Urban Renewal
The homes of low-income people in cities were destroyed in the post WW2 (1950-1966) period called urban renewal. Urban renewal meant displacement for many neighborhoods with majority BIPOC residents. This destruction led to the displacement and scattering of communities.
This process happened in Newark New Jersey where a community was demolished to build a medical center detailed in the interactive resource Uprooted.
Uprooted: How Newark Acquired a Medical School and Destroyed a Neighborhood | Interactive
See photos and hear voices from former residents of Newark New Jersey displaced for a Medical Hospital.
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Slow and Sudden Violence (Ebook)
Slow and Sudden Violence follows displacement in Baltimore and St Louis with one family being displaced 4 times in under 80 years. Derek Hyra links police violence to an ongoing cycle of racial and spatial urban redevelopment repression. By delving into the real estate histories of St. Louis and Baltimore, he shows how housing and community development policies advance neighborhood inequality by segregating, gentrifying, and displacing Black communities.
Gentrification
When residents were displaced, many develops purchased lots and rented and sold them to wealthier residents in a process called gentrification.
Part of gentrification was keeping wealthier residents feeling safe and insulated from urban distress and poverty. This meant an increase of police targeting low income deviance (e.g., sleeping outside, public intoxication, trespass). Read Police and Affordable Housing Collide in Charleston about how "alongside the increase of property values was an increase in arrests for offenses like loitering, disorderly conduct, and drug possession."
In addition to displacement, Gentrification Is Making Us Sick: Envisioning Healthy Development without Displacement
Displacements
Urban renewal displaced families across the US. The University of Richmond's interactive map, Renewing Inequality, visualizes urban renewal related displacement. From 1950-1966, over 28,000 families were displaced in New York City. And closer to home, over 1400 families were displaced from Hartford and over 60 families were displaced in Norwich.
The displacements often looked like bulldozed houses.
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Renewing Inequality: Urban Renewal, Family Displacements, and Race 1950-1966For a quarter century, the federal government provided funding for cities large and small to raze "blighted" or "slum" neighborhoods. Though improved housing opportunities was the ostensible goal, over time, cities used federal funds to stimulate commercial and industrial redevelopment. Through these programs, cities displaced hundreds of thousands of families from their homes and neighborhoods. Renewing Inequality visualizes those displacements and urban renewal more generally.
Watch changes to the urban environment through urban renewal in CT including the replacement of housing with highways. Before Urban Renewal in Hartford, Mark Twain praised the city "It is more beautiful than any other excepting Worcester."