Urban Renewal & Highways:
Demolishing Black America

The Housing Act of 1949 authorized federal grants to cities for "urban renewal" — the clearance of areas designated as "blighted" and their redevelopment for housing or commercial uses. The definition of "blight" was left to local authorities, who applied it with remarkable consistency: neighborhoods where Black people lived were blighted; adjacent neighborhoods where white people lived were not, regardless of the physical condition of the buildings.

The mechanism was straightforward: designate a neighborhood as blighted, condemn the properties through eminent domain at assessed (below-market) value, demolish the structures, and redevelop — often with luxury housing, universities, hospitals, or highway infrastructure that benefited wealthier (and whiter) users. Residents received minimal or no relocation assistance. The Black Belt neighborhood of Chicago, the Hill District in Pittsburgh, the West End in Boston, Rondo in St. Paul, Overtown in Miami — hundreds of communities were demolished in this pattern.

The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, which funded the Interstate Highway System, gave urban planners the tools and the federal money to demolish city neighborhoods at scale. Across the country, highway routes were chosen with remarkable consistency: through Black neighborhoods, near Black business districts, adjacent to neighborhoods that white communities wanted to protect from Black expansion.

In Miami, I-95 was routed directly through Overtown — then called "Harlem of the South," a thriving Black commercial and residential district with its own hotels, theaters, restaurants, and professional offices, required by segregation since Black travelers could not stay in white Miami hotels. The highway destroyed the neighborhood's core. In Nashville, I-40 was routed through Black neighborhoods and near Tennessee State University (historically Black) rather than the white Vanderbilt University neighborhoods, despite multiple alternative routes that would have caused less displacement.

In New York, Robert Moses — the master planner who shaped modern New York — routed the Cross Bronx Expressway through stable working-class neighborhoods (many of which he dismissed in explicitly racial terms), destroying them and triggering the abandonment that turned the South Bronx into a symbol of urban decay. Moses also deliberately designed the bridges of his parkways with clearances too low for buses — ensuring that working-class and non-white residents who depended on public transit could not access the parks and beaches the parkways were built to reach.

The neighborhoods destroyed by urban renewal and highway programs were not slums. Many were thriving Black commercial and professional districts that had developed under segregation, when Black-owned businesses could serve Black customers precisely because white businesses excluded them. "Black Wall Street" in Tulsa's Greenwood district was destroyed by a white race riot in 1921; St. Paul's Rondo neighborhood — a middle-class Black community of homeowners — was demolished for I-94 in the 1960s; Durham's Hayti district lost its commercial spine to urban renewal in the 1970s; the Sweet Auburn district in Atlanta was cut in half by I-75/85.

These communities had produced what redlining had made difficult everywhere else: Black homeownership, Black business ownership, Black professional networks, Black intergenerational wealth. They were not wealthy by white standards. They were economically functional by any standard. Their destruction reset the wealth accumulation clock for the residents displaced — who received minimal compensation, were scattered across cities, and lost the social networks that had sustained economic cooperation.

Many displaced residents were relocated into public housing projects — high-rise towers built with the same federal funds that had demolished their neighborhoods. The projects concentrated poverty, received chronically inadequate maintenance funding, were deliberately sited in ways that isolated them from employment centers and quality schools, and were then demolished in turn beginning in the 1990s under HOPE VI, scattering residents again.

Chicago demolished the entire Robert Taylor Homes and Cabrini-Green complexes — 25,000 units of public housing — without ensuring equivalent replacement housing for residents. Former residents dispersed across neighborhoods with fewer social supports and less access to employment. New Orleans demolished its major public housing complexes after Hurricane Katrina rather than repairing them, preventing the return of low-income Black residents to their pre-storm neighborhoods.

Urban renewal and highway construction removed Black people from land that then appreciated substantially in value. The neighborhoods deemed "blighted" in the 1950s and 1960s are now, in many cities, the most expensive real estate in the metro area. The people displaced from those neighborhoods — and their descendants — own none of it.