• Corpus ID: 189806471

Highway to Inequity: The Disparate Impact of the Interstate Highway System on Poor and Minority Communities in American Cities

@inproceedings{Karas2015HighwayTI,
  title={Highway to Inequity: The Disparate Impact of the Interstate Highway System on Poor and Minority Communities in American Cities},
  author={David Patrick Karas},
  year={2015}
}

• D. Karas
• Published 2015
• History

he Interstate Highway System constitutes one of the most substantial federal investments in the nation’s infrastructure and has provided innumerable benefits in transportation infrastructure. The positive impacts of the road building campaign sparked by President Dwight Eisenhower in the mid-1950s, however, are not without their negative counterparts. Construction of the expressway network had a profound impact on American cities, often cutting through developed neighborhoods and forever changing the social and physical characteristics of urban landscapes. In discussions of the oft-devastating effects of the Interstate Highway System on urban communities, it is impossible to ignore the impact that the system has had on poor and minority communities. A growing body of research has addressed the racial effects of the landmark federal initiative, with many academics alleging that the system’s construction constituted, at least in some cities, a civil rights violation that served to formalize Jim Crow-era discriminatory patterns and some of the original racial boundaries imposed in some urban spaces. In the present context, the still-evolving expressway teardown movement points to the reevaluation of the highway system on the part of policy scholars and public officials, many of whom have addressed the disparate outcomes of the network and have sought to remedy the harm it imposed on urban America. __________________________________________________________________________________