Many people characterize urban renewal projects and the power of eminent
domain as two of the most widely despised and often racist tools for
reshaping American cities in the postwar period. In A World More
Concrete, N. D. B. Connolly uses the history of South Florida to
unearth an older and far more complex story. Connolly captures nearly
eighty years of political and land transactions to reveal how real
estate and redevelopment created and preserved metropolitan growth and
racial peace under white supremacy. Using a materialist approach, he
offers a long view of capitalism and the color line, following much of
the money that made land taking and Jim Crow segregation profitable and
preferred approaches to governing cities throughout the twentieth
century.
A World More Concrete argues that black and white landlords,
entrepreneurs, and even liberal community leaders used tenements and
repeated land dispossession to take advantage of the poor and generate
remarkable wealth. Through a political culture built on real estate,
South Florida's landlords and homeowners advanced property rights and
white property rights, especially, at the expense of more inclusive
visions of equality. For black people and many of their white allies,
uses of eminent domain helped to harden class and color lines. Yet, for
many reformers, confiscating certain kinds of real estate through
eminent domain also promised to help improve housing conditions, to
undermine the neighborhood influence of powerful slumlords, and to open
new opportunities for suburban life for black Floridians.
Concerned more with winners and losers than with heroes and villains, A
World More Concrete offers a sober assessment of money and power in Jim
Crow America. It shows how negotiations between powerful real estate
interests on both sides of the color line gave racial segregation a
remarkable capacity to evolve, revealing property owners' power to
reshape American cities in ways that can still be seen and felt today.
