Black Labor’s Role in transforming the Urban Landscape

From the series “Wanted: A plan for the Cities to Save Themselves”

By Glen Ford and Peter Gamble, The Black Commentator

Isaiah 61:4: "And they shall build the old wastes, they shall raise up the former desolations, and they shall repair the waste cities, the desolations of many generations."  

The men who wield capital in America must be prevented from remaking the cities according to their own blueprints, destructive designs that can only result in the final demise of black political power and the dispersal of millions to points – literally – unknown.

Twice in the lifetimes of middle-aged Americans, capital has balled up its very visible fist to smash the cities, in search of other pastures to play in. The first Great Divestment hollowed out the urban centers, purposely excluding Blacks from the new markets of the suburbs, the sprawling result of America’s post-war domestic Marshall Plan to ensure that the depression of the 1930s would not return. The second, devastating divestment began as a regional shift of manufacturing to the (non-union) sunbelt, but revealed its true, horrific character after the fall of the Soviet Union. Ideologically and militarily unrestrained, capital dismantled the manufacturing base of the United States and methodically organized a global Race to the Bottom, seeking ever more advantageous terms of investment and, in the process, destroying the social structures of every nation in its path.  

It is against this backdrop of massive capital divestment that African Americans sought to carve out place and power in the cities. Having achieved numerical dominance by default in much of urban America by the Seventies – a backhanded reward for suburban exclusion – Blacks quickly seized electoral offices and nominal stewardship of the infrastructures and other assets left behind. Almost immediately, African American (and non-black) politicians began giving the urban legacy away. As we wrote in Part I of this series:  

“Urban executives extend permanent invitations to private capital to do whatever it wants with their constituents’ property and futures, but please do something! Rarely do they have anything resembling a plan of their own, beyond a firm determination to accept whatever capital offers, and a willingness to out-grovel the next mayor in line.”  

Desperate to fill in blank cityscapes and replace long-gone payrolls, and with no real strategy other than beggary, mayors enlist

their cities in a domestic version of the global Race to the Bottom, trading their constituents’ treasure for the mere whiff of jobs. The entire municipal apparatus is converted to the mission of packaging gifts of irreplaceable assets marinated in tax abatements and other subsidies to corporate treasure hunters. Much more often than not, it’s Money for Nothing, the title of Bobbi Murray’s extremely useful piece in the September issue of The Nation:  

“It’s been accepted as nothing less than gospel that public bodies must give out subsidies to private companies to fuel economic growth. State and municipal leaders dished out an estimated $48.8 billion in subsidies, tax breaks and other incentives to corporations in 1996, the last time the figure was calculated; a more recent figure would likely top $50 billion, says Greg LeRoy, founder of the Washington, DC-based Good Jobs First and author of No More Candy Store: States and Cities Making Job Subsidies Accountable.”  

Are the cities being robbed? Of that, there can be no question, since they have wholly acquiesced to capital’s assumptions and terms with no real understanding of the value of the assets that are in play. In order to transform the terms of transactions between cities and private capital, urban executives must enter the game with a Plan to benefit the existing populations of their cities. They must be armed with the most thorough understanding of how the city presently functions (or fails to function), through an analysis of the totality of the city’s public and private assets and how they can be arranged to advance the general welfare. Without a proper Audit, there can be no Plan. No major American city has done such an audit – they are, instead, dedicated to fulfilling the wish lists of corporations – mayors acting like clerks at the “candy store” of Greg LeRoy’s book title.  

Naked in the presence of Power

Capital arrives at the table knowing exactly what it wants.

Owning all the data, corporations literally feed urban politicians the growth and job projections that are then inflicted on the public as official (and campaign) literature, tightly closing the information loop and smothering democracy in its crib – a prime source of pervasive urban hopelessness. The people live and die in neighborhoods that seem to have no organic connection to each other and the rest of the city other than, possibly, a shared pain – a false impression, but the only one that the information vacuum provides. The corporate development menu is the only one posted.  Thou shalt have no other dreams but mine, says capital.  

Not content with direct gifts of urban assets, capital has converted every social initiative to its own service. The New Deal-inspired revitalization of cities became Urban Renewal – Negro Removal – now often exemplified by the Hope VI public housing demolition program. Urban executives, backs bent in permanent begging postures, cannot resist federal funds, even when they are used to displace forever their own constituents. Writing in the July/August issue of Dollars and Sense magazine (“From HOPE VI to Hope Sick?”), Sabrina L. Williams concludes that “HOPE VI has strayed from its initial intent of rehabilitating 6% of the nation’s public housing stock; instead, it has funded the demolition of housing which was often decent, just in the wrong – too desirable – place at the wrong time. It has displaced many thousands of poor families to meet the demands of private developers.”  

There are scores of examples of speculative capital’s hijacking of HOPE VI. Williams, executive director of Los Angeles-based home&community, inc., cites this one:  

“The Clippership development in East Boston, for example, was called a ‘jewel’ of public housing by the local housing authority administrator only two years before the housing authority sought HOPE VI funding to demolish it, characterizing it as severely distressed.  According to the residents, Clippership did not suddenly become ‘severely distressed.’ Rather, East Boston’s real estate boom prompted the BHA [Boston Housing Authority] to realize that the real ‘jewel’ of Clippership was not its tight-knit and safe community, but rather the land under the townhouses, with its spectacular harbor views.”  

The national urban landscape is cratered with the impact of federally financed, wholesale banishment of the poor to – no one knows where. Although “one-for-one” public housing tenant relocation agreements have been struck in scattered cities, the norm is that affordable housing is never found for large proportions of displaced families – resulting in Negro Removal combined with a city-sanctioned program of gentrification.  

Are the (often black) electoral leaders of such cities heartless, cynical agents of their own constituents’ misery? Surely, some of them are – but even officeholders with the best intentions are helpless to find the optimum place for people in a city that they themselves do not understand, whose assets and many-layered configurations are unmeasured (except by private predators, for their own narrow purposes) and are, therefore, unavailable to the public. Consequently, there is little substance to urban politics, since the actual development of the cities is planned in corporate boardrooms and presented as a fait accompli, through the offices of the mayor.