Economic Urban Renewal Essay Example for Free

Economic Urban Renewal Essay During Urban renewal, what is in the best interest of the city is sometimes not in the best interest of many people in the City. And what is in the interest of the People is often not in the best interest of the City. Cities, or their disparate parts at varying rates, are always in one natural state of evolution or another: decline or renewal. Community organizations and individuals who have no expertise or experience in modern urban design and renewal have no place influencing the renewal agenda from an official capacity any more than a lawyer should be telling a doctor how to do neurosurgery on a sick patient. Urban Renewal and Design is a challenging and daunting endeavor even for the experts. Modern Renewal does not appease or allow a sense of entitlement by amateurs to meddle in the process from appointed political positions. Community groups with a sophisticated culture of urban economics and design should be invited into the process. A good example of this type of community group is the Design Advocacy Group in Philadelphia. Urban renewal is not a social welfare program. Social programs are already abundantly in existence for the needy in every City. Urban Renewal programs are special events. Urban Renewal programs co-opted by social activists will fail. Social programs masquerading as Renewal will eventually be exposed for what they are, with negative ramifications to follow, possibly inhibiting consideration of another renewal try any time in the foreseeable future. The same goes for political and institutional pork barrel projects masquerading as Renewal or Economic Recovery projects. Usually, the make up of the renewal board itself is a strong predictor of its direction, whether its makeup is weighted in favor of social community activists, politicians or known political cronies, representatives of major city institutions by proxy, or outside experts with no current or previous political or business ties to the region, no local constituency to appease, and with no continuing participation after achieving benchmarks. Even a so-called balanced board, that is, one that gives a seat to a representative of each of the citys major constituent groups, such as the major ethnic, political, business, religious, housing, social categories etc. may be cause for suspicion. These type of boards are mainly constituted to see that each gets its share of the pie, proclaiming unity while each pursues their own vision, going in separate directions while protecting their turf. A balanced board tends to neutralize, diminish and dilute the effectiveness of good plans in the compromising process of wheeling and dealing between groups. A balanced board that provides seats of influence to entitled non-experts is bound to fail. Body Urban renewal programs are historically almost orgiastic opportunities of cronyism and pork barrel corruption. Citizens, the Law and the Press must apply the highest scrutiny. Urban renewal is not a social experiment but a pro-business, free market enabler that attracts new businesses and residents, facilitated by physical redesign. Incentives intended to attract business into a renewal zone that contain local hiring requirements will find limited appeal, since the overwhelming majority of businesses want to be free to hire People based on their qualifications rather than their address. Urbanists recognize that individual economic and residential decisions are based on self-interest, and that successful renewal depends on the cumulative effect of thousands of individual decisions. Cities where community activists have a reputation for strong-arming new businesses will have a difficult time of renewal. The existing state of the City asks at any given moment, Why would anyone choose to live or operate a business here when they have the option to choose another locale? The City may ask the question, but only outside stakeholders can answer it. Urbanists need to identify outside stakeholders and get an accurate picture of what it will take for them to move into the City. Renewal planners must constantly adjust their plans to appease stakeholders outside the City as information suggests. Urban renewal is the removing of blight and creating high density, safe attractive walkable new neighborhoods and shopping districts through policy and design. It is for the immediate benefit of middle and upper class business owners and individuals who will settle and create a sufficient tax base to provide services in the future for all residents. These are shoppers, business owners and residents who do not yet have any presence in the City. In other words, present City residents and businesses must bite the bullet and make sacrifices for current outsiders to accrue future benefits. Every move in this direction speeds up the renewal process. The immediate target constituency for urban renewal programs lay outside the City, not in it. Todays residents will receive future benefits through others that cannot come to fruition any other way. Territorial attitudes and a sense of entitlement that attempt to keep outsiders at bay and keep benefits in will generate no benefits and further isolate Inner City poor from mainstream opportunities. Urban renewal efforts influenced by social service and affordable housing providers will come to resemble a social service program and be a complete turn-off to the regions middle and upper class. Renewal leaders who as politicians had a history of applying short term patches to long term problems, or who have a prior or newly established business relationship with large institutional beneficiaries of renewal funds, will find it hard to build trust with skeptical stakeholders, especially prominent business People with honed analytical skills. The history, business and political ties of Renewal leaders will play a large role as to informing stakeholders’ decisions. Without attracting a viable upper class from the region urban renewal is dead. Often used specious arguments by community activists such as we stayed and stood by the City during its hard times, now we deserve something†¦ is a thinly disguised parasitic, something for nothing attitude. People do not hesitate to move to a better neighborhood when they can. Renewal leaders who succumb to this victimology do the City and its good people a disservice while repelling desirable potential inhabitants. While large historical forces have shaped the American ghetto, this is the context in which some must deal with their problems, not an excuse for failure or benefits beyond the social sector. Life can be hard and harder for some, but Urban Renewal funds are not to be used as welfare funds or for public housing. That is what the local housing and welfare boards, with their separate and historical funding sources are for. Church and state are separate, the effects are happy, and they do not at all interfere with each other: but where they have been confounded together, no tongue nor pen can fully describe the mischiefs that have ensued (McAteer, 1975). No matter how many People attend church or work hard in some cites, it is a lack of architectural cohesion, wasted space in the form of parking lots and vacant lots, vandalism and other property crimes, burglary and thefts, the preponderance of illegal drug markets, violence, blight, rampant anti-social behaviors, tacky shoddy retail shops, gangs, unruly teenagers, school violence, illegitimacy and lack of a skilled and employable populace that creates the profile of a worst case inner City needing attention. These problems in turn lead to a lack of economic and social capital. Churches are valuable institutions in their historical role as spiritual guides, facilitators of personal transformation and, in urban areas, the delivery of social services. Serious Urbanists must ferret out the challenges of a city, divide them between the predictable and fixable (design) and the theoretical (social) and work on them separately, considering the two processes operate on wholly different timelines and practices. Social challenges, whose solutions are purely theoretical with no predictable outcome based on past history, are on a timeline of 20 years ( one generation) to infinity, ( or never, since poverty and its associated pathologies have been in existence on this planet since the beginning of mankind, despite the best intentions of policy makers throughout history. Urbanists should work on what is known and doable within the allotted time, and not engage in risky experimentation that may ruin a window of opportunity, leaving the larger social problems, those beyond which soundly designed built environments can positively effectuate to social theorists. Urban design and physical development is a proven methodology of urban change within a specified period. Desirable outside stakeholders are, almost by definition not in need of church social services. Therefore, churches should be considered in the social and theoretical People side of the renewal equation. Urbanists must be careful to avoid The Seattle Process, that is, the civic inclination to seek so much public input and consider so many sides of an argument that nothing actually gets done. A good Urbanist begins an operation with the same singular confidence of a surgeon opening a patient’s chest. Like a good doctor, a good Urbanist persuades a patient as to what is necessary for health, does not let the patient write his own prescriptions, and gains the patients trust and cooperation for the patients own good. Church organizations often become a default local government in dysfunctional cities, securing government and philanthropic contracts and fees to provide social services. Rather than being content with the compensation and intrinsic rewards for doing good works, when renewal funds become available, churches often subsume renewal efforts into their mission, demanding a cut of the economic pie, a seat at the political table, and influence to engineer social outcomes through shaky experimental theories. Too often opportunistic ministers, both storefront and traditional, subordinate their historical role to become real estate developers in the profitable non-profit housing industry. Successful at supplanting market oriented Licensed Planners in master-planning neighborhoods, whole areas are taken off the market and are assigned for low-income housing development and rehabilitation to benefit owners and tenants who cannot afford or dont maintain their properties. This does not correct the underlying problem, the inability of poor residents to maintain their properties, and resets to the beginning the deterioration cycle, which leads inevitably to another tax payer bailout. Churches also attempt to insert themselves as the moral arbiters of what the City should be, conflicting with equally legitimate visions of other stakeholders. Urbanist should not mediate the competing visions of others, but should know what the course of action is and concentrate on their own vision. Urbanist must take command of the situation. Only church organizations that understand the economics and design necessary to attract outsiders into the City should be part of the renewal team. No more than one, if any, church seat on the board should be allowed, which represents the aggregate voice of the City religious institutions, and only those institutions that understand outside stakeholder interests. This is a concept familiar to all People of faith and can contribute to renewal success. The board presence and influence of City churches without any renewal expertise beyond low-income housing services should be as limited as their experience. Urban renewal is difficult enough without allowing fake experts on board. A healthy adversarial relationship between social activists and Urbanists should be acknowledged. The basis for this differentiation is the recognition that the City also consists of buildings, streets, infrastructure, related public services and utilities such as street and sewer service, architecture, physical neighborhood design cohesion and allure, special districts, location and transportation assets, zoning laws, tax assessment considerations, finance, business attraction strategies, public relations, marketing activities and more that are far and away outside the purview and expertise of social scientists subsidized housing activists and theorists. The best organizational chart would group these varied disciplines into appropriate categories receiving specialized representation into People (Social) and City (Renewal). Let the chips fall where they may. Ubiquitous poverty is repellent to members of the Middle and Upper Class. To find themselves surrounded by poverty and blight is their worst nightmare. Urbanists must avoid including any plans or designs that provide or support poverty programs. This should be left to the social activists. Urbanists should not over-reach and attempt to do more than they are qualified for or have the resources to do, especially when duplicating existing organizations servicing that need. Urbanists should refrain from incorporating fuzzy social goals or any other programs that rely on rosy predictions that are hard to objectively justify. Whenever possible, Urbanists should present appropriately analogous models to support their position. Unlike Social Theory, which has applied uncountable programs, ideas and billions of dollars to distressed urban cores, the great majority of which have failed, it has been proven that graphic urban design codes serve as predictable guides for change. Intrusive blight and poverty, and its associated social pathologies are the overwhelming reason Isolated City renewal efforts fail. Isolated City in this context can be defined as a City that has no existing viable and attractive residential, commercial or arts areas to build out from. Isolated Cities are the least likely to have a successful renewal and must pull out all the stops in areas of design and incentives to attract outside stakeholders (Lees, 1985). Regional poor move to areas that have a culture of the poor, where they feel less stigmatized and self-conscious, and can find and bond comfortably with others in familiar situations. The abundance of support services for the poor further encourages settlement. Above all, poor people gravitate to areas where they can afford to live, bringing with them all the psychological and social pathologies of such a tough and sad existence. Concentrations of poverty also are, to a great degree, the end result of old racist traditions, expressed in public policies and business practices decades earlier. Zoning laws, and the open discriminatory practice of suburban real estate agents refusing to sell to minorities, post WWII through the 1970s, established the present ethnic and socio-economic configuration of urban areas and suburbs. This law contains loopholes for developers and communities with an anti low income housing bias. In light of history and current practices, a solid argument can be made for compensation to certain classes and groups who have inherited the terrible ramifications of this process. However, Renewal Funds and plans are an inappropriate source. No Urban Renewal effort has ever received enough funding to do as much as is needed, and cannot take on the added burden of compensating for societys misdeeds. Failed urban renewal cycles are more the rule than the exception, and the heavy and counter-productive hand of poverty services has played a major part in their failures. In some cities however, with every cycle they have become more expert in inserting themselves into the mix. With such limited vision partners unschooled in economics as gate-keepers, it is no wonder that the full complexity, serendipity and dynamics of market forces, investors, individual visions, entrepreneurial endeavors and regional participation rarely gets a shot at involvement before the renewal steam runs out. Social activists truly committed to helping the urban poor should consider helping them relocate out of distressed cities and into settings more conducive to pursuing life, liberty and happiness. Where life is risky, and crime reduces liberty, pursuit of happiness is severely hampered. It is time to form a moral argument free of bile and acrimony and take it to the outlying regions that owe their lifestyles to regional social problem repositories in urban areas. If troubled cities are to make a comeback, the outward migration of urban poor must begin, coinciding with an inflow of self-reliant urban pioneers. Nothing less than a 1960s style movement in scope and argument will do. Considering the historic resistance to minorities and the poor in the suburbs, the argument should be taken to suburban churches first. Presented with a compelling and irrefutable moral argument, these churches must accept it or reveal a moral, ethical and religious hypocrisy. Here, urban community development activists and church organizations have an important role. In a best case scenario, the suburban churches will spearhead the drive for the end of segregation and integration into their neighborhoods (Davis, 2000). Urbanites in communities with strong values should not fear their values will be overpowered by the pathologies of poverty, but instead will be a powerful influence for good to all who are exposed to them. Any City with a publicly assisted populace of more than 20% must create programs to promote an outflow to the suburbs to have any chance of renewal. Cities can begin by freezing growth of the poverty service industry. Inner City residents who move to stable communities can immediately enjoy the benefits of mainstream American life and its opportunities for building social capital, instead of waiting and taking the risk that renewal benefits, years off into the future, may not materialize at all. Minorities can be assured that modern day discrimination is relatively weak, and is based more on behavior than race. No City can accomplish operational self-sufficiency with a subsidized population exceeding 20%. Courts and legislative bodies recognize the deleterious and burdensome effects of a low income housing market above 20%, by capping obligations at this point. The questionable history of subsidized housings premier programs and experienced practitioners should be enough to scare off Urbanists from getting caught up in it. HUD program known as Section 108 which allows block-grant communities to raise money for loans by floating HUD-backed notes, has a staggering 59 percent default rate. Although government programs are expected to make riskier bets than private banks (whose loan-default rates are typically in the low single digits), the stratospheric failure rate of HUD loans amounts to a squandering of millions of taxpayer dollars, since taxpayers are on the hook for these loan guarantees. It is a rare suburb that has a subsidized housing population approaching anywhere near 20%. The higher a Citys low income housing stock, the less the area appeals to potential newcomers who do not depend on public assistance. Helping as many poor to move out of the City and into better neighborhoods is an important social mission that should endure through all times. It is a mission separate from Urban renewal and should not be commingled.