Transportation’s Role in Equity and Justice: Restoring and Revitalizing Neighborhoods and Communities
Feature Story
By Josh Blatt
Last update July 27, 2021
For decades, major transportation and infrastructure projects in cities across the United States have contributed to racial and social inequities. Urban freeways and transit infrastructure projects — often paid for in large part by federal transportation funds — have disproportionately displaced and isolated people living in minority neighborhoods, tearing at the fabric of vibrant communities and compounding issues of equity and access to jobs and essential services.
In a new addendum on racial equity to Critical Issues in Transportation, the National Academies’ Transportation Research Board (TRB) identifies important issues about transportation’s impacts on equity, including areas such as access, institutional roles, planning and public participation, and land use and affordable housing. These topics were also explored during a recent TRB webinar that centered on two projects, in St. Paul, Minnesota, and Oakland, California. The aim of these projects is fixing injustices in communities impacted by urban freeways and “restoring, revitalizing, and reconnecting communities that still struggle with these past harms,” said Tierra Bills, Wayne State University professor and moderator for the webinar.
In St. Paul, the investment in a freeway through Rondo, the heart of the area’s Black community for much of the 20th century, represented a disinvestment for its residents that has had “an accumulative effect” over the years, according to Keith Baker, executive director of Reconnect Rondo. The value of the land in 2021 is far higher than when the freeway was built, but the estimated tens of millions of dollars in gains have gone unrealized by its former residents.
In 2009, community members proposed the concept of “capping” the freeway with a land bridge, along with a vision of affordable housing, connective roads, acres of green space to improve air quality and public health, jobs, and locally oriented institutions to serve as the center of a new African American Cultural Enterprise District. Reconnect Rondo means to use the proposed land bridge to help rebuild and restore what was lost, said Baker. “It’s about reorientating [sic] the systems, processes, tools, and resources that have impacted our community.”
The process that put a freeway through Rondo was a political one that intended to benefit communities other than Rondo itself, according to Baker. The proposed project provides an opportunity to build a new path to equity with “restorative development,” using an innovative “4P” model that brings together public and private funding partners with philanthropic efforts and the people of the community. Baker pointed out that a nearby stadium received a similar amount of public funds. “We’re able to support [these types of] initiatives on the private side, but [can we support those] being led by communities? That’s how you really get to equity in transportation,” he said.
Although freeway and interstate projects negatively impacted African Americans, Latinos, and other marginalized communities nationwide, it is vital to recognize each local, place-specific history to fully understand the issues, said Chris Sensenig, urban designer at Raimi + Associates and founder of the Connect Oakland initiative. The project seeks to reconnect West Oakland, which was split from the rest of the downtown area when I-980 was constructed, and also wants to leverage public transportation funds to repair the damage to its community caused by the freeway.
The initiative intends to “transform the underutilized freeway into livable infrastructure,” said Sensenig. Approximately 560 feet of freeway and adjacent feeder streets would be condensed to a narrower boulevard, with underground transit running across the bay to San Francisco. The proposal would reestablish surface connections to downtown and leave the city with 17 new acres of publicly controlled land “not tied to any developer or any single landowner, but to the community,” said Sensenig.
The draft plan calls for collaboration between many stakeholders to spur the creation of much-needed public green space and thousands of homes, which could help West Oakland’s African American community.
Both the St. Paul and Oakland projects underscore the need for transformed thinking around transportation infrastructure, and to make local communities the primary beneficiary no matter what model is used. “[Affected communities] should not need to justify why they want to remove the urban highways,” said Sensenig. “The freeways should have to justify their own existence to stay.”
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