The claim has been circulating for more than two decades: Snopes debunked it in , here , as did a blog post from the Federal Highway Administration Research and Technology here. This article was produced by the Reuters Fact Check team. Read more about our fact-checking work here.
But an unmistakable part of the equation was the federally supported program of "urban renewal," in which lower-income urban communities — mostly African-American — were targeted for removal.
DC Dept. The new freeways also isolated many other neighborhoods, ushering in their demise. Combined with federal housing bills that paid developers to tear down existing housing stock and replace it with high-rises, they resulted in the continued decimation of huge swaths of many cities. Downtown Detroit in , versus today. The historical neighborhood of Black Bottom was on the right side of the image. The same pattern was repeated over and over, leading to cities pockmarked with empty neighborhoods and destructive highways.
People displaced from the destroyed areas moved to others, leading to overcrowding and increases in crime , while most people with the means fled to the suburbs — commuting on the new highways, and siphoning money away from these cities' tax bases.
But not all the highways got built. Many city governments opposed them from the beginning — and in San Francisco, DC, and elsewhere, key segments were blocked by a coalition of local officials and residents. In DC, highways that would have run through the city's Northwest and center were never built.
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By choosing I Accept , you consent to our use of cookies and other tracking technologies. Highways gutted American cities. Their campaign was successful: In many places, elected officials agreed to use taxpayer money for the improvement and construction of roads. In most cases, before the federal government split the cost of roadbuilding with the states. One exception was the New Deal , when federal agencies like the Public Works Administration and the Works Progress Administration put people to work building bridges and parkways.
However, this funding arrangement did not get roads built fast enough to please the most ardent highway advocates. During World War II , Eisenhower had been stationed in Germany, where he had been impressed by the network of high-speed roads known as the Reichsautobahnen.
After he became president in , Eisenhower was determined to build the highways that lawmakers had been talking about for years. The law authorized the construction of a 41,mile network of interstate highways that would span the nation. Under the terms of the law, the federal government would pay 90 percent of the cost of expressway construction.
The money came from an increased gasoline tax—now 3 cents a gallon instead of 2—that went into a non-divertible Highway Trust Fund. The new interstate highways were controlled-access expressways with no at-grade crossings—that is, they had overpasses and underpasses instead of intersections.
They were at least four lanes wide and were designed for high-speed driving. When the Interstate Highway Act was first passed, most Americans supported it. Soon, however, the unpleasant consequences of all that roadbuilding began to show. Most unpleasant of all was the damage the roads were inflicting on the city neighborhoods in their path. The area was central to the civil rights movement in Richmond and today is honoured with US National Park Service historic status.
Jackson Ward began to change, however, during the second world war. The construction of Gilpin Court, a large public housing project, and the I, a transport artery to connect Richmond to its neighbours, saw federal funds pour in. Unsurprisingly, the formerly redlined, historically important neighbourhood of Jackson Ward was chosen as the path of construction. Photographs show the breadth of the interstate — almost a city block wide.
The southern section was fortunate in its proximity to downtown, and parts of it are now a sought-after neighbourhood. But the northern section, anchored by Gilpin Court and the Shockoe Hill cemetery, were isolated. Roads, businesses and homes were demolished, turning Gilpin Court into an island. The area plunged into an economic and cultural malaise, disintegrating into blocks of land now filled only with grass. One small victory was the Sixth Mount Zion Baptist church , a historic site of worship built in , which had the misfortune to be located directly in the path of the interstate.
With the bulldozers looming, a loud and furious resistance from community members prevented construction proceeding as planned. The church was permitted to stand, and the entire interstate was re-engineered to bend around it — one of the few symbols of resistance still visible. Making the case that infrastructure itself can be exclusionary is hardly straightforward.
But many decisions that segregated communities were unintentional. Roads, bridges and walls are agents of change, with a direct impact on our lives. Who has control over where these are placed? Who says how many there will be? How big? As the US gears up for its biggest infrastructure revitalisation project in decades, it is only by asking these questions and acknowledging the power of city planning to impact lives that we can hope to prevent the injustices of the past and fix those of the present.
This story was produced in part with a travel grant and technology support from Code for Africa and from the International Center for Journalists. Follow Guardian Cities on Twitter , Facebook and Instagram to join the discussion, and explore our archive here. Detroit: the death of Black Bottom. The future.
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