Matt Drwenski, “roadsTaken: Introduction,” Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, October 31, 2024, https://doi.org/10.25613/6X4F-2213.
This is an introduction to the “roadsTaken” project, which documents the history of highway planning, construction, and displacement in Houston, Texas.
Home to one of the country’s first modern “superhighways” — the Gulf Freeway — Houston is a city defined by its highways.[1] Its transportation infrastructure profoundly influences how residents navigate and interact with their city, so much so that Houstonians have even developed their own unique freeway lingo.[2] Given this deep connection to its roadways, it is fitting that Houston is at the forefront of research into the historical impact of highways. Within this context, the roadsTaken project seeks to uncover a hidden chapter of Houston’s and America’s past, one that has been paved over by the infrastructure of the future.
In the post-World War II era, Houston’s economy generated breakneck growth. Between 1940 and 1980, the city’s population quadrupled. During these decades, Houston city planners designed and built one of the largest networks of urban freeways in the world. Heralded as marvels of the modern age, these superhighways came at a high cost. In the three-and-a-half decades from 1946 to 1974, highway construction cleared over 11,000 buildings, displaced over 21,000 residents, and removed over 500 businesses from both old and new neighborhoods across Houston.
As policymakers and urban planners now debate the future of the aging freeway system, historians and activists have renewed the public’s interest in the human cost of urban freeway construction, particularly its impact on low-income and minority communities.[3] By creating a complete catalog of the structures cleared and people displaced during Houston’s first round of highway construction, roadsTaken aims to show the public how Houston has grown over time and the costs incurred along the way.
Featuring an interactive geospatial and temporal map, this project represents the culmination of over two years of intense labor, thousands of hours of work, multiple generous grants, and the collaboration and cooperation of numerous archival organizations, libraries, and research centers.[4] It is intended to inspire further scholarship on Houston’s infrastructure history, with the project’s methodological innovations serving as a model for similar research in other cities.
Previous research projects have compared the overall composition of census tracts at the national and state levels to analyze exactly who was impacted by highway construction.[5] Other studies have examined specific case studies of affected neighborhoods.[6] However, this project takes a unique approach by focusing on mapping, cataloging, and categorizing every building located within highway right-of-way land to accurately estimate the number and demographics of displaced residents. The technical mapping process and sources used to build the database are explained in the next section on methodology. Following that, the broad context of urban freeway planning in the United States is described, with a focus on Houston’s specific circumstances. Lastly, the results of the study are presented, along with an analysis of the consequences of urban freeway displacement in Houston. Future publications will explore specific aspects of the database and the communities affected by highways in greater detail.
Click here for the full-view version of the “roadsTaken” interactive map and database of Houston’s highway displacement.
[1] Tom Watson McKinney, “Superhighway Deluxe: Houston’s Gulf Freeway,” in Energy Metropolis, ed. Martin V. Melosi and Joseph A. Pratt (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), 148.
[2] “Pylon Project,” The Houston Artist Speaks through Grids, https://www.thastg.com/pylon; John Nova Lomax, “Talk Like a Texan: The Story Behind the Houstonian ‘Feeder Road,’” Texas Monthly, February 27, 2018, https://www.texasmonthly.com/being-texan/talk-like-texan-story-behind-feeder-road/.
[3] Deborah N. Archer, “‘White Men’s Roads Through Black Men’s Homes’: Advancing Racial Equity Through Highway Reconstruction,” Vanderbilt Law Review 73, no. 5 (2020): 1259–1330.
[4] Please see the “About the Map” and “Contributing Experts” sections of roadsTaken for our full list of collaborators.
[5] Bradford P. Sherman, “Racial Bias and Interstate Highway Planning: A Mixed Methods Approach,” CUREJ: College Undergraduate Research Electronic Journal, University of Pennsylvania, January 1, 2014, https://repository.upenn.edu/curej/176; Ben Poston and Liam Dillon, “How We Reported the Story on Highway Displacements,” Los Angeles Times, November 11, 2021, https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-11-11/how-we-reported-the-story-on-freeway-displacements.
[6] Nadja Popovich, Josh Williams, and Denise Lu, “Can Removing Highways Fix America’s Cities?” New York Times, May 27, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/05/27/climate/us-cities-highway-removal.html; Archer, “Transportation Policy and the Underdevelopment of Black Communities,” Iowa Law Review 106, no. 5 (2021): 2125–51; Yorth Group, “Restorative Rondo: Building Equity for All, Past Prosperity Study,” July 2020, https://reconnectrondo.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Rondo-Past-Prosperity-Study.pdf; and Jay A. Fernandez, “Racism by Design: The Building of Interstate 81,” American Civil Liberties Union, August 10, 2023, https://www.aclu.org/news/racial-justice/racism-by-design-the-building-of-interstate-81.
This material may be quoted or reproduced without prior permission, provided appropriate credit is given to the author and Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. The views expressed herein are those of the individual author(s), and do not necessarily represent the views of Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.
