Can Removing Highways Fix America's Cities?

Nadja Popovich and Denise Lu

The massive roads radically reshaped cities, plowing through dense downtown neighborhoods, dividing many Black communities and increasing car dependence. In order to accommodate cars and commuters, many cities “basically destroyed themselves,” said Norman Garrick, a professor at the University of Connecticut who studies how transportation projects have reshaped American cities.

“Rochester has shown what can be done in terms of reconnecting the city and restoring a sense of place,” he said. “That’s really the underlying goal of highway removal.”

The project’s successes and stumbling blocks provide lessons for other cities looking to retire some of their own aging highways. Nearly 30 cities nationwide are currently discussing some form of removal.

Some, like Syracuse and Detroit, have committed to replacing stretches of interstate with more connected, walkable neighborhoods. Others, like New Orleans and Dallas, are facing pressure from local residents and activists to address the pollution, noise and safety hazards brought by the mega-roads.

The growing movement has been energized by support from the Biden administration, which has made addressing racial justice and climate change, major themes in the debate over highway removal, central to its agenda.

In a wide-reaching infrastructure plan released at the end of March, President Joe Biden proposed spending $20 billion to help reconnect neighborhoods divided by highways. Congressional Democrats have translated the proposal into legislation that would provide funding over the next five years. And the Department of Transportation opened up separate grants that could help some cities get started.

Pete Buttigieg, who heads the department, has expressed support for removing barriers that divided Black and minority communities, saying that “there is racism physically built into some of our highways.” Midcentury highway projects often targeted Black neighborhoods, destroying cultural and economic centers and bringing decades of environmental harm.

Congress is still haggling over Biden’s infrastructure plan, but experts say the proposed funding for highway removal represents a shift in the way the government approaches transportation projects.

“As recently as a decade ago,” said Peter D. Norton, a transportation historian at the University of Virginia, “every transportation problem was a problem to be solved with new roads.” Now, the impacts of those roads are beginning to enter the equation.

Back to a Neighborhood

Federal and state funds have historically gone to building highways, not removing them. But in 2013, the city of Rochester, in upstate New York, won a nearly $18 million grant from the Obama administration that allowed it to take out an eastern segment of its sunken Inner Loop freeway, known locally as “the moat.”

The project turned a six-lane highway, with access roads running alongside, into a narrower boulevard, and the rest of the land was opened up for development.

People have already moved into town house-style apartments where the highway once stood. Scooters and bicycles share space with cars along the new Union Street corridor, a once unlikely sight. Several cross-streets cut off by the highway have been reconnected, encouraging more walking in the area.

And the big fear of removing a highway — terrible traffic — hasn’t materialized.

Lovely Warren, who has served as Rochester’s mayor since 2014, said the project is proof the city can undo some of its mistakes.

In the past, “we created a way for people to get on a highway and go directly out of our community,” she said, adding that highways also created “barriers that were really detrimental to the communities left behind.”

Now, Rochester is trying a different approach: Instead of moving people in and out of downtown as quickly as possible, the city is trying to make downtown a more livable place.

The highway removal and other deconstruction projects are part of a long-term plan for a city still struggling to come back from years of economic and population decline. The big bet: Rebuilding more walkable, bikeable and connected neighborhoods will attract new investment and new residents. And city officials hope it might even reduce car-dependence in the long run.

But rebuilding a neighborhood from scratch isn’t easy, or quick.

Four years after the sunken freeway was filled, many buildings along the corridor are still under construction and new businesses have not yet moved into the space, including a planned pharmacy and grocery store.

Local residents and business owners said they were glad to see the highway go, but many of them had mixed feelings about what followed.

“The success was: It got filled. You now have people living somewhere that was just road before,” said Shawn Dunwoody, an artist and community organizer who lives in Marketview Heights, a neighborhood near the removal site.

“We don’t have the moat that was there,” he said, walking along the new corridor. “But now, when you look down, there’s just a whole series of walls,” he added, pointing to the large, new apartment buildings that repeat down Union Street.

Others echoed the concern that the redevelopment project brought in too many higher-end apartments (though a portion are reserved for lower-income tenants and other vulnerable groups) without opening up any space for the public: No parks, no plazas.

Erik Frisch, a transportation specialist for the city who worked on the Inner Loop East removal, said the project has so far fulfilled its main goals: bringing in new investment and enlivening the city’s East End. But the new neighborhood is still a work in progress.

Rebuilding a neighborhood “is not just an ‘Add water, mix and stir’ type situation,” said Emily Morry, who works at the Rochester Public Library and has written about the neighborhoods razed by the Inner Loop’s construction. “You can set up all the infrastructure you like, but there’s the human factor, which takes all these different buildings and turns them into actual, viable communities.”

Rochester is now looking to take down more of the Inner Loop highway, starting with a northern arm. Officials hope the experience from the first removal will help expedite the process.

It took more than two decades of planning to break ground on the Inner Loop East removal, even though the project faced fewer obstacles than most.

The eastern highway segment never carried the traffic it was built to serve, so its removal faced scant opposition from daily commuters and business groups. The aging road was due for major upgrades, which would have cost much more than the entire removal process. And there weren’t a lot of people already living along the corridor.

Funding and expertise were the biggest barriers to removal.

A few highways had been taken down in the past, but there was no real template. San Francisco’s Embarcadero Freeway was irreparably damaged by an earthquake in 1989 and removed two years later. Other, more recent removals targeted waterfront highways and short “spurs” rather than segments of a working highway.

“We are a bit of a proof of concept,” said Frisch, the city’s transportation specialist.

Removing the northern arm of the Inner Loop presents a new challenge. That section of highway carries much more traffic and its removal would reconnect two long-divided neighborhoods: Marketview Heights, a majority Black and Hispanic lower-income community north of the Inner Loop, and Grove Place, a whiter, wealthier enclave to the south.

For current residents of Marketview Heights, the crucial question is: What will reconnection bring? More opportunity and less pollution? Or another round of displacement?

Dozens of Projects

In recent years, more cities have started to seriously rethink some of their highways. The Congress for the New Urbanism, a group that tracks highway removals, counted 33 proposed projects in 28 American cities. And the idea is being discussed in many others.

If rebuilding cities is done right, highway removal projects could make life better for local residents as well as the planet, said Garrick of the University of Connecticut, because denser, less car-centric neighborhoods are crucially important to reducing greenhouse gases that are causing climate change.

The proposed replacements, and their benefits, vary. Some follow Rochester’s model, turning former highways into smaller, walkable boulevards. Others are covering highways with parks, or merely replacing them with highway-like streets. Nationwide, many cities also continue to expand highways.

A growing number of removal projects are grappling with the questions of environmental justice central to Biden’s proposal. Historically, vulnerable communities have had little say in infrastructure decisions.

When the National Interstate Highway System was built in the 1950s and ’60s, it connected the country like never before. But it plowed through cities with little concern for local effects. State highways and connector roads compounded the damage.

“Highways, freeways, expressways were always hostile to cities,” said Norton of the University of Virginia. But they were particularly hostile to Black communities.

In cities like Detroit, New Orleans, Richmond, Virginia, and many more, federal interstates and other highways were often built through thriving Black neighborhoods in the name of “slum clearance.”

Most highway projects fit into a broader program of urban renewal that reshaped American cities in the mid-20th century, displacing more than a million people across the country, most of them Black. Cities replaced dense, mixed-use neighborhoods with megaprojects like convention centers, malls, and highways. When public housing was built, it usually replaced many fewer units than were destroyed.

Clearing “blighted” neighborhoods, which was usually a reference to low-income and Black areas, was the intentional goal of many urban highway projects, said Lynn Richards, president of the Congress for the New Urbanism, which advocates for more sustainable cities. “But, you know, where one person sees urban blight, another person sees a relatively stable neighborhood.”

Highways didn’t just destroy communities, they also often reinforced racial divides within cities.

White Americans increasingly fled cities altogether, following newly built roads to the growing suburbs. But Black residents were largely barred from doing the same. Government policies denied them access to federally backed mortgages and private discrimination narrowed the options further.

In effect, that left many Black residents living along the highways’ paths.

In March, Biden named New Orleans’ Claiborne Expressway as a vivid example of how highway construction divided communities and led to environmental injustice.

The highway looms over Claiborne Avenue, once an oak-lined boulevard that served as “the economic heart and soul of the Black community of New Orleans,” said Amy Stelly, a local resident and urban planner, who has been pushing for the expressway’s removal for most of the last decade. A part of the Treme neighborhood, the Claiborne Avenue corridor was a meeting space for local residents and the site of Black Mardi Gras celebrations at a time when the festival was still segregated.

In the mid-1960s, the oak trees were ripped out to make way for the highway, cleaving the neighborhood in two. Over the following decades, the once middle-class area fell into decline. Today, the expressway corridor is polluted: Local residents suffer higher than average rates of asthma and the soil is contaminated with lead, the result of years of leaded gasoline use in cars traveling into and out of downtown.

The idea of removing the highway, however, is raising some of the same concerns heard in Rochester.

Not Repeating Mistakes

Older residents of Rochester’s Marketview Heights neighborhood still remember the displacement caused by the construction of the Inner Loop. Many people now fear a second wave if it is removed.

A common argument, said Dunwoody, the artist and community organizer, is that if the highway is removed “folks are now going to be looking at our neighborhood, and bringing in yoga studios and coffee shops to move us out.”

“People don’t want to get gentrified, get pushed out, get priced out,” he said.

To make sure that city officials listen to these concerns, Dunwoody started a local advocacy group three years ago with Suzanne Mayer, who lives on the other side of the highway, in the Grove Place neighborhood. The group, called Hinge Neighbors, aims to bring local residents into the planning process.

At a community meeting in Marketview Heights in early May, the biggest question on people’s minds wasn’t whether the highway should come down, but what will replace it.

Miquel Powell, a local resident and business owner working on a prison re-entry program, worried that more large-scale apartments, like those built in the East End, would come to the neighborhood. “That would totally change the whole dynamic,” he said. Marketview Heights is mostly free-standing single-family homes; some are subdivided and most are rented.

Nancy Maciuska, who is in her 60s, said she wants to see more family-centric development in the area if the highway is removed, and some parks to replace those torn down by the construction of the freeway. “So people can raise their families and enjoy Mother Nature,” she said.

Hinge Neighbors helped Maciuska, Powell and other residents put some of their concerns about the Inner Loop North project into a presentation for city consultants and the mayor.

The project is still in early stages and Marketview Heights is only one corner of the area under study for removal. But Warren said her administration is exploring options that would help keep longtime residents in the neighborhood, including potential rent-to-own housing arrangements.

City officials are scheduled to present a series of options for the project to the community this summer.

The big challenge, according to Garrick, is that new investments in American cities today tend to lead to gentrification. “We need to figure out how to change without displacing people,” he said.

Some of the positive effects of highway removals, like decreasing pollution and increasing property values, can lead to the displacement. A recent study looked at the effects of replacing the Cypress Freeway in Oakland, California, with a street-level boulevard and found that the project decreased pollution but increased resident turnover.

Such “environmental gentrification” can also happen when parks and other greenery are introduced to historically disadvantaged neighborhoods.

The proposed Democratic legislation hopes to avoid that paradox. The bill would fund community outreach and engagement by local groups. And it prioritizes capital construction grants for projects that include measures like land trusts that would ensure the availability of affordable housing for local residents.

“It’s no longer good enough for us to remove a highway and make a replacement road beautiful,” said Richards of the Congress for the New Urbanism. “We have to reconnect the neighborhoods and invest in the legacy residents.”

White House gives GOP a week to reach deal on infrastructure

Hope Yen

WASHINGTON (AP) — Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said Sunday time is running short for a bipartisan deal on infrastructure, indicating that President Joe Biden will look to act without Republican support if there is no consensus when Congress returns from its Memorial Day break.

“By the time that they return, which is June 7, just a week from tomorrow, we need a clear direction,” Buttigieg said. “The president keeps saying inaction is not an option. And time is not unlimited here." He said the American people “expect us to do something.”

Biden plans to meet with lead Republican negotiator, Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, this coming week and says he remains open to hearing from other GOP senators who are working on different proposals. But Biden has been eying the dwindling timeline for a deal, with an early June hearing scheduled on a House transportation bill that is widely seen as a building block for the big package he favors.

Democratic senators also plan on moving forward on a sweeping infrastructure package “with or without the support of Republican senators,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., wrote to Democrats on Friday. Biden had originally set a Memorial Day deadline for reaching a deal before he let that deadline slip back.

The two sides remain far apart. Republican senators last week outlined a $928 billion infrastructure proposal as a counteroffer to Biden’s $1.7 trillion proposal, and they said they would not go along with his plans to raise the corporate tax from 21% to 28% to pay for new spending.

Republicans want to shift unspent COVID-19 relief dollars to help cover the costs, a nonstarter for many Democrats and a proposal that Biden is finding unworkable, a White House adviser told The Associated Press on Friday.

On Sunday, Capito said she remained hopeful the two sides can move closer to agreement.

“I think we can get to real compromise, absolutely, because we’re both still in the game,” she said. “I think the president told me himself that let’s get this done. We realize this is not easy. I think we bring every idea that’s on the table into the negotiations to see how we can achieve this and get it across the threshold.”

Capito said Republicans still disagree with Biden on what should be considered “infrastructure,” saying it should focus on the “physical core idea” such as roads, bridges, ports and even newer things such as broadband, but not elder care as Biden proposes. But Capito said that she believes his “heart” is in the bipartisan talks, and that there remains a “hunger for bipartisanship.”

“I think that’s what we see and, in fact, we are inching towards one another,” she insisted.

Buttigieg said while Republicans “philosophically seem to agree that trillion-dollar investments are the kind of thing we need to be doing right now,” there is “a lot of daylight” between the two sides, such as investments to boost the electric vehicle market to shift Americans away from gas-powered cars to stem greenhouse gas emissions.

The GOP plan amounts to about $250 billion in new spending, far from the president’s approach. Biden reduced his $2.3 trillion opening bid to $1.7 trillion in earlier negotiations.

“I think we are getting pretty close to a fish-or-cut-bait moment,” Buttigieg said Sunday. “We believe in this process, but also very much agree that this can’t go on forever.”

Buttigieg appeared on CNN’s “State of the Union,” ABC’s “This Week,” and “Fox News Sunday.” Capito also appeared on Fox.

Associated Press writers Jonathan Lemire and Lisa Mascaro contributed to this report.

Despite hot housing market, Greater Hartford apartment boom rolls on

Matt Pilon

Across from Dunkin’ Donuts Park in Hartford’s Downtown North neighborhood, developer Randy Salvatore began building 270 new apartments last fall and he’s already making plans for the next batch of a few hundred more.

Salvatore, CEO of Stamford-based RMS Cos., brushes aside any suggestion that the COVID-19 pandemic — which fueled significant demand for single-family homes — has made multifamily property investment more tenuous.

“I remain as bullish as ever about the long-term prospects for Hartford and this development,” Salvatore said in a recent interview. “Time is the most prized possession for a lot of people. They work really hard and they don’t want to be doing yard work on the weekends and going to Home Depot to buy a part to repair the toilet. They want to be able to just enjoy themselves.”

For those and other reasons, even if it means giving up on a spacious private backyard, experts say apartment living is here to stay, and the boom in new multifamily developments in Greater Hartford is showing no signs of letting up.

Major newly constructed or proposed apartment projects have been springing up across the region in recent months, whether it’s in the suburbs of Farmington and Bloomfield or the cities of Hartford and New Britain, a sign that developers still have significant appetites for new market-rate and highly-amenitized rental units.

According to CoStar, 2020 saw the net delivery of nearly 1,100 new apartment units in the Greater Hartford market. It’s not an earth-shattering number; it’s down from 1,300 units in 2019, but experts say the fact the region nearly matched the trailing five-year average number of new units during the pandemic is a sign of the sector’s strength and resilience. Meanwhile, vacancy rates remain in the single digits overall.

“Even as new units are built, the overall occupancy rate in and around Greater Hartford is terrific — they are absorbed quickly,” said Victor Nolletti, an executive managing director at multifamily brokerage and advisory firm Marcus & Millichap’s New Haven office. “Clearly the demand remains.”

Salvatore says he welcomes the competition.

“I think Hartford needs more housing, and more housing will bring more restaurants and better retail options, which will bring more housing,” he said. “I think that’s what creates vibrant cities. The more the merrier.”

Things seemed much more dire in the early months of the pandemic, said Jeffrey Tesch, CEO of South Windsor-based multifamily lender RCN Capital.

“A year ago I would have said multifamily is in trouble, but it just didn’t happen,” Tesch said. “It just goes to show you the real lack of availability in housing choices. There just aren’t a lot of empty units in general.”

Michael Freimuth, executive director of the Capital Region Development Authority (CRDA), which finances market-rate apartments mostly in the city said he has wondered about when demand for new apartments might slow, but he hasn’t seen any signs of that yet.

“We put out about 2,200 units [in downtown Hartford] over the past eight years and they’re running at about 90% occupancy,” Freimuth said. “I think we’re able to comfortably absorb 300 to 500 units a year, which has generally been our building pattern.”

Investors seek stable yields

While the pandemic has not caused multifamily investors to lose confidence, it has had a greater effect on other real estate sectors.

Jeffrey Dunne, a vice chairman at realty brokerage firm CBRE, whose team recently brokered a nearly $35 million sale of the 180-unit Alvista Willow Brook apartments in Meriden to an experienced local operator, said investors are increasingly flocking to multifamily, following turbulence in retail and office space.

“There are more dollars chasing deals coupled with some of the lowest interest rates in the past 50 years,” Dunne said. “Apartments are the product of choice for many investors.”

Out-of-market investors continue to sniff around Connecticut, drawn by the allure of potentially higher returns, or “cap rates,” compared to more competitive real estate markets.

“They hunt in secondary or tertiary markets for greater yield,” said Dunne, who predicts a short-term slowdown in construction activity due to price spikes in materials costs over the past year.

Demographics, demand

Connecticut is not known for booming population and job growth, so continued investment in building new apartments can seem like a bit of a head-scratcher.

Even seasoned developers admit to not fully understanding each individual element of demand for new units, which can vary by location, but that’s not a major concern so long as it keeps up.

“People are moving out of older product so you would think the older product would have a large vacancy rate, but that’s the thing: it doesn’t,” said Avner Krohn of New Britain-based Jasko Development, which has 700 apartments — not all of them yet publicly disclosed — in the planning or construction pipeline, including an 111-unit project in Bloomfield that broke ground a few weeks ago. “There is definitely some variable I don’t think anyone can put a definite finger on.”

When it comes to greater construction activity in recent years, developers are simply playing catch-up from a lengthy period in which building multifamily properties fell out of favor, according to Donald Poland, managing director of urban planning at East Hartford-based Goman+York.

Poland, who has advised area planning boards and developers alike for nearly 20 years, said multifamily development activity plummeted after the 1990-1991 recession, as some blamed a recent condo boom at the time for economic woes.

From then until after the Great Recession of 2007-2009, development activity was slow. For example, from 2004 to 2011, multifamily units represented just one-quarter of total building permits issued in Connecticut, according to U.S. Census data.

However, apartment development turned the corner after that, with activity nearly doubling. Between 2012 and 2020, permits for multifamily units have averaged 47% of total permits issued in Connecticut.

“The fact that there was an aversion to multifamily for 20 years means the majority of the existing stock is pre-1990,” Poland said.

So those older developments face competition from newer rental communities with open floor plans and more modern amenities.

“The older, tired product starts becoming functionally obsolete and is falling out of the marketplace,” Poland said.

Amenities are a major focus for any new market rate apartments, developers say. For example, Salvatore said his new Hartford apartments will have a pool, modern exercise and yoga facility with interactive equipment including a golf and multi-sports simulator, bowling alley, and rooftop deck that will overlook Dunkin’ Donuts Park with bleacher seating.

It will also have coworking space for remote-working residents.

Salvatore said he’s targeting Millennials and empty nesters as residents.

“For younger demographics it’s all about quality of life,” he said. “They will pay for that quality of life.”

The newer apartment offerings are putting pressure on the owners of middle-aged and older properties to try to keep pace with renovations, said CRDA’s Freimuth.

“There’s been a new birth of product out there that is of a higher grade and that’s forcing those buildings that have grown tired to pick it up a notch, and it’s also causing a migration to a better product,” Freimuth said.

He believes some of the demand for new apartments in Hartford will come from suburban residents who didn’t like what housing choices were previously available in the city.

“The urban apartment downtown space just didn’t see the product, so people were moving out into the suburbs, a garden apartment off the highway someplace,” he said.

There are other factors driving demand, including formation of new households by young adults fresh out of college with their first job as well as some modest population growth.

Rental demand is also coming from Baby Boomer empty nesters.

Some renters choose to rent, but many don’t have enough savings to purchase a house, even if they want one. Homeownership has been declining in recent years in Connecticut, and booming demand and low inventory during the pandemic have only placed ownership further out of reach.

Given those various factors, Poland sees the pipeline of multifamily projects remaining pretty steady for a while.

“My feeling going forward is that I think we’re going to see probably at least five to 10 years of moderate demand or production of multifamily units,” he said.

Canterbury School in New Milford starts new field project

NEW MILFORD — Construction has started on a new turf field, track and stadium complex at the Canterbury School’s 150-acre campus on Aspetuck Avenue. The project is expected to be completed by the fall, an annuouncement said.

The multi-purpose facility will feature a state-of-the-art, all-weather, all-season synthetic playing field lined for football and lacrosse; bleacher seating for 340 spectators; coaching boxes; and a six/eight-lane track. Stadium lighting will allow multiple sports to compete on the turf for night games and afford more hours for practice and off-season conditioning. The facility will be open to all Canterbury students for recreation and exercise and offer another campus venue to expand student life and weekend activities, according to an announcement.

The $4.15 million project will provide Canterbury with a second turf facility, located adjacent to the school’s existing synthetic field that was built in 2013. Initially approved in January 2020 and scheduled for completion later that same summer, the project was put on hold last year due to the pandemic. Construction was reapproved during the spring meeting of Canterbury’s Board of Trustees, and the targeted date of completion is October.