Freeways are Detroit's most enduring
monuments to racism. Let's excise them.
Detroit Free Press,
by
Nithin Vejendla
Original Article
Posted By: NorthernDog,
7/5/2020 8:42:51 AM
The protests over George Floyd’s murder at the hands of Minneapolis Police have brought to the forefront the variety of ways in which our society continues to harbor white supremacy and perpetuate racism. Part of this reckoning involves removing racist monuments, including the Christopher Columbus statue that the City of Detroit recently put in storage. But if we’re going to get serious about removing symbols of this country’s endemic racism, we shouldn’t stop there. Detroit’s most persistent, visible, and disruptive symbols of racism are its freeways. Planners routed Detroit's freeways through predominantly Black communities. The Chrysler Freeway blasted through Paradise
Reply 1 - Posted by:
Newtsche 7/5/2020 8:50:03 AM (No. 467584)
Due west from downtown St.Louis, it's extremely difficult to travel north/south.
4 people like this.
Reply 2 - Posted by:
Knotwyrkin 7/5/2020 9:00:42 AM (No. 467591)
And why exactly did the public housing projects turn into "crime-racked urban ghettos"? These days you cannot say the reason out loud.
31 people like this.
Reply 3 - Posted by:
Catfur27 7/5/2020 9:03:50 AM (No. 467595)
...zoos have bars for a reason....
16 people like this.
Reply 4 - Posted by:
GO3 7/5/2020 9:06:13 AM (No. 467599)
Better call OCP.
4 people like this.
Reply 5 - Posted by:
dirtyjersey 7/5/2020 9:21:00 AM (No. 467623)
Yes, let’s destroy the only quick way out of those hellholes. That will bring economic success to these neighborhoods.
12 people like this.
Reply 6 - Posted by:
franq 7/5/2020 9:21:05 AM (No. 467624)
Jeffrey Epstein did not commit suicide.
George Floyd was not murdered.
20 people like this.
Reply 7 - Posted by:
Lawsy0 7/5/2020 9:41:48 AM (No. 467647)
That may be true for Detroit, but it is not true for other cities. Umpteen years ago, in some sociology class we found that poorer residential areas sprouted to be close to public transportation, which back then were trolleys and trains. Then buses were cheaper and wider ranging. Average people tend to group together in tribe-like manner for either mutual aide and safety.
9 people like this.
Reply 8 - Posted by:
TJ54 7/5/2020 9:48:11 AM (No. 467655)
Chicago did the same thing in the 1950s. Who ran Chicago then? Why the Demtards, the black mans' "Friend."
14 people like this.
Reply 9 - Posted by:
HotRod 7/5/2020 10:01:17 AM (No. 467675)
I remember when all the ''public housing'' started popping up in cities and towns everywhere. The democrat politicians believed it was the best way to contain the black people. Those places were often referred to as ''slave quarters.''
Most of the public housing was damaged or destroyed over time, as there was no pride of ownership and maintenance was a luxury that the democrats couldn't afford. I think public housing was a root of crime and gangs.
13 people like this.
Reply 10 - Posted by:
columba 7/5/2020 10:13:25 AM (No. 467689)
In fact the most dominant face of racism in American is two-fold. It is the Media and Barak Obama.
18 people like this.
Reply 11 - Posted by:
cheeflo 7/5/2020 10:14:39 AM (No. 467691)
I know someone who lives in Lafayette Park, a beautiful enclave of town and carriage houses, designed by Mies van der Rohe. She's woke AF, but unperturbed by the fact that the building of her little gated community devastated the hub of black cultural, social, and economic life. The black community was forced into the Projects and other neighborhoods that did not have the amenities that the Black Bottom district did, and it never fully recovered from the displacement.
Lafayette Park is a lovely bubble floating in a toilet.
9 people like this.
Reply 12 - Posted by:
Pearson365 7/5/2020 10:50:39 AM (No. 467726)
Interstate highways have little to nothing to do with racism. Rather, it was the federal government that drew the routes with little concern for the reasons why cities were built. In Connecticut, I-91 cuts off the city of Hartford from the Conneciticut River as it heads north. The engineers then drove I-84 right through the center of Hartford in order to connect this east-west highway to I-91, with entrances and exits devouring more river front property. The same is true of New Haven, where I-95 serves as a barrier to New Haven’s harbor while connecting in an enormous interchange with I-91. While the interstate system greatly improved our mobility, it does serve as a reminder that a centralized government with enormous legal power and enough money to buy the consent of governors and mayors, isn’t always correct.
10 people like this.
Reply 13 - Posted by:
Strike3 7/5/2020 11:07:42 AM (No. 467740)
When I began reading I was sure that the article was pure sarcasm then I discovered that the putz was completely serious. Why is an Indian writing about the woes of blacks? He focuses on Detroit but every major city has gone through this type of growth. It's called "progress" in the good sense of the word. If not for freeways it would take two hours of stoplight hopping just to get across a city. In places like Chicago it does anyway with the freeways (which are no longer free due to tolls). So tear out Detroit's freeways and give them something else to complain about. It's irrelevent to me because I will never go near that decaying rustbucket again.
12 people like this.
Reply 14 - Posted by:
mc squared 7/5/2020 11:26:34 AM (No. 467773)
This is from The Onion, right? All the roads near me are black. What more could they want?
8 people like this.
Reply 15 - Posted by:
JackBurton 7/5/2020 11:45:44 AM (No. 467797)
It wasn't just the blacks. The 'barrio', mexican town near (the old) Tiger Stadium, got cut in half with a freeway. And 'Pole Town', an old, quaint neighborhood that was well kept with older residents was abruptly levelled for a GM plant that never got built. Blocks and blocks of homes seized and destroyed.
The article makes it look as if this just happened to the Blacks.... not so. Detroit had thriving Armenian, Polish, Italian, German, and other ethnic group enclaves and a number of them were obliterated in 'planning' decisions.
I would note that the WORST destroyer of ethnic and otherwise neighborhoods was the 67 riots followed by a generation of white hating Coleman Young.... Those neighborhoods left for the suburbs. 'Nother story.
(Born in Detroit in 1951 and I have a long memory)
18 people like this.
Reply 16 - Posted by:
montwoodcliff 7/5/2020 12:45:00 PM (No. 467884)
The Indian wrote a nice college term paper. I know about Interstate Highway route planning having seen my parents go through it back in the fifties in North Jersey. They go where property valuations are the lowest, and through parks (free land) in order to keep the costs of land acquisition the lowest. If it were in a wealthy town, state politicians were "persuaded' to reroute the highway to a less desirable town. In Morristown, NJ, the NJ Highway Department was going to run the new Route 24 through Washington's Headquarters (really!) until officials were again persuaded to have the road jog around the house. It all comes down to money. Keep the costs down and make sure the unions get their cut.
7 people like this.
Reply 17 - Posted by:
Chuzzles 7/5/2020 3:05:23 PM (No. 468023)
Whenever government wants to improve or fix something, somebody winds up losing out. I would not call it racism though. It is not society's fault if the buildings that the displaced/low income folks moved into were turned to rubbish. That is mostly on the inhabitants themselves. The premise of this article smacks of minority rule and roadblock against any society improvements. There are always going to be disruptions for somebody, but that is the price when society puts in a new 'something'.
2 people like this.
Reply 18 - Posted by:
stone313 7/5/2020 3:52:17 PM (No. 468073)
We can now add the interstate highway system to the list of things that are racist. Who knew? Climate, National Parks, food, the weather, and so on so forth. Everything is racist which means nothing is.
1 person likes this.
Reply 19 - Posted by:
bad-hair 7/5/2020 4:00:51 PM (No. 468077)
Truth is nationwide the interstates (freeways were built long before the residential areas. For example Houston to this day is expanding east and west and North along the interstates. Other truth is that nobdy builds anything nice next to a busy freeway so that's where the low rent residential lands.
0 people like this.
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He is correct that many older black neighborhoods were leveled for highways - but it was mostly white liberals who did it. Billions were then spent on Soviet-style public housing projects which quickly turned into crime-racked. urban ghettos. It's a little late to turn back the clock.