In his acclaimed book on blockbusting and the redlining of Black communities, Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City, former Baltimore Sun reporter Antero Pietila estimates that roughly 94,000 people—mostly Black residents—were dislocated between 1965 and 1980 by various expressway building, “slum clearance,” and “urban renewal” efforts. Many affected families had come to Baltimore looking for jobs after World War II, as part of the Great Migration, and now they were uprooted again. Payouts offered to homeowners in the Franklin-Mulberry corridor—based on declining “fair market” values in the area—were rarely enough to purchase a comparable house in one of the few neighborhoods open to Black homebuyers. (Future Hall of Famer Frank Robinson and his family struggled mightily to find a home after he was traded to Baltimore in 1966; his wife Barbara was so disgusted by the race-based real-estate market she threatened to move back to California with the couple’s two children.)
“Monuments to segregation,” ACLU lawyer Barbara Samuels called the high-rises, all since imploded as failed housing policy experiments.
Meanwhile, the destruction in the neighborhoods split by the Highway to Nowhere metastasized. The east-west expressway plans had cast a pall over the Franklin-Mulberry corridor for two decades, and when the condemnations began in 1966, and then the demolitions a few years later, things quickly took a bad turn. By the time the highway opened on Feb. 5, 1979, the surrounding blocks—and their communities—had been gutted for a decade.
Today, residents in the Black neighborhoods divided by Route 40 have the longest average commute times in Baltimore, almost three times greater than in the city’s well-to-do white neighborhoods.
“The effects of that little underpass didn’t just go into the 300 or 500 block [of a street in its corridor],” Alton West, who later organized annual reunions among those displaced, told an interviewer back in 2009. “It just spread its wings either way. Call it the ‘domino effect’ or whatever you want...[things] just fell and kept going. If the 400 block was affected, now the 3 and the 5 are . . . and after a while the 600 or the 100 [block]. I would say by the mid-’70s to the late ’70s, it was like the spread of cancer. It was just inoperable.”
As far as strategies to rehabilitate the community after the fact, added West, a retired Baltimore housing inspector, “I say ‘we’ as a city government—we just probably didn’t have a clue.
Now, a half century after it consumed 52 acres of residential Black neighborhoods—and eight years after the Red Line light rail was abruptly canceled by a governor intent on building more highways—there are hopes that the Highway to Nowhere may finally be razed.