Interstate: Highway Politics and Policy since 1939

8. The Interstates and the Cities

95 8 The Interstates and the Cities In postwar America, mass production of automobiles and tract housing signaled the beginnings of urban decline and suburban sprawl. It was an era of unrivaled prosperity for most Americans, but major spatial and demographic shifts were taking place. The populations of older industrial cities peaked around 1950 and then began a long, slow downward trend. Meanwhile, the percentage of suburban residents surpassed those living in cities as early as 1960 and continued to climb in following decades. Manufacturers and big retailers had already begun to decentralize their operations in the early postwar years. Slower sales and rising costs pushed department stores and corporations out of the cities, while the growing base of suburban consumers and workers provided a magnetic attraction. The aging central cities suffered from deindustrialization and population loss, while the brand-new suburbs benefited from both trends. Growth on the urban fringe had its costs. Massive traffic congestion clogged highways linking cities and suburbs, and, for the suburban commuter , cast a cloud over the just-fulfilled American dream of home ownership . Downtown political and economic interests searched for ways to stem the flight of people and businesses, hoping to “save” the central business districts. As middle-class and working-class whites abandoned the cities for the crabgrass frontier, a simultaneous migration of southern blacks began to reshape the demography of northern, midwestern, and western urban centers. African American residential districts faced overcrowding and housing shortages, pushing increasing numbers of black families into “transitional” neighborhoods, areas abandoned by whites headed for the urban periphery. Often dating to the late nineteenth century, the housing stock of older cities was deteriorating and required renewal; the narrow, pre-automobile street networks needed to be rebuilt for the motor age. By the end of World War II, big-city mayors, downtown business groups, and urban planners called for the reconstruction and modernization of the American city. New highways were high on their wish list. Few public policy initiatives have had as dramatic and lasting an impact on modern America as the decision to build the Interstate Highway System. Virtually completed over a fifteen-year period between 1956 and 96 INTERSTATE the early 1970s, the new Interstates had inevitable and powerful consequences . In metropolitan areas, the completion of urban expressways led very quickly to a reorganization of urban and suburban space. The Interstates linked central cities with sprawling postwar suburbs, facilitating automobile commuting while undermining what was left of inner-city mass transit. Those same Interstate highways stimulated new downtown physical development and spurred the growth of suburban shopping malls, office parks, and residential subdivisions. Oriented toward center cities, urban expressways also tore through long-established inner-city residential communities, destroying low-income housing on a vast and unprecedented scale. Huge expressway interchanges, cloverleafs, and onoff ramps created enormous areas of dead and useless space in the central cities. The new expressways, in short, permanently altered the urban and suburban landscape throughout the nation. The Interstate system was a gigantic public works program, but it is now apparent that freeway construction had enormous and often negative consequences for the cities. As historian Mark I. Gelfand noted, “No federal venture spent more funds in urban areas and returned fewer dividends to central cities than the national highway program.”1 Almost everywhere, the new urban expressways destroyed wide swaths of existing housing and dislocated people by the tens of thousands. Highway promoters and highway builders envisioned the new Interstate highways as a means of clearing “blighted” urban areas. These plans actually date to the late 1930s, but they were not fully implemented until the late 1950s and 1960s. Massive amounts of urban housing were destroyed in the process of building the urban sections of the Interstate Highway System. By the 1960s, federal highway construction was demolishing 37,000 urban housing units each year; urban renewal and redevelopment programs were destroying an equal number of mostly low-income housing units annually. “The amount of disruption,” the U.S. House Committee on Public Works conceded in 1965, was “astoundingly large.” As planning scholar Alan A. Altshuler has noted, by the mid-1960s, when Interstate construction was well underway, many believed that the new highway system would “displace a million people from their homes before it [was] completed.” A large proportion of those dislocated were African Americans, and in most cities highway officials routinely routed expressways through black neighborhoods.2 Dislocated urbanites had few advocates in the state and federal roadbuilding agencies...