Chester Hartman is President and Executive Director of the Poverty & Race Research Action Council in Washington, D.C. He is author of Between Eminence and Notoriety: Four Decades of Radical Urban Planning (2001), and editor of Challenges to Equality: Poverty and Race in America (2001) and Housing Issues of the 1990s (1989).
The importance of Chester Hartman's book reaches far beyond the case of San Francisco. It is a major work on the politics and urban development, a work that uniquely foresees alternative ways to improve our cities. It will become a landmark of urban research. - Manuel Castells, University of California The further one reads into Chester Hartman's story of San Francisco redevelopment, the more bizarre and engrossing the story becomes. Centering his account on the downtown Yerba Buena Center project, Hartman wonderfully illuminates the conflicts of interest, ambitions, misrepresentations, extravagant promises, brutality, waste, incompetence, and sheer silliness that characterized the ill-fated American experiment called Urban Renewal andputs it into a social and economic context. - Jane Jacobs, author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities