How government highways hurt blacks

See Black Community Cut Off by Akron’s ‘Road to Nowhere’ Seeks to Undo Damage by By Kris Maher of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"A freeway built in the 1970s through a Black community in Akron was supposed to reinvigorate the city’s downtown, but instead it became known as the “road to nowhere” that devastated several neighborhoods.

Akron is now trying to reimagine a mile-long section of the city’s Innerbelt freeway. The sun-bleached stretch of road was closed to traffic in 2017 and is bare except for weeds filling its cracks. But it still separates a mostly Black neighborhood from the commercial and cultural life of downtown. 

“To me, it’s an urban scar,” said Akron Mayor Daniel Horrigan, who added that people suffered an emotional toll as homes and businesses were torn down. “We, as a city, did that to our citizens,” he said.

The reassessment of the Innerbelt in Akron mirrors a process taking place in other cities where Black communities were split apart and cut off by projects spurred by federal highway bills in the 1950s aimed at improving commerce and national defense.

The Akron freeway was designed to be a “high speed, high efficiency, industrial connection” for 120,000 daily cars from the mostly white suburbs to a downtown that officials wanted to revitalize. Hundreds of Black families were forced to move when the city seized property through eminent domain, while others saw their home values plummet.

By the early 2000s, only 18,000 cars traveled on the freeway each day, and it became known as a “road to nowhere.” This year Akron won a grant of about $1 million from the Biden administration to create a community-based plan to redevelop the decommissioned roadway, by potentially adding a park and trails, public art and housing, and by reconnecting the street grid."

"City planners often routed highways through Black neighborhoods in part because they viewed them as blighted and expendable. Many of those areas—including some in Akron that made way for the Innerbelt—faced discriminatory housing policies known as redlining, in which banks declined to provide financing to Black owners seeking to improve their homes or businesses."

"Black families in Akron, many of whom had migrated from the South to work in the rubber industry, lost wealth tied to their homes. Some were forced to relocate, while others remained in an area that lost value when it was cut off by the freeway because planners didn’t include connections to their neighborhoods."