'Urban Redevelopment Areas' are a potent legal tool for municipal leaders pursuing many worthwhile aspirations for their city. Redevelopment designation is the legal mechanism that famously confers the power of eminent domain over property, upon a basic showing of either 'blight' or a more general 'need for economic development,' depending on the jurisdiction. In my recent Rutgers Law Review article (see: http://pegasus.rutgers.edu/~review/vol63n1.php ), I contend that the law confers too much power on local leaders, ultimately harming the cities that courts wrongly assume are being helped.

Notorious redevelopment (or 'renewal') practices date back to around the time of the first landmark case, Berman v. Parker, where a Washington, D.C., department store was forced to leave because it did not fit within the comprehensive Corbusian plan that the City was pursuing to replace extant low-income neighborhoods. The Supreme Court held that local governments could take and destroy everything within a generally slum-like neighborhood, including homes and businesses in perfect condition within that area. The floodgates permitting the infamous slum clearances of the 1950s and 1960s, which destroyed so much traditional urban fabric that would be coveted today, were opened when the court wrote: "redevelopment programs need not, by force of the Constitution, be on a piecemeal basis—lot by lot, building by building.”

Since Berman, almost every major city has seen several square miles-- sometimes much more-- of neighborhoods taken by eminent domain and replaced with housing projects, modernist upscale housing, factories, arenas, and casinos (above and beyond all of the neighborhoods destroyed for interstate highways). Detroit eradicated its lower east side ('Black Bottom') and its Poletown, in extremely notorious fashion. Newark laid its famous Little Italy to waste. New London, Connecticut, created an urban prairie when it took historic homes in its Fort Trumbull neighborhood-- the subject of the Kelo v. New London case, which is the modern bookend to the practices begun in Berman v. Parker. Thanks to the powers identified in Kelo, a new basketball arena and associated developments are rising in the Atlantic Yards district of Brooklyn, with scores of residents in the up-and-coming neighborhood having been displaced. And Newark once again turned to eminent domain (in 2004-2005) to build its new downtown arena, but its slash-and-burn approach stifled additional development around the arena, with a large downtown urban prairie and sea of parked cars comprising the redevelopment area today.

Almost any awkward and detrimental interruption in the urban fabric of our older city centers can be explained by the use (or more likely misuse) of eminent domain under the banner of 'redevelopment.' These practices over the years explain how cities came to their current state. By clustering the poor into housing projects and reducing the amount of stable neighborhoods of ideal density, safety, and walkability, attempts at 'renewal' actually helped to create the 20th Century urban crisis. Even Detroit, for all of its regional economic divestment, can point to poor decisions regarding its land use in explaining its shrunken condition.

Considering the routine failure of urban redevelopment to actually improve outcomes in urban cores, the outdated notions of slum clearance which justified the creation of these powers 60-80 years ago, and the ongoing and potential use of this power by ambitious local leaders to destroy even more urban fabric, I have proposed an elimination of the Berman power through simple legislative amendments (the Supreme Court reminds states that they may curtail the broad powers it conferred in Berman and Kelo). That is, the idea of the 'redevelopment area' should be allowed to die: the law should no longer allow local governments to declare a 'need for redevelopment' based on regionally generalized criteria to thereby attain the power to destroy non-blighted, productive properties because of their unfortunate location. The implications of this ongoing practice in terms of basic fairness, not to mention on the identity of our historic cities, are immense, I argue. Furthermore, the concluding sections of my Rutgers Law Review note contend that ending this process of mass demolition followed by mass building is a huge step forward for preservation and sustainability. It prevents waste of embodied energy, prioritizes rehabilitation efforts, and restricts new construction to appropriate infill situations.

Toward Successful Urban Revitalization: Why New Jersey Should Relinquish Some of Its Berman Power to Bulldoze for “Redevelopment,” in the Fall 2010 edition of the Rutgers Law Review, provides a simple introduction to the law, reviews historic and current usage of these controvesial powers in cities (with a special focus on Newark), and utilizes urban theory and economic studies to explain why organic and piecemeal urban revitalization is better for cities-- and the sustainable economy. It is available here: http://pegasus.rutgers.edu/~review/vol63n1/Biglin_EIC.pdf


Downtown Newark Redevelopment Area

Urban prairie in Newark, New Jersey, created by the previous mayoral administration's overzealous taking of land in pursuit of the 'redevelopment plan' associated with the new Prudential Center arena.