Not only was this common in the 1970s, but in the later 1960s as well.
 From 1964 to 1971, I lived in an "Urban Renewal" area in near downtown
Yonkers, New York.  There were literally blocks and blocks of blighted
buildings raised in Yonkers in a square area bounded by South Broadway,
Vark Street, Prospect Street and Buena Vista Avenue.  Three hi-rise
residential apartment buildings housing approximately 540 families were
constructed along Riverdale Avenue between Prospect and Vark.  They were
to be the "center piece" of this urban renewal project.  Little else was
done until the late 1980s.

While all these urban renewal projects were started with the very best
of intentions, most were funded with a large amount of federal money.
 As the Vietnam War escalated around this time, federal budgetary
priorities shifted from urban renewal to military spending.  Urban
renewal budgets slashed, neighborhoods were left to further decay and
eventually ruins.

Camden, New Jersey is another classic example of a community which
bought into the urban renewal concept in a big way but on a much larger
scale.  Photographs of Camden in the mid 1970s would remind you of Tokyo
and Berlin immediately following World War II:  rubble, with an
occasional firehouse, church or school left standing, for almost as far
as the eye could see.

Joe

Scott Monje wrote:

>I have run across a couple of instances of "urban renewal" projects in small cities or towns in New York in the 1970s in which old structures were razed but little or nothing new was built to replace them. Was that sort of thing common, or were these most likely local eccentricities? Has anything been written about this?
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