The long arm of history casts a shadow that extends well into the present. But the past is often much closer than we realize.
In the first 20 years of the federal interstate system alone, Foxx said, highway construction displaced 475,000 families and over a million Americans. Most of them were low-income people of color in urban cores. It was Foxx’s second speech in as many days about how federal infrastructure projects contribute to inequality and poverty, and how the agency wants to make up for it now.
...
The tool wasn’t always roads, and the decisions themselves weren’t all made way back in the mists of pre-Civil Rights Era social order.
In the early 1980s, for example, the city of St. Louis started buying out middle-class black residents of Kinloch, Missouri so that nearby Lambert International Airport could expand its runway network.
For the airlines and other businesses at Lambert, the project promised hundreds of millions of dollars in new profits by speeding up the flow of traffic through the airport. With planes spending less time idling on the tarmac, studied predicted that nearby residents would also benefit in the form of better air quality.
But for the state’s longest-standing black city, its bakeries and and drugstores and public schools, the project spelled doom. After a series of buyouts that locals say felt more like arm-twisting than a genuine personal choice to stay or sell, Kinloch’s population plunged from over 4,000 to below 300.
“I think the interesting thing about that is where they went,” Foxx said Wednesday. “Many of them, most of them, ended up moving to a town called Ferguson.”
...
America can do far better at balancing needed infrastructure expansions with the interests of local communities, Foxx said. It just has to try.
Columbus, Ohio, offers a for-instance. Interstate construction left communities literally walled off from the city’s business hub for decades. But last summer, the city officially opened a grass-lined car, pedestrian, and bike bridge over I-71 that stitches the highway wound closed and reconnects people to opportunity.