The Discriminatory History of Highway Infrastructure and American Suburbia
By: Frankie Pinchard and Rozina Kanchwala
Car-centric policies dominate US cities, leading to underinvestment in other forms of transportation, like public transit, biking infrastructure, and pedestrian pathways. The result is that we rely heavily on automobiles, which not only contribute greatly to carbon emissions, but also lead to inequality, inaccessibility, and poorer health outcomes for city dwellers.
It’s important to understand how this dominant paradigm came to be and how the prioritization of road and highway infrastructure created devastating social impacts where community centers, housing, and business districts were destroyed.
The history of American suburbia begins with the post-war boom in construction of highways, notably the 1956 Interstate Highway Act under President Eisenhower and the rising economy which paved the way for thousands more Americans to buy cars.
The new suburbia was encapsulated in the invention of the Levittowns which provided large amounts of identical and affordable housing for thousands of Americans, where driveways were an important feature of newly built houses. The new suburbs also included public parks, swimming pools and recreational facilities, however most of these were only accessible by cars.
But Levittown encapsulated the “American Dream” only for some. The story of American suburbia also shines a light on the violent and racist history of twentieth century America. William J. Levitt refused to sell Levittown homes to African Americans and the Federal Housing Authority reiterated this by placing a requirement on housing contracts that they could not be resold or rented to African Americans. There is no doubt that the wealth disparity today in America between African American wealth and white wealth can be linked to discriminatory housing policies in the 20th century.
Additionally, The Interstate Highway Act of 1956 also discriminated against minorities, in many instances by plotting highways directly through Black and Latino communities. Highway construction served two purposes:
Keep White and Black communities segregated.
Displace thriving Black communities and households
It’s no coincidence that segregation laws were being struck down around the same time that highways were being built. So, by placing highways strategically, planners were able to keep white and black neighborhoods apart in a way that would make things like school integration harder to achieve. In this way, infrastructure policies reinforced racist policies in a more subtle way.
One of the most striking examples of the second point is Miami’s Black community, nicknamed the ‘Harlem of the South’ was decimated after the Interstate Highway Act, as the expansion of I-95 through the city destroyed 87 acres of housing and commercial property in the community. Within twenty years of highway construction, more than 1 million people nationwide lost their residence.
The highway construction worked side by side with discriminatory suburban housing plans to make new developed areas of housing and business inaccessible to African American and Latino neighborhoods.
Robert Moses, one of the most powerful city planners of the century, argued that highway construction must “go right through cities and not around them” to deliberately decimate poor and Black communities. Born in New Haven, Connecticut, he was one of the most influential individuals in shaping New York City: the Cross-Bronx and Brooklyn-Queens Expressways cut through the Bronx and Red Hook neighborhoods.
With all this in mind, it was then extremely significant when Pete Buttigieg, Transportation Secretary, announced a $1 billion program Reconnecting Communities which aims to reconnect these exact cities and neighborhoods decimated by discriminatory highway construction over the next five years. Projects could include new public transport links to disadvantaged neighborhoods to jobs; bike lanes and pedestrian walkways and even partial removal of highways.
The reality is that much of America’s highways were built with segregation in mind, decimating Black and Latino neighborhoods. The consequence is that many cities today are still inaccessible without cars and will continue to be so if nothing is changed. However, by facing the discriminatory history of transport in America, not only is it possible to grapple and make amends for this history, but it may also be possible to achieve a greener way of traveling and a more sustainable way of living.
Transportation-related emissions are a leading cause of greenhouse gasses particularly in the U.S., accounting for over a quarter of all U.S. greenhouse gasses. We can and must shift this car-centric paradigm to one that paves the way for multimodal transportation options. Stay tuned for our next blog post on the topic of how multimodal transportation options can lead to more healthy and equitable communities.