[P]eople who get marked with the planners’ hex signs are pushed about, expropriated, and uprooted much as if they were the subjects of a conquering power. “Introduction” The Death and Life of Great American Cities (p5)

NORWOOD, OHIO - One house remains in the field that was once slated to become the Rookwood Exchange. It is boarded up, empty.

Back in 2007, when I was last here, three houses remained. The Ohio Supreme Court had recently reversed the city’s blight finding that enabled the use of eminent domain powers to take these properties. That reprieve, it now appears, was only temporary, the neighborhood already mostly destroyed.

The would-be-developers purchased this last house for well over $1 million. It remains like a gravestone, marking this fragment of an urban neighborhood, originally orphaned by the construction of Interstate 71 to the west and subsequent commercial development on the other sides.

Norwood v. Horney. Kelo v. New London. Planners, policy makers, land use attorneys, and property rights advocates in an uproar. Stir vigorously.

Out of a position of desperation, Norwood placed the “hex sign” on these blocks. Ohio municipalities all live and die by the income tax. Commercial redevelopment along one of the major traffic corridors in the Cincinnati metropolitan area made sense, if but only for that reason. The consulting planners labeled the area “deteriorating.” Disputable, yes, but even if true the court found that the area must be deteriorat-ED, as opaquely stated in the Ohio Revised Code.

Most of the residents sold their properties straight to the developer - many for prices well above market value. Eminent domain is a valuable tool for the planner and policy maker. It prevents extreme holdouts from defeating municipal projects. However, it can be too blunt an instrument. The outcry over the US Supreme Court’s findings in Kelo also brings up the question of whether this project could realistically be placed under the figurative umbrella of the “public good.”

The Ohio General Assembly erased the dangerous territory in the Ohio Revised Code that allowed these gray area blunders in Norwood (Substitute Senate Bill 277 of the 127th General Assembly) What is a landlocked municipality to do now?

Cities are an immense laboratory of trial and error, failure and success, in city building and city design. This is the laboratory in which city planning should have been learning and forming and testing its theories. The Death and Life of Great American Cities (p6)

Fortunately or unfortunately, there is no blank slate. The urban renewal programs Jacobs decried made this fiction a reality at great expense. They placed a value on a district, purchased the land and buildings in it, and zeroed it out. All existing value - both that quantified in the official appraisal and the additional aspects observed by Jacobs - got thrown out.

At various points, you might find me on either side of the battle here in Norwood. Today, I am much happier to be found around a table in West Norwood. My friends have been here almost 15 years. They have seen the neighborhood change, and have been a part of that change - incremental, unglamorous - house by house, project by project.