Richmond, Baton Rouge, Newark, Detroit, and Pittsburgh all lost a neighborhood to the same basic mechanism: an outside institution decided the ground was worth more as something else. What happened next split five different ways -- unresolved, refused, distributed, concentrated, and, in exactly one case, actually voted on by the people who live there. The difference wasn't speed, or whether the money was public or private. It was whether anyone who'd been harmed ever got a real say in what happened next.