Interstate highways were a product of new technologies and ‘urban renewal’

March 17, 2022 Steve Letters to the Editor 5

I was pleasantly surprised that so many Indie Auto readers have offered comments about our post, “Negative aspects of interstate highways received little initial attention.” Geeber took the time to write a lengthy and thoughtful response, so I am elevating it to the front page as a letter to the editor:

When looking at urban areas and the interstate highway systems, we have to remember two key facts.

One, technology had been allowing people to move farther away from the center city – and work – before the advent of the automobile. Railroads, telephones and local transit lines had allowed the rich and upper-middle class to begin settling in leafy suburbs in the late 19th century. (That is how Philadelphia’s western Main Line suburbs started.) They no longer had to be able to walk to work. Affordable automobiles extended that opportunity first to the middle class and then the working class.

We aren’t going to return to the days when everyone must live a few blocks from their place of employment or only shop at neighborhood outlets. (People aren’t even shopping at the mall that much – they increasingly have want they want delivered via Amazon or the mail.)

1965 Ford Ranchero
1965 Ford Ranchero (Old Car Brochures)

Second, the interstate highway system was part of the movement for grandiose public works projects – supported, incidentally, by progressive Republicans (such as Herbert Hoover) and Democrats. They weren’t necessarily supported by free-market libertarians. And those projects weren’t limited to highways.

1950 General Motors ad
1950 General Motors ad. Click on image to enlarge (Old Car Advertisements).

Those urban highways were part of the entire “urban renewal” effort, which began with the City Beautiful movement. This movement advocated what was then called “slum clearance” in favor of new parks, monuments and parkways. It grew to embrace new government buildings and, eventually, even large-scale commercial projects, such as the original World Trade Center in New York City and the Gallery Mall in downtown Philadelphia. Many of the urban parks we admire today were built after blocks of tenement neighborhoods were demolished.

Entire neighborhoods were bulldozed – and not all of them minority neighborhoods. Through the 1960s, there were plenty of working class and poor whites who still lived in cities, and their neighborhoods were bulldozed by those white male government bureaucrats and elected officials, too.

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These neighborhoods had one thing in common – they were working class or poor neighborhoods, populated with residents who didn’t have much clout with state and local governments. Properties in those neighborhoods were also cheaper – an important consideration when properties must be either sold voluntarily by the owners, or seized by the government via eminent domain procedures.

1962 Ford medium-duty trucks
1962 Ford medium-duty trucks (Old Car Brochures)

Those government bureaucrats who oversaw those projects saw rundown neighborhoods that had seen better days. Those neighborhood weren’t filled with rehabbed, trendy brownstones, luxury apartment buildings, charming bookstores and coffee shops. The buildings were old, rundown and cramped (entire families would be jammed into one small apartment), without much in the way of amenities for local children.

There was a very good reason that many people in many neighborhoods were eager to move to the suburbs, and not because they had been hypnotized by Robert Moses or GM.

This article (Malange, 2020) gives a balanced view of the entire debate over urban highways and what to do with them:

— Geeber

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5 Comments

  1. Geeber, you have written a useful overview. This is an important topic in transportation and urban planning policy so I am glad at least a few readers have shown an interest in it.

    I will save my take for another day, but for now I want to note that “urban renewal” is a highly controversial issue with a variety of schools of thought.

    The article you link to was published by the Manhattan Institute. This is a think tank dedicated to (in its own words) “greater economic choice and individual responsibility.”

    In other words, this article is not “objective” journalism — it has a bias that is in sync with the ideological leanings of its parent organization as well as its author.

    Reply

    • Thank you for the kind words.

      The key to the City Journal article is whether it is an accurate recounting of history. (We’ll also note that modern critics of freeways or automobiles have their own ideological biases that color how they view things, and also allow them to ignore how people outside of urban areas live.)

      Whatever one can say about the interstate highway program and urban renewal in general, they were not the result of Ayn Rand worshippers or free-market libertarians run amok. These programs were the result of top-down, centralized planning by activist government (at all levels – federal, state and local) working in conjunction with large corporations. And let’s also note that while homes and apartment buildings were bulldozed in the name of urban renewal, so were many small businesses.

      The discipline of urban planning is just as subject to “groupthink” and “following the herd” as the management of the big auto companies. For example, in the 1970s, urban planners, federal officials and city governments embraced the idea of bringing a form of the suburban mall to the downtown shopping district. The result was The Gallery in Philadelphia and, on a smaller scale, Strawberry Square in Harrisburg. The politicians pushing for those were all on board, as were the planners…and, again, they were not free-market libertarians.

      Now, over 40 years later, The Gallery isn’t in great shape, and virtually everyone realizes that it was a mistake to have shoppers completely isolated from Market Street in Philadelphia. Here in Harrisburg, when I see photos of the old buildings that were demolished to make way for Strawberry Square, I think, “Too bad they weren’t fixed up and modernized…they would have made the downtown more charming, and really boosted historic preservation in the city.”

      But I’m sure that if had voiced those sentiments in the mid-1970s, when the project was being planned, I would have been ignored or politely dismissed. Because the experts knew better…

      Did we make mistakes in constructing the interstate highway system? Yes. I think we can all agree that running a multi-lane limited access highway right through a downtown district was a mistake. So was separating the waterfront from the rest of the city. But, moving forward, let’s not once again throw the baby out with the bathwater.

      Reply

  2. Yeah. We should have built desperately-needed ribbons of concrete on HIGH-value property, so that the Government could confiscate even more of the Taxpayer’s money.

    OF COURSE they put the highways on top of slums. Win-Win situation.

    America could use a lot more “Urban Renewal” to support various infrastructure, and we could also use a substantial increase/updating in the nation’s highway system. There’s no shortage of sub-standard infrastructure that could be cleared-out, and not just in big cities. What has done more for St. Louis? The gleaming stainless-steel arch, or the horrible mess of outdated/decrepit buildings it replaced? Who travels to visit and spend money at “tourist-friendly” sites like ghettos?

    Reply

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