Urban Renewal’s Grandchildren: Remedying the Persistent Effects of Post-War Race Planning

David D. Troutt

17, October 2024

Urban renewal, a mid-century federal-local redevelopment program that transformed American cities and displaced millions of Black migrants from the South, was a race-conscious government policy responsible for the enduring suppression of Black wealth. Its racial history and character are untold in legal scholarship. This Article argues that the 25-year regime enacted in the Housing Act of 1949 was a response to the Great Migration of Black workers and families to northern, midwestern, and western cities. It was codified to interact with other segregation policies, such as highway construction, restrictive covenants, redlining, and public housing through the colorblind veneer of rational planning principles. Race planning created durable conditions of “racial bargaining,” the discounted value of wealth-producing transactions in segregated Black communities. Since its mid-century enactment, urban renewal federalized a race-conscious segregation policy that eluded civil rights remedies and framed contemporary urban development programs. This Article shows how this framework sustained the racial wealth gap at the core of this country’s continuing struggle with structural inequality.

Reframing requires reckoning. This Article presents for the first time the case for restorative remedies to Black descendants of the U.S. urban renewal program. Offering an architecture of accountability for race-conscious wrongs, it conceptualizes three buckets of contemporaneous, future, and cumulative harms, an analysis of government wrongfulness, and illustrative restorative programs.

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Urban Renewal’s Grandchildren: Remedying the Persistent Effects of Post-War Race Planning