Hartford Mayor Eddie Perez has uttered the “B” word, which left urban planners almost orgasmic with delight; which prompted real estate speculators to wag their tails real hard and beg for treats.
Yes, Mayor Eddie wants to scrounge up a $50 million slush fund to battle “blight” — a term of art sufficiently fuzzy to avoid accountability and guarantee that friends of Mayor Eddie are already hard at work proposing creative ways to spend the dough on studies and consultants and subsidies for hideous urban property that no sane person would invest in.
At its core, the motivation to attack urban “blight” is much the same as the motivation to engage in “urban renewal” in decades past: Force out the poor and lower-middle class in favor of folks richer and prettier and more white — what the New America Foundation’s urban analyst Joel Kotkin calls “a kind of genteel version of ethnic cleansing.”
Few municipal politicians in the state have benefited more from the creation of a subsidy-choked downtown than Mayor Eddie. Now, he wants to expand the game to the poor, black neighborhoods, where “blighted” property can be gobbled up and transferred to developers — with sufficient subsidies and tax breaks to allow all involved to pretend that the market has spoken.
A Visionary
As Connecticut discovered in its controversial New London eminent domain case, government transfer of private land from the powerless to the developers can create embarrassing public relations. The pain is eased with a designation of the target property as “blighted.”
In his State of the City speech, Mayor Eddie had it all: visions of abandoned property, lost opportunity — just waiting for the Perez magic to transform the mess into…into… what, exactly?
The city’s downtown has been so distorted by subsidy and a state-funded, money-losing convention center, that it is unclear exactly what Hartford needs or can pay for, without being put on permanent life-support by taxpayers who live somewhere else. The empty Front Street retail development symbolizes the complexity of determining what makes sense.
If the anti-blight slush fund in Hartford is directed primarily at residential neighborhoods, the strategy will be considerably more complex than the downtown fraud. The strategic goal for downtown Hartford, at least in terms of residential, has been clear for decades: Drive the Italians and blacks out of the urban core, so that it can be made comfortable for ex-suburbanites ready to live in well-guarded condo and apartment towers.
Knocking down some “blight” in the North End of Hartford won’t necessarily draw the middle-class or rich folks back to town.
Of course, the case could be made that the victory over blight would be liberating for the current residents, but if that is the case, then hard questions must be asked about what caused the blight in the first place. Are the existing neighborhoods truly viable, or did the current landlords and residents throw in the towel because schools, recreation, capital and education can be found more happily in the suburbs?
At the very least, the city must be held to some sort of precision about its notion of blight, be it property that is abandoned, structures in violation of code, structurally unattractive — or simply located in a lousy neighborhood.
The taxpayers deserve a strategic plan and some unbiased research to specify the problem that Mayor Eddie wants to solve — to void a vague money-wasting bulldozer invasion of what a writer in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences once described as neighborhoods “most offensive to eye, nose and public conscience…”
The most attractive property for government mucking-around is “abandoned” property, which is often orphaned when the property values are declining much more quickly than the property tax assessments are reflecting the decline.
This is a vicious circle that a certain kind of politician enjoys. Raise the property taxes, which in turn forces out marginal landlords, which in turn prompts another rise in property taxes, to finance a cure for the “housing crisis.”
In general, Mayor Eddie’s call to combat blight is no different than what has been going on in many cities across the country. What would be interesting in a smallish city such as Hartford is to see it done right: limited, research-based, market-sensitive initiatives — and with quick sales to private owners and developers, minus subsidies and artificial enticements.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
