Freeways force out residents in communities of color — again

The wisdom of ever-expanding freeways is being questioned more and more. Reams of academic research show that freeway widenings reduce traffic only temporarily and can actually increase congestion long-term by encouraging more driving. And beyond displacement, bigger freeways can contribute to climate change and leave those who remain nearby with worse air pollution and at higher risk of asthma and other respiratory problems.

In a sign of changing attitudes, road projects nationwide have taken homes at a much slower pace in the last decade compared with the 1990s, The Times analysis found. Citing racial inequities caused by highway building, the Biden administration has encouraged states to curtail construction, and in an unprecedented move has even advocated tearing some freeways down. The U.S. Department of Transportation also has paused the Houston multi-interstate expansion to investigate claims that the project violates the civil rights of Black and Latino residents.

Here in California, where road projects have displaced more than 10,000 families over the last 30 years, transportation officials recently halted a proposed widening of Interstate 710 through Los Angeles County in part because hundreds would lose their homes in Latino neighborhoods.

“We want to make widening highways no longer the default option,” said Toks Omishakin, director of the California Department of Transportation. “It should be the absolute final option.”

Still, the modern era of freeway expansion has hardly ended. The recently passed $1-trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill championed by President Biden includes $350 billion for roads, much of which could be used to further expand the highway network. In addition to Houston and Los Angeles, plans already on the books in El Paso, Austin, Shreveport, La., North Charleston, S.C., and elsewhere could push out thousands more people.

Nothing better reflects Americans’ insatiable appetite for driving than the U.S. Interstate Highway System. Freeways have defined the country’s landscape ever since President Eisenhower created the road network in 1956, forming the foundation for mass suburbanization and an economy centered on the automobile.

Highway construction devoured entire neighborhoods, especially in cities. LaDale Winling, an associate professor of history at Virginia Tech and an expert on the freeway network, called the effort “the largest urban displacement project in American history.”

Racism was embedded into the road system as highway planners sometimes intentionally designed routes to destroy Black neighborhoods. Some city leaders in the mid-1950s saw the interstates as a good opportunity to get rid of the local “n—town,” a former top transportation lobbyist later recalled in an interview for an academic publication.

In Miami, for instance, local leaders paved over the heart of the city’s Black community rather than route the freeways through a nearby abandoned railway. The neighborhood lost as much as three-quarters of its population — roughly 30,000 residents — through the completion of Interstate 95 and four levels of downtown interchanges in 1968.

Highway builders often defended cutting swaths through Black neighborhoods by arguing it was the cheapest land available.

All told, highways in cities nationwide — Atlanta, Baltimore, Birmingham, Detroit, Nashville, New Orleans and Tulsa among them — caused astonishing harm, said Robert D. Bullard, an urban planning professor at Texas Southern University.

“If you look at Black and Latino neighborhoods, in terms of homeownership, the loss of equity, the business corridors that were destroyed and the loss of community that highways have caused, the damage is tremendous,” said Bullard, one of the founders of the environmental justice movement.

And it was often more politically powerful white enclaves that were able to stop or reroute highways away from them, including a decades-long effort in South Pasadena to prevent Interstate 710 from coming through their community.

One of the nation’s last new urban freeways was Interstate 105, which bisected Watts and other Black L.A. neighborhoods on its 17-mile east-west path to Los Angeles International Airport.

When it opened in 1993, after nearly four decades of planning, lawsuits and construction, the interstate was supposed to be among the last of its kind. More than 21,000 people had lost their homes, with some overwhelmed by the pain of being forced out, suffering heart attacks or dying by suicide. Exhausted highway engineers conceded that the cost of building interstates through cities was too great.

The first time Willie Dixon lost a home to a highway was during the freeway construction boom in the early 1960s.

The delivery driver was living in a one-story wooden home in Tampa where he and his wife would host card games for family and friends, cooking feasts of blue crabs.

The Florida Department of Transportation’s decision to expand Interstates 4 and 275 has also forced the demolition of a 140-unit public housing complex and hundreds of other residences, with more still planned.

By the time Dixon lost his second home, he was 90. He died less than a year later.

“He had to go and start learning new neighbors at that age,” said his son, Willie Dixon Jr. “That’s the tragedy of moving.”

Highway planners insist that freeway expansions are not intended to harm communities of color. Building upon existing road corridors is less harmful — to people and to the environment — than creating brand new ones, they said.

“The only way to eliminate displacements for the interstate projects in Tampa would be to do nothing and continue to utilize the 1960s interstate system,” Florida Department of Transportation spokeswoman Alecia Collins said in a written statement to The Times. “At the rate that Florida is growing, that simply isn’t a safe and/or viable option.”

Transportation planners in Florida and Texas argued that the small number of projects analyzed by The Times were not representative of racial displacement trends over a three-decade period.

Florida officials pointed out that data going back 20 years show that whites made up the largest demographic among people displaced by transportation projects in the state.

But a Times review of the state’s data also found that Black households were forced out at higher rates than their share of the state’s population. When considering just Florida’s largest highway projects, Black households were displaced at twice their share of the state’s population.

Though not like the early days, freeways are still growing at a rapid pace.

In the country’s 100 largest urban areas, highway planners added 30,000 miles of freeway lanes between 1993 and 2017, according to Transportation for America, a nonprofit advocacy group. That expansion rate outpaced the growth in population, the group says.

Yet evidence indicates the new road building isn’t easing congestion problems. Experts have found that widening freeways can actually increase traffic, because it leads to housing development and encourages more vehicle trips.

Within five years after Texas transportation officials turned Interstate 10 in suburban Houston into one of the nation’s widest, traffic speeds during daily commutes were back to where they were before. An Interstate 405 widening through L.A.’s Sepulveda Pass a decade ago, which required a multiday closure dubbed “Carmageddon,” left rush-hour traffic just as tied up within a year of completion.

Back in Tampa, the freeways’ footprints have continued to expand. The family of Tedd Scott, one of Dixon’s neighbors on West Arch Street, held on for 12 years after Dixon was forced out. Florida transportation officials came calling five years ago. Scott’s mother’s house was one of the last taken on the block.

Tampa's interstate expansions further divide Black, Latino areas

Pinecrest

West Park

275

Interstate expansion corridor

4

Ybor City

275

Greater than 80% nonwhite

South Tampa

Hillsborough

County

Detailed

2 MILES

Hillsborough

County

275

Detailed

Interstate expansion corridor

4

275

Greater than 80% nonwhite

South

Tampa

2 MILES

Hillsborough

County

Detailed

275

Interstate expansion

corridor

4

275

South

Tampa

Greater than 80%

nonwhite

2 MILES

Scott, a 78-year-old retired college financial administrator, still misses his old neighbors.

“We were all good friends, knowing each other for 40, 50 or 60 years, and all of that was broken up with the highway,” Scott said.

Neighborhoods near the freeway expansions are littered with reminders of the past. Some dilapidated homes are plastered with “No trespassing” signs. Others are spray-painted: “FL DOT Property.” On some streets in Ybor City, the original brick roads run smack into freeway sound walls. On one block, a concrete stairway stands in the middle of a weed-choked field. Nearby, a sidewalk stops at the freeway, leading nowhere.

Highway planners, sensitive to the racist policies of the past, now take varied approaches to ease the burden of dislocations, especially in Black and Latino areas. Many efforts involve benefits for those displaced and improvement projects for surrounding neighborhoods.

However, arriving at proper compensation is tricky and sometimes impossible when it involves deep community roots, family history and personal struggle.

Across the country, transportation agencies have built new parks and bicycle trails and preserved historic properties. Florida officials rehabilitated and relocated nearly three dozen historic Ybor City homes from the path of Tampa’s expanded freeways, reserving nearly all of them for first-time homebuyers.

Rather than widening interstates through cities, planners in North Carolina have constructed beltways encircling Raleigh and other metropolitan areas because they would have lesser effects, including in communities of color, state officials said. None of the five large highway projects in the state examined by The Times disproportionately affected Black or Latino neighborhoods.

Displaced renters receive money for replacement housing. Over the last 30 years, more than 9,600 families who were tenants used their relocation payments to become homeowners, The Times’ analysis of federal statistics found.

Homeowners also get compensated, occasionally even more than what their property is worth.

Nevertheless, the disruption caused by freeway projects can be massive. Houston’s proposed expansion would cover about 450 acres through the center of the city, adding new lanes and redoing interchanges across four interstates at a cost of $9 billion.

Nearly half of the 1,000 families set to lose their homes now live in low-income apartment buildings, including the Clayton Homes and Kelly Village public housing complexes. The demolition toll also involves five churches, three homeless service providers, two schools and a shelter for refugee children.

In the areas affected, more than three-quarters of the population is Black or Latino. Letters from the Biden administration to Texas transportation officials say the project raises “serious” civil rights concerns.

8

45

Freeway expansion in Houston

would demolish many properties

10

Detailed

69

610

Kelly Village will be

partially destroyed

with 50 units taken

The expansion here would

remove Clayton Homes

Modesti Cooper’s

house would be

torn down.

N

8

45

Freeway expansion

in Houston would demolish

many properties

10

Detailed

69

610

69

Kelly Village will be partially

destroyed with 50 units taken

The expansion here would

remove Clayton Homes

Modesti Cooper’s

house would be

torn down.

10

N

Freeway expansion

in Houston would demolish

many properties

8

45

10

Detailed

69

610

10

Kelly Village will be partially

destroyed with 50 units taken

Modesti Cooper’s

house would be

torn down.

69

The expansion here

would remove

Clayton Homes

N

Still, Texas highway planners hope to resolve the civil rights complaints and advance the project by the end of the year. They point to their work in Independence Heights, the first all-Black city founded in Texas during the Jim Crow era, as an example.

North of downtown Houston, Independence Heights languished for decades without bus service and even lacked sidewalks in front of its small bungalows.

The construction of Interstate 610 in the 1960s tore through the community. Its design resulted in floodwaters from nearby areas pooling into Independence Heights. The current freeway expansion plans would displace an additional 165 families there.

This time, however, highway planners are dangling many incentives, including replacement housing, new flood protections, and murals and signs detailing the history of Independence Heights.

Tanya Debose, a longtime community leader whose great-grandfather was given little when he was forced from his Independence Heights home during the initial interstate construction, is wary of the freeway expansion. It targets a neighborhood that has suffered enough in the past, she said.

“Why does it always have to be us?” she asked.

But Debose acknowledges that the project’s promise to invest millions in the neighborhood is far different from the way government officials handled the original freeway construction decades ago.

“We’re not going to lose like my great-grandfather did,” she said.

Seven miles from Independence Heights, in Houston’s Fifth Ward neighborhood, some residents — like Cooper — aren’t giving up their homes without a fight.

In February, she filed a civil rights complaint with the U.S. Department of Transportation alleging the project is racially discriminatory, one of the claims the agency is now investigating.

The Texas Department of Transportation took notice.

Soon after, the relocation firm hired by the department began sending Cooper postcards with images of communist revolutionary Che Guevara and Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. The postcards said the firm knew Cooper had contacted the feds.

“Please understand our role comes about because of civil rights and environmental justice,” a handwritten note reads.

Cooper piled the postcards in a drawer. “Creepy,” she said.

In the four years since she’s moved in, her home has turned into a playhouse for her three godchildren. They lounge on bunkbeds, splash around the pool and play video games on her 55-inch television. On holidays, she serves her extended family hamburgers and mac and cheese from a recipe she’s continued to perfect since her time in culinary school. Last July 4, everyone gathered on her fourth-floor balcony to watch the fireworks over the downtown skyline.

Nothing the government offers her to widen the freeway, she said, would replace the home she’s built.