Black neighborhoods split by highways

Rachael Dottle, Laura Bliss and Pablo Robles for Bloomberg on how urban highways often split communities:

By the 1960s, the neighborhood’s business core was gone, replaced by newly constructed Interstate 94. Homes that had been a short walk to the shops now overlooked a six-lane highway shuttling commuters between the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Homes and businesses were seized and destroyed under eminent domain. The neighborhood was split in two.

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Family displacements through urban renewal

Hundreds of thousands of families were displaced in the 1950s under “urban renewal” programs. The families were disproportionately minorities. Renewing Inequality, from a research group at the University of Richmond’s Digital Scholarship Lab, revisits the topic and how it reflects in the present.

Renewing Inequality presents a newly comprehensive vantage point on mid-twentieth-century America: the expanding role of the federal government in the public and private redevelopment of cities and the perpetuation of racial and spatial inequalities. It offers the most comprehensive and unified set of national and local data on the federal Urban Renewal program, a World War II-era urban policy that fundamentally reshaped large and small cities well into the 1970s.

Many of the people displaced never receive promised compensation or fair market value for their property, which is kind of messed up.

Learn.

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Posted by in family, maps, urban

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