Freeway Opposition
The Interstate Highway System, the largest public works project in American history, surprised residents of numerous inner-city neighborhoods with rapid and unprecedented changes it brought to the metropolitan landscape. Eminent domain empowered State Highway officials across the country to take control of and demolish residential properties for highway right-of-ways without requirements to provide replacement housing. Residents of inner-city neighborhoods with lower property valuations learned firsthand that state and local officials maximized federal funds by placing depressed multilane freeways, loops, and spurs through their neighborhoods to connect central business districts to the broader metropolitan community. Nationwide, the U.S. House Committee on Public Works reported in the late 1960s that "federal highway construction was demolishing over 62,000 housing units annually—affecting possibly as many as 200,000 people each year (Mohl, 680). Interstate displacement thus was a major part of life in America's urban neighborhoods.
Affected individuals and families, homeowners and renters, coped with uprooting their lives and finding replacement housing. Facing economic burdens unexpected in prior years, many families took on new debt or witnessed their savings disappear in order finance a move. Other homeowners contested the state’s property evaluations. Nearby homeowners not displaced often discovered that freeways cutting through their neighborhoods reconfigured the character of their community, disrupting established families and neighborhood institutions. The freeways' disruption proposed a threat to homeownership and thus jeopardized access to or retention of middle-class financial stability for many American families.
Experiences and perspectives on the construction and relocation process, however, were not monolithic. While some renters and homeowners opposed freeways, others remained indifferent or used the opportunity to move into new housing within or along their city’s outskirts. Citizens living in and near neighborhoods in freeway paths maintained a wide array of motives and perspectives that led them to challenge, support, or remain indifferent to freeways. Moreover, those citizens who opposed urban freeway construction often approached the subject from divergent angles. Freeway opposition cut differently across lines of class, race, ethnicity, and location, demonstrating varying insights into how people contested the use of urban space in the postwar era.