Comment by Lammy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Lammy | Hacker News Reader

> Urban renewal wasn’t as top-down as people say. The routing of freeways and public project placements were often determined by municipalities and states, not federal officials, and they chose targets like minority neighborhoods.

Some serious persecution complex going on in this article. I'm sure there were places where that did happen, but here's a counter-example in the way San Francisco's intended freeway layout was based on the existing layout of the City and County's nine districts: https://i.imgur.com/MSbpF5e.jpeg

Sources:

— https://www.vanshnookenraggen.com/_index/wp-content/uploads/... (base layer)

— https://i0.wp.com/thefrontsteps.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/... (33% opacity)

I specify “residential” districts because SOMA is bisected but SOMA was all warehouses and freight railroad yards at the time so there was no reason to care. Even the famously-hated Embarcadero Freeway was on formerly-CA-state-owned land where the “State Belt” waterfront industrial railroad once ran: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Belt_Railroad https://i.imgur.com/Mq3mWQr.jpeg

The Chinese neighborhood in Seattle was mostly leveled by a freeway interchange; this pattern is not as rare as you suggest. https://crosscut.com/opinion/2021/04/legacy-racism-built-nor...

In San Francisco, the "redevelopment" of the Western Addition is a famous example of a public project that targeted certain minorities. The city basically took a wrecking ball to the heart of the black community in San Francisco, and it never really recovered afterwards. https://www.sfpublicpress.org/fillmore-revisited-how-redevel...

Baltimore's 'Highway to Nowhere' is another good example. https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/section/businessdevelopmen...

So is St. Paul's Rondo neighborhood: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rondo_neighborhood#Routing_of_...

The data show that urban highways very much impacted certain neighborhoods more than others, when you look at more than one city

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-urban-highways-infra...

> here's a counter-example in the way San Francisco's intended freeway layout was based on the existing layout of the City and County's nine districts

This is a counter-example if you ignore a ton of the impacted neighborhoods. These highways are not particularly innocent examples. Sure, some may be unavoidable (like the south-eastern neighborhoods), but some of the locations are (at least today) pretty busy and core parts of their neighborhood (eg. Irving St. in Inner-Sunset).

The highway (101?) carving up the mission and then dividing the western addition from down-town would be rough if they built it as a limited-access road (which it appears to be based on the interchanges). Even modern-day 101 could have been along the rail-road or coast to avoid blocking the mission and Potrero...

Dumping 80 into the western-addition also seems questionably-motivated as well.

> Dumping 80 into the western-addition also seems questionably-motivated as well.

Most of it would have been under ground-level, both tunneled through the hill (emerging near the DMV) then a park-topped subway through the panhandle. Check out what Oak/Fell/Octavia would have looked like: https://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/4182283392

The elevated Central Freeway (along the bottom) and the on/off-ramp pair in the center of the image were built. Here's what it used to look like to exit onto Fell westbound before 2002 when they created the most dangerous intersection for pedestrians and cyclists in the entire City (Octavia & Market) by tearing this down: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGM-crlegA4

The most infamous example is the Cross-Bronx Expressway, which many assert to have been deliberately routed by Robert Moses to destroy some of the neighborhoods in the area, and is generally seen as the catalyst of the freeway revolt movement.

You paint a very incomplete picture by neglecting to mention NYC's failure to build the IND “Second System” which would have connected many of the same areas as the Cross-Bronx Expressway. The simultaneous political support for building the one that required expensive car ownership and against building the one which anybody could ride tells me that the freeway was not the real problem here lol

https://www.nycsubway.org/wiki/IND_Second_System_-_1929_Plan

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b3/1939_IND...

The cross bronx expressway doesn’t “connect the same areas” as any subway, seeing as 95 runs north and south from Maine to Florida. IIRC, it was a question to run 95 “inconveniently” through more parts of Manhattan and wealthier areas (read: Westchester), or take the shortcut through a poor neighborhood in the Bronx. At some point, this highway has to go west to east (laterally?), and issue was where. Not that I’m saying Robert Moses did nothing wrong.

The third avenue El (which was torn down in the 70s) had no real problem being rebuilt over the portion of Third Avenue (the Third Avenue of the Bronx certainly isn’t as flashy as the one in Manhattan, and the Bronx’s Park Avenue is pretty much train tracks on one side) for the 20ish years the two co-existed, at least from my understanding.

Don’t mind me though, because I certainly don’t live about 1/4 mile away from the CBE.

They are mistaking cause and effect.

What looks like "targeting minority neighborhoods", is actually "minorities are more likely to live in areas where new highways would normally be built".

Look at any major city. Are the expensive neighborhoods built near exiting highways or interchanges? Not really, they tend to be built further away.

And if you go back to when highways were being built (50-70's), most middle income families fled cities to the suburbs, and inner city housing prices dropped, which attracted low income minorities.

> "minorities are more likely to live in areas where new highways would normally be built"

These were being built for the first time. There was no “where they were normally built” because they were first built in the areas mentioned in the 1950’s, normal hadn’t been defined yet. They targeted the poorer neighborhoods because those also tended to be the less powerful to stop it.

There is no such thing as “brand new highways you can put wherever”.

Many highways expanded from major roads. The new segments (built where no major roads existed) had to connect existing major roads.

There were very clearly areas where roads were going to be built and where they were never going to be built.

The city also has to buyout existing homeowners, and hence a part of the decision is going to be “where will buyouts cost us the least”? Hence the lowest cost housing, again often owned by minorities.

“Many highways expanded from major roads. The new segments (built where no major roads existed) had to connect existing major roads.”

This is an opinion that is not factually accurate to what happened. Entire neighborhoods were plowed under for highways that then created impediments to local neighborhood connections. Highways literally destroyed communities.

Look at the before and after pictures of Oakland in this article:

https://www.segregationbydesign.com/oakland/freeways

Your example shows the highways connected the Bay Bridge to I-95 and south to 880.

The new highways were clearly connecting existing major roadways?

Take a look at 980 in the middle that destroyed two blocks width of homes straight through the middle of the city, miles long. That disconnected communities on either side of it. The same thing happened with 580, which isn’t shown in these overhead photos.

I get it, but those connected major freeways.

You're not going to tear down homes in the Oakland Hills to build a freeway not because it's full rich white people, but because it's nowhere close to the existing freeways.

> they tend to be built further away.

This isn't actually true, historically speaking. When commuting was hard (pre-highway), the wealthy lived where it was most convenient - near street car lines, and close to the productive areas of the city. BUT service workers, laborers, etc still needed to live near-enough to work, so it wasn't 100% any one way. Once society invented a way to travel farther, poor neighborhoods were bulldozed to build highways, and the wealthy moved farther away, and commuted in.

TODAY, inner-city neighborhoods that are far from highways have wealthy people, but well-connected suburbs have wealthy people. The best example of this is (IMO) Cleveland - Shaker Heights, a nice streetcar suburb was all the rage with the well-off before the highways. They don't really have any highways, because of course the wealthy didn't want its damage. Post-highway, towns like Beachwood and Rocky River continue to gain popularity as the streetcars are decommissioned and removed, and wealthy professionals move to commuter cities.

Sure, but you need to look at when the highways were built.

The inner city neighborhoods that are pricey today were often run down ghettos when these highways were being built (or on their way to it).

> "minorities are more likely to live in areas where new highways would normally be built".

This has to be the most cynical and cruel sentence I have read today. If your system mandates uprooting people's lives then its just not a good system, is it? If your normal is to disrupt people who are already downtrodden then its a bad cruel system even in isolation.

Should we avoid infrastructure development if it’s poor areas?

It’s not like they don’t get compensation.

Americans are so soft. They admire places like Japan, Singapore, even Europe when it comes to infrastructure.

Do you think those places say “it would be great to have new infrastructure, but we’d need to displace low income people so I guess we won’t”.

No, they say “hey, we’re putting in new infrastructure so you’re going to have to leave. We’ll pay you for it and provide assistance, but you’re going to have to move”.

And you know why they have nice infrastructure? Because they accept it as progress.

> Should we avoid infrastructure development if it’s poor areas?

Yes! If you can avoid it, yes. Pressure should be applied to areas not already struggling. Just to reiterate my original point, which you didn't address, if your system consistently results in disruption of the lives of the under privileged, it's a bad system.

Also if caring about people is soft, I'm glad I'm soft.

Great, then don't expect any new infrastructure to be built. Congrats, you've just become the US.

There is always someone who is going to suffer when new infrastructure is built in an urban area. It's 100% unavoidable.

If you say "I'll make sure that never happens", then you just won't build new infrastructure.

Either you are being intentionally dense or are just not reading carefully enough what my point is. Yes there will always be someone who is going to suffer. That is not the point. My point is if the system consistently and predominantly makes the underprivileged suffer its a bad system. This isn't even controversial dude, there are wikipedia articles about some of these systems.

Meh, I’m a minority who lives a few blocks away from i95 with my father and we make ends meet in the house he mortgaged 30 years ago this year, but all I ever hear about is that only rich people live in houses in NYC and all those nimby’s should get their houses bulldozed away for “dense residential” (I can literally see the projects in my backyard). So we’ll lose anyway (rising property values? Ohhh a tax bill I won’t be able to afford when my father passes, yay) you take it.

I’m sure you all won’t know what to do with this comment and I’ll end up in the grays anyway.

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