The Other Reason Freeway-Building Hollowed Out America's Cities
A small business in St. Paul’s former Rondo neighborhood. Source: Minnesota Historical Society
I went to elementary school in a large building in St. Paul, Minnesota whose front windows face out toward Interstate 94. In one of my English classes, we read The Days of Rondo, by Evelyn Fairbanks, a memoir about the neighborhood that used to be the heart of St. Paul's Black community. Then we walked out as a class to the pedestrian bridge over the freeway and stood in the middle of what was once Rondo, as the teacher shouted over the noise of cars whizzing by underneath us.
The story we were taught as kids is the one commonly understood by Americans today, and it’s true: large swaths of U.S. cities were literally condemned and bulldozed for freeways in the postwar era. Businesses and residents were displaced by the thousands, and whole communities were never to recover. Black communities in particular were frequently, and systematically, marked for this fate.
But that story, to me, never adequately explained the much broader collapse of the neighborhoods surrounding these new freeways. In areas untouched by their physical construction, even too far away to have to deal with the noise and pollution, property values fell through the floor. Those with means moved away; amid population decline, homes deteriorated and many were abandoned; neighborhoods were left mired in concentrated poverty and social ills.
It turns out freeways had a lot to do with this too—though they were far from the only factor. And for reasons that are more subtle and weren’t explained to childhood me, or even college-aged me. The reasons have to do with the market for land. And those reasons are extremely relevant to today's cities, because the same forces are still in operation.
Land Value is About Access to Things
What determines the value of a piece of land? In rare cases, it’s what is actually on that land, such as a natural resource or scenic view. The vast majority of the time, though, it’s not what’s on the land that matters. It's what's that land affords its owner easy access to.
People will pay more for land in cities than in the country, because of the amenities the city has to offer: the jobs, the shopping, the culture, the proximity to lots of people you might have lots of individual reasons to want to be close to. Within a given city, too, people will tend to pay more for land with the best access to centers of activity and commerce, like a downtown.
We don’t measure this access in feet or miles. We measure it in time. How long do you have to travel to get somewhere you want to be? If a piece of land is located a short trip, time-wise, from somewhere you want to be, it’s going to be worth more. It’s why certain types of corporations will pay more for a headquarters near an airport: you’re paying for the ease of access to global cities like New York, Tokyo and London, though obviously not physical proximity to those places.
This leads us to a simple principle: If I can dramatically shorten your travel time to places you want to be, I can dramatically increase the value of your land.
In the 1950s and 1960s, cities all across America, using vast federal funding, began to build freeways that sliced directly into their downtowns, creating high-speed connections between those downtowns and rapidly growing suburbs. All of a sudden, a 20-minute commute to a downtown office on surface streets from an urban neighborhood was no longer any more convenient than a 20-minute commute to the same downtown office on the freeway from a much more remote suburban subdivision.
This simple fact, because of the rapidity of the change these freeways unleashed, had unimaginably destructive consequences for cities. The following series of stylized graphics shows what happened to dozens of metropolitan regions across the continent as a result of that first catalcysmic wave of urban freeway construction:
This Story Hasn't Ended
Here's the most important thing to understand about the above observations: this story isn't over. It's still unfolding, and it will continue to unfold as long as we continue to build enormous transportation megaprojects.
Every time a billion-dollar freeway or bridge project—or, yes, even a public transit project such as a rail line—is implemented, it changes the geography of access within its region, and may do so suddenly and destructively. Certain places become more convenient to live, work, and own property than before. Other places lose their comparative advantage.
“Every time a billion-dollar freeway or bridge project—or, yes, even a public transit project such as a rail line—is implemented, it changes the geography of access within its region, and may do so suddenly and destructively.”
The effects are rarely as dramatic and sudden as those of that first wave of postwar freeways. Part of this is that they're also not happening on top of a series of other trends such as white flight, mass suburbanization, and deindustrialization, as was the case in the mid-20th century.
So while we may not be producing scores of new Rondos—decimated neighborhoods and communities—anymore, we are still monkeying with land markets through public infrastructure spending, particularly when we spend that money in massive increments rather than distributing it across a large number of more modest projects. Too often, the end result is to cannibalize the wealth of one community for the benefit of another. These games don't make us either a richer or a fairer society, today any more than in the 1950s.
(Cover photo: arbyreed via Flickr.)
Daniel Herriges has been a regular contributor to Strong Towns since 2015 and is a founding member of the Strong Towns movement. He is the co-author of Escaping the Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Response to the Housing Crisis, with Charles Marohn. Daniel now works as the Policy Director at the Parking Reform Network, an organization which seeks to accelerate the reform of harmful parking policies by educating the public about these policies and serving as a connecting hub for advocates and policy makers. Daniel’s work reflects a lifelong fascination with cities and how they work. When he’s not perusing maps (for work or pleasure), he can be found exploring out-of-the-way neighborhoods on foot or bicycle. Daniel has lived in Northern California and Southwest Florida, and he now resides back in his hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota, along with his wife and two children. Daniel has a Masters in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Minnesota.