My Redacted Life: Chapter Seven (Cont._2)

On Mondays, I would arrive at the office ready to kick some serious ass, as they say. We were doing quite a bit of work for my home town, so I began taking trips there, first with Tom Hodges, then with Jim Vines. It wasn’t long, during one of those trips, that I learned an interesting fact.

The two of them had labored under the mistaken assumption that I was related to Charles Rush, the director of the city’s Urban Renewal Agency and for whom we were working. Yes, he’s the one who gave me their names and who recommended that I go to Little Rock and visit with them. I was actually related to another department head in the city, a cousin named Troy Harden, who had introduced me to Mr. Rush.

I never ascertained how much the mistaken idea of kinship contributed to my hiring. I often think about it though, when I hear people say—particularly of African-Americans—that “they should rely on hard work and initiative to get ahead, just like I did.”

Pine Bluff was scheduled for an urban renewal project. Urban renewal is another phenomenon that has gained a solid seat of honor in the Planning Hall of Infamy. As with many misguided efforts, it was conceived with the best of intentions. Government would cleanse blighted portions of a city and replace the blight with shining examples of commercial enterprise and affordable housing.

The evil serpent known as “The Law of Unintended Consequences” slithered on the scene like a vulture during a battle, and soon took over. The definition of “blighted neighborhood” soon became “any neighborhood occupied by the powerless and non-white.” Tenants who had lived in a functioning neighborhood for decades came home from work one day to find a note on their door giving them only days to vacate their building which was slated for demolition as a part of the revival of the area.

There were some productive results of the program. Mostly though, the results were best described in the 1964 book The Federal Bulldozer by Martin Anderson, and the later classic The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, by Robert Caro. Urban renewal gained the sobriquet,which lingers still, of "Urban Removal."

By 1971, most of the most destructive elements of the program had disappeared. The emphasis turned from demolition to rehabilitation and residents were compensated for relocation expenses which, unfortunately did not reflect the cost of leaving the neighborhood in which one’s grandparents had lived.

The saddest part, as I contemplate the history, is that, in many instances, these were the only neighborhoods in which the affected families had been allow to live.

I didn’t think of such things back then. Don’t ask me why. Systemic indoctrination is a powerful tool when applied at an early age.

The area of Pine Bluff scheduled for “renewal” comprised a portion of an area known as “Jean’s Addition.” It was, as I was to learn over the years, a beloved African-American neighborhood arrayed around the state’s only black college. Though neglected, it had persevered. It still does, having been saved from benign intrusion by the unlikeliest person, Richard Nixon. He ended the Urban Renewal Program, which was known as a “categorical grant,” and replaced it, and others, with “block grants,” which allowed cities to apply help to neighborhood on a case by case basis.

We were also performing some city-wide planning work for the city. This would lead to the most traumatic experience in my planning career. I shall attempt to summon the courage to recount it later, perhaps in the next chapter.

For the time being, though, I was, as they say, “On a roll.”

My beloved cousin Troy Harden,
to whom I owe my career.