![]() ![]() Planning grants will be given for between $100,000 and $2 million. The nonprofit will be applying for funding to further plan its project. It is estimated the project will cost $458.9 million. ![]() ReConnect Rondo’s plan calls for building a 22-acre land bridge over the highway, so that a traditional urban neighborhood can be rebuilt, including housing and retail. His father was never the same, Anderson said. He said his parents moved outside the city, onto land that was subdivided by a Black owner to accommodate displaced families. Anderson said his father had recently built the home and others in the neighborhood, as he transitioned to retirement. ![]() “What are we going to do now?” Marvin Roger Anderson, who lived in Rondo, recalled his father saying in the 1950s after their home was condemned. Paul, Minn., where homes, stores and other businesses once stood. This 2010 photo shows a sign for "Old Rondo Ave.: 1865-1966" standing atop other street signs overlooking Interstate 94, left, and a frontage road in St. The highway construction impacted 61% of Rondo residents, and 700 homes, according to ReConnect Rondo. Paul, Minnesota, has worked since 2015 on a project to heal a neighborhood that was decimated when Interstate 94 was built. ReConnect Rondo, a nonprofit organization in St. Other possible uses of the funding include building urban trails, called greenways, or bus rapid transit projects, according to Stephanie Pollack, the deputy administrator of the Federal Highway Administration. Atlanta is currently exploring a highway capping project. The new funding could be used for planning grants to study remedies, such as capping a highway, so that traffic runs below ground, leaving the opportunity to create a pleasant neighborhood above with walkable, tree-lined streets. “There was a very vast and drastic attack on poor communities,” Fullilove said. Robert Moses, the notorious New York builder, displaced 250,000 people in New York to build highways, his biographer Robert Caro has written. Neighbors often stop traveling to the other side of a highway once it is built through their neighborhood, she said.įullilove estimates that thousands of communities have been divided by highway construction. People don’t like to travel through the vast and bleak open spaces that highways create, Fullilove told CNN Business. Neighborhoods adjacent to highways became less livable, as air quality declined, noise pollution increased, and walking places was less appealing. Urban highways were often paved through Black neighborhoods, leading to lost homes, broken communities and divided cities. Many communities revolted against highway construction in cities like San Francisco and Washington, DC, but most highways were still built. Many Black neighborhoods, including Greenwood in Tulsa Oklahoma, were bulldozed to make way for highways. Many white Americans fled cities for new suburbs that excluded Black Americans and depended on highways to access cities. Highways were often promoted as vital to saving a city’s central business district as suburbs and sprawling development grew in popularity. But America broke with the typical design in Europe, and built its highways through cities, rather than around them. President Eisenhower, who signed the legislation, had seen in World War II the highways that Hitler built in Germany, and was impressed. “It’s part of a larger strategy of making our cities what we need - vital, functioning places where people cross paths and get to know each other.”Ĭar-focused life - including highways - became central to American culture when the Interstate Highway System was funded in 1956. “Reconnection is a profoundly good thing,” said Mindy Fullilove, a professor of urban policy and health at the New School, who has studied how highways divide cities. Urban experts say the investment pales in comparison to the long-running negative impacts of urban highways, but welcome the funding as a way to show the benefits of human-focused urban design, which may inspire more projects. The Department of Transportation announced Thursday that it will soon fund up to $1 billion in projects to reconnect city neighborhoods that have been scarred by highways. ![]()
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