The Claiborne Expressway was built in the 1960s, when the construction of interstates and highways was a symbol of progress and economic development in the U.S.
But that supposed progress often came at a great cost for marginalized communities — especially predominantly Black neighborhoods.
When it was built, the “Claiborne Corridor,” as it’s still sometimes known, tore through the heart of Tremé, one of the nation’s oldest Black neighborhoods.
For more than a century before the construction of the expressway, bustling Claiborne Avenue constituted the backbone of economic and cultural life for Black New Orleans. Back then, the oak-lined avenue was home to more than 120 businesses. Today, only a few dozen remain.
What happened to Claiborne Avenue isn’t unique. Federal planners often routed highways directly through low-income minority neighborhoods, dividing communities and polluting the air.
In Montgomery, Alabama, I-85 cut through the city’s only middle-class Black neighborhood and was “designed to displace and punish the organizers of the civil rights movement,” according to Rebecca Retzlaff, a community planning professor at Auburn University. In Nashville, planners intentionally looped I-40 around a white community, and sent it plowing through a prominent Black neighborhood, knocking down hundreds of homes and businesses. Examples like this exist in major cities across the country.
The federal government has started working on ways to confront the damage highway construction continues to do to low-income and minority communities. An initiative established in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act called the Reconnecting Communities Pilot seeks to do just that: reconnect neighborhoods and communities that were divided by infrastructure.
But there’s wide disagreement on the best way to do that, and some strategies are likely to do little to limit the health effects of living near these highways. What’s unfolding in New Orleans shows how challenging it is to pick and fund projects that will help.
Competing Visions for the Claiborne Expressway
Stelly’s group, the Claiborne Avenue Alliance, submitted a proposal for Reconnecting Communities Pilot money. It wanted $1.6 million in federal funds primarily for public engagement, data collection, and feasibility planning to work to assess whether it would be possible to remove the expressway altogether, with a plan to raise $400,000 more to cover costs.
And it seemed possible its grant proposal would succeed, since even the White House cited the Claiborne Expressway as a textbook example of the biased planning history in a published statement about the Reconnecting Communities Pilot. Ultimately, though, the federal Department of Transportation, the agency charged with allocating the program’s money, denied the Claiborne Avenue Alliance’s grant request.