Racism in Road Projects

Our local newspaper recently published an article with the title “Racism in road projects”. This article was based on a recent PennDOT report on “Dismantling Systemic Racism and Inequalities” plus interviews with local residents and transportation officials. But the primary examples used in the article I believe are not examples of “systemic racism”, but have been constructed to seem so.

It’s not that examples of this do not exist elsewhere. I recall a situation in another state several years ago where the city fathers wanted to have high-speed vehicular access from the local interstate into the city center. The current road in had become a commercial center, full of strip malls and small stores and traffic could not move freely. But the blocks behind all these stores was an area of older housing, mostly occupied by poor, minority families. So as not to disturb the commercial street, the authorities took about a two-block wide area just behind it (via eminent domain), and replaced the housing with a limited access high-speed freeway that branched off the interstate and ended just outside the city center.

While this had the intended impact, there were downsides for the poor, racially minority areas. For those who were displaced, they lost their homes, their neighborhood connections, etc. – but at least they were compensated financially (although probably not nearly enough). But even more devasted were the individuals and families who lived just on the other side of the new freeway which became an economic and cultural dead zone. Those living there were cut off from the commercial street – the source of not only the employment for many of them where they used to be able to walk to work, and the area where nearly all of them shopped for food, etc. But they were also cutoff from walking-distance schools, parks and playground, which were in many cases on the other side of that commercial street (which is why the city fathers chose which side of the commercial area to acquire). The only access these cutoff residents had to their employment, shopping, and culture was to walk parallel to the new freeway to one of the few places where there was a bridge carrying one of the main cross streets over/under the freeway, then walk back up the other side of the freeway along the commercial strip. This may have been a few miles of walking just to get to something that had been a few blocks away previously.

The city fathers who did this chose to leave the commercial street and the amenities on one side of it and to isolate the minority citizens living just beyond it. But such was NOT the case in Allentown – even if the article made it seem that way.

 

Example one – walking access during construction

The lead sentence in the article reads, “On days when she can’t get a ride, Yadira Mendez of Allentown walks about two miles from her North Second Street home to her job at the Monarch precast concrete factory on Dauphin Street, crossing the Tilghman Street bridge over the Lehigh River.” A few sentences later it states, “The bridge, which is poorly lit, ends in a deserted industrial area near North Bradford Street and Union Boulevard at the river’s eastern bank.” And then later it quotes her as saying, “I can’t wait for PennDOT to finally finish the work. Whenever I can get a ride, we can’t use the bridge. We have to go the long way around and that makes me late for work.” These sentences are clearly meant to evoke sympathy for Ms. Mendez – a Hispanic person who is impacted by this construction.

But then the article moves from a personal story to the facts of this construction. It notes that PennDOT took steps such as “leaving the Tilghman Street bridge’s sidewalks open for pedestrians during the ongoing construction”, and later quotes the executive director of the Coalition for Appropriate Transportation who says, “Somebody with a car can easily take a 5-mile detour, but somebody on foot doesn’t have that luxury.” It also ignores the fact that the place where Ms. Mendez works is actually located in that “deserted industrial area”.

This is “talking out of both sides of your mouth.” The article evokes sympathy for Ms. Mendez when PennDOT has made an effort to accommodate those who must walk across the bridge. It quotes her as saying that when she gets a ride she is “late for work”, then says that someone with a car “can easily take a 5-mile detour”. And it paints a picture of a “deserted industrial area” when that industrial area is the source of Ms. Mendez’ employment.

The executive director of the Lehigh Valley Planning Commission (LVPC) is quoted as saying, “All modes of transportation should be equally respected, as should the people who use those various modes, but they’re not.” But the situation with Ms. Mendez as an example is actually an example of where such respect was being given, as the bridge was kept open for pedestrian traffic during the nearly four years of the project when it was closed to vehicular traffic.

 

Example two – Route 22

The other example used in the article is Route 22. The executive director of the LVPC is quoted as saying, “They struggle because of barriers like Route 22, which has separated an entire neighborhood of low-income minority residents from the major employment and commercial centers of Allentown.” One would think from this quote that this is a parallel situation to the above-mentioned example from another city where a major road was put it that cutoff access to the “low-income minority” areas of Allentown. But let’s look at the facts.

If you look at the history and timing of Route 22 (see - here and here), you will see that when Route 22 was initially defined as part of the US highway system in 1926 it ran along Hamilton Street through the center of Allentown. Only a few years later, in the early 1930s, it was relocated to run along Tilghman Street. Then when the Lehigh Valley Thruway was completed in 1954, Route 22 ran along it – in the location where it is today.

In 1954, the area to the north of Route 22 was farmland, not commercial. The first mall in the area was the Whitehall Mall which was not constructed until 1966, more than a decade later. As you can see in the below pictures, everything north was open space and farmland. (Pictures taken from Allentown Morning Call)

[Lehigh Valley Thruway in 1954]

The other very misleading statement in the above quote was about Allentown having “entire neighborhood[s] of low-income minority residents.” The demographics of Allentown have had a significant transformation in recent decades. According to the federal census (see here and here), the population of Allentown in 1950 was 106K and remained nearly flat for the next 50 years. As regards “minority residents”, while I don’t have the minority breakout from 1950, the change from 2000 to 2010 and 2019, shows this change. 2000 (White 72.55, African-American 7.85, Hispanic 24.44), 2010 (White (non-Hispanic) 43.2, Black (non-Hispanic) 11.6, Hispanic 42.8), 2019 (White alone 32.4, Black 14.7, Hispanic 52.5). In the 1950s, the White percentage was probably well over 90%.

In summary, while there is no doubt today that crossing from the residential areas of Allentown on the south of Route 22 to the commercial area north of Route 22 is very difficult, to make a claim that Route 22 “HAS” caused that separation is to try and blame construction from nearly 60 years ago for a problem that has only occurred in recent decades. The residential areas to the south were NOT low-income minority areas in 1954, and the commercial areas to the north were constructed because of the availability of open farmland in the decades since.

 

Summary

As the article states, this report on “Dismantling Systemic Racism and Inequities” report is based on research that “began in August 2020, amid nationwide calls for racial justice and equality following the May 2020 murder of Black Minneapolis resident George Floyd by a white police officer.” But the primary examples in this newspaper article are very inappropriate ones to use. The first example is designed to elicit sympathy – but the article then essentially contradicts the situation. And the second example is merely trying to impose current feelings on events of the past and make it look like those past events were part of “Systemic Racism” when they clearly were not.