MIAMI: I-95

Construction of I-95 in Miami required the forcible relocation of over 12,000 residents—nearly 100% of them black. In the 1960s the government used eminent domain to seize buildings across the heart of Miami’s black community in Overtown in order to build the highway. Authorities compensated building owners with amounts well below market rate, and offered renters—the vast majority of the community—nothing at all.

The highway drastically widened Miami’s existing “color line,” which had originally been established by Henry Flagler’s FEC railroad tracks, separating white Downtown from black Overtown. Before the 1960s, official Jim Crow segregation laws severely limited housing options for black Miamians, with Overtown being the only central location not officially “whites only.” Despite resulting overcrowding and profiteering from white and black landlords alike, the neighborhood maintained a strong black middle class with hundreds of locally-owned businesses lining 2nd and 3rd Aves.

After the highway decimated the neighborhood, the population dropped from roughly 50,000 to around 10,000. As N.D.B. Connolly notes in his history of Miami, A World More Concrete, “The resulting disruption and pain many of these [highway, urban renewal, and slum clearance] projects wrought was not, as some have argued, the result of some political accident or bureaucratic misstep on the part of otherwise earnest housing reformers. Displacements were intentional. They represented, for growth-minded elites, successful attempts to contain black people and to subsidize regional economies with millions in federal spending.”