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Renewal, Reconstruction, and Retrenchment Our Society will never be great until its cities are great and today, as we face the future, the frontier of imagination and innovation is inside these cities. . . . Washington as the nation's capital is a unique city with its Federal buildings and monuments, long avenues, beautiful vistas, and government activities. But this is almost a facade for another Vv7ashington.. . . All the problems of the urban condition are present. . . . One Washington cannot be separated from the other. Annual Report of the Government of the District of Columbia, Fiscal Year 1965 During the mid-1960s national urban policy underwent a dramatic turning point, as under a proclaimed War on Poverty the federal government directed funds to neighborhood-based organizations with the intent of enabling local residents to improve their own lives. Spurred by the growing momentum ofthe civilrights movement, the nation promised a second era of reconstruction. As the leading example of a predominantly black city plagued by socialproblems while denied fundamental political rights,Washington offered aprime target both to test the ideas behind the Great Society and, as the 1965District annual report suggested, to overcome the distance between the city of federal monuments and its residential areas. Like the nation's other major cities in the 196os,however, Washington experienced the same cycle of rising expectations and disappointment. No experience better captured the hopes as well as the dashed expectations of the black community than that of urban renewal. By the early196os, even as the Southwest program received accolades in the business community and the press, urban renewal was generating criticism . Bitterness about the program was becoming familiar to those in the black community who had protested the wholesale displacement and relocation that usually accompanied redevelopment, but the most prominent voices came at first from conservatives historically antagonistic to federal grants to urban areas. Ironically, such early criticism revolved around the effort of Washington's business community to secure authority to utilize the tools of redevelopment in the historic downtown area, between Fifteenth Street, N.W., and the Capitol. Under the aegis of the Federal City Council, a new organization, Downtown Progress, formed in 1960.It secured voluntary contributions to plan for the redevelopment of the center city and sought congressional authority to use urban renewal powers downtown. The House of Representatives authorized the request, which had become largely standard in American cities, in 1962,and the Senate followed by accepting the provisions a year later.' House conservatives, however, led by John Dowdy of Texas and assisted by the chairman of the House District Committee, JohnMcMillan of South Carolina, chose to use the request as an excuse to investigate the entire renewal process in the District. They added to the Senate version of the bill a number of amendments, considered cripplingby the Federal City Council, including requirements for competitive bidding, that priority be given to displaced businessmen in urban renewal projects, that the District Commissionersmake a specificdetermination that relocationhousing would be availablefor displaced families within their income range, and placing a limit on the number of urban renewal projects that could be undertaken at any one time. Dowdy's subcommittee managed as well to gain acceptance for a redefinition of a blighted area that was so stringent that it made authorization of funds for the downtown unlikely2 Calling development officials "heartless," Dowdy castigated them for allegedly"sayingit is all right to uproot j,ooo families,bulldoze their homes and leavethem with no place to go." Making the connectionbetween urban renewal and "black removal" overt in an article in Reader's Digest, he nonetheless revealed the clear object of his attack, federal expenditures, which he claimed had skyrocketed and were associated with charges of graft, favoritism, waste, and arbitrary and illegal use of power.3 Significantly,defense of the downtown renewalbill came from liberals. Locally the Washington Planning and Housing Association, whose role had been critical in advancing public housing in Washington, decried the redefinition of blight and argued against competitive bidding.Wationally, Robert Weaver, John Kennedy's controversial choice to head the Housing and Home Finance Agency in 1961, joined the argument. Having faced conservative opposition to his appointment for his known desire to mediate the ill effects of renewal on black communities,Weaver,himself a black, wrote Congressman McMillan to protest the new restrictions imposed on Washington and published an essay in the IVashington Post, which was immediately reprinted and circulated by the Federal City Council. Identifying the enemies of renewal as "groups and spokesmen...

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