Discredited Planning Concepts Don’t Die, They Just Resurface at City Hall to Promote Real Estate Speculation.

This maxim, however, does not apply to discredited planning ideas.  They don’t die or fade away.  Instead they resurface with new names and justifications for continued real estate speculation.  The best example is public programs that allow private real estate developers to acquire old commercial property so they can build highly profitable in-fill ventures.  In the post-war era, these abandoned government programs were called Urban Renewal.  They allowed cities to form agencies, such as LA’s former Community Redevelopment Agency, that used eminent domain to acquire commercial real estate parcels, evict the tenants, demolish buildings, and then reassemble the parcels for private…