The Scourge of Urban Renewal

"Urban Renewal" is a "free lunch" program that empowers the powerful, and enriches the rich. It pursues policies demanded by large corporations, which are private tyrannies, and the industries they comprise, to gain monopoly control over everything in our lives. The goal of power-and-money is straightforward: the world, nature, and people need to be discarded or exploited at will, to further accumulate power-and-money.

In the United States, with rare exceptions, "urban renewal" is just another government program, another piece of infrastructure, that was built for capitalism, imperialism, and exploitation. It's a program unencumbered by any social, community, or human values. It's an engine of destruction: for neighborhoods, ecologies, small businesses, worthy charities, and historic, functional, affordable, self-sustaining local economies. Its only goal is to provide a tool that governments can wield for the benefit of the real estate industry. It wipes out affordable commercial space, affordable residential space, and home ownership. It drives up land prices through government intervention, and dislocates the 'underclasses', at public expense, to the enrichment of investment-backed developers, corporate landlords, and other big-business executives. It saps local government of the ability, funds, and will, to do anything positive for its residents. It is a mechanism by which the current accelerated stage of capitalism, growthism, and autocracy, is eating the planet, one city at a time.

But "Urban Renewal" can be stopped.

It was stopped once, in Eugene, Oregon, in 2007. The downtown Urban Renewal district, after causing so much damage, was defunded. It wasn't used for nearly 15 years, and then only sparingly. Unfortunately, the City government then proceeded, with the State of Oregon, to use deregulation as a hammer, to hurt the ability of city residents to resist the onslaught of capital control.

Here's the story of stopping "Urban Renewal" in Eugene.

"Urban Renewal" is still being used, but now we need to stop and reverse deregulation, too.

If they are stopped, perhaps cities can be transformed back into places that value quality-of-life. In defeating them, we can replace the impoverished "urban vision" of the "Urban Renewal" promoters with something truly good.

But that will take the creation of truly participatory, bottom-up, community-driven, deliberative democracy within cities.

See Urbanology