Camara says her parents moved when she was a baby to another neighborhood in Shreveport, Allendale, where she still lives. But now her current home is in danger of being demolished so that a second highway, Interstate 49, can connect directly with the city.
Shreveport leaders who want to replace Camara’s house with a highway are embracing a Dwight Eisenhower-era belief in the interstate highway system’s most powerful. The sentiment lingers even decades after the weakness of urban highways became clear: pollution, noise, racism, displacement and congestion. For critics, Eisenhower Highways was a stake driven by the heart of healthy cities.
Now, many of these urban highways are crumbling, and a wave of expansion has sprung up in cities across the country to bring them down. There are 30 local citizen-led campaigns to convince authorities to remove the highways, according to Ben Crowther, who leads the “highways to avenues” program at the Congress for New Urbanism, a think tank dedicated to passable urban environments. A Senate bill introduced last year required $ 10 billion to be spent on removing urban highways. Even Detroit, perhaps the most car-dominated American city, is considering removing a stretch of highway.
“Now, more than ever, in the Covid era, people are rethinking how the streets and the infrastructure around them serve people living in cities,” Crowther told CNN Business.
Activists see highway removal projects as having a role in racial justice and doing some kind of redress for families displaced for decades, like Camara’s.
United States Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg is among those who spoke about the history of black neighborhoods being disproportionately divided by road projects, and asked correcting these errors.
But experts say replacing urban highways with avenues offers no guarantee of racial justice and risks making things worse. The increase in land value can trigger gentrification, damaging communities of color that already suffered when the highways were built.
“We need to think about not just ‘let’s go to a boulevard’, but at some point of restorative justice for people who have suffered, as well as some preservation and prevention for people who are still there,” said Calvin Gladney, CEO of Smart Growth America , a community development organization.
The neighborhood that was
Detroit resident Kenneth Cox, 87, remembers hearing a young Aretha Franklin singing at her father’s New Bethel Baptist Church located in the Black Bottom neighborhood. He reminded CNN Business of how he frequented the neighborhood covered skating rink and loved the vanilla ice cream at Barthwell’s, a drugstore chain.
“It was a black mecca for business,” recalls Cox of Black Bottom, whose Gotham Hotel, a chic destination, drew stars like Louie Armstrong and Duke Ellington.
But as the interstate highway system was mapped, Black Bottom was in his sights.
There was no black people on the Detroit city council at the time, according to Jamon Jordan, a Detroit historian. The five-member housing committee in the city had a single black member, who soon resigned in protest, according to Jordan.
Black Bottom was demolished in the 1960s to make way for Interstate 375.
Go ahead today, and Detroit and Michigan are planning to tear down Interstate 375 and convert it into a boulevard. But for many Detroit residents, the project has nothing to do with fixing the past.
PG Watkins, who heads the Black Bottom Archives, which tells the story of Detroit, says that some residents like the move to make the neighborhood thrive again, and others feel that the project is not being done for Black Detroit, but for white residents who can move.
“A lot of people are like, ‘We need to be honest about why this is really happening,'” said Watkins.
Mary Sheffield, the Detroit councilwoman who represents neighborhoods near I-375, described the project for CNN Business as an effort by planners “to attract a different segment of society that in recent history did not reside in the city”.
Stephanie Chang, a Michigan state senator who surveyed residents of predominantly black neighborhoods near I-375, found that most did not want the highway to be removed.
A spokesman for the Michigan Department of Transportation, who is leading the project, told CNN Business that the project is not about gentrification, but mobility.
“It’s taking a 60-year-old highway with outdated interchanges, deteriorated bridges and pavement and finding an appropriate solution that considers safety, 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 deal with rising property values.
A spokesman for Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan, asked about any measures to ensure that the I-375 project benefits nearby black residents who may be at risk of gentrification, suggested that the project is not the case.
“The proposed 375 project does not involve the displacement of anyone – it involves the potential displacement of a suburban highway over a surface road,” said the mayor’s spokesman, John Roach, by email. “I am not aware that possible inconveniences for passengers are a recognized form of gentrification.”
But the Michigan Department of Transportation said property values and rents could increase in residential areas adjacent to I-375, indicating that the project could trigger 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 handle it is unclear.
“There has been a legacy of misguided investments and missed opportunities in federal transportation policies that reinforce racial and economic inequality,” Buttigieg said in a statement to CNN Business. “We must ensure that these errors are not repeated in ongoing projects.”
Buttigieg declined to detail specific measures that he recommended to be taken to prevent further damage to communities already negatively affected by the highways.
He also did not say whether he would intervene and paralyze the I-49 project in Shreveport, which is awaiting approval by the federal government. But he said that ongoing projects are being evaluated on a case-by-case basis to determine whether the department can intervene to address community concerns.
Detroit historian Jordan finds that when he gives tours or lectures, few people know the history of Black Bottom and black Detroit companies and institutions. He’s used to hearing from people who heard that “black people messed up the city,” he said – a belief that the city was great when Henry Ford was in Detroit, and that things were great until black people took over the city .
He asked the government to reach out to damaged black businesses when the neighborhood was destroyed more than 60 years ago, so they can be among the beneficiaries of redevelopment. And Jordan added that a landmark and a a community center must be built in the new neighborhood to educate people about the Black Bottom.
“There has to be some kind of recognition of what happened,” said Jordan. “There has to be someone to deal with this story.”