As Washington lawmakers look to big infrastructure projects to get Americans back to work after the pandemic, progressives are making the case that the money would be best spent tearing down urban highways — and reinvesting in the Black and brown communities torn apart by those bad road projects decades ago.
In a groundbreaking new policy
proposal, nonprofits Transportation for America and Third Way recommended that the next administration create a new, $5-billion competitive grant program that states could draw on to tear down their misguided downtown highways and redevelop the land that’s left behind in better ways.
But notably, the proposal also specifies that all that newly highway-free land would be held in trust for the benefit of the communities that surround it — communities that, often, are the direct descendants of Black and brown residents whose lives were upended when the highways were built in the first place. The groups say spending the money is essential to maximizing the antiracist potential of the major transportation investment.
“[The land trust idea] is really key to regenerating wealth in communities that highway projects helped bankrupt in the first place,” said Alex Laska, transportation policy adviser at Third Way. “It’s really important to talk about not just the economic benefits of highway removal, but how to make sure that the people who already live there see that benefit.”
The proposal offers a kind of restorative justice redux on the “Highways to Boulevards” concept that has been popular in urbanist circles for decades. Ever since the Federal Highway Act of 1956 handed state DOTs a hefty incentive to use heavily-subsidized highway projects as
a pretext to clear BIPOC neighborhoods, mobility justice advocates have argued that highway removal projects could be key to repairing the harm wrought by the urban renewal era — but worried that doing it could precipitate gentrification that could destroy Black and brown communities all over again.
Despite those well-founded fears, at least
18 American cities have already torn down urban highways, usually citing the comparatively low costs of highway removal and local redevelopment when stacked against the staggering costs of maintaining the infrastructure. The only question is whether the local economic windfalls those removals
often precipitate can be channeled into the Black and brown communities that have been ravaged by highway programs in the past — and help those same communities recover from the disproportionate impacts of COVID-19.
Housing reparations, meet infrastructure reparations
Though it could fit neatly into a COVID-19 relief bill
or an infrastructure stimulus bill — both of which are likely to be among the first priorities for the next administration — a highway teardown bill wouldn’t just be about roadways.
Central to T4A and Third Way’s proposal is the concept of the community land trust, a land management model that can help low-income communities retain more control over their development future. Under the model, the community collectively owns and leases out the land upon which buildings in their community sit, but still allows individuals to develop and own buildings themselves. Among other benefits, the model allows the trust to set limits on things like the sale price of new developments, which can keep housing and commercial spaces affordable in perpetuity — preventing the kind of rapid gentrification by big developers that some cities have experienced when they’ve opened up new downtown land by tearing out a highway.
