It’s amazing how someone can look at a basic set of facts and come up with completely the wrong conclusion. Such is an article in The Atlantic blaming urban poverty on highways.
“City planners,” says the article’s writer, Alana Semuels, “saw the crowded African-American areas as unhealthy organs that needed to be removed. To keep cities healthy, planners said, these areas needed to be cleared and redeveloped. Highway construction could be federally funded. Why not use those federal highway dollars to also tear down blight and rebuild city centers?”
Semuels then continues with the usual claims that highways divided neighborhoods and drained the cities of wealthy residents who moved to the suburbs, “taking with them tax revenues, even though their residents still used city services.” The result was concentrations of poverty in the cities.
Who or what is to blame for this vile plot? According to Semuels, the answer is the highways themselves. The solution to restore cities, then, is “tearing down” those highways.
Highways, however, are inanimate objects. They don’t make decisions and they don’t cause poverty. Notice in Semuels’ quotes who made the decisions to use highways as an excuse and funding mechanism for slum clearance: urban planners. Blaming the highways for planners’ poor ideas is the same as blaming a two-by-four for an architect’s poor building design.
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Here are a few points Semuels failed to note: First, jobs moved to the suburbs before people did. Before Henry Ford developed the moving assembly line, jobs could be concentrated in midtown and downtown factories. But moving assembly lines, which were quickly adopted by all sorts of industries, required lots of acres to work, and those acres could only be found in the suburbs.
Second, the transportation engineers who planned the Interstate Highway System originally called for it to by-pass cities. The federal government would fund interstate roads, but if the cities wanted freeways (most of which would not cross state lines), they would have to fund them themselves. The cities and their urban planners strongly opposed this, and Congress approved the Interstate Highway System in 1956 only after the Bureau of Public Roads addd 3,000 miles of urban interstates.
Third, one of the best ways to help people out of poverty is to improve their mobility, and within urban areas there is no mobility comparable to automobility. Urban interstates neither caused poverty nor made it worse, and to deliberately reduce mobility in cities in the name of saving those cities will, in fact, kill them.
Overall, American cities are better off with freeways and the mobility they provide than without them. No doubt many of those freeways could have been located in places where they would have minimal impact on neighborhoods. It was urban planners, not the highway engineers or the highways themselves, that placed those highways down the middle of poor neighborhoods with the goal of slum clearance.
Ironically, the people who blame highways for planners’ idiotic ideas from the 1950s are usually the ones who support planners’ idiotic ideas of today. Yet the real lesson to be learned from Semuels’ article is that we shouldn’t trust planners to know what they are doing, because when it comes to understanding how cities and urban transportation work, they usually don’t.
Amen.
The Antiplanner wrote:
Overall, American cities are better off with freeways and the mobility they provide than without them. No doubt many of those freeways could have been located in places where they would have minimal impact on neighborhoods. It was urban planners, not the highway engineers or the highways themselves, that placed those highways down the middle of poor neighborhoods with the goal of slum clearance.
Expensive though they are, the best way to provide good freeway access to urban areas while reducing impact of same is to put the freeways in tunnels. Most of the readers of this blog know of the Big Dig, in Boston, Massachusetts, which did precisely that, though it should have been toll-funded, correctly priced, and not “free.”
Across the pond, both Madrid and Stockholm have successfully put major motorway-type roads in tunnels to greatly reduce community impacts.
Ironically, the people who blame highways for planners’ idiotic ideas from the 1950s are usually the ones who support planners’ idiotic ideas of today. Yet the real lesson to be learned from Semuels’ article is that we shouldn’t trust planners to know what they are doing, because when it comes to understanding how cities and urban transportation work, they usually don’t.
For an example of what unaccountable planners can do, look at the District of Columbia, where planners with the Bureau of Public Roads and other federal agencies ran the Southeast-Southwest Freeway through Negro slums (as those areas of D.C. were then called), with no input or feedback from the people that lived there (since in those days (prior to 1975), D.C. was directly and absolutely ruled by the D.C. Commissioners, a body selected by Congress – and there were no municipal elected officials of any kind).
Alana Semuels has some good points to make – that politically-motivated or controlled urban planners have and can hurt people needlessly.
But I wish Alana Semuels had intellectual honesty. Rather than pushing the politically-correct mantra that everything is done solely to hurt black people, she should explain that people in general are being hurt by poor urban planning and bad highway plans. Remember that in New York City, the infamous Cross-Bronx Expressway development destroyed mainly Jewish and Italian neighborhoods. There are, unfortunately, too many examples like that.
As usual with The Antiplanner, not the entire story, and thus misleading.
The Interstate highways were mostly promoted and “designed,” if that’s the word, by the auto industry and its allies such as the construction industry, with specific routes determined mainly by highway engineers, not urban planners. http://www.vox.com/2015/5/14/8605917/highways-interstate-cities-history.
The Antiplanner’s attempt to justify the unjustifiable–urban freeways–is pathetic, and ultimately hypocritical, given the fact that urban freeways are an outcome of extremely heavy handed technocratic government intervention, along with urban “renewal.” I will admit, sorry legacies of the misbegotten faith in technocratic planning after World War II (everyone from Truman on down was fooled, unfortunately). And I find it odd that The Antiplanner defends urban freeways, considering that if it had been left to the private sector, almost none would have been built in the first place–and probably considerably more than half of the rural interstate system, neither.
MSetty wrote:
The Interstate highways were mostly promoted and “designed,” if that’s the word, by the auto industry and its allies such as the construction industry, with specific routes determined mainly by highway engineers, not urban planners.
Enough with the GM conspiracy. It has been thoroughly debunked.
But I do have some questions for your consideration – have you ever seen development that is intended to get (or force) residents to use transit instead of a private automobile? Ever seen such development go terribly, horribly wrong?
Odd how msetty chose such a biased piece to find his “facts”:
Highways gutted American cities. So why did they build them? (this one is the title, btw)
There was once a time when most Americans took streetcars to work every day. Nowadays, 85 percent of workers drive.
I could go on, but you get the idea.
City governments lobbied heavily for urban freeways and even testified to Congress, as shown here. The American Municipal Association (today known as the National League of Cities) lobbied heavily for urban freeways and represented 12,000 municipalities in 44 States when testifying to Congress. The AMA was an organization of city governments, which included urban planners.
The linked dot.gov site also refutes the notion that city planners weren’t involved in the process:
Vox’s unsupported assertion that “urban planners were absent — the profession barely existed at the time” is simply a load of shit, as is most everything posted here by mshitty.
“City governments lobbied heavily for urban freeways and even testified to Congress, as shown here”
But now suburban governments are the only ones who are lobbying to widen or build new highways into center cities.
http://usa.streetsblog.org/2016/02/26/with-widening-of-i-75-michigan-dot-will-deliver-another-blow-to-detroit/
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As suburbs grew, they broke off from cities, taking with them tax revenues, even though their residents still used city services.
” ~ALANA SEMUELS
Does anyone know of any studies they could point us to that demonstrate this occurring? It’s not at all a logical claim. What sort of services and at what cost could someone living and working outside of the city be using? Almost absolutely zero. If anyone they’d enrich the city since any visit and spending of money – shopping, entertainment – would have a near zero cost to the city.
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They require minimum lot sizes so that their only residents are people who can afford to live in big houses. It’s a different kind of discrimination than half a century ago, but discrimination nonetheless.
” ~ALANA SEMUELS
It’s not discrimination in the narrow sense of singling out any group. It’s only discrimination in the broadest sense of the word. It’s akin to complain the bank is discriminating since they have an ATM in the drive through lanes that you may only use if you’re in the car. God forbid you have to go someplace else – inside the building – to use that other ATM. #anotherGroupThinkInducedFacePalm
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This is bad for the health of the region. We know that people who live in concentrated poverty have a much harder time succeeding because they’re surrounded by other poor people. The economist Raj Chetty
” ~ALANA SEMUELS
Raj is definitely in fashion. Correct me if I’m wrong but there is not a body of evidence nor does Raj claim it’s the concentration of poverty that is the issue, correct? Raj’s work focuses on the issues of not getting exposure to other peoples of different groups AND THAT THE KIDS IN POVERTY ARE STUCK IN TERRIBLE FAILED SCHOOLS. That is, the concentration of poverty may not at all matter as long as the children have good teachers in good schools with children of different socio-economic backrounds. In fact, the latter may not matter much either; it may be as straight forward as fixing the schools.
Maybe I’m wrong? I’m asking because I’m not so sure that Miss Semuels isn’t reading Raj’s work with a bit too much bias.
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In the last decade, Americans’ ideas of where they want to live have been changing. Young professionals and Baby Boomers are moving back to inner cities, fueled by the desire to live somewhere walkable, near restaurants, bars, and offices, where they don’t need to have cars. A freeway passing through the heart of a city does not jibe very well with an urban renaissance.
” ~ALANA SEMUELS
That last claim is a load of bullshit, at least from my experience. I want to be able to get to work easily. Some contracts I have are right in the urban core. But many of the gigs of the year have been the opposite. Take away the freeway going through the center of the city and the most sensible thing for me to do would be to not live in the center city.
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The economically depressed town of New Haven is in the midst of a project called Downtown Crossing, which has removed parts of Route 34 and is creating a business district in an area of town bisected by the freeways.
” ~ALANA SEMUELS
The freeway portion – which had traffic levels too low to justify it’s upkeep – was replaced with giant asphalt parking lots and stroads. Is that really doing what she claims it is????
https://www.google.com/maps/@41.3062284,-72.9471561,308m/data=!3m1!1e3
“If part of a body is sick, the whole body can’t be healthy, and many cities across America have parts that aren’t doing very well
” ~ALANA SEMUELS
What kind of brain dead jack ass would make a claim like this??!?! Has she never known a person with a broken arm?
Holistic quackery makes its debut in urban planning?
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These cities have tried to tear down barriers that prevent all of their residents from reaching their full opportunity. Sometimes those barriers are highways. Sometimes they’re something else entirely. Tearing down a highway isn’t the only way to make a city healthy again. But building a new one—or expanding an existing one—seems a surefire way to make a city sick.
” ~ALANA SEMUELS
Before this – for those of you who haven’t read her article – she turns to the tried and true intellectual diahrea of implying that the TWin Cities ( MPLS / STPL ) is so succesful and great because “it’s cities share money”, yadda, yadda, yadda.
Now…. let’s set aside that painfully brain dead claim itself and think about what Ms. Semuels has done. She goes through this whoooooooooooooooole rigamoroll about the problems with the concentration of poverty and how building freeways sucked the wealth out of cities. Then she turns around and points out one of the most economically healthy metro areas in the country WITHOUT acknowledging that MPLS / STPL has one of the highest levels of road miles per capita and even more freeway lane miles than almost every other Metro in the country. It’s far more than Syracuse.
Sure, sure, Ms. Semuels does give a token nod to all those other factors. The problem is that the urban freeway building isn’t the problem. We know this because Canada mostly avoided plowing freeways through it’s urban cores yet it has higher concentrations of poverty among minorities than the US.
People want walkability and transit? Well- let’s see…
I went to the market on Saturday to do my grocery shopping for the week. When I got home, it took four trips to carry the stuff I bought from my driveway into the house. Using transit to run that errand, even assuming there was a convenient stop somewhat near my house, it would take five or six days (you can carry a lot more stuff if you’re only going 50 feet than you can if you’re walking 1/4 mile or more), not to mention the extra hour or so it would take every night after work to go out and do that shopping.
Yeah, that sounds like a whole lot of fun, doesn’t it? You can take the bus/trolley/light rail if it makes you happy. Me, I’ll take my car.
Completely absent from Semuels’s discussion of concentrated poverty in central cities is one of its most proximate causes: urban planners’ concentration of federally-funded public housing in poor and often highly segregated neighborhoods. These activities began with the Housing Act of 1949 (predating the first urban interstate links by about a decade), which set in motion the process of slum clearance and urban renewal, destroying many poor neighborhoods in the process.
Public housing projects tended to have even more profound impacts on both the urban landscape and the concentration of poverty, since the larger projects often consumed several adjacent blocks and were explicitly designed to house poor and minority households in a single location.
The economically depressed town of New Haven is in the midst of a project called Downtown Crossing, which has removed parts of Route 34 and is creating a business district in an area of town bisected by the freeways.
” ~ALANA SEMUELS
What she does not mention is that the highway and the development around it, were all part of the great urban renewal championed by the liberal, progressive Democratic powers and planners led by Mayor Richard Lee. New Haven received many national awards from urban planners for its wonderful urban renewal, which chopped up its downtown and played havoc with local businesses.
Don’t blame the highway lobby and oil companies for mass destruction caused by the same types of planners and leaders who continue to lecture us on how we should live.