ATLANTA: FREEWAYS & URBAN RENEWAL
Wholly 89% of the roughly 14,000 people displaced in Atlanta because of freeway construction and "urban renewal" were people of color (source @urichmond). I-85 sliced through the affluent African-American neighborhood of Sweet Auburn, creating a wall between it and Downtown. The junction between I-75 and I-20 wiped out hundreds of homes and businesses in the integrated, working-class neighborhoods of Mechanicsville and Summerhill. Meanwhile, the automobile consumed Downtown Atlanta. Block after block was demolished and replaced with parking, taking hundreds of historic buildings along the way. The formerly dense grid and streetcar network was reduced to an isolated series of towers surrounded by a sea of parking.
From @atlantamagazine: “Like ghosts rising out of a Confederate cemetery, Atlanta’s past lapses in judgment haunt the region today, leaving a smoky trail of suburban decay, declining home values, and clogged highways.”
The interstate highways were designed to gouge their way through black neighborhoods... The highway now called the Downtown Connector, the stretch where I-75 and I-85 run conjoined through the city, gutted black neighborhoods by forcing the removal of many working-class blacks from the central business district. It could have been worse. The highway was first designed to run smack through the headquarters of the Atlanta Life Insurance Company, the city’s major black-owned business. “The original intention was to destroy that black business,” Georgia Tech history professor Ronald H. Bayor says. A protest by the black community saved the structure and moved the highway route a few blocks east, where it still managed to cut through the black community’s main street, Auburn Avenue.
Interstate 20 on the west side of town is a particularly egregious example of race-based road-building. Bayor wrote: “In a 1960 report on the transitional westside neighborhood of Adamsville, [the government] noted ‘approximately two to three years ago, there was an “understanding” that the proposed route of the West Expressway [I-20 West] would be the boundary between the white and Negro communities.’”
