What's holding America's freeway removal movement back?

Despite winning federal favor, freeway removal projects still face hurdles at the local level

It’s pretty amazing how much the freeway removal movement has progressed in recent years. This concept went from being mostly an activist’s pipe dream to sanctioned at the highest level of government. Between the IIJA and IRA, the Biden Administration has earmarked more than $4 billion for the “removal, retrofit, or mitigation” of freeways that divide communities. All of a sudden, transformative freeway removal projects are within reach.

Despite this, freeway fighters face uphill battles in many cities. In my latest piece for CityLab, I zoomed in on a long-simmering freeway fight in New Orleans. For years, the Claiborne Expressway, part of I-10, has been viewed as a prime candidate for removal, given its racist history and the harm it caused to the Tremé neighborhood. After the passage of the IIJA, the project received gobs of media attention, with many reports implying that the freeway would soon be taken down.

But all the while, the situation on the ground in New Orleans was more complicated. The federal government actually received two competing grant applications for this project. One, a planning grant to study the full removal of the freeway, came from a small group of neighborhood activists. The other, from the state of Louisiana, the city of New Orleans, and some local non-profits, was a capital grant asking for $47 million to fix up and beautify the freeway, and to remove a few offramps.

In the end, the feds rejected both applications, essentially telling the city to go back to the drawing board. The issue very well may have been the lack of consensus on the ground. The state’s application leaned heavily on the argument that completely removing the freeway would be a gentrification and displacement bomb. Those in favor of removing the freeway argued that those impacts could be mitigated, and that in the end, the results would be worth it. When I visited New Orleans, I found Tremé residents to be quite divided on this question. It’s a tricky situation that seems to demand strong leadership capable of convincing the community that an infrastructure project really can transform people’s lives for the better. Read more here.

Over the course of my reporting, I made a few overarching observations about the state of the freeway removal movement:

The low-hanging fruit are getting picked off. Now come the more challenging projects

Many pioneering freeway removal projects, like the two in San Francisco, involved freeway stubs. Though these were difficult battles, they’re an easier pill to swallow than removing through-freeways, connected to the larger freeway network on either end. Few of these kinds of projects have been attempted in the U.S. They are a bigger leap of faith for DOTs and residents who find it hard to imagine where all of the existing traffic will go. In the near future, removal projects like I-980 in Oakland, and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway will test how much DOTs and cities are willing to disrupt their existing freeway networks in the name of healthier, more livable cities.

Freeway fighters need a more powerful rebuttal to displacement and gentrification arguments

Avoiding displacement and gentrification is the central argument employed by those in favor of leaving the Claiborne Expressway up. “In all of those places where the interstate was taken down,” Asali Ecclesiastes, a Tremé community leader, told me, “that community was aggressively displaced.” That’s clearly a generalization, but it’s difficult to refute using empirical evidence. There has been little study of the displacement impacts of freeway removals and other infrastructure mega-projects. There’s also the unfortunate reality that the most effective anti-displacement mitigation measures, like rent control, property tax abatements, land trusts, and subsidized housing, are anathema or straight up illegal in Republican-led states.

Regardless of the merits of the Claiborne debate, I find this discourse dispiriting. That so many people feel that improvements to their neighborhood are zero sum, coming at the expense of existing residents, is a sad commentary about American urbanism. Governments need to rebuild trust with communities, one project at a time, showing that neighborhood improvements can be positive sum. Otherwise, low-income neighborhoods will stay bleak, and high-income neighborhoods will monopolize civic improvements. That’s not a sustainable paradigm for equitable city-building.

We still don’t know much about the pollution and public health impacts of urban freeways

As I read up on the decade-long fight over the Claiborne Expressway, I was struck by how little the debate touched on pollution and public health. These are, after all, the most significant, most noxious impacts of urban freeways. The reason these issues don’t get as much attention is that there isn’t much data here, either. States must do exhaustive environmental reviews on new transit projects, but pre-NEPA freeways are grandfathered in, leaving the public blissfully ignorant of the environmental impacts of the status quo. To make a strong case for removing freeways, activists need clear, easy to digest data about their environmental harms.