Why this atlas exists

Urban renewal is the name given to a set of federal, state, and local policies that, across the middle of the twentieth century, cleared the homes, businesses, churches, and cultural institutions of entire neighborhoods in the name of blight removal, highway construction, civic improvement, and economic growth. The policies rested on older racial practices: redlining by the Home Owners' Loan Corporation and the Federal Housing Administration, restrictive covenants enforced by private contract, exclusionary zoning, and the routine disregard of communities of color in municipal planning.

The results were physical. Hundreds of thousands of families lost their homes. The institutions that anchored those families, the churches, the union halls, the cafes, the music clubs, the bodegas, the fish canneries, the citrus-packing sheds, and the corner stores disappeared with them. Many of the survivors moved into public-housing projects that concentrated poverty and further isolated them from the wealth of the cities that had just removed them.

The Atlas documents the record city by city. For each neighborhood, the site publishes a long-form essay grounded in archival sources, a georeferenced map with historical aerial photographs layered over contemporary basemap tiles, and a full bibliography that names every work cited. The goal is to help readers see each displacement as a specific act against specific people on a specific block in a specific year, not as an anonymous structural force.

Three goals at once

The Atlas pursues three goals at once, and treats them as coequal.

Documentation. Every essay names the blocks, the families where the record permits, the businesses, the churches, the union halls, the labor camps, and the public spaces that disappeared. Without a specific record, destruction fades into a general haze that no reader can fight.

Hope and resistance. Communities have organized against urban renewal since the policies began. The Cooper Square Committee defeated Robert Moses on the Lower East Side in 1970 and has kept defeating successor plans ever since. Eighty-two farmworker families bought Cabrillo Village in Saticoy as a cooperative in 1976 rather than accept demolition. The Malone Community Center has anchored Black Lincoln since 1942 through every round of freeway construction and university expansion. The Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños at Hunter College is recovering the San Juan Hill record so that the displaced community can tell its own story. The Atlas gives these victories the same weight the essays give to the destructions.

Transfer of tools. The site links every place to the organizing groups still active on the ground: CAUSE in Ventura County, the Cooper Square Community Land Trust on the Lower East Side, the Bronx River Alliance, the Malone Community Center in Lincoln, and others named in each place's bibliography. Where a historical case applies to a current fight, the essay names the parallel and describes what the historical organizers did that present organizers might borrow. A future data-center section will carry the same method into the rural and exurban counties now facing utility-backed expansion.

Who made this

Francisco Hermosillo built the Atlas. The project draws inspiration from Adam Paul Susaneck's Segregation by Design and aims to carry the research further in written depth. The code and the research notes live in the open at github.com/pedropipehitter/urban-renewal-atlas.

Corrections and contributions

If you find a factual error, a missing citation, or a primary source the Atlas should carry, open an issue on the GitHub repository. If you are a community organizer or an archivist whose collection belongs on the site, reach out through the same channel. The Atlas prefers collaboration with the people closest to each record.

See the methodology page for how the Atlas evaluates sources and how essays are edited.