Residential Relocation
Effects on Neighborhoods
Construction crews opened the first portion of I-480 and its southern interchange by the end of 1962. But the entire length of I-480 north and around downtown, as well as the eastern leg of I-80 through Riverview Park, was not completed until the early 1970s. Prior to completion, stretches of fallow land awaiting construction divided older communities. Neighborhood institutions including community churches either lost membership in the case of Immaculate Conception Church or moved west as did the Hanscom Park Methodist Church ("Interstate Coming--Viewpoints of 2 Churchmen Differ," Omaha World-Herald, 11 April 1959).
Nationwide, the U.S. House Committee on Public Works reported that by the late 1960s "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 centers. From 1960 to 1970, the census tracts along Sheelytown’s I-480 corridor lost more than 5,000 residents and over 1,000 housing units (1960 and 1970 Housing Demographic Reports, “Census Tracts 33, 39, 40, and 41 in Omaha, Nebraska”). Perhaps due to the incurred debt, many working-class citizens in the Interstate's path remained near their neighborhood within a mile of the freeway or close to their places of employment in South Omaha. A local survey at the time found that less than three percent of those displaced left the Omaha area, but few moved into Omaha’s burgeoning suburbs (“Displacees,” South Omaha Sun, 29 November 1962).
The packing plants that city planners and business leaders hoped to protect through Interstate construction eventually shut down by the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Stockyards gradually declined in importance until the 1990s when it, too, closed. In the 1960s, two former Swift & Company executives formed Iowa Beef Packers (IBP) and radically changed the meat packing industry. IBP sought to cut operational costs by reorganizing the layout of packing plants into single story structures and reduce the need for skilled workers. Gone was the era of multistory plants where workers skillfully disassembled livestock. Moreover, with the advent of the interstate system, companies like IBP no longer had to rely primarily on rail for regional distribution. IBP placed their plants far from traditional urban packing centers and closer to feed feedlots in rural America. Ironically, the very roads that city planners and industry leaders claimed would ensure the prominence of the Stockyards fortuitously led to their decline.