Urban Renewal and Neighborhood Change

Myron Gutmann, University of Colorado Boulder
Kerri Clement, University of Colorado Boulder
Dylan Connor, Arizona State University
Angela R Cunningham, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Stefan Leyk, University of Colorado Boulder

The last century has seen enormous change in the structure, composition, and status of neighborhoods in U.S. cities, evolving through a mixture of economic and infrastructural change, economic cycles, and the transformation of public policy. One of the most lasting influences on the nature of neighborhoods has been a series of policy analyses and prescriptions, starting with the observations of the Home Owners Loan Corporation in the 1930s (developing into the concept of “red-lining”), and continuing with the imperatives of urban renewal policy, beginning in the 1940s and continuing through the 1970s. This paper examines the role of urban renewal in the transformation of urban neighborhoods, building on new approaches to long-term data. Using Denver as a proof-of-concept, we devise a new approach to study neighborhoods over eight decades, making use of a combination of existing long-term datasets, newly processed full-count data from the 1940 census, and a new database of urban structures drawn from the Zillow app. Urban renewal projects had a significant visual impact on Denver, but they were relatively limited in size, and we suspect that the overall impact will be modest and shaped as much by the underlying racial structure of the neighborhoods and their capacity to gentrify in recent decades. We expect to conclude that taking a long view of neighborhoods can help reconcile conflicting claims regarding the prevalence and nature of changes in cities today.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 104. Urban Renewal and Its Discontents