Displacement of the Urban Poor
The Side-effects of Urban Renewal and the Interstate Highways
Jul 17, 2009
The Great Depression caused President Franklin D. Roosevelt to reassess the responsibilities of the government towards the American people. Instead of the laissez-faire policies favored by the Robber Barons, Roosevelt, and his presidential successors Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, believed the government should pursue paternalistic policies for the betterment of society. Two of these policies, urban renewal and the interstate highway system, altered the very fabric of the urban core, oftentimes at the expense of the inner city poor.
Urban Renewal Programs
In 1937, the Roosevelt administration established the U.S. Housing Authority (USHA) to address the growing numbers of urban slums and substandard housing found in cities throughout the country. Even though the successes of the USHA, and other New Deal agencies, have been debated, it did establish the groundwork for decades of urban renewal activities.
After World War II, the Housing Act of 1949 led to slum clearance activities in city after city. Unfortunately, these activities often displaced thousands who live in or near the urban cores, most of whom were poor and minority. While the decay of the urban core was not a new phenomenon, the way in which the government dealt with it, slum clearance, aggravated the problem by increasing the numbers of the homeless.
Furthermore, the problem of finding new homes for the victims of urban renewal was complicated by racial discrimination and the fact that most of the displaced had relatively low incomes, which limited their options to low-rent areas. As a result, urban renewal programs forced the relocation of over 609,000 people by 1963.
The Interstate Highways
Another factor contributing to the massive displacement of thousands during the 1950s and 1960s was the interstate highways. Even though improved mobility made the automobile indispensible, it also contributed to urban segregation. Postwar policymakers and highway builders used interstate construction as an excuse to destroy minority neighborhoods thus reshaping racial landscapes. As a result, in the early 1960s, highway construction dislocated an average of 32,400 families each year and between 1957 and 1968 over 330,000 urban housing units were destroyed. Additionally, local officials often made decisions with little or no public input and rarely provided for the relocation needs of those displaced by highway construction.
During height of the interstate highway construction little was done to link highway planning with public or private housing construction. Because federal funds paid for the bulk of interstate construction, state highway departments working with local officials selected the actual interstate routes. This allowed state and local officials to design urban expressways to carry out their own racial, housing and residential segregation agendas.
Conclusion
Unfortunately, highway planners often aimed interstate construction at poor, black neighborhoods. They justified this by claiming that was where the cheapest land was found for highway acquisitions. But in Chicago, for example, expressways bulldozed swaths through a variety of ethnic neighborhoods. In Boston, they cut through Chinatown and part of the city's Italian North End. In New York City, they ripped through a primarily working-class Jewish community. In the end, highways and urban renewal destroyed more inner city housing than was being built and created more spatially isolated and more intensely segregated urban neighborhoods in cities throughout the country.
References
Anderson, Martin. The Federal Bulldozer: A Critical Analysis of Urban Renewal, 1949-1962. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1964.
Selman, Sean. “Pathways to Displacement.” Black Issues in Higher Education (Aug. 31, 2000).
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