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HEALING COMMUNITY SCARS FROM INTERSTATE HIGHWAYS  
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Jared Brey
March 21, 2024
Governing
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_ The Reconnecting Communities program is giving $3.3 billion to help
cities address problems caused by highways. But in most cases, the
projects stop short of removing highways altogether. _

The Vine Street Expressway cut Philadelphia's Chinatown in two.,
Jared Brey/Governing

 

In Brief:

* The U.S. Department of Transportation announced $3.3 billion in
grants to address harms from past infrastructure investments.
* The program responds to decades of advocacy for highway removal
and mitigation in urban areas.
* Some of the projects are paired with highway expansions.

A lot of the original urban fabric in Philadelphia’s central
downtown core is still intact. In parts of Center City, you can walk a
mile at a stretch without even crossing a two-way street. But when you
reach Vine Street, at the northern edge of Chinatown, you’re
suddenly standing at the edge of a sunken highway. Twelve lanes of
traffic separate one side of the neighborhood from the other — six
lanes at grade, and six on the fast-moving interstate down below.

Chinatown originally developed on both sides of Vine Street, and the
gradual expansion of the road — first into a boulevard in the 1950s
and then into an interstate highway — has come at the expense of
neighborhood cohesion. When the Vine Street Expressway was completed
in 1991, it severed Chinatown into two pieces. Homes and businesses
were destroyed in the process. The expressway has become an obstacle
to the neighborhood’s growth and residents’ basic mobility.

“Even today you cannot cross Vine Street in one signal light,”
says John Chin, director of the Philadelphia Chinatown Development
Corporation.

While the core of Chinatown, south of the expressway, has remained a
vibrant, thriving neighborhood, the northern half has had to fight
harder to maintain its character. With moderate success, residents
have branded that section as “Chinatown North,” trying to protect
its cultural identity from encroaching gentrification in the
surrounding industrial neighborhoods.

This whole story might sound familiar. Urban neighborhoods all over
America were damaged, penned in or destroyed so that interstate
highways could be built in the 20th century. They were usually places
filled with the most marginalized people in American society. Often
they were communities of color that planners thought of as slums.

The federal government has recently started to recognize the extent of
the damage it did to cities while building out the interstate highway
system. Earlier this month, the Department of Transportation (DOT)
awarded $3.33 billion to dozens of cities through its Reconnecting
Communities grant program, which is aimed at ameliorating the harms of
past transportation infrastructure projects.

“While the purpose of transportation is to connect, in too many
communities past infrastructure decisions have served instead to
divide,” federal Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a
news release announcing the awards.

Among the projects being funded is the Chinatown Stitch, an effort to
build a cap over two-and-a-half blocks of the Vine Street Expressway
and a gesture toward putting the neighborhood back together. The grant
is a culminating moment for Chinatown residents, who have spent
decades pushing for a solution to the problems of separation,
pollution and disrupted mobility caused by the expressway. It’s a
step forward — if not an outright victory — for a growing movement
to undo the worst excesses of the highway program.

“All of a sudden there is money, where once there was not even
acknowledgement from the federal government about the impacts of these
highways," says Lauren Mayer, communications manager at the Congress
for the New Urbanism.

[Crossing Vine Street in Philadelphia can be a risky business]
 
Philadelphia residents say they can't cross Vine Street in the length
of a single traffic light. (Jared Brey/Governing)

Addressing Past Harms

The Reconnecting Communities program was established through the
Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in 2021, an explicit response
to decades of research and activism that has explored the
environmental, economic and social harms to cities from highway
construction. The White House has estimated
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that “at least 1 million people and businesses were displaced by
decades of harmful urban renewal projects and legacy policy decisions
in the build-out of the federal highway system.”

The proposal initially called for $20 billion worth of projects to
remove and cap over highways, or otherwise help people build new
connections across infrastructural divides. It shrunk
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to $1 billion before the bill was passed. DOT began making grants last
year, with $185 million to 45 cities, mostly for planning work. This
year’s grants were boosted with funding from the Neighborhood Access
and Equity Program
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part of the Inflation Reduction Act, which Congress passed in 2022.
The programs are aimed specifically at undoing damage from previous
federal investments in transportation.

Projects that won this year’s awards range from small planning
grants for site-specific efforts, to large awards funding a variety of
improvements across large cityscapes. Los Angeles, for example
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received $139 million to help build new transit, bike and pedestrian
connections across highway barriers throughout the county. The funding
will likely dovetail with Measure HLA, a ballot referendum that L.A.
voters approved this month
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requiring the city to implement a plan to build safer streets for
bikers, pedestrians and transit riders.
 
Highways Will Endure

Critics complain that many Reconnecting Communities grants will
support a “Band-Aid” approach to highway infrastructure. Many of
the projects will help build connections across existing automobile
infrastructure rather than dismantling it altogether. In other cases,
Reconnecting Communities grants will fund projects that are paired
with highway expansions.

Portland, Ore., received $450 million — the largest grant in the
bunch — to build a cap over Interstate 5. The Oregon Department of
Transportation has acknowledged
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that “generations of Black Portland families are still negatively
impacted by the original construction of I-5 in the 1950s,” even as
it seeks to add new lanes to the highway.

"Many of the scars of the highway program are far more about a history
of automobile dependence, and a combination of destructive land uses
and associated negative outcomes like pollution, that a cap or
pedestrian bridge will not resolve," says Yonah Freemark, a researcher
at the Urban Institute. "My critique of the program is that it’s
going to do very little to reduce the car dependence of our cities."

Still, the federal Transportation Department can only fund projects
that cities apply for. Those projects require consensus-building
within communities and between state and local agencies with different
missions. Projects such as highway caps help cities achieve some urban
mobility objectives without disrupting traffic flow on state-owned
highways. “They’re one of the easier ways to get something
done,” says Mayer, of the Congress for the New Urbanism.

A Longstanding Demand in Chinatown

Chinatown residents have organized advocacy efforts around the highway
for decades, first to oppose its proposed route and later to address
some of the problems it caused. Their initial efforts successfully led
planners to adjust the route to save some important institutions from
the wrecking ball, including the Holy Redeemer Chinese Catholic Church
on the north side of Vine Street. But the placement of the highway
still cleaved the community in half, says Chin, who grew up going to
the church.

Now, he says, “We’re just resolved to living with it because it
exists. We have to deal with it. We have to cross it.”

Starting in the early 2000s, the Philadelphia Chinatown Development
Corporation began including highway caps in neighborhood plans. The
goals were to re-establish links that were lost to the highway; to
make it safer to cross Vine Street; and to create new public space in
a neighborhood that has very little of it.

The group has worked to establish affordable housing and institutional
anchors in different parts of Chinatown. A few years ago, it built a
public plaza on one of the highway bridges to reclaim some space for
the Chinatown community. But funding for a more comprehensive cap
always seemed like a longshot until the Reconnecting Communities
program was established.

The city’s planning and transportation agencies had expressed soft
support for the highway cap in various ways over the last decade. But
the city didn’t enter the fray until the Reconnecting Communities
applications were opened.

The Office of Transportation, Infrastructure and Sustainability
received a planning grant from the program last year to study the cap.
And this year it received $158 million, which officials say will fully
cover the first phase of construction, including two blocks of highway
caps. The eventual use of those new spaces is to be determined, but is
certain to include public park space, and could include new land for
development. The city is also coordinating with the state Department
of Transportation to make safety and mobility improvements on Vine
Street, including reducing vehicular lanes.

Megan Clarkin, an infrastructure program director for the city, says
that plenty of people in Chinatown would rather see the highway
removed altogether and the street grid restored. To some degree,
planners would prefer that too. “We certainly recognize that it
would be great if we could try again from scratch,” Clarkin says.

In the meantime, neighborhood surveys show more than 80 percent of
people support the Chinatown Stitch project. For many Chinatown
residents, it’s a payoff for long years of organizing around a local
vision for the neighborhood.

“I personally am just ecstatic,” says Chin.

* urban renewal
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* Highways
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* inner cities
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