven’t noticed, is a very real possibility in the future of American politics.
On top of all of everything, there’s the paucity of imagination: do you really think our current arrangements are as good as it gets? That the result of those bulldozers was some inevitable progress that cities were destined to achieve? Of all the many possibilities, it is hard for me to believe that more than a handful of people are content with our present conditions. The most sought-after parts of American cities are the ones that did not suffer Urban Renewal projects. The results have been almost uniformly awful. The willingness of residents to accept the brutal urban environments that popped up following Renewal projects is a curse upon this land.
Large-scale change is hard. It feels overwhelming. So I think it is important to imagine, at the detailed, micro level, of what is missing: sidewalks where children can play; the elderly safely crossing the street; bumping into friends; the joy of picking up a quart of fresh pecans from the neighborhood tree and gifting them to the new resident on the corner; old buildings full of memories that call us back to our best selves.
One Last Note: Today is the John Coltrane centennial. I have had a piece planned for this day for months, but it is not done yet. I will publish it when it is. I would appreciate everyone not making massive and horrifying infrastructure, development. or theological decisions until I can get it completed.
Until then, here’s one of about 1000 tracks I could select: