Presented by Dr. David Hochfelder, Associate Professor and Director of the Public History program, SUNY Albany
Between 1950 and 1975, about 1,360,000 people were displaced for federally-funded urban renewal projects. All levels of government (federal, state, and local) spent about $20 billion to finance urban renewal projects in about 1,200 municipalities around the country. A similar number of people were displaced for urban expressway projects in the same time frame. About 60% were nonwhite (as the US Census classified them) and about the same percentage were tenants.
This presentation will discuss efforts to launch reparative justice policies to undo some of the damage that urban renewal and urban expressways inflicted on families and communities.
David Hochfelder is associate professor of history at University at Albany, SUNY. He and his colleagues Ann Pfau and Stacy Sewell are working on a digital public history of urban renewal in New York State called Picturing Urban Renewal
