4 ms·

> Urban renewal wasn’t as top-down as people say. The routing of freeways and public project placements were often determined by municipalities and states, not

• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• davidw 2y ago
  The data show that urban highways very much impacted certain neighborhoods more than others, when you look at more than one city https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-urban-highways-infrastructure-racism/ https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-urban-highways-infra...
  • Lammy 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • hirsin 2y ago
      I mean, the same classes and groups instituting redlining were the ones picking where the infrastructure went. I don't think anyone is blaming the existence of infrastructure as the causative factor.
      • davidw 2y ago
        This is correct. It's not like it was one group of people who did the redlining and the racist zoning and all that and then some completely separate and totally unrelated group of people thought "let's put the freeway here".
    • vineyardmike 2y ago
      > A better question is why did those places have minority neighborhoods instead of anybody living anywhere they want? Not to be mean, but is this question intentionally obtuse? It feels like a bad faith question to ask. In America, in the relevant time periods (eg. 1950s), black neighborhoods were often targeted by infrastructure. This was before they had the protected rights to vote. This was a time where slavery, then legal segregation, and then redlining literally forced people of color into certain geographic regions. THEN infrastructure projects literally bulldozed those neighborhoods. So "why did people of color not live wherever they want, and why do we blame the bulldozers that destroyed the place they did live" is ignoring the history of so much systemic issues in America, that it feels like a bad-faith question to ask.
      • Lammy 2y ago
        [flagged]
        • ElemenoPicuares 2y ago
          https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cop-out https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cop-out
    • aaronbrethorst 2y ago
      In part because of official US government policy, commonly known as redlining. https://www.npr.org/2017/05/03/526655831/a-forgotten-history-of-how-the-u-s-government-segregated-america https://www.npr.org/2017/05/03/526655831/a-forgotten-history...
    • ncallaway 2y ago
      > Infrastructure projects should not be blamed for conditions they did not cause. This seems like a strange sentiment to me. Intrastructure projects should not be blamed for anything. Blame rests with people, not things. And the people running those infrastructure projects, making the decisions about them were the same people that were responsible for many of the other factors that went into the conditions that we’re discussing. It’s pretty much all the same set of people—the people that had political power when these decisions were being made. So it feels weird to slice out just the infrastructure pieces out of that.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
• jcranmer 2y ago
  The most infamous example is the Cross-Bronx Expressway, which many assert to have been deliberately routed by Robert Moses to destroy some of the neighborhoods in the area, and is generally seen as the catalyst of the freeway revolt movement.
  • Lammy 2y ago
    You paint a very incomplete picture by neglecting to mention NYC's failure to build the IND “Second System” which would have connected many of the same areas as the Cross-Bronx Expressway. The simultaneous political support for building the one that required expensive car ownership and against building the one which anybody could ride tells me that the freeway was not the real problem here lol https://www.nycsubway.org/wiki/IND_Second_System_-_1929_Plan https://www.nycsubway.org/wiki/IND_Second_System_-_1929_Plan https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b3/1939_IND_Second_System.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b3/1939_IND...
    • 7speter 2y ago
      The cross bronx expressway doesn’t “connect the same areas” as any subway, seeing as 95 runs north and south from Maine to Florida. IIRC, it was a question to run 95 “inconveniently” through more parts of Manhattan and wealthier areas (read: Westchester), or take the shortcut through a poor neighborhood in the Bronx. At some point, this highway has to go west to east (laterally?), and issue was where. Not that I’m saying Robert Moses did nothing wrong. The third avenue El (which was torn down in the 70s) had no real problem being rebuilt over the portion of Third Avenue (the Third Avenue of the Bronx certainly isn’t as flashy as the one in Manhattan, and the Bronx’s Park Avenue is pretty much train tracks on one side) for the 20ish years the two co-existed, at least from my understanding. Don’t mind me though, because I certainly don’t live about 1/4 mile away from the CBE.
• samcheng 2y ago
  The Chinese neighborhood in Seattle was mostly leveled by a freeway interchange; this pattern is not as rare as you suggest. https://crosscut.com/opinion/2021/04/legacy-racism-built-northwest-highways-and-roads https://crosscut.com/opinion/2021/04/legacy-racism-built-nor... In San Francisco, the "redevelopment" of the Western Addition is a famous example of a public project that targeted certain minorities. The city basically took a wrecking ball to the heart of the black community in San Francisco, and it never really recovered afterwards. https://www.sfpublicpress.org/fillmore-revisited-how-redevelopment-tore-through-the-western-addition/ https://www.sfpublicpress.org/fillmore-revisited-how-redevel...
  • throwanem 2y ago
    Baltimore's 'Highway to Nowhere' is another good example. https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/section/businessdevelopment/highway-to-nowhere-baltimore-expressway-demolished-black-neighborhoods/ https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/section/businessdevelopmen...
    • glial 2y ago
      So is St. Paul's Rondo neighborhood: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rondo_neighborhood#Routing_of_Interstate_94 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rondo_neighborhood#Routing_of_...
• refurb 2y ago
  They are mistaking cause and effect. What looks like "targeting minority neighborhoods", is actually "minorities are more likely to live in areas where new highways would normally be built". Look at any major city. Are the expensive neighborhoods built near exiting highways or interchanges? Not really, they tend to be built further away. And if you go back to when highways were being built (50-70's), most middle income families fled cities to the suburbs, and inner city housing prices dropped, which attracted low income minorities.
  • bluejekyll 2y ago
    > "minorities are more likely to live in areas where new highways would normally be built" These were being built for the first time. There was no “where they were normally built” because they were first built in the areas mentioned in the 1950’s, normal hadn’t been defined yet. They targeted the poorer neighborhoods because those also tended to be the less powerful to stop it.
    • refurb 2y ago
      There is no such thing as “brand new highways you can put wherever”. Many highways expanded from major roads. The new segments (built where no major roads existed) had to connect existing major roads. There were very clearly areas where roads were going to be built and where they were never going to be built. The city also has to buyout existing homeowners, and hence a part of the decision is going to be “where will buyouts cost us the least”? Hence the lowest cost housing, again often owned by minorities.
      • bluejekyll 2y ago
        “Many highways expanded from major roads. The new segments (built where no major roads existed) had to connect existing major roads.” This is an opinion that is not factually accurate to what happened. Entire neighborhoods were plowed under for highways that then created impediments to local neighborhood connections. Highways literally destroyed communities. Look at the before and after pictures of Oakland in this article: https://www.segregationbydesign.com/oakland/freeways https://www.segregationbydesign.com/oakland/freeways
• vineyardmike 2y ago
  > here's a counter-example in the way San Francisco's intended freeway layout was based on the existing layout of the City and County's nine districts This is a counter-example if you ignore a ton of the impacted neighborhoods. These highways are not particularly innocent examples. Sure, some may be unavoidable (like the south-eastern neighborhoods), but some of the locations are (at least today) pretty busy and core parts of their neighborhood (eg. Irving St. in Inner-Sunset). The highway (101?) carving up the mission and then dividing the western addition from down-town would be rough if they built it as a limited-access road (which it appears to be based on the interchanges). Even modern-day 101 could have been along the rail-road or coast to avoid blocking the mission and Potrero... Dumping 80 into the western-addition also seems questionably-motivated as well.
  • Lammy 2y ago
    > Dumping 80 into the western-addition also seems questionably-motivated as well. Most of it would have been under ground-level, both tunneled through the hill (emerging near the DMV) then a park-topped subway through the panhandle. Check out what Oak/Fell/Octavia would have looked like: https://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/4182283392 https://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/4182283392 The elevated Central Freeway (along the bottom) and the on/off-ramp pair in the center of the image were built. Here's what it used to look like to exit onto Fell westbound before 2002 when they created the most dangerous intersection for pedestrians and cyclists in the entire City (Octavia & Market) by tearing this down: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGM-crlegA4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGM-crlegA4