Her proposed solution is both impossible to fund and impractical to implement, but in her push to propose mass high-speed rail development as a solution, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez correctly diagnoses a problem: namely that expanded highway construction, both in the past and right now, exacerbate racial inequality.
“Construction of highways can have a disproportionate impact on communities of color, from displacement and pollution, and high-speed rail actually connects these communities to greater economic and housing opportunities,” the Bronx congresswoman said.
Ocasio-Cortez and her acolytes badly overuse “racism” when playing policy Mad Libs, but in this case, AOC has a point. Highway development in cities historically exacerbated de facto racial segregation and eliminated black and brown wealth. Sure, the sort of cross-country bullet train she’s touting is not a cure for historical racism, but she’s right that mass highway expansion is not the solution.
If you try to find the neighborhood of Sugar Hill in Los Angeles, you won’t find it. Today, it goes by West Adams. Its residents have a median income of a little more than half that of the entire county, and of the county’s 209 neighborhoods, West Adams ranks 25th in violent crime, with 122 violent crimes per 100,000 people.
But during the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance, Sugar Hill hosted its own, becoming a capital of black wealth and culture on the West Coast. Hattie McDaniel, the first black actress to win the Oscar for best supporting actress, reigned supreme, holding court at her mansion with the likes of Duke Ellington and Butterfly McQueen. For years, white racists tried to run their black neighbors out of town with eviction lawsuits, and for years, those black neighbors succeeded in maintaining their homes and growing their businesses. The neighborhood was ultimately destroyed, literally, by the government. Rather than build the coastal expansion of the Interstate Highway 10 south of Sugar Hill, the state built the freeway right through it.
“The road could have been built without cutting through the so-called Sugar Hill section,” the Los Angeles Sentinel reported of the expansion. “However, in order to miss Sugar Hill, it was ‘said’ that the route would have to cut through fraternity and sorority row area around USC. Sorority and fraternity row still stands and Sugar Hill doesn’t, so you know who won out.”
This was a lie, of course, as the freeway could have been built anywhere within the more than a half-mile in between its current location and the University of Southern California’s Greek Row, but then all of the wealthy white children would be able to smell the smog of the cars! But the decision got the job done, pushing black Angelenos further south, effectively red-lining them out of the areas with more jobs and into poverty, and ultimately giving generations of black children disproportionately high rates of asthma. And all of this occurred as the city intentionally dismantled its streetcar network, once the most robust on the planet.
Chicago suffered a similar story. Following the city’s 1919 race riot, black Chicagoans, feeling unsafe in vast swaths of the city, coalesced in the neighborhood of Bronzeville, which, like Sugar Hill, became a cultural epicenter. But when the “Black Belt” grew too populous, the city responded by simply increasing the density of the housing, concentrating black residents in the projects. Unlike the case of Sugar Hill, the Dan Ryan Expressway wasn’t built to destroy the neighborhood, but rather, as Chicago documentarian Arlen Parsa explained to me, “to calcify existing color lines.”
“The Robert Taylor homes next to the Dan Ryan Expressway became known as some of the most unsafe ‘projects’ in the world, synonymous with crime and poverty,” says Parsa. “It can certainly feel like Chicago’s South Side has been built and rebuilt in a series of cycles, with each bulldozing replacing something falling into neglect but ultimately not quite living up to the promises city planners make.”
From Nashville to Miami, the list of highways built during the ’60s to destroy or redline black neighborhoods goes on, and the ramifications still persist. Climate change affects us all, but as evidenced by the Los Angeles data, proximity to pollution does matter. Although Los Angeles eventually rebuilt some of its public transit, it pales in comparison to the former network, a pity considering that light rail emits around a third of the pounds of carbon dioxide per passenger mile than a car.
Furthermore, highway expansion without rail expansion does disproportionately benefit whites. People of color are more than twice as likely than whites to lack access to a car, with black households, in particular, the least likely. All in all, nearly 1 in 5 black households have no car access.
No, Ocasio-Cortez’s proposed solution to such inequality, mass high-speed rail, isn’t tenable on a wide scale considering the size and topology of the country. But Joe Biden is wrong that we need more road and bridge development. As Matt Yglesias notes over at his Substack, the World Economic Forum considers our roads some of the world’s best, our bridge failure is on par with the European Union, and our commute time is among the lowest on the planet, with Americans spending just 45 minutes per day commuting, or fewer than 23 minutes each way to work or school.
But we could use much more housing and some regular trains, not the sexy bullet trains Biden and AOC tout, but simply local rails connecting urban centers to the suburbs. More than any amount of cash reparations, that would undo the horrifyingly racist legacy of the past century of our urban planning. Such a plan would benefit everyone of all colors.
