American Dream

[Begin comments]

This op-ed article from the Washington Post Outlook section "tells it like it is," and is consistent with my own knowledge of the Southwest area of the District of Columbia. Had I written this, I would have added that a major reason for all of that urban renewal in this part of D.C. was planning for the Metrorail system, an effort that dated back to the 1960's, in particular the Green Line, which was eventually built through these neighborhoods, but did not open until the 1980's, long after the "urban renewal" projects had torn down the old and replaced it with the new.

The late Julius Hobson, Sr. a liberal D.C. activist (no, I did not agree with many of the stands that he took, but I respected him deeply anyway) and later politician of tremendous integrity (unlike some of his peers) used the term "Negro removal" (he may have been the first to use it) to describe what went on in the Southwest area of D.C.

[End comments]

A Wreck of a Plan
Look at How Renewal Ruined SW

By Charlotte Allen

Sunday, July 17, 2005; Page B01

Quotes:

When I read about last month's Supreme Court decision permitting the city of New London, Conn., to use its power of eminent domain to seize working-class homes so that developers can build a waterfront office, residential and hotel complex, my first thought (after pitying the homeowners who thought that their property rights meant something) was: Oh no, not another misbegotten urban renewal program.

That's because I live in Southwest Washington, where nearly every day I contend with the wreckage -- architectural, socioeconomic and cultural -- from the first time the Supreme Court issued such a ruling. That was the 1954 case of Berman v. Parker, allowing a public entity to seize the heart of the District of Columbia's southwest quadrant -- a huge swath of working-class homes and businesses -- so that developers could build . . . a waterfront office, residential and hotel complex.

The sorry truth is that governments aren't very good at rejuvenating neighborhoods. Revitalization is strictly a job for the private sector, as our own experience here in Southwest Washington is proving.

Then there's our marina. In most localities, the yacht docks are high-end real estate, crowded with boutiques and eateries. Not in Southwest, where, courtesy of Berman v. Parker, the land abutting the Potomac docks is owned by the National Capital Revitalization (that word again) Corp. (NCRC), a District-chartered quasi-government agency and successor to the federal agencies that seized the waterfront back in the '50s. Right now, the waterfront is a concrete wasteland of unused parking lots, untended trees and a couple of big-box restaurants and nightclubs.

The NCRC also owns the land under what the planners decided in the late 1960s would be our economic magnet: the Waterside Mall. Perhaps it's the '70s architecture, glaringly hideous even by New Southwest standards, or the vast Soviet-style rear plaza that blocks off Fourth Street physically and cuts it off psychologically from the rest of the District, but Waterside never flourished. The mall was half-empty even before its major tenant, the Environmental Protection Agency, relocated in 2002 after years of begging and pleading to be allowed to move to Federal Triangle, where there's more civilization.

Around the same time, the NCRC devised a plan with two developers to tear down the mall, reopen Fourth Street and build an attractive constellation of office, street-level retail and residential space. But that plan went on hold in February, perhaps indefinitely, when the putative anchor tenant, Fannie Mae, beset by regulatory and financial problems, retracted its commitment to lease space there.

It's tempting to dismiss Southwest as an aberration of the hubristic urban planning of the 1950s, except that hundreds of smaller-scale eminent-domain-fueled redevelopment projects have followed relentlessly in cities across the country, including failed "Renaissance" centers in Pittsburgh and Detroit. Think of Detroit demolishing the entire ethnic neighborhood of Poletown in the 1980s to build a General Motors plant that never delivered on its promised 6,000 new jobs. The District now proposes to knock down homes, warehouses and bars for the new stadium (which is at least arguably a genuine public use). In Anacostia, the NCRC last week filed a condemnation suit against the Skyland Shopping Center, whose unglamorous but viable community-serving businesses (laundromats, fast-food outfits, a Murry's Steaks) are to be replaced by a presumably higher revenue-generating shopping complex -- even though the intended Target anchor store has yet to commit to move there. Given the NCRC's track record, Skyland could remain a vacant lot for decades.

Author's e-mail:

charfleur@aol.com

Charlotte Allen is a Washington writer and co-editor of the Independent Women's Forum online blog, InkWell.