Detroit's before and after
 

Before and after photos of Detroit were shared on Reddit that shows the damage that mid-century freeway construction and urban renewal projects did to the city's urban fabric. Hastings Street is the street that originates about 1/3 from the lower left of the photo. This was the main thoroughfare through Detroit's Black Bottom neighborhood. I believe that the right service road of I-75 of the second image (going south towards the river) is aligned with what was Hastings.

Before

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-k...png?authuser=0

After

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-5...jpg?authuser=0

source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Detroit/com...3_6000_x_4800/

Freeways: destroying American cities since ~1940.

I almost wonder if it's worth cities suing the Federal Government for "freeway reparations," due to the untold financial and environmental damage.

yep.

sadly, detroit has A LOT of company here.

but man, what an outstanding aerial of pre-war detroit!





i know you're probably speaking rhetorically here, but it's my understanding that most (all?) cities that built urban expressways did so of their own volition, they just took the federal money to fund it.

so i don't know what legal recourse they could take today to help rectify the situation when the cities themselves decided to tear their own urban fabric apart, all in the name of "progress".

The amount of mafia concrete money made from the 1950s to 1990s across the USA must be staggering.

yeah that's what makes so little sense to me, that people in cities thought this was a good idea!

You have to think of it in the context of the times, though. A lot of freeways went through what were considered blighted areas; of course this displaced a lot of lower income people and non-whites. And believe it or not, "superhighways" were also considered a form of urban renewal!

But yeah, it's unfathomable today to think that people would rather look at a freeway than look at old shabby buildings that have the potential to be restored!

yeah but the predictable consequence is so obvious if you can't annex all surrounding land.

I think it's also a case of how well the political leaders could sell the vision of freeways to voters. It appears that freeways through city centers were a harder sell in some cities than others, and most of the cities where they most successfully pushed back on them came out better than the ones where they didn't.

Slums were considered a spreading cancer, so freeways and urban renewal were removing the cancer. The freeways would keep office workers/shoppers headed downtown as transit got scary, and the urban renewal was how people wanted to live in the Jet Age.

It was logical in the context of the times.

Still doesn't really make sense to me. Even if people thought that bulldozing slums would get rid of them, it's not clear why they thought the people who lived and worked in those places would just disappear. Especially since none of these white voters wanted any of these displaced black* people in their own neighborhoods.

*One thing that gets overlooked about this is that it wasn't only black neighborhoods that got razed. I-75 also destroyed Detroit's Chinatown. The freeway erased Chinatown so well that most people are unaware that it ever existed.

Yeah, I never got that part. I mean, you destroy the poor neighborhood, and then what? Yeah, there's new public housing on the urban renewal land, but at much lower densities/unit counts. So where do you think everyone's going?

Obviously a neighborhood was "renewed" and most of the residents went to the next nearest cheap neighborhood, sparking race/wealth flight, and the cycle repeated. So, for Detroit, blacks moved up Woodward/John R, Appalachian whites headed to SW Detroit, and the Chinese moved into the Cass Corridor.

And, yeah, lots of non-blacks were removed, in Detroit and other cities. Core Detroit west of Woodward Ave. was white (heavily Appalachian) till the 1960's. There are still a tiny remnants around North Corktown/Briggs neighborhood. The Jeffries Projects (since demolished) were heavily white till the late 60's, I believe.

Quite obviously, there was little foresight at the time (at least as displayed by those in power), and the national trend (with wads of federal $$$) was to "modernize".

While it's widely agreed that the large-scale "urban renewal" schemes of the 1960s to 1980s, primarily, were a major failure and literally destroyed cities as people knew them, I do think it's interesting to consider the context.

That is... by the 1960s, many of the core neighborhoods of American cities, particularly manufacturing cities in the rustbelt, were pretty fucking dilaptidated. Blocks and blocks of residential neighborhoods consisted of homes that were nearing a century in age and older (with few modern updates; i.e., they were already getting old when the poor immigrants moved in half a century earlier)... and they were covered in industrial grime. It was nasty. Used up.

So through that lens, I can understand the prevailing attitude to "improve" at the time. It just seems like no one really pumped the breaks to say, "hey, let's just talk about this for a second before we go apeshit knocking everything down". Or at least if people did try to hit pause, they were muffled or they had zero real voice in the matter.

The massing and scale is very similar to Toronto’s pre-war low rise neighborhoods.

Right, it's one thing to knock over "blight." It's quite another to replace them with highways to the suburbs.

I imagine you can get a good sense of what it might look like today by venturing a much shorter distance:
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Wi...!4d-83.0363633

(not to say Windsor has not made any planning mistakes... but compared to Detroit it's night and day).

And to be fair, not all urban renewal was equally horrific. Some was middling, some decent.

The Lincoln Center neighborhood, on Manhattan's UWS, was pre-1960, a slum called San Juan Hill. West Side Story was filmed in the neighborhood right before the buildings came down. It was considered one of the worst slums in NYC at the time.

Nowadays, that area, called Lincoln Square, is one of the most desirable neighborhoods in Manhattan, even though practically everything west of Broadway, to the Hudson, was leveled.

For Detroit urban renewal, I think it's less the design, or the use, or even the auto-centricity, but the lack of density. Everything was built low-scale, it's like they recreated anonymous suburban sprawl next to downtown. The Lafayette Park neighborhood, with the famous Mies towers, feels lower density than a new exurban subdivision. It's mostly unused lawns and half-empty parking lots.

Better yet, head to Hamtramck, an enclave within Detroit that never suffered from abandonment. It's a separate municipality that was kept intact via South Boston-level racism in the postwar years, and, more recently, Muslim immigrants. The whole East Side of Detroit more or less looked like this:

https://www.google.com/maps/@42.3961...7i16384!8i8192

https://www.google.com/maps/@42.3960...7i16384!8i8192

true, some of the urban renewal replacement stuff from the 70s-90s was truly god awful.

are these crappy suburban townhomes next to a 6-lane sprawlburban arterial way out in the boondocks?

https://www.google.com/maps/@42.3479...7i16384!8i8192


nope. it's literally 1.5 miles from Campus Martius. full-blown post-war suburbia just outside of downtown.

i mean, if you told me that was somewhere in schaumburg or the like, i'd have no reason to disbelieve you.

Indeed, that is a better example. Jos Champeau sadly takes on a very different character a short distance South:
https://www.google.com/maps/@42.3698...7i16384!8i8192

Windsor is more intact, but it wasn't as dense as this area of Detroit. Downtown Windsor is more similar to areas of Detroit that are/were farther from the center, some of which are still intact. Such as:

https://goo.gl/maps/ng1PQqbDyc1wotq47

Black Bottom/Hastings St. would've been more similar to current day Greektown, which was adjacent to Black Bottom. A Black Bottom that survived into 2021 would've looked more along the lines of this:

https://goo.gl/maps/v8JiPLyW5TW7FoqY6