Diary of Greensboro's first urban renewal project

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DIARY OF GREENSBORO'S FIRST URBAN
RENEWAL PROJECT
By  Robert E. Barkley, Executive Director
Redevelopment Commission of Greensboro
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May-June, 1960
Editor's Note: The North Carolina
city of 1970 will be a strikingly different
place from its 1960 counterpart if
germinating urban renewal programs
come to life and grow according to
plan. As of this writing ten North
Carolina cities have received urban renewal planning advances from the federal government, and capital grant
reservations have been set aside for
these cities. They are Asheville, Charlotte, Durham, Fayetteville, Greensboro, Laurinburg, Mooresville, Raleigh,
Wilmington and Winston-Salem. (See
table on p. 7) In addition, an application for federal assistance is pending
for Greenville. At least eleven other
cities are actively considering initiating
urban renewal programs. These are
Burlington, Elizabeth City, Henderson-
ville, Hickory, High Point, Kinston,
Monroe, Mount Airy, Salisbury, States-
ville, and Washington.
Of the ten cities which have received
the "go-ahead signal" from the federal
government, only one—the city of
Greensboro—has passed the plan stage
and reached the point of project execution. On January 19, 1960 the Greensboro Redevelopment Commission made
its first property purchases in the Cumberland Redevelopment Project area.
The process of land acquisition, which
is expected to go on for about eighteen
months, is now under way.
All of North Carolina's cities, Greensboro included, are novices at the business of urban renewal and redevelopment. With the thought that we can
all benefit from each other's experiences, POPULAR GOVERNMENT
plans to report from time to time on
each of these programs as particular
milestones are reached. Greensboro has
reached an important milestone as it
moves from planning to execution
through land purchase. We therefore
invited the Executive Director of the
Greensboro Commission to prepare for
us a diary account of his city's experience in this new and challenging area
of municipal responsibility. Mr. Bark-
ley's DIARY is presented below. We
hope that it will serve other North
Carolina cities both as a checklist of
the major actions involved and a rough
schedule of the amount of time it takes
to get from the stage of idea to the
stage of execution and from step to
step in the intervening period.
One word of caution to the reader—
particularly the small town official.
As North Carolina cities go, Greensboro is a large city. Its redevelopment
program is likely to be more complicated and elaborate than such a program would be in a smaller city, just
as its problem of blighted areas is liable to be more substantial and pressing.
Officials of other cities should not be
deterred if the Greensboro procedures,
described below, seem unduly complex.
They would do well to contact the Atlanta office of the Urban Renewal Administration (E. Bruce Wedge, Regional Director of Urban Renewal,
6U5 Peachtree, Seventh Building, Atlanta 23, Georgia.) A Field Representative will, upon request, visit your
community to explain details of the program as they apply in your particular
situation. He will also work closely
with your Redevelopment Commission.
For further details of the Greensboro
program, the reader may wish to correspond with Mr. Barkley or to procure
from him one or more of the following
publications which the Greensboro Redevelopment Commission has issued in
connection with its work:
THE CUMBERLAND PROJECT: A
PROGRAM FOR RENEWING A.
BLIGHTED AREA OF GREENSBORO (1959); THE EFFECTS OF
BAD HOUSING ON GREENSBORO'S
CITIZENS (1959) ; LAND DISPOSITION POLICY (1959) ; URBAN RENEWAL: A PROGRESS REPORT TO
THE MAYOR AND CITY COUNCIL
(1959); THE WORKABLE PROGRAM FOR URBAN RENEWAL
(1958).
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