Above photo: The former Park East Freeway in Milwaukee. City of Milwaukee.
Highway removal isn’t a silver bullet.
But when done right, it can offer cities something rare and precious: empty land and a fresh start.
The 20th-century era of urban planning saw highways carving scars across the landscapes of many American cities, leaving in their wake a legacy of displacement and destruction. Today, removing freeways seems to offer a path to repairing some of this harm and moving away from car-centric infrastructure. But highway removal alone is not enough.
Whether removal projects make good on their promises to mend some of the damage caused by freeway construction and redesign cities at a more human scale depends entirely on two questions: Who controls the reclaimed land when a freeway comes down, and how will those decision makers use it?
Freeways provide a textbook example of the way institutional racism shaped U.S. cities. Research the history of urban highways almost anywhere in America and you’ll get some version of the same story—a road paved through a thriving middle-class Black community or erected as a wall dividing Black residents from their white neighbors. Across the country, freeway construction was touted by city leaders as serving two purposes: reducing traffic and facilitating “slum clearance” or “urban renewal.” That coded language ushered in an era in which Black communities were razed and their residents displaced, often with little to no warning or relocation assistance.
As the untold stories of highway construction have come to light, the idea of taking down freeways has emerged as a possible solution—a sort of excising of the malignancy. Accordingly, highway removal projects have begun to attract more interest and, crucially, funding. The federal government announced in July the third round of funding for its Reconnecting Communities Pilot grant program, which will inject $607 million into communities looking to repair the harms of past infrastructure projects, including freeways.
In undertaking these newly funded projects planners would do well to look to the past. Highway removal has been around for more than 20 years, and a handful of cities have demonstrated the proof of concept for removal.
Milwaukee, Wisconsin is one such city. Milwaukee became one of the first cities to take down a freeway when it completed demolition of an underutilized stretch of road, the Park East freeway, back in 2003. There is much to be learned from this example.
In many ways, the Park East removal was a success. Though it took nearly 20 years for the area around the former freeway to fill in, it is now a vibrant mixed-used entertainment district and the home to the arena of the Milwaukee Bucks, the city’s NBA team. The development has been a boon in terms of property taxes, bringing in more than $317 million in incremental value that funded projects throughout the metropolitan area.
It also brought victory for community organizers. In 2005, a group called the Good Jobs and Livable Neighborhoods coalition negotiated a first-of-its-kind community benefits agreement that applied to some of the excess land created by removal. This contract, signed by Milwaukee County, included legally-binding requirements for local hiring during construction and the financing of affordable housing stock, among other provisions.
But the Park East project also demonstrated that repairing the harms of highway construction is not as simple as rolling in wrecking balls to knock down a few overpasses. Even given the successes of organizers, it would be hard to argue that the Park East redevelopment represented a reordering of the city’s priorities or reparations for the damage caused by the destruction of communities in the name of freeway construction. In this way, it was a missed opportunity.
The road that replaced the Park East is large and not particularly pedestrian- or bike-friendly. And though some affordable housing was incorporated on land freed up by removal, demographic change as a result of rising housing costs in nearby neighborhoods showed that this was insufficient. Efforts by the city and nonprofits to address these displacement pressures, though well-intentioned, may be too little too late.
Similar removals in other cities have further emphasized that the benefits of highway removal do not automatically accrue to the populations who were displaced to build a freeway or even necessarily to the individuals who have been living along the freeway corridor. Research in the Bay Area showed that removal projects can drive displacement as much as the highways that came before them, gentrifying neighborhoods rather than making them better for existing residents. The pervasive presence of real estate actors in conversations around removal provides a window into who stands to benefit when land is sold to the highest bidder without consideration of community needs and desires.
This isn’t to say that highway removal cannot be a powerful tool for advancing equity or addressing other urban issues like those brought about by climate change. It’s just that repair shouldn’t end when the road comes down.
The power of highway removal lies not in what it subtracts, but what it adds: large swaths of land for reimagining. Land cost is one of the primary challenges local governments face in implementing “public good” projects. Many projects that provide benefits to communities — things like affordable housing or commercial, nature-based climate solutions, community gathering space, or community solar — don’t offer the same short-term economic returns as other types of development.
Obtaining “new” land at no cost to a municipality can therefore be a game-changer. Peter Park, the former Planning Director for the City of Milwaukee who led the removal of the Park East, put it best: “In an American city, where do you get free land like that?”
Milwaukee, like many other cities, is now considering removing additional freeways. Though these projects are still in their early stages, signs point to a more equity-focused approach and a community-engaged process for imagining future land use.
The extent to which the “new” land can be used for the public good may come down to which government bodies end up controlling land disposition—some state agencies, including the Wisconsin Department of Transportation, are required by law to sell excess parcels of land at or above market value, which limits the potential for what the land can be used for. Other states, like California and Washington, provide a model for legislation that gives state and local authorities flexibility in land disposition when the land use is beneficial to the wider community.
Expensive, luxury-style development is often what crops up when land in a city center is sold at market value—the high cost of the land means that the return on investment needs to be high too. This type of development has a place, especially given that most cities depend heavily on property taxes to fund service delivery. But it’s not the only thing that is worthwhile.
For projects to be truly transformative, highway removal’s greatest asset — reclaimed land — must be used for the public good rather than simply being auctioned off to outside developers.
Absent restrictive laws, the opportunities presented by the newly-available parcels are plenty: affordable housing in housing cost-burdened or gentrifying areas, climate resilience strategies where risks of extreme heat and flooding arise, resources like fresh food and healthcare where they are missing. Alternative ownership models like community land trusts could even be used to ensure collective control over land use decisions in perpetuity.
There is no one-size-fits-all model for redevelopment of removal land. To realize removal’s full potential, city and state officials will have to come together across jurisdictions and siloes, working hand-in-hand with residents to execute a vision for post-removal land use that best serves the members of the community who bore the brunt of a freeway’s harm.