What We Must Do To Address the Historic Harms of Highways
(Source: Smart Growth America.)
The gleaming office towers of Charlotte, North Carolina, sit on ground that was once a thriving Black neighborhood. The West End of Cincinnati is cleaved by a highway that paved over a huge swath of the city and destroyed thousands of homes, churches, and businesses. Atlanta is laced with highways, freeways, and spurs, none of which created the free-flowing traffic utopia their builders promised.
A compelling new report, Divided by Design, from Smart Growth America examines the tangled history of highway building and so-called urban renewal in the U.S. But more importantly, it recommends a pivot point in transportation planning and decision-making. Even as we acknowledge the historical inequities caused by these 20th-century projects, we continue to propagate many of their harms, and Smart Growth America argues it’s time to stop assigning blame for the past and establish a rubric to keep from repeating its mistakes.
“This more openly racist past may be behind us, but that history still shapes the present,” states the report, while “a deeply held system of assumptions, measures, models, and other hidden factors continue to produce the same inequitable outcomes, regardless of the motives of those in charge.”
Smart Growth America uses a tale of two cities to exemplify its points. Both Washington, DC, and Atlanta were transformed by highway expansion. Both had plans to build even more roads. And both suffered from these decisions, replacing tax-paying neighborhoods with multibillion-dollar infrastructure liabilities.
Smart Growth America’s analysis puts numbers behind these arguments. It estimates that the construction of Interstate 20 in Atlanta destroyed about 2,200 homes, with an average of $596,000 in home equity. I-395/695 in DC destroyed 99% of buildings in the city’s southwest quadrant, displacing 4,700 people and causing an average of $483,000 in lost home equity.
Tellingly, the projects in both Atlanta and DC that were ultimately unbuilt came when each targeted prosperous, majority-white neighborhoods. Here too, Smart Growth America puts dollar figures behind the analysis. If DC had gone ahead with plans to expand I-95 through the city (as happened in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Providence, among others), it would have lost at least 6.8 billion dollars in taxable land value. If Atlanta had followed through with Interstate 485, it would have eliminated $473 million in taxable land. In both cases, the number of displaced residents and businesses would have been economically devastating.
Despite such telling metrics, “[t]his has not stopped urban areas from continuing to expand highways,” argues the report. “In the last three decades, more than 200,000 people nationwide have lost their homes to federal road projects. The overwhelming majority of people forced from their homes are people of color.”
Smart Growth America’s focus is on preventing similarly destructive plans from taking root today. It proposes a new four-point checklist for transportation leaders, urban planners, and elected officials, arguing that “first and foremost, impacted communities must be centered in the decision-making around investment in their community and the vision for their future. We cannot truly rebuild the fabric of these communities without prioritizing those who have been marginalized or disenfranchised by past decisions.”
Strong Towns readers will be familiar with the folly of using lost time in traffic congestion to justify highway projects. Smart Growth America argues that metric should shift to focus on whose time. So first in its checklist is “measure what matters most.” A focus on vehicle travel and speed “comes at the expense of people traveling outside of a car,” and a more holistic focus on all users, modes, and economic activity is required.
Second is to “repair the damage and stop repeating past mistakes.” The continued drumbeat for highway expansion shows how many cities need to heed this message.
State departments of transportation are the target of Smart Growth America’s third recommendation: “Prioritize the safety of everyone over the speed of a few.” While much of these departments’ earlier focus was building a highway system to move cars quickly, the focus must change to safe transportation for all users of public infrastructure.
Lastly, Smart Growth America insightfully notes that “things that get labeled as transportation problems are often land-use problems.” It notes that restrictive zoning imposes transportation burdens and enabling more mixed-use and infill development would diminish the need for so many roads dedicated to through traffic. So, officials and elected representatives must “always consider land use and transportation planning together.”
Interested in learning more about Smart Growth America’s analysis, methodology, and recommendations? Join its webinar, Tuesday, July 25, at 2 p.m. ET.
Until we have a credible plan for maintaining our existing transportation infrastructure, we must stop building more roads and bridges. Period.