WASHINGTON (CN) — The Biden administration unveiled $3.3 billion in funding Wednesday to correct some of the past wrongs of transportation and urban renewal programs across more than 40 states.
President Joe Biden will announce the funding in an event in Milwaukee on Wednesday afternoon.
“While the purpose of transportation is to connect, in too many communities past infrastructure decisions have served instead to divide,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a press release. “Now the Biden-Harris administration is acting to fix that.”
The money is part of the U.S. Department of Transportation’s new Reconnecting Communities and Neighborhoods Program, which seeks to “rectify the damage done by past transportation projects and drive economic growth in communities in every corner of the country,” the White House said.
In the early to mid 20th century, transportation and “urban renewal” projects expanded throughout the country. To make room for these projects, local, state and federal leaders frequently razed predominantly minority neighborhoods.
Richard Rothstein, a distinguished fellow at the Economic Policy Institute, wrote in his 2017 book “The Color of Law” that the federal interstate highway system was a prime example of a transportation project used to segregate or destroy Black neighborhoods in the 1940s.
“In many cases, state and local governments, with federal acquiescence, designed interstate highway routes to destroy African American communities,” he wrote. “They found that an effective way to argue a case for highway spending was to stress the capacity of road construction to make business districts and their environs white.”
Biden’s event in Milwaukee highlights a $36 million grant for the 6th Street Complete Streets project.
Construction of Interstates 94 and 43 in the 1960s led to the demolition of roughly 17,000 homes and 1,000 businesses. The project will reconnect communities with wider sidewalks, bike lanes, dedicated bus lanes, landscaping and stormwater and sewage infrastructure upgrades.
Wisconsin Representative Gwen Moore said the interstates “created systemic inequities in Walker’s Point that my constituents are confronting every day.”
“It’s important that we know these challenges didn’t happen by accident and that as investment pours into these areas, Walker’s Point remains affordable and accessible to long-standing residents,” she said.
A big ticket item is the Interstate 5 Rose Corridor Project in Portland, Oregon, which is receiving $450 million. Officials will use the money to construct a highway cover and a pedestrian and bicycle-only bridge to reconnect the predominantly Black neighborhood of Albina.
Other large projects are The Chinatown Stitch in Philadelphia, which will construct a cap over the Vine Street Expressway in Chinatown. When it was constructed in the 1980s and 1990s, officials demolished portions of the historically Chinese-American immigrant neighborhood. The project received $159 million.
In Atlanta, $158 million will boost “The Stitch.” The project seeks to create a 14-acre mixed-use development on three-quarters of the Downtown Connector, which is Interstates 75 and 85. When the connector was constructed, it cut off the neighborhood of Sweet Auburn from downtown and displayed hundreds of homes and businesses.
California Representative Nancy Pelosi said San Francisco will receive $2 million to develop plans to reconnect Japantown and the Fillmore, which were separated by the construction of the Geary Boulevard underpass in 1961.
“In 1961, the construction of the Geary Expressway displaced thousands of established residents, shuttered scores of businesses and ruptured the social and economic fabric of Black, Jewish and Japanese American communities in San Francisco,” Pelosi said. “This $2 million in new federal funding is an important step to reunite Japantown, Fillmore and Western Addition neighborhoods, supporting a community-driven plan to reimagine the one-mile Geary Boulevard at Fillmore Street.”
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