Re: Renters Getting Screwed - or Why EminentDomainisaDistraction
Dwayne Monroe wrote:
Wojtek:
Like any capitalist project, the urban development that the latter days Luddites criticize creates both, private profits and public benefits: jobs, tax base, better and safer environment, neighborhood effects - to name a few. It creates better material conditions than the slums and the junkyards it destroys. It also comes at a cost, which is upsetting the people who live in those slums and have stakes in those junkyards, and who naturally oppose the development for that reason.
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A strong statement. But it leads to an obvious question.
Can you cite examples of urban development projects which, in defiance of knowledgeble critics’ objections and predictions, have proven over time to be generally beneficial?
In many places, urban renewal destroyed stable neighborhoods, created slums (in part because new highways isolated neighborhoods from the rest of town - e.g. in The Bronx and New Haven), and fostered the suburbanization that Woj usually hates. He’s working with a fantasy version of urban renewal, not its actual history.
Doug