Highways that destroyed Black neighborhoods are crumbling. Some want to undo that legacy

Channel 3000 ^ | February 27, 2021 | CNN

[Tolerance Sucks Rocks]

(CNN) — Njeri Camara, 61, can’t visit the Shreveport, Louisiana home where she was born. Like many Black homes and neighborhoods across the country in the 1960s, it was bulldozed to clear space for highways.

Camara says her parents moved when she was a baby to another Shreveport neighborhood, Allendale, where she still lives. But now her current home is at risk of being bulldozed so that a second highway, Interstate 49, can connect directly through the city.

The Shreveport leaders who want to trade Camara’s home for a highway are embracing a Dwight Eisenhower-era belief in the almighty good of the Interstate Highway System. The sentiment lingers even decades after the underbelly of urban highways became clear: pollution, noise, racism, displacement and congestion. For critics, Eisenhower’s highways were a stake driven through the heart of healthy cities.

Now many of these urban highways are crumbling, and a groundswell has emerged in cities nationwide to tear them down. There are 30 local, citizen-led campaigns to convince officials to remove highways, according to Ben Crowther, who leads the “highways to boulevards” program at the Congress for New Urbanism, a think tank devoted to walkable urban environments. A Senate bill introduced last year called for $10 billion to be spent on urban highway removals. Even Detroit, perhaps the most car-dominated US city, is considering removing a stretch of highway.

“Now more than ever, in the age of Covid, people are rethinking how streets and the infrastructure around them serves the people who live in cities,” Crowther told CNN Business.

Activists see highway removal projects as playing a role in racial justice, and making some sort of amends for families displaced decades ago, like Camara’s.

[PIF]

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