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:
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.
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.
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.
> "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.
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.
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.