Tear them down!

The Washington Post has a feel-good story today about the Biden infrastructure plan's inclusion of funding to tear down dilapidated highways that were built decades ago. In the 1950s and 60s it was conventional city policy to break up cities for the benefit of cars. This policy often had the racist benefit of breaking up thriving majority Black neighborhoods. 

“Nobody thinks you can get rid of a highway,” [Amy Stelly] said.

On Wednesday, Stelly’s effort gained a considerable boost when the White House named the highway, the Claiborne Expressway, an example of a historic inequity that President Biden’s new infrastructure plan would seek to address through billions in new spending.

Stelly, an architectural designer, is part of a growing movement across the country to take down highways bored through neighborhoods predominantly home to people of color. Most were created as the federal government worked to connect the nation after the birth of the interstate highway system. Many such highways are reaching the end of their 50-year life span, raising the question of whether they should be rebuilt or reimagined. 

“It’s the same in many Black communities, not only in Louisiana,” Stelly said. “It’s great the federal government and this administration is recognizing that this is something that must be corrected if we are to be fair and just in America.”

Freeway Revolt monument on Gough St.

I'm reminded that what's recalled as the "Freeway Revolt" has been central to the development of both the physical and political shape of San Francisco. This is a small, very compact city. If planners in the 1950s had gotten their way, it would have been crisscrossed by connected concrete behemoths, running along the north shore from Bay Bridge to Golden Gate, with a connector straight through the Mission and Western Addition, and another around the shore on Bayview landfill. Forget all those charming Victorian houses and startling views of the Bay.

Political resistance was intense. Much of the intricate neighborhood activism which gives the city its intense local politics was seeded in the freeway fight. By 1959, citizen uproar forced the cancelation by the Board of Supervisors of seven of ten planned freeway projects. 

Unhappily, the Freeway Revolt, largely led by white San Franciscans, didn't coalesce with the concurrent struggle against "urban renewal" (better called "Negro removal") centered in the Fillmore neighborhood. This urban catastrophe set the stage for the nearly complete pushout of Black San Franciscans.

And then, San Francisco got lucky. The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake knocked down the Embarcadero Freeway, clearing the way for the present attractive downtown shoreline.

Let's hope the current infrastructure plan can help additional cities recover some of what they lost to cars in the 20th century.