community connectors Archives - Transportation For America

Rays of hope: National City & Southeast San Diego’s Community Connectors story

A group of people representing a range of ages, genders, and ethnicities, stands in a circle beneath a highway overpass, with the sun rising in the background

After many decades of being divided by highways, community members in National City, CA are building capacity to reconnect their community in a project that will also acknowledge their community’s heritage and future.

The National City Southeast Greenspace Corridor Project is receiving support from the Community Connectors Program, led by Smart Growth America in collaboration with Equitable Cities, the New Urban Mobility Alliance, and America Walks with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Learn more about the Community Connectors Program.

Often romanticized in the media, Southern California has been the home and the template for the modern US highway that we know today. Media portrays these highways as facilitating economic growth and safer and speedier commutes for area residents. However, the underbelly of that media portrayal fails to acknowledge the divisiveness those highways create, separating communities, destroying cultural and economic assets, and exposing many vulnerable road users to deadly conditions.

However, Southern California, especially the greater San Diego region, didn’t have divisive highways when those communities were initially developed. For San Diego and the greater Southern California region, one only has to look to the Robert Moses of the West, Mr. Caltrans, Jacob Dekema. Dekema came to the San Diego region in 1955 as its first Caltrans district director. At the time, the region was home to only 25 miles of highways. When Dekema retired in 1980, he had overseen that network growing into 485 miles of highways and entrenched a culture dependent on the car.

A black and white aerial photo shows the relatively dense community of National City before the highway boom. — *National City, CA before the I-805 Expressway. (Source: John Fry)*

Google Earth screenshot shows a more recent picture of National City, with large roadways highlighted in yellow lacing through the city's core — *National City, CA with the I-805 Expressway and defunct SR-252 spur (future park site). (Google Earth)*

One of those communities in the shadows of, and sliced by the intrusive, life-sized sculpture dedicated to the car, is National City, CA. This diverse community of 56,000 as of the 2020 census, had its community sliced and diced by the sprawling highway creation. I-5 divides the city from it’s waterfront to the west, and I-805 runs through the heart of the city’s east side.

The 805, like many highways across the country, came into consciousness around 1956, with its construction in the late 1960s that wrapped up by 1975. Parallel to the highway’s construction, efforts in National City in 1969 revisited zoning to facilitate auto-oriented strip mall development, further setting up a concrete jungle for residents.

The most disruptive and obsolete highway construction for I-805 is Exit 11A. This exit was built to facilitate a highway to future highway transfer (what was to be known as the El Toyon Freeway or SR-252). Through intense community advocacy and opposition, the Toyon Freeway project was canceled in 1980 and removed from consciousness in 1994. However, Exit 11A remained, today serving as the 43rd Street exit, which drops a driver off at the auto-oriented Southcrest Park Plaza.

Seeds of a movement

Two women crouch in front of a child playing in the grass, with a raised highway looming in the background — *Since the construction of the Interstate 805 Corridor in 1967, SESD and National City have grappled with the legacy of redlining and infrastructure divisions. (Mundo Gardens)*

The multicultural tapestry that connects National City and Southeast San Diego (SESD) today has been left with a disproportionate share of challenges. The community lacks green space, has high levels of diesel particulate matter exposure, faces transportation barriers (due to the intricate web of highways around it), plus more and bigger cars zooming by community streets. These challenges have eroded the community’s quality of life, health outcomes, and well-being, particularly for those living in low-income households.

There is considerable acreage lying fallow under the shadow of the 43rd Street ramp. The land under the freeway occasionally is used by Caltrans as a highway maintenance and operations storage space, but otherwise remains a living scar for the community, overlapping National City and Southeast San Diego and preventing them from being fully connected to their fellow neighbors. With the economic decisions made in the 1960s, economic development opportunities remain poor in the area, with value generated in the area not fully captured and invested back into the community.

Even in the midst of an overbearing highway structure dividing various neighborhoods in northeast National City and Southeast San Diego, members of the community have worked to bridge infrastructure divides through cultural activities and streetscape beautification. One of those efforts, Joe’s Pocket Farm, has served as a catalyst for area advocates to push for a holistic community vision to reconnect the community.

Starting as a vacant land plot by I-805 and Division Street, Mr. Jose Nuñez cultivated a pocket garden near his home for many years before moving away from the area in 2008. This pocket garden fell into disrepair and turned into a dumping ground until community members organized to save the garden and turn it into a community asset. In late 2009, community members engaged the National City City Council to reclaim the vacant and dilapidated garden into what is today the Joe’s Pocket Farm. This advocacy and organizing ultimately led to the creation of a local-area nonprofit, community garden, and social justice organization, what is Mundo Gardens today, which is aimed at empowering youth and community members on cultivating solutions to address social determinants of health.

Not long after Mundo Gardens’ founding, the Urban Collaborative Project (UCP) was formed. Created in 2013 as a nonprofit organization serving redlined communities in National City and Southeast San Diego, UCP leverages a data-driven, community self-healing approach to tackle key issues, including building social infrastructure and capital, transportation and infrastructure equity, health disparity and environmental justice, cultural beautification, and housing and community development.

Developing and executing a community vision

A group of people gathers around a circular table covered in posters and sticky notes, hard at work — *National City* / *Southeast San Diego community coalition at the RWJF Community Connectors Convening in Atlanta. (Smart Growth America)*

Mundo Gardens and UCP are pieces of a larger community-driven movement that has been in the making over the past two decades on reconnecting their community and mitigating social determinants of health. Community conversations have scoped out the Greenspace Corridor Project, which would unify National City and Southeast San Diego through reforestation, cultural art, and community. This project aims to accomplish various tasks, including but not limited to, 1) dismantling the 43rd Street exit ramp from I-805 and the defunct SR-252 built segment, 2) creating a community park on the reclaimed highway land centered on community culture, community health, and the natural environment, 3) stimulate social equity investment in the community, and 4) reconnecting the greater community to its culture and heritage.

The National City / Southeast San Diego community coalition, which is advancing the Greenspace Corridor Project, has made great strides in building its community network, which now includes city staff from National City, Council of Equity Advocacy San Diego, Kumeyaay Community College, Tocayo Engagement, SANDAG staff, Caltrans District 11 staff, among others.

This coalition joins other community coalitions around the country selected in July 2023 to be part of the Community Connectors program. This program has allowed the National City / Southeast San Diego community coalition, alongside their peers, to access technical assistance and capacity building support to advance their community project. In November 2023, the coalition met alongside their peers in Atlanta for a Community Connectors convening. At that convening, the National City / Southeast San Diego community coalition was able to map out project challenges and possible wins, plus flesh out a preliminary implementation plan.

In March 2024, the community coalition received double good news: two major wins in their collective advocacy and outreach efforts to support and fund the Greenspace Corridor Project. On March 12, 2024, Caltrans announced the coalition as one of three grant winners of the state’s Reconnecting Communities: Highways to Boulevards pilot program, totaling around $50 million for planning and implementation efforts that advance the project. The very next day, USDOT announced the coalition also won a $2 million Reconnecting Communities & Neighborhoods Program planning grant.

Looking to the future

Community members gather beneath the 43rd Street exit, a large check in hand, ready to tackle their project — *National City / Southeast San Diego community coalition at the Caltrans Reconnecting Communities: Highways to Boulevards press conference. (City of San Diego)*

The Greenspace Corridor Project holds much promise with a strong and emboldened coalition that now has seed funding to actualize their project. However, the work is only beginning, as the coalition will now begin the figurative and literal cultivation of their community garden. Later in 2024, the National City / Southeast San Diego community coalition will organize and deliver a community convening aimed to advance the conversation held in Atlanta and more fully flesh out a project implementation plan. The coalition also aims to enhance community engagement, storytelling, and outreach to raise awareness on the project and broaden stakeholder support. Lastly, the coalition aims to continue to pursue additional local, state, and federal resources to realize the community park that is centered on community health, culture, and economic opportunity, expanding what started as a small pocket farm from the hands of Mr. Nuñez.

Restoring Buffalo’s “Emerald Necklace”

A park extends down the center of two narrow streets

Humboldt Parkway, once home to vibrant public space, was destroyed by the Kensington Highway, displacing over 600 families and leaving a concrete gash through Buffalo’s network of city parks. With federal support, the Kensington Expressway project aims to reconnect the community.

The rendering below is not an accurate depiction of the Kensington Expressway project. After hearing from local advocates, we’re working to uplift the on-the-ground experience that paints a different picture than the one we initially shared.

In the meantime, take a look at this article that sheds more light on the situation in Buffalo and check the rest of our case studies that demonstrate the right way to heal the divides caused by divisive infrastructure…and the stories where those efforts have gone wrong.

Better build another highway: The Legacy Parkway story

A long highway surrounded by grasslands and hills, with a narrow black trail curving to the left

Gently curving through wetlands southeast of the Great Salt Lake, Utah’s Legacy Parkway has been characterized as an example of a state DOT making a principled compromise to craft a transportation solution balancing transport modes and ecological needs. However, the legacy UDOT had truly left behind was a connection for the new West Davis Corridor, an ongoing project continuing the march through the remaining marshes and farmland of the Salt Lake Valley.

Background

Over the last thirty years, Utah has seen impressive population growth that has been unmatched by most states, but not all responses to growth balance communities’ needs for equity, environmental preservation, and economic sustainability.

According to projections from transportation planners at UDOT, population and travel demand in the five counties on the east half of the Great Salt Lake were going to increase an astonishing 60 percent and 69 percent, respectively, by 2020. (2020 Census data shows their population estimate was off by about 130,000 people.) Planners warned that at this scale of growth, not building new highway infrastructure would be devastating with travel speeds at peak hours dropping to just seven miles per hour.

To prevent this catastrophe, Utah Governor Michael Leavitt announced long-range plans for Legacy Highway in 1996, a 120-mile highway running parallel to Interstate 15. The first portion of this expansive route would be called Legacy Parkway and double as a “line in the sand” to prevent development west of the highway. Under the Utah DOT’s original preferred plan, that line would cut through 1,568 acres of Utah’s rare wetlands and historic farmsteads.

Advocates push back

Starting in 1997, the Utah Department of Transportation began environmental impact studies for Legacy Parkway as part of the NEPA process, culminating in the release of the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) in 1998. In the public meetings following the release, advocacy groups like Utahns for Better Transportation highlighted a multitude of flaws in the study and in the plans themselves. Instead of presenting alternatives to highway routes, UDOT presented the public with alternative highway routes, variations in the right of way that differed only in their relative negative impacts on residences, farms, and wetlands. Residents pointed to the Draft Environmental Statement’s incompleteness and contradictions, finding it had failed to calculate the project’s impact on wildlife, paradoxically associated higher air quality with increasing vehicle travel, and neglected to evaluate transit and land use among the alternatives. In an analysis commissioned by the Sierra Club, researchers found the DEIS’s traffic analyses were misleading. The models were applied inconsistently across geographies, allowing UDOT to present the no-build alternative as extremely untenable.

Legacy Highway

Musicians weighed in on the project too. Country music singer and songwriter Brenn Hill wrote the song “Legacy Highway” expressing his frustrations about the plan. The title of this blog post comes from the lyrics of that song. Listen to it here.

After one year of comments and federal reviews, UDOT and the Federal Highway Administration, the lead federal agency of the project, released the Legacy Parkway Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) in July 2000. Utah DOT’s new preferred plans would include a multi-use trail, cost only $369 million, fill only 46 acres of wetlands, and impact the second least amount of developable land compared to alternative highway plans.

Screen capture of a chart of Projected Demographic and Traffic Changes in Legacy Parkway’s 2000 Environmental Impact Statement, which includes projections for population, households, employment, vehicles, home-based work trips, total vehicle trips, VMT, and average system peak speed. The chart is available on page 47 of the document linked in the caption of this image. — *Legacy Parkway 2000 Final Environmental Impact Statement, including the projected 60% increase in population from 1995 to 2020.*

While UDOT’s Final Environmental Impact Study portrayed Legacy Parkway as a principled compromise that could both meet the automotive travel demands of 2020 and preserve wetlands, it still ignored much of the substantive criticism levied against the models in the earlier Draft Environmental Impact Statement. As UDOT forged ahead, awarding construction contracts as early as December 2000 (before they’d received final permits), Utahns for Better Transportation, the Sierra Club, and Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson took the only recourse left to them: they filed a lawsuit.

Lawsuit

Construction on the Legacy Parkway began in January 2001, just after the Federal Highway Administration approved the Legacy Parkway FEIS. With no other recourse, Utahns for Better Transportation, the Sierra Club, and Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson sued the Utah Department of Transportation and participating federal agencies to stop the construction of Legacy Parkway. The plaintiffs brought their issues against the DEIS and FEIS to the Utah District Court.

Elected leaders make a difference

It should not be too surprising that Anderson, a mayor known for his ardent advocacy for sustainable municipal policies, joined the suit. Since the start of his term in 1999, Mayor Anderson had seen the outsized impact that Salt Lake City’s TRAX light rail system had on the city and presided over network improvements that improved daily ridership vastly beyond initial projections. Local support for transportation alternatives grew to be so strong that voters in the city passed tax increases—on themselves—to support the development of new mass transit infrastructure. Building off of public support for these new systems, Anderson stated that “with the commitment by the community to mass transit comes a commitment by our Administration to transit-oriented development.”

While the first case against Legacy Parkway was dismissed in the Utah District Court, the coalition of advocates appealed the decision in the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals. In November 2001, the court issued an injunction and forced the Utah Department of Transportation to cease construction. After nearly a year of review, the Court found that the federal agencies’ Environmental Impact Statements were inadequate “to the point of being arbitrary and capricious.”

The court forced the agencies to develop a Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement that addressed failures to adequately consider harm to wildlife, alternate highway routes, narrower median design (the design included in the 2000 FEIS would have allowed for future expansion to six lanes), and mass transit. UDOT and the FHWA developed a new impact statement to account for the original deficiencies from 2002 to 2004, but by then, the project could not afford any more lawsuits.

Compromise

Advocates might have won the battle, but they lost the war. They negotiated a compromise with UDOT while the Final Environmental Impact Statement was being drafted, winning concessions like $2.5 million for rapid transit studies, an additional $12 million for land preservation, and unique provisions banning semi-trucks and lowering Legacy Parkway’s speed limit (an ineffective solution to dangerous roadway speeds, as we wrote in Dangerous by Design).

Construction resumed in March 2006, Legacy Parkway was completed in 2008, and just 12 years later, the provisions expired, allowing the speed limit to increase and semi-trucks to drive on the parkway. By making a few temporary compromises, UDOT successfully greenwashed the first segment of the 120-mile-long Legacy Highway network that now transports 20,000-30,000 vehicles a day.

When Legacy Parkway opened, it was celebrated by motorists for its scenic routes and tranquil views of sunflower blooms along its meandering path. Ironically, drivers enjoying the views now contribute to emissions in a region with some of the worst air quality in the nation. To build the parkway, over 4 million tons of material had to be used to fill in the wetlands below the road and the concrete and steel used in construction could have produced as much as 40,000 tons of CO2. It cost 685 million dollars.

Better build another highway

Though planners miscalculated how dramatic population growth would be in the past, the counties surrounding the Great Salt Lake will no doubt continue to see major growth. But rather than taking congestion as a sign to innovate new solutions, like a hammer looking for a nail, UDOT uses the all too familiar tool of highway expansion to “solve” congestion. Lane additions and highway expansion every 10 years can’t solve traffic and certainly will not improve ecological outcomes, but it can cost the public their health and hundreds of millions of dollars for a handful of miles.

Now UDOT has new plans for a northern expansion of Legacy Parkway, meant to address still further population growth projections. UDOT and FHWA have familiar words for the project, called the West Davis Corridor:

By 2040, the number of households in this region will increase by 65 percent. This population growth requires a solution that addresses upcoming transportation needs while minimizing impact to the community and environment. After a thorough analysis of fifty-one alternatives, a preferred alternative (West Davis Highway) has been identified. By 2040, this one project would reduce all congestion west of I-15 by one-third.

This new highway will include a land preserve and a recreational trail as part of its environmental impact mitigation strategy. While the interchange to I-15 is being constructed, traffic is being routed over the Legacy Parkway. The budget for the West Davis Corridor project is $800 million.

A satellite image from the Utah Department of Transportation showing a new extension of roadway North of Legacy Parkway, weaving past the Salt Lake and into suburbs north of Salt Lake City. — *Project plans showing the interchange between I-15, Legacy Parkway and the West Davis Corridor. Image Source: ArcGIS*

State DOTs would have us believe that highways are the solution to population growth and congestion on our nation’s roadways, but history has proven otherwise. Costly highway projects always seem to require a new costly highway project, and the endless cycle only makes conditions worse for the environment and people who live around and drive on these roads. While advocates did succeed in changing the course and character of Legacy Parkway, this compromise failed to make lasting change. To do that, we need more than compromise. We need a fundamental change in our priorities.

Community Connectors: tools for advocates

You may be fighting against a freeway expansion. You may be trying to advance a Reconnecting Communities project to remove an old highway. You might be just trying to make wide, dangerous arterial roads a little safer for people to cross. This Community Connectors portal explains common terms, decodes the processes, clarifies the important actors, and inspires with helpful real-world stories.

Mind the gap: USDOT’s first take on reconnecting communities

A group of people representing a range of ages, genders, and ethnicities walk across a cracked road within a marked crosswalk.

In March 2023, USDOT announced the initial 45 awardees for the opening round of the Reconnecting Communities Pilot Program. This first-of-its-kind program represents the start of a new series of initiatives that confronts the legacy of inequitable infrastructure projects in the US and will (un)pave the way for the Neighborhood Access and Equity Grant program created in the Inflation Reduction Act. But to meet the needs of communities, the USDOT needs to expand its vision and scope of funds available.

An excavator digs a massive hole titled "Dangerous Roads $$$". On the other side of the hole, a man tries to fill the hole with a small pile of dirt (labeled "Safety Improvements $." The comic is labeled "U.S. Approach to Road Safety." — *This illustration was produced for T4America by visual artist Jean Wei. IG/@weisanboo*

435 communities applied for the first round of the Reconnecting Communities Pilot Program (RCP), despite the fact that only $195 million in funding was available. To put this in perspective, the Multimodal Project Discretionary Grants (MPDG) program received about the same number of applications for nearly 15 times the funding ($2.85 billion). If those numbers are anything to go by, we can see that the demand from communities to fix divisive transportation infrastructure far outstrips what even the largest discretionary grant programs could garner. This is especially true when formula funding, which dwarves discretionary funding, continues to perpetuate the very issues the Reconnecting Communities Pilot seeks to resolve.

That demand comes from a diverse array of applicants. The Reconnecting Communities Pilot program received applications from 51 states and territories, from smaller communities like Phenix City, Alabama, home to less than 40,000 people, to large cities with millions of residents like Philadelphia and Los Angeles.

With that variation in size came variations in resources. We know some of these project applicants, like the grant-winning recipient Reconnect Rondo, hosted accompanying websites and social media pages managed by activist community partners, boosting the strength of application narratives. On the other end of the spectrum, two individuals applying to the program accidentally gave their own names instead of the name of the city that the grant would apply for, a sign of the difference in preparedness for the competitiveness of this grant program.

Who were these applicants? USDOT has done great work releasing outcome information in this first year of the program, and we acknowledge their efforts to release the name and state of aspiring applicants. However, we are still missing crucial information to assess how funding has been distributed and lack information on 21 applicants. T4A has requested more data from USDOT, including the individual census tracts used to assess each community as disadvantaged according to the Justice40 initiative.

In the meantime, we conducted an analysis of every applicant at the county level using data from EJScreen, the EPA’s Environmental Justice Screening tool. Though this method has limitations, it allowed us to learn more about the applicants, even those who did not receive awards and a profile from USDOT, across a variety of environmental and social measures. See the below map of applicants, with successful applicants marked in green and unsuccessful ones marked in red:

While it may be difficult to quantify the social costs of divisive infrastructure, the costs to physical health remain apparent. Including those who did not receive an award, RCP applicants had on average lower air quality, higher risk for cancer, lower income, and higher rates of unemployment than the typical American community according to EJScreen data. Many of these communities are severely marginalized, and may only be able to heal if we increase RCP funding to meet demand.

Among these many applicants was Stillwater. Stillwater is a smaller city in Oklahoma, and like many communities in the United States, highway infrastructure has left its mark on the community. Two state highways cut through the city’s downtown, creating dangerous barriers to people walking or biking in the city. In an attempt to undo the damage and support its status as a growing active transportation hub, Stillwater applied for an RCP grant to plan for a new pedestrian bridge over State Highway 51 and create a new active transportation map to connect the city and increase protections for vulnerable road users.

Photo of highway facing Main Street, with right turn lane directly next to sidewalk — *Current conditions along State Highway 51 place pedestrians dangerously close to fast car travel. Source: Stillwater, OK Corridor Plan*

Further west, Fowler is a small agricultural city in California. CA State Highway 99 and Golden State Boulevard cuts diagonally across Fowler, preventing access to almost half of the city. The community applied for an RCP grant to better connect the community across the highway. Fowler is located in Fresno county, which has some of the worst air quality and pollution in the nation.

Edinburg, Texas applied for a planning grant to convert a high-speed, arterial-style road into a Complete Street. The road, which requires children to walk across a nearly 80-foot-wide unsignalized crossing, runs adjacent to neighborhoods, a playground, and an elementary school. According to EJscreen data, Edinburg’s county has some of the country’s worst cancer-causing air pollution and has a higher proportion of people earning under the federal poverty line than 84 percent of the country. 101 of 113 census tracts in the county were identified as disadvantaged according to Justice40 metrics.

The outsized demand for the Reconnecting Communities Pilot and widespread community interest in the program’s unique mission is a sign that the pilot has been a resounding success. But with current levels of funding, the RCP will not be able to meet the massive scale of community need. Instead, USDOT should increase funding for the Reconnecting Communities Pilot and the Neighborhood Access and Equity Program to meet this historic demand.

But competitive grant programs cannot be communities’ only recourse to restore community links. Funding for the Reconnecting Communities program would have to expand by an order of magnitude to meet the demand from hundreds of qualified communities. The approach to funding these types of projects needs to change on a system-wide level, and there’s no better way to fund these projects than through formula dollars. Almost 90 percent of Highway Trust Fund funding goes to formula programs, and states have vast flexibility in how formula dollars could be used. Most, if not all, reconnecting communities projects would already be eligible under existing formula programs. States should take the opportunity to use formula dollars to reconcile the legacy of damaging transportation infrastructure, rather than repeat past mistakes.

Eligible communities have an opportunity to apply to Smart Growth America’s Community Connectors program to help prepare for the next round of competitive Reconnecting Communities grants and other funding opportunities.

Learn more

New Community Connectors grant program and resources for advocates

A new grant program from Smart Growth America will help advance locally driven projects that will reconnect communities separated or harmed by transportation infrastructure and tap available federal and state funds to support them.

Removing divisive infrastructure is largely uncharted territory in the United States, but the need to fix the damage it has caused is imperative. Transportation infrastructure like divisive highways and dangerous arterial roads often separates and harms the communities living around them. This is particularly true for Black and Brown communities, who are more likely to live near large roads and have to live with the environmental, economic, and social harms they cause.

The movement to remove divisive infrastructure has often required communities to be pioneers and the lack of a roadmap and the nature of the work often meant that there were few others to easily learn from. The Community Connectors grant program aims to change that by providing financial resources to help build local capacity and advance these projects, but also by connecting local leaders to experts and other cities attempting to accomplish similar things.

Applications are due before July 15, 2023 at 11:59 p.m.

Learn more and apply here

Who is eligible to apply for the program?

Community Connectors welcomes diverse, multi-entity project teams from small to mid-sized U.S. cities (between 50,000–500,000 in population) to apply for the program. Teams may consist of non-profit community-based organizations and advocates, government agencies (including U.S. territories), and tribes. For-profit entities may be part of the wider project team but are not eligible to receive any of the funds directly or indirectly disbursed through the grant or technical assistance.

What support will selected teams receive?

Selected teams will receive grants of up to $130,000 for capacity building and to advance their projects. In addition, the selected teams will also receive customized technical assistance and participate in a learning exchange program over the next 18-24 months, which includes an in-person convening in Atlanta, Georgia, in November 2023.

What kinds of projects are eligible?

We encourage teams to submit proposals for projects or concepts to reconnect communities separated or harmed by transportation infrastructure through an integrated transportation, land-use, housing and economic development approach. Applications for proposals at all stages are welcome. Teams are not required to have applied for or formalized an application for U.S. Department of Transportation programs.

The Community Connectors program is led by Smart Growth America in partnership with Equitable Cities, the New Urban Mobility Alliance, and America Walks and is supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Bonus: New tools for all “Community Connector” advocates

In coordination with this new grant opportunity, we have launched a brand new suite of resources to support all Community Connectors in communities of any size. These are the advocates all across the country who are working to reconnect their communities: fighting freeway expansions, advancing projects to remove old highways, making wide, dangerous arterial roads a little safer for people to cross, or just improving basic infrastructure people depend on each day.

While the new grant opportunity is limited, Transportation for America’s Community Connectors portal is for anyone, providing tools and information for advocates to decode the complex and confusing maze of programs, acronyms, and decision points that determine what gets built with federal and state transportation dollars.

Dive into the portal

Expect to hear much more about this new portal of resources. Our team will be regularly updating it with new explainers and stories over the coming months.

Want to get updates on new content? Be sure to sign up for our email list here.

Reconnecting the Hill District to downtown Pittsburgh

A brightly colored mural decorates the side of a building in the Hill District

In its heyday, the historic Hill District neighborhood was bursting with life. It was full of opportunities and culture; residents treasured it. After slowly cultivating a unique identity through generations and incremental layers of growth, it was nearly destroyed in just a few short years through the building of I-579 and the Civic Arena. Now, 60 years later, some connections are being restored.

A cultural district cut off from downtown

The Hill District of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, located just to the east of the core of downtown Pittsburgh began as a community of freed Black men and women early in the 20th century. As the city’s first Black district, it became a “cultural icon,” known for its jazz scene, radio station, and weekly newspaper, the Pittsburgh Courier. Following World War II, the Hill’s aging housing infrastructure, in conjunction with “crime and disease” (how the city defined it) became the basis to justify drastic urban renewal. Over 95 acres were condemned by the city. Developers came in and began taking houses by eminent domain to “revitalize” the neighborhood. This was the beginning of a swift downfall for the Hill District.

Black and white photographic of a highway cutting through Pittsburgh, with a small segment of the highway outlined in green — *Aerial view of Hill District (right) separated from downtown (left) by I-579, with project site for the “cap” connector outlined in green. Historic photo from Pittsburgh-Exhibition Authority.*

The plan for I-579, which today cuts directly across Pittsburgh and crosses the Allegheny River to connect with I-279, was conceived almost a decade before any work began. In 1949-1950, there were ongoing conversations about building a highway from Liberty Bridge to Grant Street, at the the end of Bigelow Boulevard. This would cut across the Golden Triangle, enabling a quicker, less congested commute across the city. After a few years of back-and-forth over route and cost, the city and county finally agreed to split the cost of an “82-foot-wide, six-lane expressway.” The City Council passed an ordinance establishing the right-of-way for the partially elevated, partially below grade project, cutting through the Hill District. The repercussions of the expressway on the Hill District were either never considered or blatantly ignored.

Pittsburgh Post Gazette black and white aerial photographs of the Hill District before demolition (rows of clustered buildings) and after (large, cleared area for the arena and highway) — *A before and after of the changes made to the Hill.*

In 1957, much to the City Planning Commission’s displeasure, the state announced that Crosstown Boulevard would be part of the newly created national Interstate System and moved forward with a larger, wider highway than they had originally approved, now backed by federal dollars.

The expressway, built in two sections, was completed by 1964. Simultaneously (1961) a new arena (home to the NHL’s Pittsburgh Penguins) and adjacent parking were constructed in the Hill District (South Side). All told, the destruction required to build I-579 and the greater urban renewal efforts resulted in the displacement of over 8,000 predominantly Black residents and 400 locally owned businesses. In addition, almost overnight, the Hill District was cut off from downtown right next door.

“The massive highway constructed at the base of the arena severed the residents of the Middle and Upper Hill from downtown and any kind of continuity with civic life,” according to this piece in Belt Magazine. For residents of this low-income neighborhood, in a (previously) well-connected central location, walking to work, or walking to access essential needs and services, was no longer an option. By the mid-1980s, the Hill District had “deteriorated into a shell of its former self.”

A path forward: The “Cap” Connector

Streets form an open square over another segment of roads

The open square is filled in with green space and sidewalks, allowing pedestrians to walk over land that was once entirely highway

Before and after cap construction. Photos from HDR, Inc.

Today, there is a new cap over a portion of I-579, creating a limited new connection between the Hill and Downtown, restoring access to employment, education, and services—now known as Frankie Pace Park. The cap and park were built (2019-2021) in the open air space above a portion of the below grade I-579 just to the west of the old Civic Arena site The project was initiated by the Penguins’ move into a new arena a few blocks away in 2010, after which the owner of the Penguins demolished the arena and replaced it with 28 acres of parking. The Urban Redevelopment Authority threatened to take one-fifth of the parking revenue unless 6.45 acres were redeveloped by 2020. The Penguin’s owner acquiesced. Approximately half of this land would become Frankie Pace Park, the remainder would be used for mixed-use development.

The space includes bicycle, pedestrian, and ADA access through and around the three acres of land, as well as rain gardens, performance areas, recreation space, and other public amenities. Improved sidewalks, lighting, and signage were included in the project for improved safety and use at all times of the day, as well as curb-cut ramps and enhanced crosswalks at intersections leading into the space.

This project was funded by a combination of federal and state sources including: USDOT through a TIGER (round 8) grant, PA Redevelopment Assistance Capital Program, PA Department of Transportation (Multimodal PennDOT), PA Commonwealth Financing Authority (Multimodal DCED), and PA Department of Conservation & Natural Resources (DCNR Keystone Recreation, Park and Conservation Fund). Several local agencies and foundations also provided funding.¹

An additional aspect of this project was its location near an existing subway station, a new bus stop, and a (then) proposed bus rapid transit system (BRT). In March 2023, the Pittsburgh Regional Transit announced approval for the first phase of this project, connecting Downtown, Uptown, and Oakland. Five new stations will be added downtown, including one at Steel Plaza station, made more accessible to Hill District residents by the new park. The electric buses will move along dedicated lanes to ease congestion and improve commuter efficiency.

Map of proposed rapid transit (description in caption and in text above) — *Map of proposed BRT. The red route indicates bus-only lanes and shows the new proposed stops between downtown (far left) and Oakland (middle-left).*

Still more work to do

In August of 2022, Pittsburgh received a federal RAISE grant to further address the harms caused by I-579. Projects funded by the RAISE grant, including curb extensions, new sidewalks, and intersection improvements, will help make the Hill District a safer place to walk for those who are still left in the Hill District.

9/ Together, Pittsburgh and PennDOT devastated the Hill District in the mid-20th century. The RAISE grant projects represent an important step toward redressing some the harm caused by highway construction and urban renewal. pic.twitter.com/SzzQDgZvOh
— Kevin DeGood (@kevin_degood) March 21, 2023

From the looks of the new park, it can be deemed a success. However, this new park and new connections do not address the issues of past and current displacement and harm that was done to this community over decades, and which continues today.

Lessons for budding community connectors

Transportation and land use are inherently intertwined. As we advocate for development, and redevelopment, and fight to reconnect communities, we must always consider how one variable impacts the others—at the micro and macro levels. The building of I-579 had tremendous repercussions on housing and access (to employment, healthy food, community services, etc). That transportation decision to cut an entire neighborhood off from opportunity to serve thru-commuters had cascading effects on land use decisions across the region. And then 60 years later, the land use decision to create the cap created valuable new transportation connections between the Hill District and downtown. These decisions are inexorably connected.

Projects like these can require significant cooperation and a diverse range of funding sources. Building an interstate is relatively simple—the federal government provides 90 percent of the funding for the project. But Frankie Pace Park, which took nearly a decade to develop, required the cooperation of multiple local, regional, and state agencies, leverage placed on private landowners, and funding from a wide range of sources. Engaging a broad range of stakeholders is required for these complex projects, so get everyone to the table.

The cap is a band-aid on a historical wound. The cap and new park, although successfully built, doesn’t do enough to right historical wrongs and steer the benefits to come from the connection to those who were displaced. The best intentions are no replacement for listening to, including, and prioritizing the voices of those who lost their neighborhood in the first place. Successful reconnecting communities projects should reflect the needs and goals of the existing community, and that can only happen by engaging everyone in the process and empowering them to shape the final product.

Community Connectors: tools for advocates

Greenville, SC: Out with the cars, in with the people

Leaders and residents in Greenville, South Carolina had been working for decades to transform their neglected, denuded downtown into a walkable, dynamic place. But the most significant catalyst was the removal of a highway bridge through downtown and the installation of a beautiful pedestrian bridge in 2004, creating a popular new attraction for people and restoring the city’s relationship to the river that birthed it.

History and context

Greenville, SC emerged from World War II as a thriving mill town. In the 1950s, this prosperity drove development into the suburbs, replacing the residential neighborhoods downtown with department stores and restaurants. While cars were becoming the primary mode of transportation, people continued to return to walkable Main Street, the hub of retail and social life. Many consider this decade to be the economic heyday of Greenville.

The 1960s brought changes to Greenville, similar to many cities across the United States. Increased sprawl, fueled by nearly free federal money for new highways, drove demand for highway access, and decision makers didn’t think twice about displacing residents and businesses to build infrastructure. Following the conventional wisdom of the day, and plenty of assistance from the South Carolina DOT, Greenville was transformed.

In 1960, the city built the Camperdown Way Bridge, a four-lane highway overpass, across the polluted Reedy River and Falls, the very spot where the earliest settlers gathered and eventually founded the city. Located in the West End section of the city (though technically positioned on the southern end of Main Street), the Camperdown Way Bridge turned this once-warehouse district into “a place you drove through…nothing but derelicts and dilapidated buildings.”²

Camperdown Bridge over Reedy River, with car travel — *The Camperdown Bridge. (2000). Photo courtesy of Greenville Online.*

Saving Main Street

In 1968, the Greenville downtown development plan proposed a redesign of Main Street to create “a pedestrian friendly environment” in the name of economic revitalization. Max Heller, the mayor of Greenville from 1971-79, was determined to bring this plan to fruition. Fighting upstream against the prevailing wisdom of the day when it came to accommodating vehicles at all costs, Heller’s vision of Main Street included a lane reduction (four-lanes to two-lanes), angled parking, street trees, lighting, and widened sidewalks suitable for outdoor dining. His government formed public-private partnerships to maximize success implementing the 1968 plan, and downtown began to flourish. While Heller’s continued influence fostered the extension of Main Street into the West End (1981), the neighborhood lagged behind, continuing to struggle for two more decades.

*Main Street Greenville, circa early-1970s. Photo courtesy of The City of Greenville.*

*Main Street Greenville, circa 1980. Photo courtesy of The City of Greenville.*

Restoring the city’s relationship to the river that birthed it

Throughout Greenville’s infrastructure transitions, the Carolina Foothills Garden Club was working on a transition of its own: giving pedestrians, not cars, priority access to the Reedy River and Falls Park and in doing so, restoring the history of the city. But realizing the full fruit of their effort would take decades.

The Club, with support from the City and Furman University, reclaimed the land in 1967. Although still hidden under the unsightly Camperdown Way Bridge, the park began to re-emerge in the 1970s. The shutdown of the mills together with the Clean Water Act (1972) resulted in a much cleaner Reedy River. The following year, 1973, the park was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. This was just the beginning.

In the 1980s, a group of performing artists set their sights on replacing Greenville’s last industrial complex with a center for the arts. The Peace Center, opened in 1990 on the south end of Main Street, is seen as the link between Greenville’s natural resources and Main Street. Its success inspired the Duke Power Company to fund infrastructure upgrades, carrying the feel of Main Street to the West End. Today, a footpath connects Falls Park, the Peace Center, and the West End.

Efforts to tear down the Camperdown Way Bridge began in earnest during the 1990s. The Greenville Central Area Partnership (GCAP) funded a study of the bridge in 1989, with a clear finding that the bridge “needed to come down. It blocked views of the majestic falls…. It divided the area. It made any potential growth moot.”³

This was quickly followed by a city-funded feasibility study in 1990 with outcomes focused on the chaos that would certainly ensue if the bridge was removed, the exorbitant cost to drivers for fuel (due to rerouting)—not to mention the embarrassment of removing perfectly good bridge paid for by the state. In spite of the latter findings, an independent task force recommended removing the bridge in 1991. But there was still a long road ahead.

Replacing a highway bridge with a people bridge

In 1995, Knox White was elected mayor of Greenville (1995-present). A former city council member, White was a longtime advocate for removing the Camperdown Way Bridge. He immediately began using his new position to lobby for removal. Together with his ally in the arts, Virginia Ulderick, White gained support from the governor by showing him the falls on a site visit to the future home of the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities. The opening of the school (1999) clinched the turnaround for the West End, bringing foot traffic back to the area and strengthening the call to remove the unsightly obstacle standing in the way of resurgence. White next welcomed the head of the state Department of Transportation to visit the school and the park, in an effort to convince the state to give the bridge to the city. Then a state senator. Finally, he began to gain ground.

Even following another traffic study (1998) calling for removal of the bridge, there was still dissent. Naysayers were more interested in roads being fixed, traffic increasing, and any risk of stifling development in the West End just as it was getting going. White recognized the need for a “story,” something beyond tearing down a bridge, something that looked ahead, to the future of Greenville. He found exactly that in the decades-old vision of the Garden Club: a pedestrian bridge over the falls. In 2000, the Camperdown Way bridge became part of the Greenville road system. Greenville published the Reedy River Corridor Master Plan, funded through hospitality tax money, and set about the process of removing the Camperdown Bridge, restoring access to the river, and making the once-hidden falls a showpiece attraction once more.

Within five years, the Camperdown Bridge came down (2002) and the Liberty Bridge opened (2004), funded through the city council budget. Foot traffic replaced vehicle traffic. Liberty Bridge quickly became known as an architectural and engineering marvel, meant to emphasize the livable, walkable beauty of Greenville.

Falls Park, Greenville, SC (2023). Credit: City of Greenville, Parks, Recreation & Tourism.

Today Greenville, South Carolina is alive with pedestrians. What began with Max Heller’s vision for a walkable Main Street grew to include the beauty of Falls Park. The West End of Greenville is now a thriving mixed-use residential neighborhood, known for its artistic community and proximity to nature. A network of paved trails extends through multiple parks, over Liberty Bridge, around the city, and beyond. While the city is still ringed by plenty of other highways, including another highway viaduct through the heart of the city, downtown Greenville is now a thriving, walkable urban center.

Lessons for Community Connectors

Greenville demonstrates a few impactful lessons for future reconnecting communities projects.

First, leadership and advocacy from the local government can be the driving force of change. Max Heller and Knox White recognized and fought for the potential they saw in Greenville. They used the power of their positions to change the direction of the community, resulting in economic and cultural success.

Second, partnerships go a long way in achieving a vision. The buy-in of public companies helped initiate the redevelopment of Main Street. Their combined vision and advocacy uncovered the natural beauty for which Greenville is now known. Artists also took part in the collaborative work of connecting nature, downtown, and history.

Third, attractions accessible to both visitors and residents foster success. Paved walking paths connect Falls Park and the Peace Center to each other, to the West End, and to Main Street. In a single walk or bike ride you can be in nature, experience art, dine in a local restaurant, and return to your home or a hotel.

Finally, in the words of Knox White, “Find your waterfall!!!” Find what is distinct, what makes your city unique, what features create this “place.” That is the first challenge. Only then can you draw in residents and tourists—who will not just live, work, shop, and dine, but will love this beautiful, walkable, historical (yet innovative), locale.

Urban areas, including but not limited to city centers, grow stronger through investments in walkability (and transit). Urban walkability creates a livable, connected community. Foot Traffic Ahead outlines this concept, using the top 35 largest metropolitan areas as examples. From Greenville, as well as Foot Traffic Ahead, cities can determine which aspects of their predecessors’ paths apply to their own future connected communities.

Community Connectors: tools for advocates

The long fight for connectivity in Milwaukee

Successfully halting construction on the Park East Freeway in Milwaukee in 1977 was a major early win for advocates. But removing highways is more complicated. Milwaukee confronted that problem in the late 1990s and early 2000s when they attempted to remove the portion that had been built—a story which can serve as a model for other highway removal efforts.

*Google Maps street view of a section of North Water Street within the Park East Corridor*

Freeways built over communities

In 1966, officials in southeast Wisconsin had penned the quickly growing area’s first comprehensive regional transportation plan, which called for 16 freeway routes in the seven-county region. Many of those (pictured below) would cut through the city itself, destroying thousands of homes and businesses. The plan was created to rearrange Milwaukee’s transportation system around the growing suburban sprawl of the 1940s and 1950s, with a priority on creating ways for suburban residents to quickly drive into and through the city. The needs of city residents in the neighborhoods those people would pass through were never the prime consideration, if their needs were considered at all.

*The Southeast Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission’s 1966 plan for downtown freeway development. The Park East Freeway is the top east-west connection on this map. (Source:* *City of Milwaukee*)

Some Milwaukeeans quickly grew concerned and frustrated over the destruction of thousands of homes, businesses, and parks as the first sections of the region’s freeways were built. One of the most destructive new freeway projects was the Park East Freeway. Black communities, most notably the thriving community of Bronzeville, faced the brunt of the damage and many were largely leveled to pave way for freeway construction. The Park East Freeway destroyed nearly all of what was a thriving community in Bronzeville, which once surrounded Walnut Street west of the Milwaukee River. Other freeways repeated this process across the city.

The staunch opposition of Black Milwaukeeans was ignored by the city and the Southeast Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission (SWRPC), which jointly completed the first section of the Park East Freeway in 1969 — the east/west segment marked in green and gray on the graphic above. As with many other cities, the tide in the fight against freeway construction would turn only when interstates were proposed to be built in whiter, more privileged neighborhoods.

Residents fight to halt construction

In the early 1970s, residents in nearby, primarily white neighborhoods like Sherman Park and Bay View in north Milwaukee organized citizens’ associations to formally resist construction of the Park East Freeway through their communities. These newly formed groups, which had significant resources at their disposal, turned to the legal system to fight the freeways.

Their legal challenges were enabled by a new law that radically changed the highway construction process. Congress had just passed the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA), which required all construction projects utilizing federal funding to conduct environmental impact studies that measured projects’ impacts on the environment, which included tangible impacts to people in the community. Armed with new NEPA regulations, those wealthy Milwaukee residents were able to not only halt the construction of the Park East Freeway, but successfully got the SWRPC to institute a ten-year moratorium on all new freeway construction in the region.

This seemed like a major win, but the fight was far from over. Much of the Park East Freeway and other freeways had already been built, crisscrossing the Milwaukee region with damaging road infrastructure that disconnected scores of communities.

By the time the courts and the SWRPC had halted construction on the Park East, city, regional, and state agencies had already displaced thousands of residents, torn down thousands of homes, and laid miles of asphalt. What was left of the Park East Freeway—a spur of a half-completed highway (pictured below)—remained a gaping hole in the middle of several neighborhoods in north Milwaukee, dividing the people that lived there from neighbors, jobs, and essential services. Repairing these holes would prove to be a greater challenge than halting construction had been.

Removing the Park East Freeway

*The former Park East Freeway (Source:* *City of Milwaukee*)

The one-mile spur of the Park East Freeway from I-43 to North Milwaukee Street destroyed or disconnected 17,300 homes and as many as 1,000 businesses. Only a few decades later, the underutilized and expensive freeway would become a clear candidate for removal.

For decades, the area around the Park East Freeway languished in underdevelopment, devoid of essential services or transportation facilities designed to serve the needs of people living in the area. Developers refused to build anything but surface parking on land adjacent to the freeway, not because parking was in high demand but because other uses were a tough sell right next to the highway. But in 1991, one developer finally took a chance on the area. Mandel Group built a remarkably successful development of luxury apartments and condominiums, selling homes for as much as $500,000.

The success of this newly created real estate company—and the buzz of nearby redevelopment activity that followed—caught the attention of Milwaukee’s new mayor, John Norquist. He had been elected to the Wisconsin State Assembly on an anti-freeway platform during the height of Milwaukee’s freeway legal battles of the 1970s, and saw an opportunity to revitalize his home city by removing the old, blighted freeways that divided it. He began drafting a plan to replace the Park East Freeway with McKinley Boulevard, restoring the urban street grid in the area and freeing up 26 acres of land for redevelopment.

Illustrations of the urban street grid overlaid on the former Park East Freeway right-of-way (Source: City of Milwaukee)

Norquist and his allies, however, still needed to convince other regional and state government agencies to approve the removal project and commit funds to it. They opted to make economic development their core message, proving that removing the freeway would draw new investment and economic activity to downtown Milwaukee. In 1998, they drafted a plan for downtown Milwaukee that tied freeway removal to economic development goals. The plan was approved shortly afterward, in 1999. Another 1998 report, this one by the SWRPC, helped to allay fears that removing the Park East Freeway would increase traffic. The Milwaukee Board of Supervisors and City of Milwaukee Common Council were convinced, approving the plan in quick succession in 1999.

Over the years, NEPA has also been utilized in counterintuitive ways to fight proposed highway removals. The well-researched removal plans helped Norquist’s plan survive one of these NEPA-based legal challenges from local businesses concerned about congestion. And in 2002, the city broke ground to remove the one-mile stub of the Park East Freeway and replace it with an urban street grid—dubbed the Park East Corridor—in 2003.

Milwaukee funded the project through a compromise with the State of Wisconsin that redirected $21 million in federal highway dollars originally appropriated to the State of Wisconsin for a bus priority lane on I-94. The state matched this money with $1.2 million of its own, and the city followed suit with $2.5 million to bring the full project funding to $25 million. The SWRPC made this agreement official in its 2001 plan, cementing the joint commitment of all three parties toward removing the Park East Freeway.

*Park East Freeway being torn down. (Source: City of Milwaukee)*

As with other similar projects to remove freeways or highways across the country, the hefty congestion predicted by opponents or skeptics never materialized. Traffic just disappeared, as every state DOT’s expensive models consistently fail to accurately predict. The project was a major success, reducing congestion and attracting billions of dollars in new investment to the Park East Corridor. One block of the new corridor, “Block 22”, has attracted over $3 billion in investment. The corridor was slated to host the 2020 Democratic National Convention before the COVID-19 pandemic spoiled the event. The area has attracted several new corporate headquarters, recently including The American Family Insurance Company.

With this proven example in mind, officials in Milwaukee are studying the removal of an outdated portion of State Highway 175 that walls Washington Park off from the Washington Heights neighborhood to the west. As Milwaukee looks to continue healing from its era of roadway-based demolition and division, localities across the country can learn from its successes.

Lessons for budding community connectors

Milwaukee benefitted from a skilled and motivated political leader in John Norquist. Advocates should cultivate political champions of freeway removal of their own, but they also can learn from Norquist’s success in other key ways.

For highways that are still on the books or being advanced toward construction, the NEPA process is as relevant now as it was in the 1970s, still requiring projects of a certain size and scope to engage communities before proceeding. NEPA public engagement processes are a great opportunity for advocacy groups and concerned residents alike to fight for projects that avoid harmful roadway construction.

Mayor John Norquist succeeded with a simple, well–supported argument for removal that focused on a broadly shared value of economic growth. While Norquist and the coalition supported the project for scores of other worthy reasons and benefits, this economic framing was decisive in convincing skeptical public officials in Milwaukee, the greater region, and Wisconsin state government to approve the project. Local policymakers and advocacy groups should document the benefits of their plans, framing them in ways that will resonate with their communities—and with the people they need to convince.

While Milwaukee is a good model, it is not perfect. While the destruction of neighborhoods like Bronzeville can never be undone, officials should seek to replace the freeways that destroyed them with development designed to serve the needs of those affected communities. Other communities have prioritized finding ways to restore some portion of lost wealth and income to those who were affected. Milwaukee has developed the Park East Corridor to include luxury apartments and corporate headquarters, but city officials should also seek out ways to provide affordable housing and invest in Black-owned businesses in the area. Undoing the damage created in the first place has to be part of the equation, as does creating a plan from the ground-up with those left behind or neglected, rather than just delivering a top-down plan to them and asking for their support.

But the bottom line is this: resisting and reversing highway construction is possible. The destruction of American communities is not inevitable, and when it happens it need not be permanent.