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Segregation by Design: Using visual data and spatial analysis to highlight the racist legacy of urban renewal

2022-08-29T15:12:00-04:00

What started as a self-funded project from New York-based architect Adam Paul Susaneck is gaining attention over its unique ability to paint a picture of the effects of racial segregation in the 180 American cities included in the controversial Federal Highway Act of 1956.

Inspired by Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law, Susaneck launched his Segregation by Design project in early 2021 to "reveal the extent to which the American city was methodically hollowed out based on race."

Susaneck is in league with others who have been calling on the Biden Administration to dismantle the legacy of race-based discrimination laden in America’s aging highway network and says the trifold goal of the project is to: 1. Create an "Atlas of Urban Renewal" in book form; 2. Create digital materials for local groups opposing ongoing freeway expansion; and 3. Continue to grow the followership of Segregation by Design’s social media channels (which to date number some 132,000).

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Researchers call for dismantling of 'racist infrastructure' to improve U.S. neighborhoods

2021-09-07T17:54:00-04:00

A group of researchers from Northeastern University and Tufts University has called for funds from President Biden’s infrastructure bill to be diverted to dismantling “racist infrastructure” which is currently disproportionally impacting minority neighborhoods in the United States. The stance is set out in a new thought piece on The Conversation written by Joan Fitzgerald, a Professor of Public Policy and Urban Affairs at Northeastern University, and Julian Agyeman, a Professor of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University.

The researchers focus on the network of urban highways built across the U.S. in the 1950s and 1960s, which the team posits was deliberately run through neighborhoods occupied by Black families, and other people of color, thus physically distancing the communities from jobs, opportunities, and urban connectivity. Scholars identify the 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Act as the beginning of a trend whereby transportation planners used highways to form...

Highways: Another enduring monument to American racism?

2020-06-24T17:58:00-04:00

The aftermath of George Floyd’s death while in police custody has created a moment for radical truth-telling. So here’s some ugly truth about the city of Los Angeles: Our freeway system is one of the most noxious monuments to racism and segregation in the country.

Mattew Fleischer, Senior Digital Editor of The Los Angeles Times pens an editorial for the newspaper highlighting the indefensible, racist legacy of highway construction in American cities.

Citing historical research regarding the ways in which highway construction and urban renewal practices helped to institute and literally cement racial and income segregation, Fleischer writes, "Local officials rerouted the elaborate designs of freeway engineers — often at considerable expense — to destroy thousands of homes in racially diverse communities."

These highways, Fleischer explains, continue to fuel environmental racism and other negative impacts for communities of color. Should they be torn down too?

HUD continues to whittle away at the Fair Housing Act

2020-01-21T16:24:00-05:00

The Fair Housing Act [...] prohibits not only intentional segregation, but also policies and practices whose effect is to discriminate for no defensible reason, even if there is no evidence of a racial motive. Lawyers describe such actions as having a “disparate impact” on minorities. Now, however, the Trump administration is about to put into effect procedures to make it virtually impossible to prove disparate impact, no matter how egregious a discriminatory policy or practice may be.

Richard Rothstein, author of the influential book The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, presents an opinion piece in The New York Times highlighting the latest multi-pronged efforts on the part of the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to dismantle the effectiveness and legal significance of the Fair Housing Act under the administration of President Donald Trump.

The latest efforts aim to make filing lawsuits arguing that policies and practices generate acts of de-facto racial segregation more difficult and onerous.

That traffic jam you're stuck in? Blame white supremacy

2019-08-15T19:59:00-04:00

This intertwined history of infrastructure and racial inequality extended into the 1950s and 1960s with the creation of the Interstate highway system. As in most American cities in the decades after the Second World War, the new highways in Atlanta—local expressways at first, then Interstates—were steered along routes that bulldozed “blighted” neighborhoods that housed its poorest residents, almost always racial minorities.

Writing in The New York Times, Kevin M. Kruse connects the dots between highway planning and America's historical campaign to keep African Americans "in their place," an impetus that can be traced back to slavery and its modern day manifestations: segregation, urban renewal, redlining, gentrification, and mass incarceration.

The story is part of The New York Times' 1619 Project, a collection of stories and reports that "reframe the country's history" by foregrounding America's conception in its historical relationship to slavery.

The argument against zoning

2016-08-11T13:29:00-04:00

Zoning, although designed with the benign intention of keeping toxin-spewing industrial factories away from residential properties, has certainly been used for ill: ask any African-American family in the 20th century whose application to use their VA entitlement to buy a house was denied due to "redlining." Over at Bloomberg News, Justin Fox takes up the case that on the 100th anniversary of zoning laws in New York City, maybe it's time to substantially re-evaluate them.

As he writes, "Over the past few years, zoning has been blamed, mainly by economists bearing substantial empirical evidence, for an ever-growing litany of ills. The charge that zoning is used to keep poor people and minorities out of wealthy suburbs has been around for decades. But recent research has also blamed it for increasing income segregation, reducing economic mobility and depressing economic growth nationwide."

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The return of redlining: how the mortgage industry is threatening Detroit's rejuvenation

2015-12-07T13:04:00-05:00

In Detroit, there were 3,500 sales of single-family homes in 2014. Only 462 of them received a mortgage. That means that nearly 87 percent of sales were in cash — and that doesn’t include homes sold in foreclosure auction. Comparatively, the overall metro area saw only 53 percent in cash sales the same year. Nationwide, it was 43 percent. “The number one issue that we, in the end, identified in Detroit is that it’s incredibly hard for homebuyers to get a mortgage right now,” say Svenja Gudell..

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