Ripped up, robbed and relocated! How urban renewal is PEOPLE REMOVAL

Last night, Doug Farrand sent an alarming email to our University of Orange Urbanism Team.  It contained a link to a news story about the City of Orange Township's plan for urban renewal on Main Street, replacing the old Y, where I achieved junior and senior life guard status, and Rossi's Paint Store with an 400-unit apartment complex. I lived through the decades of urban renewal which tore apart Newark, East Orange and other cities in the 1950s and 60s. And I have had the opportunity to study urban renewal in major US cities. Bottom line: urban renewal promised riches for cities and delivered chaos. The people in the path of bulldozers were "ripped up, robbed and relocated" as my brother, the songwriter Joshua Thompson, put it while I was working on a subtitle for my book Root Shock: -- eventually subtitled: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America and What We Can Do About It. 

Urban renewal causes horrific harm all the way around, yet planners and developers told me "you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet." I gathered that by that they meant they'd break the "eggs" of the community to make an "omelet" of wealth for themselves. But people do not take well to having their "shells" broken. Urban renewal was, I learned, a prescription for death of those who were carelessly pushed aside. You can see the award-winning video Sara Booth made about urban renewal -- Urban Renewal is People Removal -- and I'm happy to send you a free DVD. 

The official horrible US urban renewal program was shut down in 1973, but the laws that enabled it linger on the books. The leaders of Orange, NJ, are licking their chops at the money they could rake in by tearing down the historic buildings of Main Street and replacing them with 5-10 story "market rate" apartments. This means that the apartments will rent for upwards of $1500 a month and be geared toward people who would take the train to work in New York City (but will anyone do that in the future?). The incursion of these apartments will trigger an avalanche of gentrification, pushing the minority and immigrant communities living to the south and north of Main Street out of the city. Their needs are not considered in the planning process. Orange "has enough" low income people, or so they say, or maybe too many, so this "push out" is justified in the eyes of the decision-makers.

This article kept me up all night. You might ask, "Why did you check your email at 10PM?" And you might ask, "Why were you surprised, you wrote about this in your book, Main Street?" Both good questions. It's not that I'm surprised, it's that I'm physician and it is extremely upsetting to me that we have failed to learn that urban renewal=death.  It is what Edgar Rivera Colon has described as hell. While I was awake and in that hell, I imagined writing a pamphlet called "Death by Renovation." 

Morning brings good counsel. My UofO colleagues suggested that I write this blog post instead, and having explained the horrors of what's being planned, shift to our proposal: an urbanism that centers life. What could be a better urbanism for Orange, NJ? It is a city full of life. On Saturday, I was at an event to promote completing the census, registering to vote and wearing masks to prevent Covid-19 infection. During the event, young dancers from Concepts in Choreography demonstrated their considerable skill in a genre my granddaughter explained is known as Jersey House. In the parking lot of the building next door, a Guatemalan folkloric dance was taking place with gorgeous costumes and drumming. The issue in Orange is to take the talent to Main Street, let people come visit us and see the amazing accomplishments of the people. We can nurture these accomplishments and get all the money we need or could imagine, while extending life! That is what urbanism that centers life can do!