This post is part of a CityLab series on wastelands, and what we squander, discard, and fritter away.
There’s a difference in what President Donald Trump prescribes for restoring “the middle class” and fixing “the inner city.” Each of those demographics are, respectively, stand-in terms for the white small towns and suburbs that voted for him, and the black urban neighborhoods that didn’t. In both cases, he calls for bringing back jobs, particularly in the manufacturing sector, and increasing wages. But when addressing black communities—or “inner cities”—Trump talks about policing and blight.
Delivering his “New Deal for African Americans” at a black church congregation in Charlotte last year, Trump said:
I will … propose tax holidays for inner-city investment, and new tax incentives to get foreign companies to relocate in blighted American neighborhoods. I will further empower cities and states to seek a federal disaster designation for blighted communities in order to initiate the rebuilding of vital infrastructure, the demolition of abandoned properties, and the increased presence of law enforcement.
His repeated centering of “blight” is worth interrogating. For pretty much all of the 20th century, that word has been used in close association with cities, and usually as a pretext for some kind of drastic project that results in massive displacement. For example, it was a blight designation that led to the gutting of Pittsburgh’s historic Hill District in the 1950s that uprooted thousands of families. For cities, blight lands louder than a bomb.
[For more of this story, written by Brentin Mock, go to https://www.citylab.com/housin...ng-of-blight/516801/]
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