The $800 million project transitions from “nothing has been decided” to “nothing can be changed”

There’s a kind of calculated phase-shift in the way transportation department’s talk about major projects.  For a long, long time, they’ll respond to any challenges or questions by claiming that “nothing has been decided” or that a project is still being designed, that its in its infancy, and that objections will be dealt with . . . at some point in the indefinite future.

But then, a magic moment occurs, with no notice or observable event, and they’ll suddenly proclaim that it’s too late to raise and questions or consider any changes.

That’s exactly what’s happened with the Oregon Department of Transportation’s $800 million I-5 Rose Quarter project in the past few weeks.

You’ve got concerns?  Not to worry, nothing’s been decided

As recently as last fall, ODOT’s Director of Urban Mobility, Brendan Finn was telling OPB’s Think Out Loud host Dave Miller, the project is only 15 percent designed, and that there was lots of opportunity for the community to shape the project:

Well, the project is still pretty much in its infancy, it’s only being at 15 percent design.  I don’t clearly remember the exact verbiage as far as that.  The House Bill that was passed that created the Rose Quarter project, HB 2017, did have certain parameters in it that were expected from the Legislature, and that was one of them.  That said, there is almost an amazing opportunity here to connect neighborhoods and to provide not only multi-modal options, but  community connections.  And for us, making this move right now is signaling to the community . . . especially . . . those who have left the process, that we are willing to do things differently, we are ready to change, we are ready to be deliberative about our commitment to our shared values around restorative justice.

And very publicly at that time, ODOT convened an “Historic Albina Advisory Board “(after blowing up two other efforts at community engagement) and spent several million dollars hiring a team of consultants to conduct an independent highway cover assessment.  ODOT hired a multi-million dollar team of consultants to undertake an independent analysis of the freeway covers, undertaking both a technical analysis, and seeking public opinion.  This work developed a series of alternatives that vary considerably from the proposal being designed by ODOT—devoting more space to housing  and better reconnecting the urban street grid, and moving freeway on and off ramps away from the center of project.

This process is proceeding according to the timeline ODOT announced when it appointed this new board last year.  In May, consultants presented their analysis and recommendations to the Historic Albina Advisory Board and the project’s steering committee.  Their alternatives, included two that rate much higher technically, and in community support, and which would significantly re-design the project.

Sorry, time’s up: Too late to make any changes

Now, ODOT says, it’s simply too late to think about doing anything different than what the agency first planned.

The community has been pushing for buildable covers for years, and now ODOT says, that any consideration of covers will create unacceptable further delays.  Last week, in response to support by Oregon’s two Senators and local Congressman for buildable covers, ODOT said it was basically too late to think about doing that, according to the Portland Mercury:

A spokesperson for ODOT told the Mercury that while getting the cost of the caps fully funded by federal dollars would be “a dream,” there are still other obstacles to consider when building more substantial freeway caps. In order to build caps capable of supporting five-story buildings, the caps would need larger support pillars on either side of the freeway to ensure that there is enough structural strength to support the buildings.

“That could mean further acquisitions of land in the area, potentially displacing businesses,” said April deLeon, an ODOT spokesperson.

According to deLeon, changing the design of the caps now could also add time delays. The Federal Highway Administration would need to approve the new cap design, but would be under no timeline to do so. That time delay could make the project more expensive due to the cost of inflation.

It’s also worth noting that ODOT’s own consultants have said that buildable covers would be much more economical, if only ODOT would narrow the overly wide project to just the two additional lanes it says it needs, and built shoulders comparable to other urban freeway projects.  According to ODOT, it will build stronger covers only if it gets to condemn other people’s land, not if it has to give up any of the monstrously oversized roadway it intends to built (and then to re-stripe into a ten-lane freeway).

ODOT’s reflexive claim that its too late, and too costly to even consider buildable caps shows that their claims of interest in “restorative justice” are just a sham.  What the really want to do is build a wider freeway, and they’ll engage in whatever performative theatre they think is needed to convince people they care

Kudos to OPB’s Dave Miller for asking hard questions last fall:  But what the media generally fails to do is follow the thread and insist on accountability.  At what point did the project go from “infancy” to unchangeable?  Who made that decision?  Deus ex machina is a great literary device, but it’s no way to run a government.

Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood survived the 1921 race massacre, only to be ultimately destroyed by a more unrelenting foe: Interstate highways

Black Tulsans quickly rebuilt Greenwood in the 1920s, and it flourished for decades, but was ultimately done in by freeway construction and urban renewal

Even now, Tulsa has money for more road widening, but apparently nothing for reparations.

The past week has marked the Centennial of the Tulsa Race Massacre, when hundreds of Black residents of Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood were brutally killed and the neighborhood, Greenwood, was leveled.  Recent news stories have made more Americans aware of this tragic chapter of our history than unfolded in May 1921:  Greenwood’s residents were shot and beaten, their homes and businesses burned and their neighborhood bombed.

What’s less known is that despite the best efforts of the violent racists, they didn’t kill Greenwood.  In fact, the neighborhood’s Black residents returned and rebuilt, in less than five years.  The rapid rebuilding, in spite of the obstacles put in its place by the City of Tulsa, and continued racial discrimination grew praise for the neighborhood’s  resilience.  In 1926, W.E.B. Dubois wrote “Black Tulsa is a happy city,“ saying:

Five little years ago, fire and blood and robbery leveled it to the ground. Scars are there, but the city is impudent and noisy. It believes in itself. Thank God for the grit of Black Tulsa.”

Greenwood’s heyday stretched into the 1950s, and even its moniker–The Black Wall Street–dates from this period, and not before the massacre.

What finally killed Greenwood wasn’t an angry racist mob:  it was the federally funded Interstate highway system.  Coupled with urban renewal, highways built through North Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood in the late 1960’s did what the Klan and white racists couldn’t do:  demolish the and depopulate the place.  That’s the key conclusion of a newly published book by Carlos Moreno, which chronicles the neighborhood’s destruction, re-birth and ultimate demise at the hands of the highway builders.  NBC News interviewed Moreno, and reported:

In his new book set to be released next week, “The Victory of Greenwood,” Moreno explores how the neighborhood had a second renaissance led by Black Tulsans after the massacre, rebuilding even bigger than before. It was not the bloodshed that eventually destroyed most of Greenwood, however; rather, it was this, he said, pointing to the spaghetti of interchanges to the south and the expressway that stretches north.

In an essay at Next City, Moreno explains:

What often gets erased from Greenwood’s history is its 45 years of prosperity after the massacre and the events that led to Greenwood’s second destruction: The Federal-Aid Highway Acts of 1965 and 1968. As early as 1957, Tulsa’s Comprehensive Plan included creating a ring road (locally dubbed the Inner-Dispersal Loop, or IDL); a tangle of four highways encircling the downtown area. The north (I-244) and east (U.S. 75) sections of the IDL were designed to replace the dense, diverse, mixed-use, mixed-income, pedestrian, and transit-oriented Greenwood and Kendall-Whittier neighborhoods.

As in so many other US cities, the construction of freeways was used to demolish, divide and isolate communities of color.  President Biden acknowledged the federal government’s role in Greenwood’s decline in his proclamation of a Day of Remembrance:

And in later decades, Federal investment, including Federal highway construction, tore down and cut off parts of the community. The attack on Black families and Black wealth in Greenwood persisted across generations.

At a community conversation sponsored by Tulsa Urbanists, Moreno summarized his research on the role of the 1921 race massacre and later highway building and urban renewal efforts in destroying Greenwood:

Greenwood looks the way it does today, not because of the massacre.  It came back. And there’s a video footage of that. But North Tulsa/Greenwood look the way it does today because of the federal highway project, and because of urban renewal . . .

And Tulsa continues to widen highways even as it refuses to discuss reparations for the destruction of Greenwood.  Again, Moreno:

Somehow it’s okay for Tulsa to pay $36 million to repair one mile of road between 81st and 91st on Yale in South Tulsa, like that’s okay. We have no problems doing that. We just passed a road widening bill and every single citizen of Tulsa is paying a part of that $36 million. But somehow reparations for Greenwood is a non starter . . .

A hat tip to Next City for publishing Carlos Moreno’s synopsis of his book and Graham Lee Brewer of NBC News his reporting of how the highway’s wounds still trouble Greenwood to this day.

It’s hard to imagine anything more hateful and horrific than the bloody attack on Greenwood in May, 1921.  In the past century, that kind of violent overt racism has given way to a more subtle, more pernicious and more devastating  kind of systemic or institutional racism, in the form of highway construction.

What City Observatory did this week

1. Cars kill city neighborhoods.  Across the nation, America’s cities have been remade to accomodate the automobile.  Freeways have been widened through city neighborhoods, demolishing homes and businesses, but more than that, the sprawling, car-dependent transportation system which is now firmly rooted across the nation is simply toxic to urban neighborhoods.  A recent study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia shows that across metropolitan areas, population growth and decline is directly related to proximity to urban freeways:  urban neighborhoods close to freeways decline; suburban neighborhoods near freeways thrive.

In short, freeways are toxic to urban neighborhoods but a tonic to suburban sprawl.  In close-in urban neighborhoods, freeway construction was associated with an 80 to 100% decline in population within one mile of a freeway.  In and near city centers, the closer your neighborhood was to a freeway, the larger its population decline.  The reverse is true in the suburbs, where population growth was concentrated in those areas closest to freeways.  The evidence across six decades of freeway building shows us that freeways kill cities.

2.  The Bum’s Rush. The Oregon Department of Transportation’s $800 million I-5 Rose Quarter project has recently had a major shift in its plans. Just last fall, ODOT’s Director of Urban Mobility Brendan Finn stated that the project is only 15 percent designed and that there is “almost an amazing opportunity here to connect neighborhoods.” However, after this magical moment, ODOT claims that it is simply too late to think about doing anything differently than the original plan. This sudden change is completely different from the outlook expressed last fall. It disregards the community and their own consultants support for buildable covers. ODOT argues that it is too costly to consider buildable caps. Acquiring more land would be “necessary” to implement them, rather than narrowing the excessively oversized roadway it intends to build. The change from a work in progress plan to an unchangeable design showcases ODOT’s true desires once again. There is not a fight for “restorative justice” for the Albina neighborhood nor a push for the economically best model. ODOT is only interested in building a wider freeway.

Must read

1.  The case against freeway widening:  Milwaukee edition.  Around the country, urbanists, social justice activists and climate warriors are all challenging plans to squander billions of dollars widening urban freeways.  We’ve known for decades that wider freeways do not reduce traffic congestion, rather they simply increase traffic, air pollution and sprawl.  A battle rages in Milwaukee, where this coalition of local groups is fighting against state plans to spend upwards of billion dollars widening I-94. 

Writing at the local blog, The Recombobulation Area, Dan Shafer describes the multi-faceted community alliance that’s pushing back.  Their efforts are a template for freeway fighters across the nation.

2.   If it’s really a climate emergency, maybe we should start charging for parking.  Vancouver city planners are showing that they’re willing to take some serious steps toward fighting climate change.  They are proposing a $1,000 annual fee for residents parking high polluting vehicles on city streets.  The fee would be zero for non-polluting vehicles, like electric cars, and graduated based on vehicle emissions.  While this is definitely a second-best approach compared to a strong carbon tax or a congestion fee, such a measure sends a tangible economic signal to the region’s residents about the environmental consequences of high polluting vehicles. 

While the headline number of $1,000 sounds like a lot, it actually works out to about $2.75 a day (about $2.20 in US$), which is less than a single, one-way bus ticket in most US cities.  However, this measure is far from perfect, the fee only applies to newly purchased vehicles (model year 2022 or later). Grandfathering older vehicles may seem politically wise, but it would incentivize people to keep their old dirty cars for longer.  If the climate is really a crisis, maybe we should charge people more for polluting than for taking transit.

3.  Gentrification is not the real problem. Writing at Shelterforce, Brett McMillan argues that “we have a major problem with how we talk about gentrification in this country.” In this piece, he explains gentrification’s flawed theory and the greater problems that the term fails to cover. Neil Smith’s theory of gentrification was a hypothesis introduced in the 1970s to explain the demographic pattern of people moving from the suburbs back into the city. Numerous studies have found this theory to be insufficient. For example, scholars Lance Freeman and Tiacheng Cai found that the white “invasion” into areas with predominantly Black populations (50% or more of the population) has been a relatively infrequent phenomenon since 1980, despite a slight recent uptick.  McMillan is particularly critical of the failure of the gentrification literature to clearly define or document gentrification-driven displacement:

In 2020, a paper in the high-ranking academic journal Urban Studies criticized statistical analyses that showed limited displacement because their “progress in identifying [displacement’s] extent has been remarkably slow,” meaning, as I take it, that we ought to reverse the scientific method. Which is to say, rather than forming a hypothesis, rigorously testing it, and adjusting it in light of studies’ results in order to better understand problems motivating the analysis, such claims suggest we ought to make results conform to a pre-determined outcome.

McMillan supports his argument with links to a number of critical studies. He pushes to change the framework for discussion to address broader, structural issues. Neighborhood-level inequalities and housing shortages and the growth of concentrated poverty, it turns out are more serious issues masked by a too frequent focus on gentrification. McMillan states that wealthier people moving into and driving up costs in particular urban neighborhoods is merely a “symptom” of urban equality issues, not its cause. Solutions that address systemic roots like increasing housing supply and eliminating exclusionary zoning are necessary for greater housing equality. Controlling the conversation around the term “gentrification” fails to take into consideration the structural problems and the solutions which could alleviate the adverse effects of inequality.

New Knowledge

What City Observatory this week

1.  Race and economic polarization.  In the past several decades, racial segregation in the US has attenuated, but economic segregation has increased.  This is nowhere more apparent than in the residential patterns of Black Americans.  A recent analysis by David Rusk looks at the growing economic polarization of urban neighborhoods and its effects on the Black community.  In the heyday of segregation 50 years ago, Black Americans were effectively restricted to Black neighborhoods, regardless of their income.  Consequently, Black Americans were considerably less segregated by income than other Americans (high income and low income Black households tended to live in the same neighborhoods).  As the following chart shows, economic polarization for whites has moved upward only slightly since 1970.  In contrast, Black Americans, who were less polarized that whites in 1970, and now vastly more polarized by income.

In recent decades, however, upper and middle income Black families have been the ones moving to suburbs and integrated neighborhoods, with the result being that low income Black families are now more segregated both by race and income.  This growing economic polarization is a huge challenge for the nation’s cities and for achieving social justice.

2.  More evidence the Oregon Department of Transportation is lying about its Rose Quarter freeway widening project.  For several years, ODOT has been trying to “woke-wash” its $800 million plan to widen the I-5 freeway to as much as 10 lanes by asserting that the “covers” it will build over the freeway (really just extra-wide overpasses), will somehow repair the damage done to this traditionally African-American neighborhood when the freeway was first built in the 1960s.  A report prepared by an ODOT contractor obtained by alt-weekly Willamette Week, shows that if the agency is serious about constructing “buildable” caps that could support a building, it should be planning a much narrower freeway project, instead of constructing over-sized shoulders (that would ultimately be converted to traffic lanes).

The oversized overpasses that ODOT is proposing are so weak and expensive that they can’t support buildings without adding hundreds of millions of dollars to the cost of the project–something Oregon DOT almost certainly won’t do.  The revelations here confirm that ODOT is really only interested in a wider freeway, not restorative justice for the Albina neighborhood.

Must read

1.  A Little More Remote Work Could Change Rush Hour a Lot.  Coping with peak hour congestion is one of the key challenges of transportation policy. Transportation systems have long been structured to meet the needs of peak travelers, but when the pandemic shifted many jobs from the office to the home, rush hour traffic appeared to dissipate. The increase in telecommuting throughout the COVID-19 pandemic has diminished the  rush hour congestion across U.S. cities. Morning rush hour traffic in Washington DC has seen a profound reduction from before the pandemic.

In this New York Times article, Emily Badger explores the implications of remote work, and whether pandemic induced commuting changes will persist. Due to improving technology and major investments, the increased rate of remote workers will likely be maintained as we enter a post-pandemic world. Badger examines the positive impacts on those free from rush hour hell, as well as the essential workers most reliant on the transportation system. This increase in telecommuting presents a groundbreaking opportunity to rethink the structure and investments of transportation systems.

2.  Wall Street isn’t to blame for the chaotic housing market.  Investors bought a record $77 billion worth of homes in markets around the United States in the final half of 2020. Accusations have been thrown towards these “yield-chasing” institutional investors for purchasing up the single-family houses from consumers as demand increases and prices soar. However, Vox’s Jerusalem Demsas shows that these investors play only a small role in the real estate market. Poor data collection and argument framing have created questionable narratives that highlight the impact of large firms. Demsas argues that this discussion results from a continued failure to address the core reason for these market trends: the undersupply of housing. Local governments and homeowners blocking new homes from being built.  This contributed to the creation of this housing shortage, boosting the profitability and attractiveness of the market to large investors. At the same time, low mortgage rates and the increasing entrance of millennials into the housing market combine with this low supply to push the prices up. Scapegoating institutional investors fails to address the central problem — a housing abundance is needed.

3.  NIMBYism and the Externalities of Non-Development.We usually consider zoning as a local issue, but that is a flawed point of view. The combined impact of hundreds of local zoning decisions have notable effects on regional housing markets. Local restrictive land use decisions lead to raise housing costs, which spills into labor markets because workers are pushed  to less productive cities. In this piece, Will Wilkinson considers these detrimental aggregate impacts of local restrictive zoning regulations, particularly with the problem of “homevoters.” Economist William Fischel defines homevoters as risk-averse individuals who participate in public meetings and the local government to protect and enhance their local property values. These homevoters create reluctance among developers with their difficult negotiations and time-wasting processes. Wilkinson writes that homevoters cause inefficient allocations of development and a reduction in housing options. Homevoter NIMBY-ism with strong local controls creates external costs that impact the entire United States economy and exacerbates the affordability crisis. Wilkinson argues towards a “rebalancing of authority over land use regulation in the direction of state and even federal government.” State governments have the authority to adjust the jurisdiction delegated to cities. An adjustment away from local control might be necessary to ameliorate the adverse effects of homevoters and NIMBYism locally and nationally.

New Knowledge

David Metz from University College London compared the outcome of the road widening to the forecasted model in this paper. Metz found that three years after the opening of the motorway, there was a substantial increase in traffic but no reduction in travel time. Looking at the investment appraisal, the investment was based largely on forecasted journey time savings. It was clear that the increase in travel speed failed to occur. The model’s inability to take induced demand into account resulted in this investment’s approval. M25’s added lane increased traffic but didn’t reduce travel time.

David Metz, “Economic benefits of road widening: Discrepancy between outturn and forecast,” Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Volume 147, May 2021, Pages 312-319

What City Observatory this week

What ultimately destroyed Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood:  Highways.  This past week marked the centennial of the Tulsa Race Massacre.  In 1921, a racist mob attacked and destroyed the Black Greenwood neighborhood, killing hundreds. The Greenwood’s residents were resilient, rebuilding a neighborhood that thrived for almost 50 years.

According to a new book on the neighborhood’s history, the death of “Black Wall Street” ultimately came by the construction of the Interstate freeway system, slicing through the traditionally Black neighborhood.

Must read

1. Can “Opt-out” zoning reform break the political log-jam?  As we’ve argued at City Observatory, allowing more affordable housing is caught in a kind of prisoner’s dilemma: no local government wants to be the first to liberalize because they fear that no one else will follow.  It takes state legislation to produce change, but state legislature’s are usually deferential to local control, at least when it comes to land use. Writing at the Sightline Institute, Michael Andersen reviews newly passed legislation in Connecticut that would legalize accessory dwelling units throughout the state.  The new law comes with a catch:  if a two-thirds majority of both a city’s zoning board and city council votes to opt out of the law, they can do so.  There’s an element of “try-before-you-buy” to the law as well. The legalization of ADUs takes effect some months before cities are allowed to opt-out, so there will likely be some experience of what ADU legalization looks like before they have to make the decision.  While there’s a risk that truly exclusionary cities will easily get the two-thirds votes needed to opt-out, this approach seems like a worthwhile experiment to prod more cities into allowing this form of affordable housing.

2. The limits of the Fair Housing Act.  Residential segregation and its negative effects continue to persist more than a half century after the passage of the federal Fair Housing Act.  What will it take to achieve fair access to housing for all?  Richard Kahlenberg reviews a new book for the Washington Monthly looking at the past and future of the Fair Housing Act, with an eye to making policy changes.  While the federal law has limited some forms of overt discrimination, the more subtle and pervasive forms of exclusion, like restrictive local zoning, are producing many of the same effects.  The challenge is to craft measures that “affirmatively further” fair housing.  The big challenge is that segregation by class is accomplishing what used to be done by racial discrimination:

While racial segregation is slowly declining, income segregation has doubled since 1970. The Fair Housing Act outlaws discrimination on the basis of “race, color, religion, sex, familial status, national origin, or disability”—but it remains perfectly legal for municipalities to discriminate based on income, per se, by banning the construction of more affordable types of housing, such as duplexes, triplexes and apartments.

Since people of color have disproportionately lower incomes –a product of past discrimination–income segregation perpetuates these fundamentally unfair patterns, which is today’s biggest challenge to equitable housing.

New Knowledge

The Donut effect of Covid. How has the Coronavirus Pandemic affected urban economies?  A new study from Arjun Ramani and Nicolas Bloom looks at the changes in home values and population levels within and across the nation’s metropolitan areas.

It finds that there’s been relatively little population re-distribution (or value shift) across metropolitan areas.  People aren’t relocating wholesale from some metropolitan areas to others, nor are the contours of real estate values shifting.

The study does find that in the past year there has been a city-to-suburb shift in population movement and home price appreciation, chiefly in the dozen or so largest metro areas.  US Postal Service change of address forms display a relative surge of core-to-periphery moves since the start of the pandemic, while Zillow data show home prices and rents have performed relatively better in suburbs than central cities.  Strikingly, these effects only seem to hold for larger cities like New York, San Francisco, Seattle and others.  This may be explained by the very high proportion of workers in tech and professional service occupations who are more able to work from home in these cities.

Central business districts in very large metro areas showed an absolute decline in home values (with the CBD defined very narrowly as areas within 2 kilometers, or about 1.2 miles, of the center of a city). These trends are far more muted outside of these large metro areas, with modestly weaker performance in CBD’s in the 13th through 50th largest metros; and essentially no difference in smaller metros (those with populations of less than 1 million).

It should be little surprise that in the midst of a pandemic, when large scale gatherings of people for business, cultural, social or recreational activities are mostly banned, that the impact should be most felt in central cities.  Providing opportunities for lots of people to get together in close proximity is the raison d’etre and competitive advantage of large urban centers.  The really interesting question going forward is whether the pattern seen in the pandemic persists, or reverses as we are once again able to be in close proximity to one another.  One early sign:  rents in urban centers have ticked upward in the past few months.  These trends bear watching.