Professor Joo Appears in PBS Documentary on Sacramento Redevelopment

Professor Thomas Joo appears in "Replacing the Past: Sacramento's Redevelopment History," a documentary film that was broadcast in April as part of Sacramento PBS station KVIE's "Viewfinder" series. The film may be viewed on the KVIE website and on YouTube.

The film documents the activities of the Sacramento Redevelopment Agency, which displaced a diverse, mixed-use neighborhood on the western edge of Sacramento to make way for one of the nation's first major urban renewal projects. The area had functioned as the region's "labor market" and was home to a wide range of small businesses as well as large and vibrant Japanese American and African American communities, Joo said.

"It's really important today to think about this because now we have this very different notion," Joo states. "The trend now is to mix the old with the new and to have mixed use and not single-use zoning."

Joo, Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor at UC Davis School of Law, specializes in the areas of corporate governance and race and the law.