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Because the Homestead Community Consent would give residents one collective veto rather than many individual vetoes, it would foster, rather than frustrate, collective action. The neighborhood would likely have individuals who refused to consider giving up their current homes even for a wide range of community improvements. But, if these benefits offered by the proposed redevelopment plan were badly needed and would benefit all residents, the holdouts would be out of step with the mainstream. Those who wished to engage in strategic bargaining for personal monetary gain would find little opportunity in a community-referendum process that focused on the neighborhood’s redesign.

By making resident approval essential to the land assembly process, Homestead Community Consent develops social capital, broadly recognized as essential to urban redevelopment. Although residents could express their views through elected representatives, the direct democracy approach of Homestead Community Consent draws upon community organizing’s roots in the labor movement. In Reveille for Radicals, Saul Alinsky wrote that “a People’s Organization can arise only from the efforts of the people themselves.” Redevelopment, by its nature, will drastically change a severely distressed neighborhood. Only if returning residents have themselves produced the new community will they be able to rejoin it and call it their own. Their inevitable conflicts and compromises with officials will only build their connection to the neighborhood vision for which they had to fight.

As Roberta Rubin explains in “Take and Give”, the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative’s combined emphasis on resident planning and community legal control of land resources has made the organization a model for community-based development in distressed neighborhoods. The Homestead Community Consent process, by enhancing and communalizing residents’ protection in urban redevelopment, creates a forum for this same kind of transformative conflict resolution. By giving residents a legal right to hold on to what they have, this resident-control proposal offers them an opportunity to let it go for something that is better and that is truly theirs.

Community Residency Entitlement

The Uniform Relocation Act was enacted in 1970 to ensure some minimum provision for those displaced by the federally funded use of eminent domain authority. Whether a highway, an office complex, or a mixed-income residential development forces resident condemnees out, they are entitled to benefit from the condemning agency’s required plan to facilitate their relocation to comparable replacement housing. These substitute homes not only have to be decent, safe, and sanitary, but also have to be located in the same metropolitan area, so that displaced people do not lose their jobs as well. But what about the relationships these neighbors have built with each other? If the current federal law can recognize the need to maintain a displaced resident’s connection to a particular job, why can it not also value the importance of residents preserving their links to one another and their community? Any federally subsidized private residential redevelopment availing itself of eminent domain authority should have to offer eventual relocation into onsite replacement housing.

The public need for the specific route of a highway and, thereby, for permanent displacement trumps the right of the resident to preserve his or her unique relationship to his or her home, the land, and the community occupying that land. The homeowner forced to make way for someone else’s private residence, however, receives no such justification. Much of the outrage against the Kelo decision can be traced back to its apparent endorsement of the government’s ability to force out one homeowner in favor of another, higher-income homeowner. Nothing about the public benefit in such a case is fundamentally incompatible with the resident’s right to permanent on-site replacement housing.

Truly comparable housing is not just about square footage and proximity to one’s place of employment. It also involves the ability to maintain community relationships developed over decades. For the more controversial uses of eminent domain, federal and state relocation should guarantee displacees the right to continue membership in their original communities. If the needs of such projects are not compatible with honoring such guarantees, then bargaining between the residents and the agency should be allowed to establish just compensation for the loss of community.