The chapters from Model City Blues highlight the tension between a business management style of urban renewal and one that allows for citizen involvement, as it specifically relates to redevelopment in New Haven in the 1960’s. Jackson details how racial attitudes influenced the assumption that primarily white academic and business leaders knew what was best for neighborhoods such as the Hill. She explains that neighborhood organizers had a long and sometimes successful history of advocating with Mayor Lee’s administration for improvements and taking direct action to improve their neighborhood, while the focus of the planners worked to stymie citizen involvement. Jackson describes how New Haven fit into the broader issue of urban redevelopment as a national issue, and how Mayor Lee’s relationship with the Federal Government fostered a top-down formula for deciding how Federal dollars were spent in the city. 

It was with great interest that I read Jackson’s history of redevelopment in the Hill neighborhood as I was born on Kimberly Avenue, and my father taught in the Head Start summer program on Congress Avenue in the late sixties. I was not aware of the local issues involved in the riots in 1967, I had always assumed they were simply part of a national phenomenon, and there is some truth in that, however, I can now see how much they were also greatly influenced by frustration of residents not being allowed a voice in policies on their own block. I also think that while New Haven’s redevelopment efforts in the 1960’s were not a complete failure, most of the benefits went to businesses and developers at the expense of  neighborhoods of color, and much of this was the result of a mindset that held , consciously or otherwise, that only educated, White minds could ‘fix’ these ‘problem’ neighborhoods. It is also a cautionary tale for those who see data as the only answer to all our urban planning problems. As these chapters point out, a neighborhood’s most valuable resource is not housing and infrastructure but people.