Was It Really that Bad?

The question people keep asking.

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. 

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 Kansas City before:

And after:

(These photos are from this Twitter thread by the account culture_crit, which often has fascinating architectural photos.)

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“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.

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“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.

Charlotte Museum of History: I’ll be giving a talk this Thursday in conversation with historian Nolan Dahm. Register here:

Book Update: Our Trespasses has done well so far, but there’s a long way to go yet. We sold out the first printing, which is excellent news! There has been lots of good engagement in Charlotte. The challenge now is to move that beyond Charlotte, so that this book finds its audience around the country. You can help in these ways:

• Work with a local body to read the book and then dig into your own history.

• Invite me to speak. I’d love especially to join in conversations with local organizers in your place who are working against the legacy of Urban Renewal and for housing and neighborhood justice.

• Leave an Amazon review or make a social media post. That may sound simple, but all reviews and engagements with your circle make a big difference in getting the work in front of more people.

Common Good Podcast: With my friends at Common Good Collective, we hosted a conversation about my new book a few weeks back. The brilliant Courtney Napier facilitated. Joey Taylor turned it into two beautiful episodes. Find them here. https://commongood.cc/podcast/

One Last Note: My friend Dawn Anthony sent over this song by Abbey Lincoln recently. She thought it especially poignant in light of my work on Urban Renewal.

1. This attention-getting headline from the 2014 Chetty study has since been updated and adjusted to show slightly different results. But the difference is only slight.

2. I knew I should have ridden a bicycle. I spent years commuting by bike. I enjoy it, I could have made the trip in 18 minutes, and I would have felt better when I arrived. Forgive me, dear reader.