Camara says her parents moved when she was a baby to another ward in Shreveport, Allendale, where she still lives. But now her current home is at risk of being bulldozed so that a second highway, Interstate 49, can be connected directly through the city.
Shreveport leaders who want to trade Camara’s home for a freeway are embracing the 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 apparent: pollution, noise, racism, displacement and congestion. To critics, Eisenhower’s highways were a ring driven through the heart of healthy cities.
Now many of these urban highways are crumbling and a well has opened in cities across the country to break them down. There are 30 local civilian-led campaigns to persuade officials to remove highways, said Ben Crowther, who “highways to boulevards” program at the Congress for New Urbanism, a think tank dedicated to walkable urban environments. A Senate bill introduced last year called for $ 10 billion to be spent on removing urban highways. Even Detroit, arguably America’s most car-dominated city, is considering removing a stretch of highway.
“Now more than ever, in the era of Covid, people are rethinking how streets and the infrastructure around them serve the people who live in cities,” Crowther told CNN Business.
Activists see highway removal projects as playing a role in racial justice and making amends for families displaced decades ago, such as Camara’s.
U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg is among those who have spoken out about the history of black neighborhoods disproportionately divided by highway projects, and has called for correct those mistakes.
But experts say replacing urban highways with boulevards doesn’t guarantee racial justice and runs the risk of making things worse. Rising land values can cause gentrification, damaging color communities already affected when the highways were first built.
“We need to think not only about ‘let’s go to a boulevard,’ but also about a moment of restoration of justice for the people who have suffered, as well as preservation and prevention for the people who remain,” said Calvin Gladney, CEO of Smart Growth America, a community development organization.
The neighborhood that was
Detroit resident Kenneth Cox, 87, recalls hearing a young Aretha Franklin singing at her father’s New Bethel Baptist Church located near Black Bottom. He recalled CNN Business how he frequented the neighborhood’s indoor skating rink, and loved the vanilla ice cream at Barthwell’s, a chain of drugstores.
“It was a black business mecca,” recalls Cox of Black Bottom, whose Gotham Hotel, a chic destination, attracted stars like Louie Armstrong and Duke Ellington.
But when the Interstate Highway system was mapped, Black Bottom was in the crosshairs.
There were no blacks people in Detroit City Council, according to Jamon Jordan, a Detroit historian. The city’s five-member housing committee had one black member, who, according to Jordan, soon resigned in protest.
Black Bottom was bulldozed in the 1960s to make way for Interstate 375.
Fast forward to today, and Detroit and the state of Michigan plan to tear down Interstate 375 and turn it into a boulevard. But for many Detroiters, it is the project has nothing to do with making up for the past.
PG Watkins, who heads the Black Bottom Archives, which chronicles Detroit’s history, says some residents welcome the removal to bring the neighborhood back to fruition, and others feel the project is not being done for Black Detroit, but for white residents that might move in.
“A lot of people say, ‘We just have to be honest about why this is really happening,’” said Watkins.
Mary Sheffield, the Detroit city councilor representing the neighborhoods near I-375, described the project to CNN Business as an attempt by planners “to attract another segment of society that has not been seen in recent memory. residents of the city “.
Stephanie Chang, a Michigan state senator who questioned residents in largely black neighborhoods near I-375, found that most don’t want the highway removed.
A spokesman for the Michigan Department of Transportation, which is leading the project, told CNN Business that the project is not about gentrification, but about mobility.
“It will take a 60-year-old highway with outdated interchanges, worn bridges and pavement, and find a suitable solution that takes into account security, operations and improved connectivity for all users,” said spokesman Rob Morosi.
The department is working with the Detroit city government, he added, which has programs and policies to address rising real estate values.
A spokesperson for Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan asked about any steps to ensure that the I-375 project benefits black residents in the area at risk of gentrification, suggested the project would not have such case.
“The proposed 375 project does not involve the relocation of people – it implies the possible relocation of a commuter highway by a regular road,” the mayor’s spokesman John Roach said in an email. “I am not aware that potential commuter nuisance is a recognized form of gentrification.”
But Michigan’s transportation division has said real estate values and rents could increase in residential neighborhoods off I-375, indicating the project could be causing gentrification. The spokesman did not respond to requests for comment on the department’s findings.
Gentrification appears to be on Buttigieg’s radar, but how he will go about it is unclear.
“There is a legacy of misplaced investment and missed opportunities in federal transportation policy that amplify racial and economic inequality,” Buttigieg said in a statement to CNN Business. “We must ensure that these mistakes are not repeated in ongoing projects.”
Buttigieg declined to elaborate specific steps he recommended to prevent further damage to communities already negatively impacted by highways.
Nor would he say whether he would step in and stop the I-49 project in Shreveport, which is awaiting federal government approval. But he said projects in the pipeline are being evaluated on a case-by-case basis to determine if the department can intervene to address the community’s concerns.
Jordan, the Detroit historian, discovers that when he gives tours or lectures, few people know the history of Black Bottom and Detroit’s Black companies and institutions. He’s used to hearing from people who have heard that “Black people are ruining the city,” he said – a belief that the city was great when Henry Ford was in Detroit, and that things were great until Blacks took over the city.
He has called on the government to contact black businesses that were damaged when the neighborhood was destroyed over 60 years ago, so they could be among the beneficiaries of the redevelopment. And Jordan added that a historical marker and one a community center should be built in the new neighborhood to educate people about Black Bottom.
“There has to be some kind of recognition of what happened,” Jordan said. ‘A number of people need to get a grip on this story.’