Not to be mean, but is this question intentionally obtuse? It feels like a bad faith question to ask.

In America, in the relevant time periods (eg. 1950s), black neighborhoods were often targeted by infrastructure. This was before they had the protected rights to vote. This was a time where slavery, then legal segregation, and then redlining literally forced people of color into certain geographic regions.

THEN infrastructure projects literally bulldozed those neighborhoods.

So "why did people of color not live wherever they want, and why do we blame the bulldozers that destroyed the place they did live" is ignoring the history of so much systemic issues in America, that it feels like a bad-faith question to ask.

This seems like a strange sentiment to me. Intrastructure projects should not be blamed for anything. Blame rests with people, not things.

And the people running those infrastructure projects, making the decisions about them were the same people that were responsible for many of the other factors that went into the conditions that we’re discussing.

It’s pretty much all the same set of people—the people that had political power when these decisions were being made. So it feels weird to slice out just the infrastructure pieces out of that.

I don't think anyone is blaming the existence of infrastructure as the causative factor.