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Lessons From Past Urban Renewal Projects Can Be Used As Guidelines Today

It’s been roughly 50 years since Jamestown started down the path of urban renewal.

Whether that path was a good one to take is still open to debate. As we have learned from the yearly gatherings of the Lost Neighborhood — which ended this year after nearly a decade of observances — the process was hard on the neighborhood that once called Brooklyn Square home. Brooklyn Square was once home to 144 buildings, 137 of which were demolished during the 39-acre, $5.2 million Urban Renewal project. There were 101 non-residential establishments, with 72 commercial businesses, 14 industries and 15 public or semi-public organizations like churches or nursing homes. Also, there were 88 families and 27 individuals that were relocated during the project.

Between the relocations and the lack of a major manufacturing tenant that was once the anchor of the urban renewal project, it would be easy to call the project a failure. But, those involved with urban renewal got at least one thing right — something had to change for downtown Jamestown to have a fighting chance at survival. While the urban renewal project’s success can be at best considered a mixed bag, consider the alternatives: dozens of obsolete, vacant buildings clogging up available land that could be used for the next wave of development. The city’s leaders in the 1960s and 1970s knew if buildings couldn’t be used, they had to be cleared from the landscape so something new could spring up in their place.

Urban renewal didn’t bring the type of development city officials had hoped, but it did bring new uses to spaces that were long dormant. For years, Jamestown has filled in around obsolete buildings that can’t be occupied or are too expensive for developers to fix. The city needs a plan to clear the flotsam from its landscape so that something new can be built in its place.

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