“Some men see things as they are and ask why;
I dream things that never were and ask why not?”

— Robert Kennedy, March 18, 1968

The trilogy named the problem. We Know Who You Are Working For, Reparations: The Preferential Rental Option for the Displaced, and The Holding described, in three different registers, the same operation: a directional asymmetry in municipal authority that runs in one direction only.¹ Land moves out of the hands of working people and Black families and into the hands of a developer class. Blight is declared. Just compensation is paid at depressed valuations. The ground is cleared. The cleared ground is conveyed. The compounding begins.

What no one has yet asked, in print, is the next question. If the asymmetry is real, and the documentary record shows that it is, what would a remedy look like that matches the injury?

Not a payment. Not a monument. Not a generic affordable-housing set-aside that routes the subsidy through the same developer class that benefits from the original taking. Something structural. Something that returns what was taken in the form in which it was taken, to the class of people from whom it was taken, by the same legal mechanism used to take it.

There is such a remedy. It’s been there all along. However, it exists in pieces, in working precedent, in every component except the synthesis.

It can be assembled. And the parcel on which it must be assembled is the one currently being negotiated away — the cleared ground above the river, what the urban renewal map called “the project area,” what we now call by its softened names: the waterfront, the hillside, the opportunity, the development site. What the families who lived there before 1965 called their neighborhood. And what I have been calling, for eight years, the Grassy Knoll, because a crime was committed there.

“Some people see things that are and ask, Why?
Some people dream of things that never were and ask, Why not?
Some people have to go to work and don’t have time for that shit.”

— George Carlin, Brain Droppings, 1997

So which Irishman am I going to take my cue from? Kennedy or Carlin? I think I’ll take George: let’s go to work.

The Loft Law as Structural Model

The legal move at the center of the proposal I would like to make is one I have lived inside. In 1982, the New York State Legislature passed Article 7-C of the Multiple Dwelling Law — what came to be known as the Loft Law.² The statute did something specific. It bifurcated the bundle of rights in a converted industrial building. The landlord retained the real property: the walls, the roof, the floor plates, the deed. But the occupant’s investment — the years of labor, the installed kitchens and floors and partitions, the accumulated value created by a tenant who had made a habitable home out of a shell — became a separately recognized property interest. The Improvements. Sellable under §286(6). Documented on a filed Sale of Improvements Record Form. Distinct from the lease, distinct from the building, distinct from the land beneath.

The Loft Law worked because it refused the all-or-nothing framing the real-estate industry preferred. Either the landlord owned everything, or the tenant did. The legislature said no — there are two interests here, two distinct economic positions, and they can be held separately by different people without contradiction. What followed was forty years of operation, tens of thousands of regulated units, and a body of case law confirming that property rights can be unbundled with precision when the legal architecture is built to do it.

What is proposed here is the same surgical move, one layer down. Not the building and its improvements, but the building and its land. The fee in land becomes a separately held interest. The buildings on top remain private property. The two are bound together by a chartered covenant — a founding instrument I will describe in detail below, and which is the single legal hinge on which the proposal turns.

This is not novel as real estate. Battery Park City operates on a bifurcated land-and-improvements structure. Most of the City of London does. The Hampton estates have operated this way since the eighteenth century. Stuyvesant Town. Rockefeller Center for most of its life. The Chrysler Building. The Irvine Ranch. Singapore as a whole. Bifurcation of land and improvements is one of the oldest moves in property law.³

A chartered covenant is the constitutive document that binds the two interests. It establishes a perpetual relationship between two parties of equal standing — the trust holding the fee in land, and the holder of the buildings on top — and binds successive owners on both sides to that relationship. It runs with the land. It cannot be dissolved by either party alone. It defines what each party holds, what each party owes, and what flows between them in perpetuity.

What flows between them is ground tribute. The term has a long history in English and American property law, predating the modern landlord-tenant framework by several centuries.⁴ Ground tribute is rendered by the holder of the buildings to the holder of the underlying land, in recognition of the perpetual relationship the covenant establishes. The Hampton estates collected ground tribute. The City of London still does. The medieval English manorial system was structured around it. It is the form ownership took before the simplification of fee simple absolute became the dominant American model in the nineteenth century, and it survives wherever the older bifurcated structure of landholding has been preserved.

The chartered covenant is the founding document. The ground tribute is its perpetual operating expression. Together they constitute a structure of land tenure older than the United States and operative, on serious scale, throughout the Anglo-American property tradition.

The Inversion

The mechanism by which the original taking occurred during urban renewal was the blight declaration. Title I of the Housing Act of 1949,⁵ as carried forward through subsequent legislation and as exercised by the Newburgh Urban Renewal Agency between 1961 and 1974,⁶ allowed a municipality to determine that an area was “blighted,” to assemble parcels by eminent domain at appraised value, to clear the assembled site, and to convey the cleared ground to private redevelopers on terms favorable to capital and unfavorable to the displaced. The constitutional vehicle was the Fifth Amendment takings clause. The doctrinal license was Berman v. Parker (1954) and later Kelo v. New London (2005).⁷ The political license was the consensus that what stood on the ground was less valuable than what could be built there, and that the people who lived there were obstacles rather than parties.

It is worth pausing on the word parties, because the question that follows from it is the one that exposes the program’s character most directly. Why, an honest reader will ask, did the program not simply make the existing property holders parties to the redevelopment? Co-investors. Equity partners. Recipients of some share of the value that redevelopment was supposed to create. The fragmented title structure of working-class and Black urban neighborhoods could have been preserved through partnership rather than dissolved through condemnation. Hundreds of small holders could have been brought into the value chain rather than removed from it. The federal financing that made the program possible could have flowed through arrangements that left the original residents holding equity in what was built. The program could have been designed that way. It was not. The question is why.

The answer is structural and it is unambiguous in the historical record. The federal urban renewal program was built on a specific theoretical premise: that the existing pattern of small-parcel ownership in working-class and Black urban neighborhoods was itself the obstacle to redevelopment.⁸ The premise was that fragmented title — hundreds of small owners, mixed tenancies, generations of informal succession, partial titles, unrecorded improvements, the entire fabric of how working-class neighborhoods actually held property — could not produce the comprehensive redevelopment plans the program was designed to enable. The whole point of the federal financing structure was to clear that fragmentation. Eminent domain was the tool. The blight declaration was the legal predicate. The redeveloper, taking title to the assembled and cleared parcel, was the intended beneficiary. Making the existing holders parties to the redevelopment would have preserved the fragmented title structure the program existed to dissolve. It would have left small Black and working-class property holders inside the value chain at the precise moment the program required them not to be. The program’s success, as defined by the people who designed it, depended on their removal from the value chain, not their incorporation into it.

This was not hidden at the time. James Baldwin named it directly in 1963, in his interview with Kenneth Clark recorded in New York for the WGBH program The Negro and the American Promise, in the line that has been quoted in every honest treatment of the program ever since: urban renewal means Negro removal.⁹ The line has done sixty years of moral work. What it has not always done, in the way it gets quoted, is structural work. Baldwin was not making a clever observation about a regrettable side effect. He was making a structural diagnosis of what the program was built to accomplish. Urban renewal means Negro removal is the description of the program’s operating logic, not a critique of its excesses. The program ran the way it ran because the program was designed to run that way. The clearance of fragmented title was not a means to some other end. It was the end. The wealth transfer from small Black and working-class holders to the developer class was not collateral. It was the function.

Once the design premise is named, the question of “why didn’t they make them parties?” answers itself. They could not be made parties because the program existed to take what they held. A program that incorporated them as parties would have been a different program, with a different financing structure, a different redeveloper relationship, and a different result. The program that actually existed could not have done what it did with them inside it. Their removal was the precondition for everything else.

This is the historical foundation the chartered covenant rests on, and it is what makes the covenant a structural answer rather than a moral protest. The original program was designed around a specific exclusion: the holders had to be removed in order for the value transfer to run upward. The chartered covenant is designed around the inverse premise: the holders, and their descendants, are the parties whose residual interest in the ground the entire structure exists to maintain. The original program said: the small holders must be removed from the value chain so that redevelopment can proceed. The chartered covenant says: the small holders, and their descendants, are the value chain, and redevelopment proceeds on top of their permanent residual claim to the ground beneath it.

Making them parties in 1962 would have meant adding negotiation overhead to a redeveloper-centered transaction, which is why the program was structured to forbid it. Making them parties in 2026 means establishing, through eminent domain in reverse, the residual interest in the ground that the original program was designed to extinguish. Same parties, different structural position, different legal instrument, different historical moment. The program took something specific from a specific class of people. The covenant returns the residual claim to the same class — not to the original holders themselves, most of whom are dead, but to the documentary class their descendants belong to.

That is what Baldwin’s line, given structural meat, requires the present to do.

Newburgh’s federal disposition record shows the result of the original design.¹⁰ Across the urban renewal projects undertaken in this city, hundreds of households were displaced under the directional logic that has held in this country for sixty years: the blight statute was a tool that ran one way only.

It does not have to. The statute is procedurally neutral. A blight declaration can be made, just compensation can be paid, and an interest in real property can be taken — in either direction. What has been absent is the political authority willing to declare it in the other direction, and the structural design for what to do with the interest once it has been taken.

Here is the proposal.

The cleared urban renewal ground above the river — the Grassy Knoll and the parcels extending to the water’s edge, currently held by a small number of private holders and currently the subject of the Bonura/Kaplan 2 Washington Street proposal that The Holding described — is declared a blighted area by the City of Newburgh. The declaration is not rhetorical. It is the same procedural finding the city has used in every previous urban renewal action, and it is supported by the same documentary basis: a parcel that has failed, in sixty years of public investment and private negotiation, to deliver a public benefit commensurate with its public history.

The fee interests in the land — not the buildings on top of it, not the businesses operating in those buildings, but the underlying real property — are taken by eminent domain. The current owners are paid just compensation at appraised value for the land alone. They retain ownership of their improvements. They continue to operate their businesses. What changes is that they no longer own the ground beneath. The ground is held by a trust. The relationship between the trust and the building owners is established by chartered covenant, under which the building owners render ground tribute to the trust in perpetuity.

This is the inversion. Same statute. Same just-compensation framework. Same constitutional posture. Reversed direction.

The Reparative Share Class

The trust that holds the ground is structured as a community land trust — a form forty-five years deep in American practice, with roughly 280 operating instances and a track record that includes the Champlain Housing Trust in Burlington (founded as the Burlington Community Land Trust in 1984 under Bernie Sanders’ mayoralty, now the largest CLT in the country), the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative in Roxbury (which won eminent domain authority from the City of Boston in 1988 and used it to assemble its land), and the Cooper Square Mutual Housing Association on the Bowery, on whose ground I stood through the years of organizing that produced its instrument with the City of New York.¹¹ The CLT is a working form. It is not theoretical. The chartered covenant proposed here is its constitutive document, written for this site, with terms specific to what is being held and to whom the residual is owed.

What is laid over the CLT is a limited equity structure. The trust does not exist to be sold. It exists to hold the land in perpetuity, to receive ground tribute from the buildings on top, to maintain itself, and to distribute its residual benefits to a defined class. Limited equity cooperatives are older still — Mitchell-Lama in New York dates to 1955.¹² The form is mature.

What is novel is the share class.

The shares of this trust are reserved, in the founding documents, for the documented households of the federal urban renewal disposition record and their direct descendants. Not “the community” as an abstraction. Not “future residents” as a placeholder. The specific families who were taken from when this ground was cleared, identified to the level the federal record permits and to the level subsequent research will reach.

Two distinct documentary layers matter here, and the difference between them is where the proposal does its operational work. The first layer is the federal disposition record at the project and parcel level — which urban renewal projects in this city displaced how many families, on what dates, under what authority, with conveyance to which redevelopers, and at what compensation. That layer is documented. It is in the 430-city dataset. It is in the months of audit research the trilogy is grounded on. The second layer is the individual-household register — which specific families lived at which addresses, with what names, and where their descendants are now. That second layer exists in fragments: in HUD’s underlying case files, in municipal relocation records, in tax rolls and directories, in Census enumeration sheets, in the institutional memory of churches and fraternal organizations and the families themselves. It has never been comprehensively assembled for any urban renewal city in the country.

The gap between project-level documentation and household-level identification is the central methodological problem in this field. I have flagged it through the trilogy, and I flag it again here, because everything that follows depends on naming it accurately. Dr. David Hochfelder at the University of Albany, whose work on the Albany urban renewal record runs parallel to mine, has independently confirmed the gap from his own data.¹³ The problem is real, it is consequential, and it has functioned, until now, as the reason every reparative proposal grounded in urban renewal history has failed at the point of administration.

The proposal is built precisely around that gap. The chartered covenant does not require the second documentary layer to be complete at the moment of trust formation. It requires the second layer to be constructible — and to have a sustained funding source dedicated to constructing it. The trust, capitalized at the moment of the taking, generates ground tribute. A defined portion of that revenue funds a sustained, professional descendant-identification campaign — archival research, genealogical investigation, public outreach, legal-notice advertising, oral-history collection, and the staff and infrastructure to do this work seriously over the decade or more it will take to do it well. The fund pays for the search. The search expands the register. The register grows over time. The shares allocated to households not yet identified are held in escrow against the day they are.

That the construction is operationally feasible is established in the peer-reviewed scholarly record. Pfau, Lawlor, Hochfelder, and Sewell, working from the Newburgh and Kingston Urban Renewal Agency records and the Asheville Housing Authority records, have demonstrated the methodology: household-level identification reconstructed through renewal agency payment vouchers, planning surveys, on-site tenant lists, appraisals, oral histories, local newspapers, tax rolls, deeds, and city directories.¹³ What their work has demonstrated to be archivally achievable, the chartered covenant operationalizes at scale through a perpetual funding source. The historians have shown the documentary basis exists. The covenant supplies the structural mechanism that makes deployment possible without waiting for the documentary basis to be complete on day one.

The question the proposal answers is not new in Newburgh’s political record. In 1972, at a contentious public meeting on a third proposed renewal project in the same Black neighborhood, NAACP figure Richie Peterson confronted the developer the city was prepared to license. What you are destroying is a black community, a culture, a political base and a way of life. You are destroying our self respect, our unity. This is our waterfront. When the downtown wasn’t important, we couldn’t get help. Who will own and control the area?¹⁴ That question has been waiting fifty-four years for a structural answer. The chartered covenant is an answer. Who will own and control the area is, after the covenant, no longer rhetorical. It is administered. The land is held by a trust whose share register is reserved for the documentary class Peterson was speaking on behalf of, and the question’s answer becomes the operating governance structure of the parcel rather than the unanswered cry of a community leader at a 1972 public meeting.

Ground tribute flows in. Trust income compounds. The shares appreciate with the land, which means the descendants of the displaced benefit from exactly the appreciation that was extracted from their grandparents when the original parcels were taken at urban-renewal valuations. The mechanism that was used to remove value from those families becomes, structurally, the mechanism that returns it.

Kearney says that their agreement with the city is first in the nation. It is nothing of the kind.

This is what no other municipality has done.

CLTs exist. Limited equity exists. Reparative housing trusts exist in small forms — the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust in Oakland, holding land for Ohlone people on a reparative basis; the Black Land Trust networks; Evanston’s reparations program.¹⁵ None of these is structured as a share register tied to an audited federal displacement dataset of the kind the 430-city research has produced. The synthesis is original. It requires the documentary basis to exist before it can be administered. Newburgh has the documentary basis because work was done here. No other city is currently positioned to do this.

The Asbestos Architecture

The standard objection to any reparative scheme is that the class cannot be identified with sufficient precision to administer the remedy, therefore the remedy is unworkable, therefore the only practical course is symbolic gesture or generic anti-poverty programming that dissolves the specificity of the historical injury into a contemporary need-based framework.

This objection has killed just about every reparative proposal that has reached committee in the last forty years. It has to be answered, and the answer is structural rather than rhetorical.

The answer is the asbestos trust architecture. When the Manville Corporation and the other asbestos defendants moved through Chapter 11 reorganization in the 1980s, the federal courts confronted exactly this problem.¹⁶ The class of injured persons was real, was documented in principle, and was open-ended in practice. People were going to develop mesothelioma in 1985, 1995, 2025, and — in cases of the longest latency — 2045. You could not identify every claimant on day one. If you required identification before establishment, you would never establish anything.

What the courts did, and what Congress codified in §524(g) of the Bankruptcy Code, was decouple the establishment of the trust from the identification of the claimants.¹⁷ The trust was capitalized at the moment of the bankruptcy. The class was defined by documentary criteria — exposure, diagnosis, causal chain. Claimants came forward over decades, were adjudicated against the criteria, and were paid from the corpus. The same architecture appeared in the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund, in the Indian Trust settlement, in the Holocaust restitution mechanisms, in Pigford v. Glickman for Black farmers.¹⁸ None of these required full class identification before establishment. All assumed ongoing identification as a feature, not a bug.

That is what makes the proposal here operationally possible. The fund does not wait on the genealogical search. The fund is the legal entity at the moment of the taking. The share class is defined by documentary criteria — displacement under a specific federal urban renewal project, residency at a specific parcel during the project’s clearance period, direct descent through standard genealogical evidence — and the criteria are the same on day one as they are on year twenty. The register opens with the households the federal and municipal records already permit to be identified, and grows continuously as the descendant-identification campaign expands what can be documented. Living displaced persons identified through current public records receive their shares immediately. Direct descendants located through the campaign receive theirs as identification is established. Shares allocated to households not yet identified are held in escrow against the day they are. The campaign is funded by the trust itself, in perpetuity, out of its own tribute revenue. The work continues as long as there is work to do.

The campaign to find descendants becomes its own sustained public presence. Visible, documentary, continuing. It is the opposite of the gesture-and-forget pattern that has characterized every previous attempt at urban renewal accountability in this country. The fund is doing something every year. The register is growing every year. The development on the ground above is happening alongside an active reconnection of that ground to the people from whom it was taken, in real time, with real names being added to a real register.

This is not symbolism. It is structural restoration as an ongoing public process. And it is what holds a political coalition together over the decade-plus horizon a project of this scale requires.

The Coalition Geometry

A proposal of this kind succeeds or fails on whether it can hold a coalition. Most reform proposals cannot, because they ask people to choose between competing goods. Property rights against redistribution. Reparations against fiscal prudence. Development against preservation. Each of those framings has killed otherwise-promising work.

This proposal does not require any of those choices.

Property rights in improvements are preserved. Just compensation is paid for the land. The constitutional posture is conservative — the doctrine here is one Justice Scalia would recognize, and Lebron v. Amtrak, which I will return to in detail later in this essay, forecloses the most likely defensive move the opposition will make against the proposal: the argument that the present parcels are held through private corporate vehicles and are therefore exempt from the constitutional analysis that would apply if the municipality had acted in its own name. Buildings still get built. Businesses still operate. The waterfront still functions as a waterfront. Restaurants stay open. Their owners render ground tribute rather than property tax on the land component, and the tribute flows to a trust whose chartered covenant binds it, in perpetuity, to document and pay the descendants of the people from whom this ground was taken.

The coalition is therefore wider than the standard reparations proposal can muster. Descendants of displaced families have a direct material stake — not a symbolic acknowledgment, but a share register. Existing residents have a stake in a waterfront that does not become a fortified enclave of luxury units priced for buyers from elsewhere. Small property owners have a stake in a structure that constrains speculative land assembly and protects the surrounding tax base. Even fiscal conservatives have a stake — ground tribute is a stable municipal revenue stream that does not depend on PILOT negotiations or tax abatements, and the trust’s administrative costs come out of the trust rather than the general fund.

If the developer objects, there is an easy way to make the medicine go down. They are already proposing a platform — a building raised many feet above the ground, for the engineering reasons floodplain construction requires, … and other reasons. The chartered covenant proposes a platform of a different sort, at ground level. Their platform separates a building from the ground physically. The covenant’s platform separates a building from the ground legally. Same move, two separations.

The opposition is narrow. It consists of the developers currently positioned to capture these parcels under the existing arrangement, and the governance structure that protects them. That is a small constituency. It is well-funded and well-represented, and it will fight, but it is small.

What This Is, and What It Is Not

A proposal of this scale will be opposed in two registers. The first is the rhetorical category in which the opposition will try to file it. The second is the substantive charge they will try to make against it. Both deserve to be answered directly, before they are made.

The category first. There exists, in the contemporary literature on housing policy, a class of instruments described as “tenant opportunity to purchase” or “right to purchase” or, in some jurisdictions, “right to rent.” TOPA in the District of Columbia is the cleanest version.¹⁹ New York State has weaker derivatives. The mechanics, in every variant, are the same: when a landlord moves to sell or convert a building, existing tenants are given a defined window during which they may match the offer, individually for their unit or collectively for the building. This is a right of first refusal, embedded in a transactional moment. It changes nothing about the underlying property regime. The fee remains where it was. The landlord remains the landlord. The tenant remains the tenant. What shifts is the order of operations at the moment of sale — and only if the tenant has the capital, the financing, and the organizational capacity to exercise the preference within the statutory window, which most do not.

This instrument is also not new. In New York City, the 1982 condo and co-op conversion regime — the non-eviction plan and eviction plan structures under the Martin Act, GBL §352-eeee — gave existing rental tenants a purchase preference at the insider price during the conversion window.²⁰ Tenants in occupancy at the moment of an offering plan’s acceptance had a defined period to buy at a discount, and non-purchasing tenants in non-eviction plans retained their leasehold protections. Hundreds of thousands of New York City units passed through that mechanism between 1980 and the early 1990s. The right of first refusal at the insider price was the consideration tenants received in exchange for the conversion proceeding. It was contractual, statutory, and routine. The contemporary “right to purchase” rebranding of this instrument is therefore not first in any jurisdiction that adopts it. It is the conversion-era right of first refusal, reframed for a political moment that requires the appearance of innovation, applied to a slightly broader transactional trigger, and marketed as a structural reform when it is, in fact, a transactional preference. The 1980s regime had at least the honesty to name the instrument what it was. The contemporary rebranding strips out the structural protections that surrounded the conversion-era right — rent stabilization carryover, succession rights, the non-eviction plan itself — and presents the residual transactional right as if it were substantive reform.

The chartered covenant is not that. It does not depend on a tenant assembling capital within a sixty-day window. It does not preserve the underlying property regime and tinker with the order of operations. It changes the property regime. The fee in land is taken. The trust holds it in perpetuity. The covenant runs with the land. There is no moment-of-sale window, because the sale is not the trigger — the historical taking is. The reparative share class is documented at the moment of trust formation, and the register grows over time through the parallel campaign. There is no condition that the displaced or their descendants must perform within a statutory window in order to claim what is owed. The claim is structural, not transactional.

That clears the rhetorical category. The substantive charge is sharper, and it deserves the dignity of being answered directly rather than deflected.

The opposition will say the proposal redistributes wealth. The opposition will be correct.

Urban renewal was wealth redistribution. That is not metaphor and not polemical flourish. It is description. Federal funds and municipal eminent domain authority were used to transfer real property from one class of holders to another, at compensation levels that systematically undervalued the taken interests, with the gains accruing to a developer class whose access to the disposition pipeline was institutionally protected. The 430-city dataset documents this at scale.²¹ The federal urban renewal program, as actually implemented between 1949 and 1974, moved enormous wealth — in land values, in displaced equity, in foregone appreciation, in destroyed neighborhood capital — from working-class and predominantly Black households upward into the developer class and its institutional successors. The official histories soften this as “renewal” or “redevelopment.” The structural description is wealth redistribution, executed through the takings clause, with the federal government as the financing instrument and the local authority as the executing agent.

So the question is not whether the proposal redistributes wealth. The question is which direction. The original program redistributed upward. The proposal here redistributes the residual claim in the other direction, back toward the class from which it was originally extracted, through the same legal instrument, with the same constitutional logic. The vector reverses. The mechanism is identical.

It is also worth locating the magnitude of what is being proposed inside American historical practice. The top marginal income tax rate under Eisenhower was 91% on income over $400,000 — roughly $4.5 million in current dollars.²² That was not a fringe position. It was the settled bipartisan policy of the Republican administration that built the Interstate Highway System and presided over the largest sustained economic expansion in American history. The wealth redistribution embedded in that tax structure was, in dollar-flow terms, vastly more aggressive than anything the chartered covenant would do. The covenant takes a fee in land at appraised value, pays just compensation, and routes ground tribute on a defined parcel into a reparative trust. The Eisenhower-era top bracket took ninety-one cents of every marginal dollar above the threshold, every year, from every high earner in the country, and routed it into the federal general fund. If 91% on the top bracket was the Republican consensus position in 1955, the structural redistribution proposed here — narrower in scope, defensible in constitutional posture, grounded in documented historical injury, and operating on a single parcel rather than the entire economy — sits well within the range of what American policy has historically considered moderate.

The post-war American order was a redistributive order. It redistributed wealth from concentrated capital toward labor, from inheritance toward education, from rentier returns toward productive investment. The GI Bill, the suburban middle class, the public university system, the rising-wage decades — these were the products of redistribution, not departures from it.²³ The dismantling of that order, beginning roughly in 1971 and accelerating through the period Mattei describes in The Capital Order,²⁴ is what produced the conditions under which a Newburgh urban renewal site sits cleared and contested sixty years after the original taking. The proposal here does not invent redistribution. It restores a small piece of the redistributive logic on which the country’s mid-century prosperity was actually built.

Then the constitutional argument, which closes the question. The opposition’s recourse, after rhetorical category and substantive charge have failed, will be to claim that redistributive use of eminent domain is constitutionally illegitimate.

Either the takings clause permits redistributive use of eminent domain or it does not. There is no third position.

If it does — and the entire body of doctrine from Berman v. Parker (1954) through Kelo v. New London (2005) holds that it does — then the chartered covenant is constitutionally available. The same authority that permitted the upward taking permits the downward correction. The opposition’s only remaining argument is policy preference, dressed up as constitutional principle, which is not an argument that survives the Supreme Court precedent they themselves rely on for the title chain they currently hold.

If it does not — if redistributive takings are constitutionally illegitimate — then the original urban renewal takings were illegitimate when they occurred. Every parcel cleared between 1961 and 1974 in this city was taken under a doctrine the opposition would now be arguing is invalid. The title chain that runs from the Newburgh Urban Renewal Agency through subsequent conveyances to the present holders is, on that argument, defective at its origin. The current owners would be holding land whose first link in the chain is constitutionally void by their own reasoning. They cannot quiet title against a defect they themselves have just argued exists.

The pincer closes. Either the doctrine is good and the proposal is constitutional, or the doctrine is bad and the opposition’s title is defective. There is no exit.

It is worth naming, briefly, the strongest internal opposition to the doctrine the proposal relies on, because the opposition will reach for it. Justice Thomas’s dissent in Kelo argued that the public-use clause should mean what it says — actual public use, not merely public purpose — and that Berman, Midkiff, and Kelo together represent a sixty-year drift from the original meaning of the clause.²⁵ Thomas would, if his position became law, foreclose the doctrinal basis for redistributive takings altogether. His position is serious. It is not the law. And, more importantly for the argument made here, if it ever became the law it would not save the opposition: it would render the original urban renewal takings constitutionally suspect at their root, leaving the current title chain operating on a doctrine the Court had repudiated. The pincer holds in either constitutional regime. The proposal is defensible under Berman and Kelo as they stand. It is also defensible against the originalist critique, because the originalist critique, fully applied, attacks the title the opposition relies on more deeply than it attacks the chartered covenant. There is no doctrinal vector from which the proposal can be defeated without simultaneously defeating the chain of title that produced the parcels in dispute.

There is one further doctrinal piece the opposition will reach for, and the foreclosure of it deserves to be named in full. The opposition will argue that the parcels in dispute, having passed through nominally private corporate hands over the intervening sixty years, are now insulated from the constitutional analysis that would apply if the municipality had acted in its own name. Lebron v. National Railroad Passenger Corporation — a case I brought to the Supreme Court in 1994 and won 8-1 the following year — forecloses this argument.²⁶ Justice Scalia, writing for the majority, held that when the federal government creates a corporation by special law for the furtherance of governmental objectives, and retains for itself permanent authority to appoint a majority of the directors, that corporation is part of the government for constitutional purposes. Amtrak had argued that its private corporate form insulated it from First Amendment scrutiny when it refused to display a political billboard. The Court rejected the argument. The corporate form does not insulate. A sovereign instrument operating through corporate vehicle remains a sovereign instrument, and the constitutional obligations that attach to sovereign action travel with it.

The holding is a state-action doctrine, and its application to the ground above the river is direct. The Newburgh Urban Renewal Agency that took the parcels in the 1960s was nominally a separate corporate entity. The Newburgh Industrial Development Agency that has structured PILOT arrangements on the cleared ground is nominally a separate corporate entity. The various redevelopment vehicles through which the parcels have moved over sixty years were nominally separate corporate entities. When the chartered covenant is proposed, the opposition will argue that the parcels are now held through private corporate vehicles, that the transactions over the intervening sixty years have been private real-estate transactions, and that the constitutional analysis appropriate to a public taking does not apply because the present holders are private parties. Lebron forecloses this argument. When the corporate vehicles in question were created by sovereign action, performed sovereign functions, and produced the title chain that runs forward to the present holders, the corporate form does not insulate any link in that chain from the constitutional analysis that would attach if the municipality had acted in its own name. The current holders cannot claim the protections of pure private property while denying the sovereign character of the authority that produced their title.

The doctrine compounds with the pincer just described. The pincer says: either redistributive takings are permissible under the takings clause or the original takings were defective at their root. Lebron says: the corporate intermediation between the original taking and the present title does not exempt any link in the chain from constitutional analysis. Together, the two doctrines close off the opposition’s escape routes. They cannot argue private-party status to avoid the takings analysis. They cannot argue that the original public character of the program does not reach forward to the present holders. The sovereign authority that produced the title chain is the same sovereign authority that can adjust it, and the corporate forms through which it has operated do not break the chain of public obligation that runs forward from 1962 to the present.

The line that runs from Lebron through Berman and Kelo to the chartered covenant is therefore a single constitutional architecture. Sovereign takings remain sovereign takings even when administered through corporate intermediaries. The doctrinal posture that secured the original parcels for the developer class is the same doctrinal posture that supports their adjustment now. The doctrine the opposition would need to repudiate to defeat the proposal is doctrine they cannot afford to lose, because losing it dissolves their own title chain at its constitutional root. The proposal moves through the gap their own constitutional commitments leave open.²⁷

Aylwin’s Mistake

I was in Chile in 1989. I watched, in person, the electoral transfer that ended the Pinochet dictatorship and brought Patricio Aylwin to the presidency, and I have carried what I saw there for thirty-seven years as a central political education of my adult life. The chartered covenant proposal cannot be understood, and the present moment in Newburgh cannot be understood, without naming what I saw.

Patricio Aylwin was a Christian Democrat — a centrist, by the standards of Chilean politics, and the president of the Partido Demócrata Cristiano, the centrist Catholic party that occupied the middle ground in Chile between Allende’s Popular Unity coalition on the left and the National Party on the right. He had taken the leadership of the PDC in May 1973, four months before the coup, displacing the more conciliatory Renan Fuentealba, whose faction had favored continued dialogue with Allende. Under Aylwin, the PDC’s dominant faction abandoned dialogue and aligned with the position that became, in the historical record, the civilian green light for the September 11 coup. Aylwin himself helped draft the August 23, 1973 congressional motion declaring that the Allende government had “sought to impose a totalitarian regime” — the document that, three weeks before the tanks rolled, gave the military the civilian legitimation it needed.²⁸ His public position, in the documented contemporaneous record, was that he would prefer a temporary dictatorship of the Chilean military to a Marxist government, and that a brief military intervention was, in his characterization, the lesser of two available evils.²⁹ He anticipated, the historical record shows, a brief intervention followed by a quick return to civilian government — six months, twelve, eighteen at the outside. The Christian Democrats were not the architects of the coup. They were the civilian centrist apparatus that made the coup defensible to the international middle class and to the Chilean professional class. Without their legitimation, Pinochet’s seizure of power would have been politically much harder to sustain through its first months. Aylwin gave the coup the cover it needed to consolidate.

Santiago, Chile, 1989:
Left: Supporters of Hernán Büchi, Pinochet’s Minister of Finance and ideologue of the neoliberal reforms of The Chicago School that were introduced in Chile. Büchi generated sympathy due to his youthful image and his close association with the country’s supposedly successful economic recovery, and was the candidate of the right-wing coalition that generally aligned with Pinochet.
Right: dodging water cannon. I quickly learned that “water cannon” was a misnomer: that was raw sewage that they were spraying. I went to a dinner one evening at the home of Paz Errázuriz, a photojournalist who created a definitive, intimate photographic study of the gay and trans underground in Santiago https://www.ceciliabrunsonprojects.com/publications/14/. There were photographers from all over the world there: dinner conversation revolved around the various home remedies to counteract tear gas in various countries. For Chile, it was a plain old lemon rind.

The promised elections did not come at six months, twelve, or eighteen. Because of course they didn’t: dictators rarely give up power easily. The elections finally arrived in 1989, sixteen years after the coup. It was a constitutional referendum that Pinochet granted and that subsequently forced his hand, after the Caravan of Death, after Operation Condor, after the desaparecidos, after the Chicago School economists had restructured the entire Chilean economy along the neoliberal lines that became the global template, and after the wealth transfer from labor to capital that the coup had made possible had been institutionalized as the new normal.³⁰ Aylwin became the first post-Pinochet president in 1990 — by which time the entire economic and constitutional structure of the country had been remade in a direction the Christian Democrats, in 1973, had not contemplated and, by 1990, could not … or would not … undo.

What I watched in 1989 was the moment of restoration that arrived sixteen years late, through the same centrist apparatus that had originally enabled the seizure, on terms that ratify rather than reverse what the seizure built. The 1980 constitution stayed in place. The economic restructuring stayed in place. The amnesty for regime crimes stayed in place. The military’s structural role in the post-transition state stayed in place. Aylwin took the sash on the explicit condition, encoded in the transition’s own terms, that the Concertación would not undo what the regime had built. The centrist class licensed the seizure on the theory that the dirty work would be followed by the restoration of constitutional order. The dirty work was followed by the institutionalization of what the dirty work had accomplished, and the centrist class, returned to office a generation later, was permitted to administer the result without permission to reverse it.

This is the structural lesson I carried out of 1989, and it is the lesson the present moment in Newburgh requires us to look at directly. The Christian Democrats licensed a seizure they did not understand on the theory that order would be restored in due course. The Democratic Party in this country, on the question of urban renewal extraction and developer-centered redevelopment, has performed the structurally identical function for sixty years. The 1949 Housing Act and its 1954 amendments were passed with civilian liberal legitimation, on the theory that comprehensive redevelopment would, in some not-too-distant future, produce a more livable and equitable urban form. The reformers who supported Title I were not cynical. They were Aylwin in 1973: providing the legitimating cover for a transaction whose actual structural character they had not understood and whose long-term consequences they had not contemplated. The dirty work of clearance was followed not by the promised reconstruction but by the institutionalization of the developer-centered extractive arrangement that the program was actually designed to enable. The promised restoration did not come at five years, ten years, or twenty. In Newburgh, it has now not come at sixty.

The Democratic Party in its current operating form is the centrist legitimating apparatus that has administered this non-arrival across the half-century since the original program ran out of federal money. It is the apparatus that produces the community benefits agreements, the affordable-housing set-asides, the equity-and-inclusion frameworks, the PILOT structures, the LIHTC syndications. Each of these is the contemporary form of the Aylwin promise: the dirty work has already happened, the structural changes are in place, and the centrist class is here to administer the result on terms that frame the administration as moderation. The party’s role on this question is not to reverse the extraction. The party’s role is to make the extraction legible as moderation, to absorb the labor and racial-justice constituencies that would otherwise organize against it, and to channel their political energy into electoral cycles that produce no structural change. This is not the architecture of opposition. It is the architecture of legitimating consent.

This is what Frank’s Listen, Liberal describes from one direction.³¹ The professional-managerial wing of the party has, since roughly 1972, traded class politics for a meritocratic self-conception that treats redistribution as crude and structural intervention as inelegant. It has substituted technocratic management of extraction for refusal of extraction. This is what Mattei’s The Capital Order describes from the other direction. The post-1971 dismantling of the redistributive consensus required, structurally, a centrist political party that would administer the dismantling without rupturing the coalition that had supported the redistributive order. The Democratic Party became that vehicle in the United States, as the Christian Democrats and their European equivalents became the corresponding vehicles in their own contexts. The two analyses converge on the present moment, in which a structurally moderate proposal — one that would have been unremarkable in 1955 — is functionally unavailable to the party that, in its mid-century form, would have enacted without controversy.

In Newburgh, this is not abstract. The PILOT-driven redevelopment arrangements, the Bonura-Kaplan accumulations, the 2 Washington Street proposal, the absence of any Democratic official in the Hudson Valley currently positioned to orchestrate a chartered covenant or anything structurally similar — all of this is the local expression of the national pattern. The Democratic Party in this region is the operating apparatus of the developer-extractive arrangement on cleared urban renewal ground. Its officeholders are not architects of the arrangement. They are its legitimating staff. The community benefits language, the affordable-housing percentages, the equity-and-inclusion frameworks attached to the projects — these are the public-relations finishes on a transaction whose structural character was decided sixty years ago and is now moving towards a completion.

The investor class has waited for this completion for sixty years. They have watched the public investment accumulate. They have watched the surrounding city be dismantled and slowly recover. They have watched the property values trace the arc of the broader American urban story: disinvestment, decline, stabilization, the early signals of recovery. And they have positioned themselves, through Bonura’s accumulation and Kaplan’s assembly and the 2 Washington Street proposal, to seize the parcel at the moment when it has finally become possible to seize it on the terms the original program was designed to enable. They are doing in 2026 what the 1949 program could not finish in 1973, because the conditions for finishing it did not exist until now. They are completing the original transaction. The centrist apparatus that licensed the original taking is the centrist apparatus that will, if permitted, license its completion.

I want to be careful about the scope of this argument, because there is a version of it that becomes a generic anti-party screed and loses the structural specificity that makes it useful. The point is not that the Democratic Party is generally bad. The point is that the Democratic Party in its current operating form performs, on the question of urban renewal extraction and developer-centered redevelopment, the structural function the Christian Democrats performed on the question of the Pinochet seizure. It is the centrist legitimating apparatus that licenses the extraction by framing it as moderation. That function is specific. It is identifiable. It is supported by the documentary record of how the party has actually administered redevelopment policy in Newburgh, in the Hudson Valley, and in the broader American urban policy framework over the last forty years. And it is the function the chartered covenant cannot be enacted through, because the function is the obstacle the chartered covenant exists to bypass.

The chartered covenant, named accurately, is a proposal the Democratic Party as currently constituted is structurally ill-equipped to make. Not because of any individual official’s character or commitments, but because the party’s operating logic since the early 1970s — the trade of class politics for meritocratic technocracy that Frank diagnoses, the management of extraction in lieu of its refusal that Mattei traces — does not produce officials capable of carrying it. To become capable of carrying it, the party would have to undertake specific structural changes. It would have to treat extraction as a structure to be refused rather than a fact to be managed. It would have to treat redistribution as a legitimate constitutional posture rather than as politically toxic. It would have to disengage, operationally, from the developer-class fundraising relationships that currently structure local Democratic politics in places like the Hudson Valley. Those are not rhetorical adjustments. They are structural reorganizations of the party’s relationship to capital, to its own constituencies, and to the language of moderation it has used for half a century to make extraction legible as care.

This is uncomfortable to say in a city where most of the people whose engagement the proposal would require are registered Democrats. But the discomfort is generative rather than foreclosing. The party has been one thing and then another across its history. Whether it can become, again, something closer to what it was in its mid-century period and I know some will question even that: the period’s actual record on race, labor, and war has to be reckoned with rather than romanticized, but let’s stay focused) is the question this writing puts to the party.

What I learned in Chile in 1989 was that restoration which arrives through the same centrist apparatus that licensed the original seizure is not restoration. It is ratification. The Concertación did not undo what the regime had built. It administered what the regime had built, with somewhat more visible accountability and somewhat less behind-the-scenes maneuvering. The regime’s structural changes became permanent. The centrist class returned to office on the explicit condition that they would not reverse what they had once enabled.

If the chartered covenant is to be something other than the Concertación version of urban renewal accountability — if it is to be structural restoration rather than ratifying administration — it cannot arrive through the apparatus that has spent sixty years administering the non-arrival of the original promise. It has to arrive through a political authority constituted differently. The question, then, is whether the Democratic Party can become that authority, or whether that authority has to be built outside it.

The answer the historical record offers is that the party has, in earlier moments, been the vehicle for structural redistribution rather than its civilian legitimating apparatus. The party that passed the Wagner Act in 1935 was not the same party as the one that administered urban renewal redevelopment after 1949.³² The party that wrote Social Security and the GI Bill and the Voting Rights Act was not the same party as the one that, after 1972, traded class politics for meritocratic technocracy. The party has been one thing and then another, and the difference between its mid-century redistributive form and its post-1972 administrative form is not a difference of personnel but a difference of relationship to the people whose lives the party’s policy choices actually structure. The party in its mid-century form fought with the people, against extractive arrangements that were transparent in their character. The party in its current form administers extractive arrangements on behalf of the people, in language that frames the administration as care.

What the party would have to re-become, to be the vehicle for this fight rather than the obstacle to it, is what it has been before: a coalition that recognizes its own working-class and Black and immigrant constituencies as the parties whose structural interests the party exists to advance, rather than as constituencies whose political energy the party exists to absorb. That re-becoming is not a matter of rhetoric. It is a matter of structural relationship. A party that fights with the people for the chartered covenant is a party that has chosen the constituency of the displaced and their descendants over the constituency of the developer class and its institutional successors. That choice is available. It has been made before. Whether the party chooses to make it again, on this question, on this ground, in this generation, is the question this writing puts to the party. The answer the party gives, in deeds rather than in language, is what determines whether the fight is fought through the party or around it. Either way, the fight has to be fought, because the chartered covenant is the structural answer the moment requires, and the moment is now.

The Answer to the Holding

The Holding described an asymmetry. This essay describes its inversion.

The structure of the original taking was: blight declared, land assembled, ground cleared, parcels conveyed, public extinguished, private compounded. The structure of the return is: blight declared, land assembled, ground retained, covenant established, public restored, private continued. Same statute. Same procedure. Same constitutional logic. Reversed vector. Returned residual.

What has not been done elsewhere can be done here, because the dataset is here. The trilogy diagnosed the asymmetry. This is an answer. It is not a gesture. It is a structure. It is buildable. And it is, on every component except the synthesis itself, already built — somewhere else, in some other form, by people who proved it could be done.

“You’ve always had the power, my dear. You’ve had it all along.”

— Glinda, The Wizard of Oz (1939)

Dorothy’s red shoes are sitting on the hillside. See ’em? They are right there. Waiting for anyone with the political courage to slip them on, get them dirty, and get to work.

Epigraphs.

The Robert F. Kennedy formulation derives from his 1968 presidential campaign and was used by him in numerous addresses, including his speech at the University of Kansas on March 18, 1968. The line itself originates with George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah (1921), Part I, “In the Beginning,” in which the Serpent speaks the formulation to Eve (“You see things; and you say, ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say, ‘Why not?'”). Senator Edward M. Kennedy quoted the line in his eulogy at his brother’s funeral on June 8, 1968.

George Carlin, Brain Droppings (Hyperion 1997).

Notes

I am a one-man band here — writer, editor, copy editor, fact-checker, graphic designer, photographer, image fabricator, legal consultant, publisher and moderator wrapped into one, publishing within a time line that is compressed from the weeks or even months of what is normally allowed for long-form investigative writing into sometimes as little as a few days. Errors and omissions are inevitable in work produced under these conditions. I rely on an informed public to identify them, and where they are identified, the record is corrected. This piece reflects my best understanding at the time of publication and is subject to revision as additional information becomes available.

Footnotes

Michael Lebron, We Know Who You Are Working For (April 27, 2026), http://newburghisamerica.com/2026/04/27/we-know-who-you-are-working-for/; Michael Lebron, Reparations: The Preferential Rental Option for the Displaced (April 29, 2026), http://newburghisamerica.com/2026/04/29/reparations-the-preferential-rental-option/; Michael Lebron, The Holding (April 30, 2026), http://newburghisamerica.com/2026/04/30/the-holding/. The three essays are referenced in this essay collectively as “the trilogy” within the larger continuing Newburgh Is America series.
New York Multiple Dwelling Law, art. 7-C, §§ 280–287 (McKinney). Article 7-C was added by chapter 349 of the Laws of 1982. The Sale of Improvements provisions are codified at § 286(6); the form filing requirements are administered by the New York City Loft Board.
On the bifurcation of land and improvements as a working real estate structure: Battery Park City operates under a long-term ground lease from the Battery Park City Authority, a New York State public benefit corporation; the freehold-leasehold split has structured much of the City of London since medieval grants and continues today across substantial portions of the Square Mile and the West End estates (including the Grosvenor, Cadogan, Howard de Walden, and Portman estates); Stuyvesant Town/Peter Cooper Village was assembled by Metropolitan Life under New York’s Redevelopment Companies Law; Rockefeller Center sat on Columbia University–owned land via long-term lease from 1928 until the lease’s eventual termination; the Irvine Ranch in Orange County, California operated as a single estate for over a century; Singapore reserves freehold to the state for the substantial majority of land. See generally A.W.B. Simpson, A History of the Land Law (2d ed. Oxford 1986); Stuart Banner, American Property: A History of How, Why, and What We Own (Harvard 2011).
On ground rents and the Anglo-American bifurcation tradition: Simpson, A History of the Land Law, supra; Eric Kades, “The Dark Side of Efficiency: Johnson v. M’Intosh and the Expropriation of American Indian Lands,” 148 U. Pa. L. Rev. 1065 (2000), discussing the layered tenure structures that preceded fee simple absolute as the American norm. The term “ground rent” in modern American usage commonly refers to the payment under a ground lease; the term “ground tribute” is used in this essay to mark the structural distinction between a leased-property rental relationship and a perpetual covenanted relationship of the kind proposed.
Housing Act of 1949, Pub. L. No. 81-171, 63 Stat. 413 (1949), Title I, formerly codified at 42 U.S.C. §§ 1450 et seq. The statute was substantially superseded by the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974, Pub. L. 93-383, 88 Stat. 633, which consolidated urban renewal funding into the Community Development Block Grant program.
The 1961–1974 dating reflects the active execution period of the City of Newburgh’s federally-funded urban renewal program. The Water Street project went into execution in 1961; the East End project, which encompassed and extended the Water Street area, was approved in 1964 and continued through the program’s wind-down following the 1973 oil crisis and the 1974 Housing and Community Development Act. See Ann Pfau, Kathleen Lawlor, David Hochfelder, and Stacy Kinlock Sewell, “Using Urban Renewal Records to Advance Reparative Justice,” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 10(2): 113–131 (June 2024), at 119, 120, 124; Ann Pfau and Stacy Kinlock Sewell, “Newburgh’s ‘Last Chance’: The Elusive Promise of Urban Renewal in a Small and Divided City,” Journal of Planning History 19(3): 144–63 (2020). Specific project numbers, conveyance dates, and parcel-level disposition records are documented in the Newburgh Urban Renewal Agency records, M. E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives, University at Albany, SUNY, and in the federal urban renewal project files at the National Archives, Record Group 207.
Berman v. Parker, 348 U.S. 26 (1954); Kelo v. City of New London, 545 U.S. 469 (2005). Berman upheld the use of eminent domain in Washington, D.C. to take unblighted property as part of a comprehensive redevelopment plan, holding the legislature’s determination of public purpose substantially unreviewable. Kelo extended Berman to permit the transfer of condemned property to private redevelopers where the municipality found the redevelopment to serve a public purpose.
For the structural analysis of urban renewal’s design premise, see generally Mindy Thompson Fullilove, Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America, and What We Can Do About It (One World/Ballantine 2004); Jon C. Teaford, The Rough Road to Renaissance: Urban Revitalization in America, 1940-1985 (Johns Hopkins 1990); Robert A. Beauregard, Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of U.S. Cities (Routledge, 2d ed. 2003). The fragmentation-as-obstacle premise is documented in the contemporaneous federal and municipal planning literature of the period and is taken up explicitly in Catherine Bauer Wurster, “The Dreary Deadlock of Public Housing,” Architectural Forum (May 1957).
James Baldwin, interviewed by Kenneth Clark, The Negro and the American Promise, WGBH/National Educational Television (recorded New York, May 24, 1963; aired June 24, 1963). The “urban renewal means Negro removal” formulation appears in this interview. The interview was filmed immediately after Baldwin’s meeting with Attorney General Robert Kennedy at the Kennedy family’s New York apartment. Footage and transcript are available through the GBH Open Vault, https://openvault.wgbh.org/, catalog references cpb-aacip-15-0v89g5gf5r and cpb-aacip-15-9m03xx2p.
See endnote 20 (430-city dataset) for the federal disposition record and the audit research underlying this essay’s claims about Newburgh’s urban renewal projects.
On community land trusts: as of 2016, approximately 280 CLTs operated in the United States; current census data is maintained by Grounded Solutions Network and the International Center for Community Land Trusts (cltweb.org). The Champlain Housing Trust traces its origin to the Burlington Community Land Trust (BCLT), established in 1984 with a $200,000 seed grant from the City of Burlington under Mayor Bernie Sanders; the BCLT merged with the Lake Champlain Housing Development Corporation in 2006 to form CHT, currently the largest CLT in the United States. The Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative obtained eminent domain authority from the City of Boston in 1988 through Dudley Neighbors, Inc. The Cooper Square Mutual Housing Association (Manhattan) operates twenty-one buildings under a long-term agreement with the City of New York established in the early 1990s. See generally John Emmeus Davis, ed., The Community Land Trust Reader (Lincoln Institute of Land Policy 2010); Davis & Stokes, Lands in Trust, Homes That Last: A Performance Evaluation of the Champlain Housing Trust (Burlington, VT: Champlain Housing Trust 2009).
New York Mitchell-Lama Housing Companies Act, codified at N.Y. Priv. Hous. Fin. Law, art. II (McKinney), enacted 1955. Mitchell-Lama authorized state and municipal financing of limited-equity cooperative and rental housing for moderate-income tenants.
Ann Pfau, Kathleen Lawlor, David Hochfelder, and Stacy Kinlock Sewell, “Using Urban Renewal Records to Advance Reparative Justice,” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 10(2): 113–131 (June 2024), DOI: 10.7758/RSF.2024.10.2.05 (open access). The methodological gap between project-level and household-level documentation is a recurring theme in the field literature on urban renewal accountability and is the explicit subject of the methodology Pfau, Lawlor, Hochfelder, and Sewell develop. Their work, drawing on the Newburgh and Kingston Urban Renewal Agency records (held at the M. E. Grenander Department of Special Collections, University at Albany, and the Ulster County Hall of Records, respectively) and the Housing Authority of the City of Asheville records (held at the University of North Carolina, Asheville), demonstrates that household-level identification through renewal agency payment vouchers, planning surveys, on-site tenant lists, appraisals, oral histories, local newspapers, tax rolls, deeds, and city directories is operationally feasible. See also David Hochfelder, “Renewed or Ruined? Urban Renewal in Upstate New York,” New York Archives Magazine 21(3): 28–33 (2022); David Hochfelder, “Toward a Social History of Urban Renewal,” in Douglas R. Appler, ed., The Many Geographies of Urban Renewal: New Perspectives on the Housing Act of 1949 (Temple University Press, 2023); Ann Pfau and Stacy Kinlock Sewell, “Newburgh’s ‘Last Chance’: The Elusive Promise of Urban Renewal in a Small and Divided City,” Journal of Planning History 19(3): 144–63 (2020). The Picturing Urban Renewal project (picturingurbanrenewal.org), funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, is the public-facing digital scholarly project advancing this work. ²
The Peterson confrontation is documented in Pfau and Sewell, “Newburgh’s ‘Last Chance,'” Journal of Planning History 19(3): 144–63 (2020), at 156, and is also quoted in Pfau, Lawlor, Hochfelder, and Sewell, supra note 13, at 124. The 1972 meeting concerned a proposed third renewal project in the same Black neighborhood that had already been the subject of the 1959 Water Street and 1964 East End projects. The third project did not proceed.
Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, founded 2015 in Oakland, California, holds land for the Lisjan (Ohlone) people on a reparative basis. See sogoreate-landtrust.org. The Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust and similar organizations form what is referenced as the Black Land Trust networks. Evanston, Illinois adopted the first U.S. municipal reparations program in November 2019, originally funded through a tax on cannabis sales; the program’s structure and operations are documented at cityofevanston.org/government/departments/city-manager/reparations.
In re Johns-Manville Corp., Bankr. Ct. S.D.N.Y., filed August 26, 1982. The Manville Personal Injury Settlement Trust was established in 1988 as part of the company’s confirmed plan of reorganization.
11 U.S.C. § 524(g), enacted by the Bankruptcy Reform Act of 1994, Pub. L. 103-394, § 111. Section 524(g) codified the channeling-injunction-and-trust mechanism developed in the Manville bankruptcy, permitting Chapter 11 debtors with asbestos-related liabilities to channel current and future claims into a trust funded in whole or in part by the debtor and protected by an injunction against direct claims on the reorganized debtor.
September 11th Victim Compensation Fund: Air Transportation Safety and System Stabilization Act, Pub. L. 107-42, Title IV (2001); reauthorized through the Never Forget the Heroes: James Zadroga, Ray Pfeifer, and Luis Alvarez Permanent Authorization of the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund Act, Pub. L. 116-34 (2019). Indian Trust settlement: Cobell v. Salazar, settled 2010 under the Claims Resolution Act of 2010, Pub. L. 111-291. Holocaust restitution: administered through multiple national and international instruments including the Holocaust Victim Insurance Relief Act and the German Forced Labour Compensation Programme administered by the International Organization for Migration. Pigford litigation: Pigford v. Glickman, 185 F.R.D. 82 (D.D.C. 1999) (consent decree); In re Black Farmers Discrimination Litigation, 856 F. Supp. 2d 1 (D.D.C. 2011) (Pigford II).
District of Columbia Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA), D.C. Code §§ 42-3404.01 et seq.
N.Y. Gen. Bus. Law § 352-eeee (McKinney), enacted by Chapter 555 of the Laws of 1982. The statute, part of the Martin Act framework administered by the New York Attorney General, governs cooperative and condominium conversions in the City of New York. The non-eviction plan structure (52(2)(c)) requires purchase agreements from at least 51% of bona fide tenants in occupancy on the date of acceptance for filing; the eviction plan structure (now substantially restricted by the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act of 2019, Chapter 36 of the Laws of 2019) historically permitted eviction of non-purchasing tenants subject to specified protections.
Michael Lebron, “Council-Manager Government and Urban Renewal Displacement: A 430-City Audit,” working paper (April 2026). The dataset assembles the federal urban renewal disposition record (HUD Records Group 207, National Archives) for 430 American cities, comprising 215 council-manager and 215 mayor-council municipalities and covering, by the dataset’s accounting, 95.7% of all displaced families in the federal record. The comparative analysis underlies the structural findings of the They Call It Good Government essay series and is the documentary basis for this essay’s claims about the program’s directional asymmetry.
Internal Revenue Service, Statistics of Income — Individual Income Tax Returns, historical tables, available at irs.gov; Tax Foundation, Federal Individual Income Tax Rates History, 1862–2013 (2013). The 91% top marginal rate applied to taxable income above $400,000 (married filing jointly) and prevailed from 1954 through 1963; the rate was reduced to 77% in 1964 and 70% in 1965 under the Revenue Act of 1964, Pub. L. 88-272.
Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 (G.I. Bill), Pub. L. 78-346, 58 Stat. 284. On the redistributive character of the postwar order, see generally Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (Norton 2005); Kevin M. Kruse & Julian E. Zelizer, Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974 (Norton 2019); see also endnote 23.
Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism (University of Chicago Press 2022).
Kelo v. City of New London, 545 U.S. 469, 505–23 (2005) (Thomas, J., dissenting). Justice Thomas argued that the public-use clause should be construed to require actual use by the public rather than mere public purpose, and that Berman v. Parker and Hawaii Housing Authority v. Midkiff, 467 U.S. 229 (1984), should be reconsidered. Midkiff upheld the use of eminent domain to take title from concentrated landowners and redistribute it to lessees on a public purpose theory.
Lebron v. National Railroad Passenger Corp., 513 U.S. 374 (1995). Petitioner: Michael A. Lebron (the author of this essay). Counsel of record: David D. Cole; with Bruce Rich and Gloria C. Phares on the briefs. The Court held, 8-1 (Scalia, J., for the majority; O’Connor, J., dissenting), that Amtrak — created by special federal statute, with a majority of directors appointed by the President — is part of the government for First Amendment purposes, and that the corporate form does not insulate sovereign action from constitutional obligation.
A subsequent essay in this series will treat the constitutional architecture in greater depth — the line from Berman through Midkiff and Kelo, the originalist counterargument, the Mill Acts and the early-republic understanding of public use, and the implications of Lebron v. Amtrak for state-action analysis when sovereign authority is exercised through quasi-private redevelopment vehicles. The argument made here is the structural one. The legal one is owed its own treatment.
Resolution of the Chamber of Deputies of Chile, August 22–23, 1973, declaring that the Allende government had committed serious violations of the constitutional and legal order. The text is reprinted in numerous historical sources; see, e.g., Peter Winn, ed., Victims of the Chilean Miracle: Workers and Neoliberalism in the Pinochet Era, 1973–2002 (Duke University Press 2004); Paul E. Sigmund, The Overthrow of Allende and the Politics of Chile, 1964-1976 (University of Pittsburgh Press 1977). Aylwin’s role in shaping the resolution is discussed in his retrospective work, Patricio Aylwin Azócar, El reencuentro de los demócratas: Del Golpe al Triunfo del No (Ediciones B 1998).
Aylwin’s preference for a temporary military intervention over the continuation of the Allende government, and his characterization of that intervention as the lesser of two available evils, are reflected in contemporaneous accounts and biographical treatments of his positions in the spring and summer of 1973. See Sigmund, The Overthrow of Allende, supra; Robert J. Alexander, The Tragedy of Chile (Greenwood Press 1978); Aylwin, El reencuentro de los demócratas, supra.
On the Pinochet regime’s repression and economic restructuring: the Caravan of Death (October 1973) was the helicopter-borne military mission led by General Sergio Arellano Stark that executed political detainees in Chilean provincial prisons; Operation Condor (formalized in 1975) was the multinational intelligence-sharing and assassination operation among the Southern Cone military governments; the Rettig Report (Informe de la Comisión Nacional de Verdad y Reconciliación, 1991) and the Valech Report (Informe de la Comisión Nacional sobre Prisión Política y Tortura, 2004) documented systematic human rights violations under the regime. On the Chicago Boys and the neoliberal restructuring of the Chilean economy, see Juan Gabriel Valdés, Pinochet’s Economists: The Chicago School in Chile (Cambridge University Press 1995); Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Metropolitan Books 2007); Mattei, The Capital Order, supra.
Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? (Metropolitan Books 2016).
National Labor Relations Act (Wagner Act), Pub. L. 74-198, 49 Stat. 449 (1935), codified at 29 U.S.C. §§ 151–169; Social Security Act, Pub. L. 74-271, 49 Stat. 620 (1935); Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 (G.I. Bill), Pub. L. 78-346, 58 Stat. 284; Voting Rights Act of 1965, Pub. L. 89-110, 79 Stat. 437.