{"id":25238,"date":"2023-02-20T13:09:51","date_gmt":"2023-02-20T21:09:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=25238"},"modified":"2023-02-20T13:09:52","modified_gmt":"2023-02-20T21:09:52","slug":"we-mythologize-highways-but-theyve-damaged-communities-of-color","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2023\/02\/20\/we-mythologize-highways-but-theyve-damaged-communities-of-color\/","title":{"rendered":"We mythologize highways, but they\u2019ve damaged communities of color"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Urban<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>Urban Resilience Project<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Feb 7, 2023 (Medium.com)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By Ryan Reft<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
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Last year, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg<\/a> unveiled new efforts<\/a> to address the problematic racial legacy of interstate highway construction, dedicating $1 billion to \u201creconnect cities and neighborhoods racially segregated or divided by road projects.\u201d Buttigieg\u2019s efforts were quickly assailed by critics<\/a> who lamented the \u201cwokefication<\/a>\u201d of the interstates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But with the interstate system turning 67 years old this year, it is important to understand its many troubled legacies, including those that Buttigieg has pledged to address. Although planners knew early on that the interstates could disproportionately harm urban communities of color, officials made policy choices that cemented stark racial divides \u2014 and the creation of mythic lore surrounding the freedom of the open road worked to obscure them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the National Interstate and Defense Highway Act, making the interstate system a reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Created in the era of Cold War competition, the construction and engineering of the system came wrapped in scientific language that obscured its impact. Engineers, planners and others deployed technical and scientific jargon that not only established the interstates as the height of modernity and a necessary step for the nation\u2019s present and future, but also helped shield the system\u2019s architects from criticism. They could explain away issues and counter criticisms with technocratic arguments beyond the reach of most protesters of the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unprecedented in its size and scope, the law imposed new design standards that emphasized greater flow, wider freeway lanes, as well as larger and more complex interchanges. And from 1958 to 1966, the project was the largest source of federal funding to the states.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But while earlier state and urban highways had snaked around older communities, the 1956 act favored straight lines that sliced through neighborhoods. In the two decades following its passage, nearly 1 million people<\/a> lost their homes to highway construction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Non-White residents and homeowners were <\/mark>disproportionately affected<\/a><\/mark> by this massive displacement. Discriminatory federal housing policies such as <\/mark>redlining<\/a><\/mark>, alongside racism at the local level, had denied people of color from obtaining cheap, federally-subsidized mortgages for single-family homes. The result was the creation of booming, nearly all-White suburbs, while populations of color lived in segregated, crowded, often urban communities with declining housing values and conditions \u2014 the exact neighborhoods that planners, engineers and politicians targeted for highway construction.<\/mark><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The impact felt by Black and Latino urban residents \u2014 including community destruction, the loss of housing in an already stratified and segregated market, deprivation of generational wealth and exposure to unending environmental hazards \u2014 is frequently blamed on \u201curban renewal\u201d and corrupt urban politicians rather than on planners or engineers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In truth, planners knew from the beginning that the interstates threatened communities of color living in urban areas. In 1958, for example, the Sagamore Conference<\/a> \u2014 convened by the Highway Research Board and attended by top federal, state and municipal officials, academics and civic leaders \u2014 issued a report that clearly noted the perils of highway construction. It warned of widespread displacement, with low-income, non-White and elderly residents facing the \u201cgreatest potential injury.\u201d<\/a> Yet the type of highway construction that the report warned about proceeded across the nation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This initial awareness of the problems that interstate construction could, and eventually did, cause was soon erased from institutional memory \u2014 first in internal policy briefs in the mid-1970s and later in official Department of Transportation histories<\/a> that did not acknowledge how officials failed to prevent the highways\u2019 unequal impacts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The results were devastating. For example, in Montgomery, Ala., during the 1950s, Sam Englehart \u2014 an innovator in political gerrymandering \u2014 punished civil rights activists by running the new highway through West Montgomery, home to Rosa Parks, E.D. Nixon and others. In Chicago, Mayor Richard J. Daley<\/a> used highway construction funds to build the Dan Ryan Expressway<\/a>, isolating the city\u2019s Black communities and cauterizing White communities from integration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I-94 tore the historically Black community of Rondo in St. Paul, Minn.<\/a>, in two, while in Los Angeles, the construction of the East Los Angeles Interchange displaced thousands of Latino families, robbed Boyle Heights and East Los Angeles<\/a> of green space and saddled remaining residents with countless environmental dangers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These practices became the norm for the Interstate Highway System, shaping the physical and cultural reality of the United States at a great cost that persists today. Over the past 30 years, some 6,300 families<\/a> were displaced by the nation\u2019s 22 largest highway expansion projects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For decades, policymakers have inadequately addressed these issues wrought by highway construction. In 1966, when what historians<\/a> call the \u201cfreeway revolts,\u201d erupted, lawmakers attempted to mollify citizen protests with the creation of the Department of Transportation to provide greater oversight for construction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They also passed laws such as the National Environmental Protection Act of 1969. New legislation helped communities prevent construction, but this advocacy failed to include non-White homeowners, who lacked the political leverage and financial reach to challenge such efforts, particularly in the courts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nor has historic-preservation legislation<\/a>, often enacted alongside environmental laws, protected historically Black and Latino communities from the interstates. Of the 95,000 sites on the National Historic Register by 2020, only about 2 percent addressed the Black experience. \u201cThe dominant narrative of the freeway revolt is a racialized<\/em> story,\u201d writes historian Eric Avila<\/a> of this earlier era of resistance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Popular stories celebrating highways, as well as their centrality to the lives of many Americans regardless of gender, race and ethnicity, have stymied a more accurate understanding of the interstates\u2019 impacts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even before the 1956 Act, Americans \u2014 including Black Americans \u2014 had already embraced the automobile as a vehicle for greater freedom and opportunity. The existence of the \u201cGreen Book\u201d<\/a> \u2014 an annual travel guide published from 1936 to 1964 that provided information for Black motorists regarding lodging, food and other information to ensure safe travel \u2014 testifies to the systemic racism of the country\u2019s transportation networks, and despite its obvious limits, the freedom and opportunity it enabled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Popular culture highlighted the freeway\u2019s passage to freedom and opportunity. Jack Kerouac\u2019s 1957 novel \u201cOn the Road\u201d established one of the first and most lasting testaments to the promise of the open road, a story that graphed easily onto the interstate reality that followed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During the 1960s, writer Joan Didion famously referred to driving Southern California highways as \u201csecular communion.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Popular songs also firmly established the highway as a symbol for freedom, such as Bruce Springsteen\u2019s 1975 hit, \u201cThunder Road,\u201d with its lyrics, \u201cThese two lanes will take us anywhere. We got one last chance to make it real.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1971, Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell even observed that \u201closing one\u2019s driver\u2019s license is more serious for some individuals than a stay in jail.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While exceptions to this narrative exist, too, of course, the vast majority of popular depictions of highways in American culture have represented them as conduits of freedom, community and economic success.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Historian Sarah Jo Peterson and planner Steven Higashide advocate for \u201ctruth and reconciliation\u201d carried out, in part, by existing institutions such as the Transportation Research Board, the utilization of preexisting clusters of University Transit Centers and a congressional commission to investigate the damages wrought by the construction of interstates. \u201cIf we have any hope of avoiding future injustices, we have to fully understand the past,\u201d notes Higashide.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Deconstructing the myth behind the creation of the Interstate Highway System, unwinding the overly simplistic narratives that have defined the interstates and putting forth ideas for the future serve as the first steps in understanding this history. The next will be to rectify it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ryan Reft<\/strong> is editor and contributor for the forthcoming Justice and the Interstates: The Racist Truth about Urban Highways<\/em><\/a> (Island Press, 2023) and 2020\u2019s East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte<\/em> (Rutgers Press).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This article was published in collaboration with the <\/em>Island Press Urban Resilience Project<\/em><\/a>, which is supported by The Kresge Foundation and The JPB Foundation. It was originally published January 19, 2023 on <\/em>The Washington Post<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Urban Resilience Project Feb 7, 2023 (Medium.com) By Ryan Reft Last year, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg unveiled new efforts to address the problematic racial legacy of interstate highway construction, dedicating $1 billion to \u201creconnect cities and neighborhoods racially segregated or divided by road projects.\u201d Buttigieg\u2019s efforts were quickly assailed by critics who lamented the \u201cwokefication\u201d of… Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[119],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25238"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25238"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25238\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25239,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25238\/revisions\/25239"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25238"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25238"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25238"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}