Continued...

Even long-time residents of the neighborhood will value the right to return to the redeveloped community differently. For some, the transformed community, even if it includes many of their neighbors and features improvements that they approved, will just not be the same. Others may have been planning to leave the neighborhood anyway.

To facilitate productive planning, the Community Residency Entitlement amendment should allow redevelopment managers to offer residents money in return for voluntarily giving up their right to return to the redeveloped neighborhood. For instance, let us imagine a distressed neighborhood that had 300 long-term households—that is, all renters who have occupied their current homes for at least two years and all homeowners—in an area of 1,000 evenly distributed, identical row-house parcels. For example, suppose that planners have a resident-approved plan that uses 25 percent of the land for the expansion of a neighboring private university and reduces the density of the remaining land to 600 townhouses. Assuming that the project’s aspirations to attract higher-income residents limited the amount of housing that would be affordable to most of the original residents to 200 units, the planners could make buyout offers until they had purchased 100 Community Residency Entitlement releases.

City officials wishing to use non-exempt eminent domain for projects that offer even fewer benefits to the community, however, would apparently face an insurmountable barrier in the Homestead Community Consent phase. Residents of a neighborhood facing total elimination would not have to be irrational to turn down a redevelopment plan that flattened all their homes solely to make way for a big-box retail center to serve adjacent communities to which they may or may not relocate. There would be nothing in it for them, so there would be no reason to hand over their land. With the combination of these two proposed reforms, non-residential private redevelopers would have to pay for the privilege of permanent displacement.

Although the proposed Homestead Community Consent procedures would prevent city officials who favor the development from buying the votes of individual residents, they would still have a great deal of flexibility in timing the buyout of all the Community Residency Entitlement rights. For projects designed without a residential component, the planning process requirements should allow officials to include an offer to buy out 100 percent of the residents’ Community Residency Entitlement protections in the plan to be approved by the Homestead Community, as long as all residents holding Community Residency Entitlement were allowed to vote. If the offer were generous enough, the community would approve the plan.

Both the Homestead Community Consent and the Community Resident Protection processes require that redevelopment officials deal with residents’ shared concerns. If the redevelopment agency works with neighborhood residents to forge a plan that responds to their needs and expresses their visions of community, then the land assembly will be approved. The owners of homestead rights will release their holds on their individual properties without dissolving their relationship with either the neighborhood land or one another. The more the redevelopment plan places the agency’s other goals above the interests of the residents and small businesses, the greater the compensation the agency will need to offer.

Few federal programs have ever begun with more optimism and acclaim than urban renewal did more than half a century ago. The use of eminent domain in urban redevelopment to overcome the acquisition problems of major redevelopment projects did, and still does, make sense. Urban renewal, however, failed to differentiate between what money could buy and what it could not buy. Residents whose lives were threatened by urban renewal rose up and ended it.

Although memories of those struggles have begun to fade, the Supreme Court’s recent Kelo decision has rekindled public concern over eminent-domain abuse. Those committed to true community development should seize the opportunity this popular backlash presents. Resident empowerment in the redevelopment process will strengthen older communities. Furthermore it will attract an array of people and businesses to return to America’s urban centers, restoring the vital diversity which has been both their lifeblood and their most important contribution to world culture.