Opinion | Mr. Biden, Tear Down This Highway

Since the mid-20th century, urban highway construction has worked as a powerful tool to segregate American cities and demolish communities of color. These imposing roadways served as a physical barrier to reinforce racist policies like redlining. As a result, walls of concrete and veils of smog and pollution grew to separate Black and brown communities from white.

Although government-led segregation is usually discussed as history, in the communities divided by these roads, considerable public health impacts persist. Increased investment in urban highways threatens to inflict further harm. In Houston, the expansion would demolish the Clayton Homes and displace many more residents from the historic Black and Latino neighborhoods of Near Northside and Independence Heights — all despite decades of evidence that widening highways does little to relieve congestion.

Local advocacy groups have protested the project, including by helping affected residents file complaints against the TxDOT, highlighting the expansion’s disproportionate impact on communities of color. Though this advocacy led the Biden administration to halt construction, invoking Title VI of the Civil Rights Act (which prohibits racial discrimination in any activity that receives federal funding), Texas relocated over 110 people anyway.

“Where adverse impacts can’t be avoided, our team is exploring an array of extraordinary mitigation strategies to help leave the impacted areas better than before and as whole as possible,” said a statement provided by a spokesman for the Texas Department of Transportation. “We know that many in the community are anxious to see this project advance.”

Rather than being a rare exception, projects like this one fit a longstanding pattern of how the United States chooses to force highways through communities with the least political power to resist. A Los Angeles Times analysis found that expansions of existing highways have displaced more than 200,000 people over the past three decades, predominantly in nonwhite neighborhoods. Today, in El Paso, Austin, Portland, Los Angeles and Shreveport, planned highway expansions threaten many more with the loss of their homes. In Houston, the Third Ward — the heart of the city’s Black community — remains blocked off on all sides by highways. The planned expansion would literally widen this divide.

The Department of Transportation has estimated that highway construction has displaced over a million people in the United States since the 1950s. Hundreds of thousands more were forced to move by urban renewal projects, with scant assistance provided to those relocated.

Unfortunately, the Cross Bronx Expressway served as a model for other cities looking to develop their own highway networks after President Dwight Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act in 1956.

These highways, for which the 1956 law provided matching funds of 90 cents for every 10 cents spent by the states, sliced through downtown areas and made possible the development of new car-centric suburbs on the outskirts of existing cities. The real estate industry’s widespread use of what were known as “restrictive covenants” during the first half of the 20th century ensured that many of these new suburbs were closed to anybody considered nonwhite, specifying that the homes could be sold only to “members of the Caucasian race.” Although the Fair Housing Act outlawed restrictive covenants in 1968 and they carry no legal force today, their legacy lives on in many cities where they have never been struck from the books.

These practices encouraged and exacerbated white flight and racial segregation. American city centers entered a period of significant decay as tax bases dried up and cities cut back on municipal services. Urban renewal programs used this physical decline as justification to remake their civic cores for the convenience of the suburban, white commuter.

Cities paved over vibrant neighborhoods filled with parks, public spaces and rail transit systems, replacing them with amenities focused on suburban commuters, such as massive sports arenas, entertainment centers, single-use office complexes and parking — lots of parking. Black neighborhoods were targeted with such regularity that James Baldwin, in a 1963 interview, famously described urban renewal by saying: “It means Negro removal. That is what it means. And the federal government is an accomplice to this fact.”

Many homeowners whose houses were seized by eminent domain and destroyed by the government were also denied the ability to purchase new homes in whites-only suburbs. Displaced residents often had no choice but to move into shoddily maintained public housing, robbing them of their chance to pass down wealth in the form of real estate from parent to child, thereby cementing a cycle of generational poverty.

The urban highway network and the urban renewal projects it spawned are tools of systemic discrimination. They’re also in terrible shape: The American Society of Civil Engineers gives the overall condition of America’s roads a D grade. As many of the highways built in the 1950s and ’60s reach the end of their useful life, now is the perfect opportunity to radically rethink the urban environment that shapes social relations within American city life.

In practice, such a reckoning may mean dismantling much of the urban highway network wholesale.

It’s heartening that a few places show that change is possible. In Rochester, N.Y., the massive highway loop that once cut through the city’s Black community and walled part of it off from downtown has finally been demolished, the street grid stitched back together and affordable housing built on the site where the highway used to run. Less than 100 miles away in Syracuse, there are plans to tear down Interstate 81, which bulldozed through the 15th Ward in the ’60s, displacing roughly 1,300 residents, most of them Black.

In other countries, city planners have realized that many of their urban highways were mistakes. In Seoul, the local government tore down a central elevated highway that had capped a tributary of the Han River, restoring the waterway and converting it into what has become one of the city’s most popular public spaces.

But in the United States, federal legislation is moving in the opposite direction. Despite a well-intentioned $1 billion allocation in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act to reconnect communities isolated by highway construction, that law provides far more for the highways themselves: over $273 billion — much of which is likely to be used for further expansion.

The recently signed Inflation Reduction Act threatens to feed our national appetite for highway widening. By emphasizing the funding of electric vehicles at the expense of more equitable and sustainable modes of transit, the federal government is choosing to repeat past mistakes and encouraging cities and states to do the same. Demolishing someone’s home for the convenience of a suburbanite driving an electric car is hardly better than if the car were powered by gasoline.

President Biden has a favorite phrase he attributes to his father: “Don’t tell me what you value. Show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.”

We shouldn’t double down on the failed urban highway planning that keeps Americans divided from one another. The Biden administration ought to use the Civil Rights Act not to pause but to fully cancel the highway expansion project that would further strangle Houston. For the United States to adapt to a changing, urbanizing world, the federal government must reckon with the automobile-based segregation it has encouraged for the past 70 years, investing instead in public transit and walkability.

And yes, in many cases, cities should follow Rochester’s lead. Recognize that these hulking concrete structures are the mistakes of a previous generation. Tear them down. Let the cities and their people heal.