Bulldozed: How eminent domain erased working-class neighborhoods

Editor’s note: This is the fourth installment in a series examining the roots of America’s housing crisis. To read the earlier pieces, visit The roots of today’s housing crisis.On May 8, 1959, Los Angeles deputies dragged a 37-year-old World War II widow named Aurora Vargas out of her home at 1771 Malvina Avenue in Chavez Ravine and detained her. Her mother threw rocks at the deputies. Children cried. The rest of the family was escorted out.

Minutes later, the waiting bulldozers were fired up, and her home was smashed to pieces.

Aurora’s family home had been taken by involuntary eminent domain so her Latino neighborhood could be razed. The first plan for the site was for public housing. Although the residents were to be given first dibs on the new housing, many objected. The people had deep ties to their neighborhood, which had been established in the 1840s and was home to over 1,000 families. As Aurora’s father recounted, “My family and I fought every way we knew how to stay in our home in Chavez Ravine. Police had to carry my daughter, Aurora Vargas, from our house… we lost our home and our land, but we didn’t lose our pride because we fought with everything we had.”

And, like so many redevelopment projects across the nation, even the meager promises of new housing for Aurora and her neighbors were never kept. Instead of public housing, Dodger Stadium was built on the graves of the homes.

Aurora’s story wasn’t an isolated tragedy. Across the country, communities like hers were uprooted in the name of “redevelopment.”

There have been countless other broken promises. Three decades after the ethnically diverse working-class neighborhood of Poletown in Detroit was razed to make way for a General Motors plant, the plant was abandoned. Instead of a vibrant neighborhood, there remains only another rusting hulk of an abandoned factory. And who can forget the saga, just two decades ago, of Suzette Kelo and all her New London, Connecticut, neighbors whose homes were destroyed to make way for a Pfizer pharmaceutical project—a project that was abandoned after Pfizer left town a few years later?

These are just a few of the legion of stories across America where poor, minority, and working-class neighborhoods have been torn apart in favor of grandiose redevelopment projects. What’s worse, according to the Constitution, most of these projects should never have come to fruition.

The Constitution is plain enough when it says, “Nor shall property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” In the early days of the Republic, the Supreme Court was clear: property could not be taken from one private owner and given to another without a public use being involved. That limitation began to give way in the 19th century when the railroad barons needed property to build their rail lines. However, there was at least an argument that since the public could ride the private rails, some public use was involved.

However, that pretense was removed in 1954 with the Berman v. Parker decision, a challenge to a redevelopment project in Washington, D.C. In that case, the Supreme Court upheld a project that allowed the destruction of a racially mixed working-class neighborhood, home to 23,000 people, to be replaced by private office buildings, hotels, and a limited amount of housing. The court said that since the project served a “public purpose” of beautifying the city, that was good enough to meet the Constitution’s requirement that takings be for public use—even though the former homes were turned over not to the government, but to private redevelopers. And, of course, in a pattern to be repeated many times, the promised replacement housing never materialized.

After Berman, there was no stopping the redevelopment machine. Urban neighborhood after urban neighborhood was depopulated. As the prominent Black intellectual James Baldwin commented, urban renewal was nothing but “Negro removal.” A recent government study concluded that urban renewal “helped to entrench poverty and segregation in ’America’s cities, particularly for people of color.” The human cost of redevelopment was staggering and unequal. As Justice Thomas noted in his Kelo dissent, “of the many families displaced by urban renewal from 1949 through 1963, sixty-three percent of those whose race was known were nonwhite.”

But most of America was blissfully unaware of the havoc wreaked by urban renewal until Kelo, when the veil was lifted. Anybody’s home could be bulldozed. And everyone now knew that “public use” meant “public interest,” which meant whatever damn-fool thing the politicians thought was a good idea to do with other people’s homes and lives.

James Burling is vice president of legal affairs at Pacific Legal Foundation, a nonprofit legal organization that defends Americans’ individual liberty and constitutional rights. He is the author of “Nowhere to Live: The Hidden Story of America’s Housing Crisis.”