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Urban Renewal in New Haven, Ct

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Urban Renewal in New Haven, CT

Education is a number one factor when it comes to planning for the future. Whether you’re a parent, teacher, grandparent, or a high school senior rummaging through college trip packages looking for the median between your perspective lifestyle and your SAT scores. There is an unidentified common ground that is correlated between education and where the education being received is located. A parent may want to send their child to a specific school because of a good district, good reviews, or even because the housing in the area is affordable for them. Another reason would be that the location is the best place their children can get an education for what was bargained in terms of schooling fees. A prospective college student may choose a school based on the programs offered that would aid towards their career path, the student may want to study abroad, they may want to be outside of the normal environmental climate, or simply just because they want to establish life in a specific area. But who is to say that the community in which the education is received in is also a big part of the student’s life. The interaction between the student and the surrounding neighborhood can be very crucial to an extent.

Whatever the case may be location is a key aspect when choosing an education system for your needs. However there have been instances where this correlation may not have turned out to be the best for some families. To be precise in the last two decades there was an urban renewal project that took place in the city of New Haven, Connecticut. This particular area called The Hill was undergoing gentrification rapidly. In the documentary called The Hill, we saw how the processes of urban redevelopment was carried out in this city. About 123 houses were demolished to make space for a new school in the city of New Haven. But at the same time 123 families were destroyed, displaced, and just out of luck due to an urban renewal project brought forth by the mayor John DeStefano.

Urban renewal can be defined as a physical change to a part of land or also a change of the environment. Change in terms of the land would entail taking a building and making a different use for it, different functionality and even to the extent of just changing the whole infrastructure of the land being occupied. The urban redevelopment programs designed are set up to stimulate the ideology that a community needs help or improvement. A community may show signs of deterioration due to crime, a downfall in economic or physical conditions as well. This would then trigger for the officials of the city to carry out various plans that would help to better to community as a whole. But does urban redevelopment really help the community in a positive aspect? To further the question which exact community are we trying to help? Is urban renewal the type of help that needs to be set in stone? First we must get in depth insight to comprehend the means of enduring the understandings of the advantages and disadvantages of urban renewal.

Generally when the officials of a community believe that a neighborhood is declining or deteriorating due to drugs, crime or homelessness, they take various actions to try to influx the middle class and displace the lower class citizens. Robert Moses was spoken about all semester long. He was mostly famous for carrying out the most of his work in selected positions in New York City. He overseen and planned out projects of both the Triborough Bridge Authority and the public housing projects. Moses is also noted for transforming New York City into a place dominated by automobiles. He frequently recommended demolishing older, poor neighborhoods in order to carve a path for an elevated highway. Moses had authority over nearly every public construction project underway in New York City. He created the Cross Bronx Expressway, demolishing thousands of homes in its path. The public began to realize that the term "urban renewal" meant "slum clearance." Moses ran into difficulty with a project where six blocks in New York City were destroyed in favor of new development.

New Haven is home to one of the richest Ivy League schools in the United States of America. Yet according to statistics it is one of the poorest cities (Vulliamy 2002). The city has the highest unemployment rate in the state and a high concentration of low-income families. The low income and high unemployment rates in the city have contributed to problems of crime and drugs. In the middle of the 20th century the city of New Haven would see acres of wrecked urban areas cleared, its citizens were removed from their homes and relocated to reconstructed parts of the city. In its place new buildings and traffic patterns were built to replace them. The first urban renewal project was the Oak Street neighborhood. This project saw the clearance of about 40 acres of slum area, to be replaced with a mile-long, four lane connector highway that would link the central business district of New Haven with two brand new interstates. (Jackson 2008).

Very similarly to the Oak Street Connector project was another urban renewal project which was documented in the film called in The Hill. In the film it was unknown by whom this project was orchestrated by. There were many fingers pointed at the then mayor John DeStefano Jr. who did not want to conduct an interview for the film. However the film does suggest that DeStefano spent $1.5 billion to rebuild the schools, but of course that it what he did to assist with his campaign on the road to becoming governor (Bass 2013). In the documentary you can see then neglected homes in the area, signs of drug-dealing and prostitution and some homelessness. One you not be opposed to the urban renewal projects to basically allow the neighborhood to do a 180 turn for the better. But there must be better routs to plan to make a neighborhood cleaner and safer place to inhabit. A whopping total of 94 families were destroyed in the urban renewal project. The government had incentives in place for these families to be moved out, but many of them could barely afford where they were already living yet alone move to a different location. Some of them had even payed off their mortgages, and with the new projects they would have to go out and seek a new home which would then create more bills and put these families in debt (Elwood 1994). The saddest thing to comprehend with this whole plan is that every single one of these families were low-income families, barely making enough to strive and living in a bad neighborhood.

In the documentary we see that they destroyed a community in order to rebuild new magnet school to combine two schools in the community. The buildings were becoming inadequate for the children to continue their education. Just to look in a different point of view in how the project was carried out, yes they did need to rebuild the community as well as the need for a better building for the students to attend. But there could have been many ways to assess the problem without resorting to such an urban entrepreneurialism approach. Such as, dividing the schools and dispersing the students into other buildings while they rebuild the building that are already placed on the map. Simultaneously they can create better programs and have a different teams go into to the neighborhoods and properly make it environmentally better in hopes of decreasing the crime rate and the homelessness. In the end result it may increase the land tax of the people living in The Hill, but it wouldn’t displace the families that have already been occupying the neighborhood. Moving forward towards the future, citizens of a community must strive to emulate these hard enduring lessons. We also must keep in mind that there are the human consequences of the financial risks involved in such an undertaking.

Citations
Bass, P., 2013. New Film Reveals A Crime. Where’s The Villain? New Haven Independent.

Elwood, John P. (1994). “Rethinking Government Participation in Urban Renewal: Neighborhood Revitalization in New Haven.” Yale Law and Policy Review, 138 (12) pp. 138-183.

Domhoff, G. William (2005). “Who Really Ruled in Dahl’s New Haven?” http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/local/new_haven.html

Isaacs Jackson, M., 2008. Model City Blues: Urban Space and Organized Resistance in New Haven. Temple University Press, Philadelphia.

New Haven Oral History Project, 2004. Life in the Model City: Stories of Urban Renewal in New Haven. http://www.yale.edu/nhohp/modelcity/about.html

Vulliamy, Ed (2002). “US in denial as poverty rises.” http://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/nov/03/usa.georgebush

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