Will Biden’s plan to remove highways improve the health of cities?

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Mandela Parkway, a four-lane street reinforced with average trees and a curved pedestrian walkway, runs along a 24-block section in West Auckland. It is the outgrowth of a grassroots neighborhood campaign to prevent the rebuilding of an elevated highway left by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and to reimagine the road to replace it.

Since the Parkway’s completion in 2005, 168 affordable housing units have sprung up along its route. The air is freer of pollutants than it was when the Cypress Highway passed through the area.

A federal report announced the project as the kind of socially-minded renovation that could appropriate, albeit partially, the devastation inflicted on low-income neighborhoods by the highway-building boom of previous decades.

The report stated that “community participation was a very important part of the rebuilding process”, and concluded that “people of West Auckland got what they wanted”.

Unfortunately, this is not entirely the case.

Although the 1.3-mile strip of land that the Mandela Parkway passes through has cleaner air and better amenities than when it was a highway, many of the neighborhood’s original residents are no longer there to enjoy it, forced to leave due to rising rents and costs. Living. More broadly, West Auckland, bordered by the massive port of Auckland, still crisscrossed with elevated highways where cars and heavy trucks spew hundreds of tons of pollutants each year.

The successes and failures of the Mandela Parkway are emblematic of the challenges of the new urban renewal movement, which seeks to replace dozens of stretches of elevated urban highways built in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s across the United States. These highways divide cities, displacing residents and local businesses into low-income, working-class, non-white neighborhoods. Pollution and noise affect the health of those who continue to live nearby.

Today, as many of these roads are nearing or passing the end of their lives, policy makers, social justice advocates, and urban planners are calling to get down.

The Biden administration agrees. His infrastructure plan calls for the removal of highways to correct historical grievances and improve the health of people living nearby. At least four bills in Congress would fund such efforts, though none are guaranteed to pass.

But the Cypress Highway diversion shows the complexity of accomplishing highway clearance in a way that improves the health and well-being of residents long darkened by the legacy of the roads. The effects of ‘greening’ neighborhoods can be contradictory, leading to ‘green improvement’.

There is ample evidence that living near highways is detrimental to human health: research has linked it to higher rates of high blood pressure, heart attacks, neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and multiple sclerosis, poor birth outcomes and asthma, especially in children.

Reagan Patterson, a transportation equality research fellow for the Congressional Black Foundation, said the evidence is more shaky about whether diverting roads will reverse these problems.

A 2019 study by Patterson and Robert Harley of the University of California, Berkeley’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering showed that rerouting the Cypress Highway—Highway 880—and building the Mandela Parkway reduced nitrogen oxides at an annual rate of 38%, and soot by 25%, along Parkway. But west Auckland in general remains heavily polluted by the redirected I-880, as well as I-580 and I-980.

“You can’t talk about Mandela Parkway if you don’t talk about the impact of the Three Highways,” said Margaret Gordon, 74, a founding member of the West Auckland Environmental Indicators Project, an environmental sanitation organization.

The upgrading of the area along the Mandela Parkway – along with the arrival of Big Tech offices in the area – has contributed to rising property values ​​and long-time residents leaving. The black population, which made up 73% of the population around the highway in 1990, made up only 45% in 2010, according to Patterson’s research. Median home values ​​along the aisle jumped by $261,059 in that time frame.

“Green amelioration” is a paradoxical effect of projects aimed at supporting healthier communities, said Jennifer Walsh, professor of urban and regional planning at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research, which focuses on the public health effects of urban greening, shows that rising housing costs and long-term population displacement can also harm their health. Other research has found that residents of marginalized groups report a lower sense of community after green transitions.

For example, Old Latin residents reported avoiding parts of Chicago’s Pedestrian Route 606 that runs through mostly white neighborhoods due to discrimination concerns. Wealthy white residents were more likely than black residents to use the Atlanta BeltLine, a 33-mile network of trails and parks.

City activists say that none of these problems concludes an argument against freeway clearance. Congress for New Urbanism, a nonprofit organization focused on sustainable urban development, identified 15 highways in major U.S. cities that are ready for removal in its 2021 “Highways with No Future” report.

The lesson, instead, is to pay attention to the desires of old community members in planning these infrastructure projects – said Jonathan Fern, a member of the Auckland Planning Commission and founder of ConnectOakland, an advocacy group involved in Demolition Plans 2. Mile Long I-980 and redesign the area.

Dr. Richard Jackson, professor emeritus at the University of California’s Fielding School of Public Health and former director of the CDC’s National Center for the Environment, said clearing highways and neighborhood regeneration should focus on making communities less dependent on cars, adding affordable housing and other amenities. . Health.

For example, creating community land trusts—nonprofits that buy vacant lots in communities and sell them back to residents at a discount—can help ensure stable affordable housing and rent stability.

Some bills of Congress under consideration contain provisions that require strategies to combat displacement. But the Biden administration’s $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure framework, which includes $1 billion in “Reconnecting Communities” funding, provides few details about improving displacement.

If and when projects are completed, conversations about who benefit should happen early, said Ben Crowther, Congressional Program Director for New Urbanism’s Highways to Boulevards. But he said it was “very encouraging,” that federal bills to fund remanufacturing include strategies to make sure existing residents benefit.

This story was produced by Kaiser Health News, a national editorial board and one of the three principal drivers of the Kaiser Family Foundation.

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