Posted on 04/01/2021 10:14:06 AM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
There are legitimate arguments to be made to building more bridges so that people can safely cross highways. There is not a legitimate argument to removing billions of dollars in infrastructure so that two generation old disruptions MAY be “healed”.
You got it.
Allocate the money, then redefine what it is actually spent on. Speak up for your share!
Oh Goodie Goodie, the Regime wants to build infrastructure, cities want to tear it down. This should be fun.
I mean, who needs 4-6 lane or more well maintained interstate highway system to transport goods, people and in time of war heavy military equipment, when 1-2 lane dirt and gravel roads the highway system replaced work so much better for cities?
Sometimes I just want to immigrate to whatever native English-speaking country has the lowest percentage of blacks in its national population.
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Probably is the US with only 13% black, else pick from Canada, the UK, Australia, or New Zealand
They want to chop out the arteries that allow white people to flee to the suburbs and still have good paying jobs in the cities.
So will Chomo Joe’s massive infrastructure plan hurt communities of color hardest? Will black neighborhoods be torn down to make solar panel factories?
By forcing working people off the highways and onto boulevards it opens up more opportunities for reparations. Cause they be owed.
No matter what is done it will be called racist by blacks.
Tear it down, racist, you’re taking access to the world away from blacks
Do nothing, racist, not spending money on black areas
Rebuild, racist, its gentrification and more non-blacks will come into black areas
Congress for New Urbanism, a think tank devoted to walkable urban environments.
ah, utopianism. Walk in an urban environment and you’re a target for criminals. From picpockets to polar bear hunters.
Learn Japanese, go to Japan; just stay away from Roppongi and Azabu (Both in Tokyo).
If you’re talking about Detroit (mentioned in the article) it is better to take the bypass (275/696). I only drove through Detroit once. Afterward, both my mother and a friend convinced me that once was enough.
Asphalt is pavement blackface. But concrete is off-white, and therefore racist as well.
I’m guessing either England or Australia.
There is a New York City highway - the Cross Bronx Expressway - that is held largely responsible for cutting through the heart of many strong Middle Class neighborhoods in the Bronx, upending neighborhood connections, relationships and property values, and helping the deterioration of the Bronx into the majority “minority” lower income area it was by the 1970s. To some people it was safer to go into Harlem in the 1970s than into the Bronx.
Whoa wait a minute so highways are racist?
I find it fascinating that the 1960’s line up of presidents was Eisenhower until early 1961, then Kennedy, Johnson for two terms, and that ended in 1969. So for the decade of the 60’s, there was a conservative president for one year prior to Nixon taking the reins in early 69.
I would guess if there was a problem when it started, they could have terminated the program if they wanted in 8 years. So the question comes out, “Whose worse, the fool, or the fools that follow?”
But Kennedy sped up the highway work by hiring new people into the job and approved the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1961 which increased the gas tax from three to four cents to fund it. Further, the committee that ran the program was under investigation for allegations of corruption while the staff flooded the people with manure advertising like billboards, radio and television spots, and newspaper magazine articles of great success of the program and how it is improving peoples lives.
https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/infrastructure/50interstate2.cfm
And it just got worse under Johnson. So the die was cast as it is said. And here we are complaining about conservative president era actions, that were incidentally hidden while the mess was really made.
wy69
— 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.
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I grew up in San Diego CA - many homes of my relatives are gone replaced with freeways. It is not “racism” as much as location, location, location.
This was back in the Eisenhower-thru-Kennedy era. After a decade of block-busting, our congregation was regrettably unable to integrate; there was violence in the streets, and when MLK would be shot some years hence, riots burned a major street in NE DC and it wouldn't recover for the next twenty years. instead the elders transferred the building to a black congregation.
Our generations-deep, tight-knit congregation and neighbors who kept DC working other than in government scattered all around a 50-mile radius, and some even moved out of state to be near extended family. Members of the church's main women's circle drove hundreds of miles all over the metro area once a month in the ensuing decades to keep raising money for the missionaries, retirement home and hospital, but eventually after 60 years of continuous service, they aged out and it ended.
I was among the first generation not to be a part of these endeavors. When I was grown, I had to find a neighborhood, find a church, interview and pay babysitters, find work contacts and find people to repair my car or things in my house, because was no longer ensconced and networked with family and lifelong friends. It was "liberated," but grew wearisome, expensive and often dangerous. I couldn't take my child around and show him where all his forebearers had lived. When I would hear the lyrics of, "Anatevfka", I would tear up. The couple of times I went back to the old neighborhood to look around, black people asked me, "Can I help you?" as if I were from a foreign country. My skin color tipped them off.
About ten years ago, I dropped by and chatted with the pastor and some of the people who had been "originals" when the church changed over. The church that had held 600 worshippers every Sunday morning was down to about 20 regular attendees. The stained glass windows on the alley side of the sanctuary had been knocked out by vandals, and everything inside was in disrepair.
I later found a news article saying that the congregation had tried welcoming a group of 125 mostly white young people who were gentrifying the area and meeting in a school gym on Sundays, but that the congregants had been offended by the "new" people's white habits, like arriving on time and going straight to the kitchen to make the coffee when it was their turn instead of greeting everyone and talking before doing their chore; so they rejected a merger, and would rather fail than integrate with white oppressors. Seventy years of civil rights efforts and misfires on all sides, and this is what we've come to. Nothing will ever be enough.
For our family, being torn off our roots was like a death. My parents never got over it, and I still think about it often, like one does for a long-gone grandparent. Where's the grave, where I can mourn and lay flowers?
I've lately seen signs in the neighborhood saying, "Stop the gentrification of this historically black neighborhood."
In what neighborhood did you grow up? (I think you’ve told me this before, but I don’t recall.)
I know that you know this stuff, but for the out-of-towners who have a lot of very outdated notions: DC always had a substantial black population, typically a quarter to a third of the total. This of course grew rapidly in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s, topping out at over 70 percent. The white middle class started moving out when suburbanization became the thing after WWII. Then came school desegregation, which set off an exodus in what was still a largely southern town. The ‘68 riots put some more nails in the coffin. But by the end of the 70’s, the pendulum was already swinging back. I arrived in ‘79; I was not the only white guy east of Lincoln Park on Capitol Hill but there were darn few of us. The black middle class started moving to the suburbs and gentrifiers started coming back into the city. We now have gentrification on steroids, while a lot of suburbanites are spending four or more hours a day in their cars. Cycles.
I have never seen a listing of neighborhoods that were, in fact, built originally as black neighborhoods. Historically a lot of the black population (and lower class, often immigrant, white working class families) lived in alley housing, often with either the husband or wife working as a servant. A lot of this housing was torn down by 1960’s urban renewal, but displacing people into big projects turned out to be a cure worse than the disease.
Old Town Anacostia was originally a white working class area. Frederick Douglass had to win a landmark legal case to break a restrictive racial covenant before buying Cedar Hill, his home in Anacostia. For out of towners who are still operating on old information about Anacostia, Cedar Hill is now a National Historic Site run by the NPS and is well worth visiting. The surrounding area is now gentrifying, though there are enough aging housing projects in the area to keep things lively for the time being. (Those need to be shut down, and many of them will be as they age out.) Prior to buying Cedar Hill, Douglass also owned a house on the 300 block of A Street N.E., a block from the Supreme Court.
Most of Capitol Hill was built as white working and middle class housing. Along the fringes, Kingman Terrace and Carver Langston were built as black neighborhoods. I don’t know about Rosedale, Trinidad or Ivy City, which has an honorable history as a railroad workers’ neighborhood before it crashed and burned. That happened mainly because passenger rail travel declined and most of the jobs disappeared; the young, the skilled, and the energetic folks moved out and the neighborhood collapsed. It’s being rebuilt now. Shaw grew out of the freedman’s camps established during the Civil War and was always heavily black. (It is named for William Gould Shaw of the 54th Massachusetts, and as far as I know, the renamers haven’t gone after it yet.) Next door, Ledroit Park was built as an upscale white neighborhood but became majority black in the 1920’s, partly because of its proximity to Howard University. So, DC has always been a mix.
Anyhow, you are absolutely correct. In most of today’s overheated debates about the evils of gentrification, the “historically black neighborhoods” being claimed by activists were actually historically white areas that flipped in the 50’s-70’s, and in a few cases earlier. The lefties operate on the Brezhnev Doctrine of racial entitlement. But it does leave me curious: what neighborhoods were in fact built originally for black homeowners, back when DC was still a segregated southern city? I’ve never seen a good list.
A 200 year old local white Baptist congregation bought the small dairy farm next to us back around 1960, and built a huge church. All through the sixties, they were adding parking lots and more wings. They had a full time school, all kinds of gigantic meals and fairs. By the mid eighties, they were renting prime times to a “non denominational church”, a Korean church, and any other group they could find. A few years later, they sold out and did not buy another church. Not a black in sight. Only thing I can think of is that they had been given a huge lump sum by a dying congregant or two back in the fifties, spent it, attracted freeloaders, went in to debt, and that was that.
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