This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, April 27th, 2010. I'm Caleb Brown. Great cities

wax and wane, live and die, and the process is largely organic. So too with neighborhoods. The Obama administration hopes to reform the failures

of past urban renewal with the new ethos of green living, high density living.

Eileen Norcross is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

She evaluates the new debate compared with the old.

In 1949, the federal government became more involved in planning in the cities.

Essentially, the idea was to revitalize declining areas.

So the first series of policies were aimed at federal urban renewal.

And what this meant in the 1950s

was the bulldozing of neighborhoods

that were considered deteriorated.

And the re-envisioning of these areas,

according to the design aspirations of the elite planning

forces of the day which was to build high rises and expressways in these areas

on the theory that this would provide a better environment for people in the cities and better housing.

But what ended up happening was really the displacement of people who were living in these neighborhoods and

the erection of these high rises and these freeways destroyed the life of many of these neighborhoods and did not result in what the planners imagined.

So you have the gutting of a lot of inner cities in Baltimore, New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, and throughout the United States.

What was the housing stock like that actually was raised? A lot of them were modest

brownstones and apartments and like you would see in many cities today that are still standing in

Philadelphia and Greenwich Village these sort of small neighborhoods but they were

low-income middle-income neighborhoods that a lot of planners seem to think were

...