According to Antress Farwell in the documentary The Hill, sixty percent of the downtown section of New Haven was destroyed to make way for several renewal project that included a lot of infrastructure that was still in good standing; a large portion of the area was also residential. After the two world wars New Haven suffered from urban issues like many other cities across the US, and urban renewal projects were seen across the nation. What made New Haven different was the how extreme the project of New haven was. In his written work Rethinking Government Participation in Urban Renewal: Neighborhood Revitalization in New Haven, Elwood describes how capacity of the project stating the following: “Over the course of his eight terms as mayor, Lee secured approximately $450 million in federal aid for his projects-more federal money per capita than any other city received '-transforming New Haven into "an exciting laboratory for change, a model of urban renewal and a testing ground for the war on poverty." It became the most federally funded urban renewal project in the …show more content…
Although the situation is at a much smaller scale than the downtown urban renewal project in New Haven had seen in earlier decades, the covert intentions of this school construction plan set to be located in the residential neighborhood of the Upper Hill were the same to benefit a power structure. Once again it would benefit Yale University who owned the Yale-New Haven Hospital was in the Upper Hill neighborhood. The new haven urban renewal plan didn’t prove to have large success in improving the quality of life, because when John DeStefano Jr. became Mayor of New Haven in 1994, the city still suffered economically and from high crime rates (Goodman). Mayor Destefano ran his election promising reconstruction, it is the ideal promise citizens want to