Bristol Place Neighborhood Plan: urban renewal in post-Kelo fiscal policy space

Institutional racism in the United States has evolved into a “racial state” that situates the state as a reproducer of the inequalities of the past in terms of resource allocation, social consciousness, and political power, but which is often operationalized under more subtle guises. One of the primary mechanisms of this contemporary disenfranchisement centers around value capture through property disputes, and can be traced back to the evolution of urban renewal policies, and the integral early coalitions between local political actors and real estate capital interests. Urban renewal has been the focus of extensive research and debate, and one of its defining characteristics has been the deleterious and disproportionate impact on African American residents of central city neighborhoods. The evolution of urban renewal policy represents a powerful manifestation of state-led land revalorization and socio-spatial stratification with such disparate impacts that the program earned the nickname “Negro Removal.” Using Pagano and Hoene’s (2010) theory of fiscal policy space, I analyze a case study in Champaign, Illinois that illustrates how a local redevelopment plan’s use of eminent domain represents a new form of urban renewal that reproduces the unequal racial and spatial outcomes of a previous historical era. This case uses interviews with local political actors, financial managers, and civic subjects in addition to archival newspaper and city records research to determine how the decision space and strategy of the local government is shaped by local fiscal constraints (context, economic base, local fiscal controls, and local politics) that create the justification for actions predisposed to differential impacts on low-income and minority residents. In this paper, I chart the evolution of urban renewal policy since mid-century, provide a historical analysis of affordable housing issues and mid-century urban renewal in Champaign, and use an inductive instrumental case study method to investigate the continued unevenly racial outcomes of stated-initiated forced residential displacement as embodied by the implementation of the housing and land use goals of the currently ongoing Bristol Park Neighborhood Plan. The findings from this work contribute to debates on transforming the use of eminent domain statutes as applied to low-income communities of color in order to more justly facilitate urban growth and development processes driven by political-capital interest coalitions. This will help us to better understand a place-specific economic and political racial project through the applied theory of fiscal policy space, with implications for analysis in other municipalities and at different scales of analysis. This will also contribute to recent fair housing litigation progress in evaluating disparate impact claims