CityLab Daily: Two Divergent Models for Local ‘Reparations’
Also today: Can U.S. road builders break the highway habit, and how a plan to stabilize rents sent prices skyrocketing.
The East End neighborhood of Asheville, North Carolina, as it looked before Black homes, businesses and schools were demolished by urban renewal in the 1970s. Asheville’s reparations program aims to redress the harms of urban renewal by investing in Black neighborhoods.
Photographer: Andrea Clark/North Carolina Collection, Pack Memorial Public Library, Asheville, North Carolina
Remedying the past: In a historic vote late Wednesday night, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee advanced a bill to study the effects of slavery and racial discrimination, and recommend reparations for Black families — a proposal that’s been introduced in every Congress since the late 1980s. Meanwhile, a handful of cities are beginning to experiment with their own versions of reparations legislation, exploring new ideas about what exactly local reparations might look like.
The suburb of Evanston, just north of Chicago, recently passed a resolution to right some of its past wrongs through housing grants. And last summer, Asheville, North Carolina, passed a “community reparations” model in which the city will look for ways to shore up its investments in Black neighborhoods, instead of making payments directly to families.