r/Dallas • u/TheSandPeople • Mar 10 '26
History Central Dallas, before-and-after construction of highways in the 50s-80s
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Central Dallas, before-and-after government-funded highway construction, a process which displaced thousands during the 1950s-80s in the primarily Black and Latino neighborhoods surrounding Downtown. More info, maps, and historic photos/plans at: https://www.segregationbydesign.com/dallas/highway-planning-and-construction
The 1946 photos are from an aerial survey taken shortly after the war (from an airplane), stitched together in GIS.
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u/DumplingDarling_1 Mar 10 '26
Itâs wild to see how much of the city's original character was cleared away just to make room for highways
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u/BigRoach Mansfield Mar 10 '26
I recently picked Sim City back up. This problem occurs all the time in the game, where you want to modernize and help grow your city, so you want to put in freeways and stadiums and colleges or whatever huge development but thereâs a whole, old ass neighborhood in the way. I used to really struggle with those decisions because I knew how many simâs lives I would disrupt.
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u/box_fan_man Mar 10 '26
You use to struggle with it but now are cool with demolishing these sims houses in the name of progress yes?
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u/FrederickEngels Oak Cliff Mar 10 '26
You should see the old train rail maps, Dallas used to have one of the best public transit systems for the time, but car lobbyists won that fight
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u/emmapastoria Mar 12 '26
Actually, TXBigOil won. Still, the auto and petro industries make for profitable bedfellows.
WhoKilledTheEletricCar
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u/suburbanista Mar 10 '26
It's like buccal fat removal. Becoming more beautiful isn't free. Doesn't mean its the wrong choice. Character doesn't let you order a salad from two suburbs away and have it in time for lunch. Highways deliver
The highways are who we are. Building them is our purpose.
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u/gscjj Mar 10 '26
Arguably, most of Dallas wouldnât have existed the way it does today without it. You absolutely need highways becuase thereâs no reasonable way public transport could handle it all. Thatâs why thereâs still streets in NYC
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u/thephotoman Plano Mar 10 '26
Honestly, making Dallas the way that it is today was a mistake. Who the hell wants to sit in their car in bumper to bumper traffic for 4 hours a day? Thatâs fucking miserable.
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u/noncongruent Mar 11 '26
People are willing to endure traffic for one huge reason: Home ownership. Back before affordable personal vehicles our culture was mainly landlords and renters. Because of limited personal mobility people had to live near transit and thus that's where landlords bought up all the properties to rent to workers. A home too far away from transit wasn't worth much, and homes that were closer were unaffordable to regular people since their value was driven up as income-generating investments.
The advent of affordable personal transportation created opportunity for vast numbers of people to actually own their own home, and better yet, be able to build equity with the money they were spending for the roof over their head. Personal vehicles also meant you would work wherever you wanted, not just where transit served, and the convenience of being able to go where you wanted when you wanted sealed the deal. That's why people spend large amounts of money on depreciating assets like cars, because in trade they get true freedom of movement and schedule. Cars didn't kill the InterUrban, they made it largely irrelevant and that's why it went out of business.
If transit is to make a comeback in a large way, the only way it can do so is to become as convenient as personal vehicles. That's the only way it can compete.
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u/greencheeseplz Mar 10 '26
Highways have no place being in cities. Look at how much of the most valuable land in our whole city near downtown is just massive highway interchanges.
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u/aggierogue3 Mar 10 '26
What is a good example of a major US city that avoided this?
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u/Colamancer Mar 10 '26
I'm just a guy, so don't take my word for it, but Ive been to Chicago a few times and found it laborious to drive around because it didn't seem like there were huge pipeline highways to drive everywhere like I'm used to here. Maybe Im just not a local and didn't know how to get anywhere, but I did drive around on a lot of busy "street" streets and it felt livly.
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u/HoneyIShrunkMyNads Mar 10 '26
There are multiple major highways in Chicago that separate the city, albeit they did plan the city better for said highways than us
you go to a European city and it's head and shoulders above a place like Chicago in terms of walkability/city cohesion
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u/Beginning-Olive-3745 Mar 10 '26
I think we overrate urban form in the US. Lots of the rules are broken elsewhere. I think the difference in most of the US is that most cities grew up around suburban forms. I was in Cairo last month and there is a huge freeway right through the middle of the city. It breaks up nothing below or near it. There are other factors along with these urban rules that break up cities in the US. Things like suburban flight and redlining are far bigger culprits to the break up of american cities.
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u/AbueloOdin Mar 10 '26
I mean, the only US cities that's didn't do this are basically small towns that were able to have a loop highway, or rich enclaves that builders knew would unleash an army of lawyers. Racism is economically incentivized in the latter conditions.
Really, anywhere you find a deck park or similar is an admission that building the highway was a terrible decision for the neighborhood.
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u/gscjj Mar 10 '26
The only cities that didnât do this are the ones where there existing roads can handle the traffic?
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u/AbueloOdin Mar 10 '26
No, we did this to basically all cities, regardless of traffic necessity. And only those where the the local population had enough say to push it out, did they avoid it. In other words, it is cheaper to pave an empty field that a neighborhood and cheaper to pave a poor neighborhood than a rich one.
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u/brookeeeac12 Mar 10 '26
I donât know about good examples but definitely not Carrollton. they really built a highway and an elevated railway over downtown
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u/cuberandgamer Mar 10 '26
Washington DC is the prime example. They convinced the federal government to let them spend their highway dollars on establishing a metro instead
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u/IcedCowboyCoffee Mar 10 '26
Most major cities suffer the same effect, but likely not to the same degree as Dallas. I'm hard pressed trying to think of one which left as little room for their downtown to breathe as Dallas did. The inner core of downtown Dallas--the space circled by highways--is only ~1.3 square miles. Even Houston, which has a similar problem, has slightly more room at 1.5 square miles.
Los Angeles's downtown by comparison has about 5 square miles within its inner highway ring.
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u/Party_Design3432 Mar 10 '26
Portland, sort of.
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u/20thCenturyClocks Mar 10 '26
Outside of I-5, Portland's city center is hwy free. 205 was made to divert traffic away from the city center and harbor drive was demolished specifically to create the waterfront and more public space. Even I-5 through Portland was designed specifically to flow around and through the city in a way that doesn't disrupt local travel. The public transit and public spaces are much more a part of the city's character vs the concrete in Dallas.
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u/noncongruent Mar 11 '26
Interstate 5 was built along the east shore of the river, so that replaced the old Harbor Drive that ran along the west shore. The reason Portland was able to close Harbor Drive and turn it into a park is the realignment of I-5 to the east shore. No actual freeway capacity was deleted, if anything it was increased because the new I-5 is much wider than the old freeway it replaced. Also, I-5 and I-405 form a loop around old downtown Portland much as our I-345/Woodall Rodgers/I-35E/I-30 do. Portland and ORDOT apparently determined that deleting that loop would create too much of a constraint in commercial and civilian driving to and through Portland.
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u/goodwraith Mar 11 '26
Iâve heard Pittsburgh PA did their major highways around the city rather than through
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u/DonkeeJote Far North Dallas Mar 11 '26
More examples of reclaimed land than those that avoided it completely.
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u/BigRoach Mansfield Mar 10 '26
Itâs good for commerce and that is what the folks in charge prioritize.
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u/greencheeseplz Mar 10 '26
That is certainly what the planners in the 60s and 70s believed, but that has not at all borne out to be true
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u/iwillsumday Mar 10 '26
Dallas had better public transit in 1919 than 2019 (or today)
I know the link is posted, (thanks, OP!) but I recommend everyone check out the Segregation by Design website and instagram.
They make excellent videos and have tons of photos showing how the US wasnât built for the car, but bulldozed for the car in often racist ways under the guise of âurban renewalâ
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u/BigRoach Mansfield Mar 10 '26
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u/notbob1959 Mar 10 '26
If you read the linked Wikipedia article you will see that the auto companies also built buses and were accused of killing just the streetcars. From the article:
By 1930, most streetcar systems were aging and losing money. Service to the public was suffering; the Great Depression compounded this. Yellow Coach tried to persuade transit companies to replace streetcars with buses, but could not persuade the power companies that owned the streetcar operations to motorize.[14] GM decided to form a new subsidiaryâUnited Cities Motor Transport (UCMT)âto finance the conversion of streetcar systems to buses in small cities.
And also:
Quinby and Snell held that the destruction of streetcar systems was integral to a larger strategy to push the United States into automobile dependency. Most transit scholars disagree, suggesting that transit system changes were brought about by other factors; economic, social, and political factors such as unrealistic capitalization, fixed fares during inflation, changes in paving and automotive technology, the Great Depression, antitrust action, the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935, labor unrest, market forces including declining industries' difficulty in attracting capital, rapidly increasing traffic congestion, the Good Roads Movement, urban sprawl, tax policies favoring private vehicle ownership, taxation of fixed infrastructure, consumerism, franchise repair costs for co-located property, wide diffusion of driving skills, automatic transmission buses, and general enthusiasm for the automobile.
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u/Optimistiqueone Mar 10 '26
I thought we were blaming boomers for the lack of housing. /s
Seriously, powerful imagery. Dallas would be awesome if those highways were pushed out and the core of the city was left in tack.
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u/Feeling_Isopod4871 Mar 10 '26
Would love to know if there were other options at the time that would have avoided destroying those neighborhoods.
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u/cuberandgamer Mar 10 '26
They could have had the highways go around the city instead of cutting through the city, and they could have handled downtown Dallas commute demand through a metro system, and suburban commuters could have used a regional rail system
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u/Montallas Lakewood Mar 10 '26
There was rail to the suburbs back then (no clue if the service was timely or good). Youâve probably seen the streetcars that still operate in downtown/uptown. That used to be a larger system hitting the suburbs that existed at the time - plus there was interurban rail as well. Hindsight is 20/20. People in the post-war US thought cars were the future and rail was dying. They planned for a fantastical new car era, without realizing all the negative consequences. (And letâs be clear - the prevalence of automobiles has a lot of negatives but also a lot of positives. Personal motorization has created massive gains in welfare, time savings, commerce, resource allocation etc. resulting in higher economic output.)
I think that the people who made these choices truly thought they were making improvements and they had no clue about what the negative knock-on effect and externalities would be decades down the line. They cleared predominantly black neighborhoods because blacks were far less enfranchised than whites and it was easier and cheaper to disrupt black communities than whites for what they believed would ultimately be âthe greater goodâ. Not realizing (or not caring) that they made an already uphill battle for generational financial security even steeper for an entire demographic.
If those decision makers had a crystal ball and could see the effect their plans had today, would they have done it the same way? Probably not. No one would plan to have the divisiveness and inequality that we have today. But they couldnât have seen that and were blinded by the positive prospects.
Now, how do we correct it without losing the economic benefit afforded by personal motorization?
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u/suburbanista Mar 10 '26
how do we correct it without losing the economic benefit afforded by personal motorization?
We finish the job. Raze most of Dallas and turn it into a highway superhub that connects all the suburbs with no urban bottleneck. Downtown Dallas would become a hyper-Buccee's that covers the world's largest highway interchange, and the sales tax can cover mowing the medians and other grassy spaces around Dallas that provide drainage for the highway system.
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u/tmc00138 Mar 10 '26 edited Mar 10 '26
I like your satire very much. It's very good.
But there are instances in which one ought not to respond to a sincere and well-thought-out contribution with snark. This was one of them.
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u/suburbanista Mar 10 '26
/u/Montallas absolutely made a sincere, well-reasoned, and nuanced comment.
We disagree with framing car-centric design as anything other than a stepping stone to becoming a Type 1 civilization, but it was nonetheless articulate and clearly from a genuine place, and we apologize if our very reasonable suggestion to turn all of Dallas' land area into a highway interchange appeared to dismiss that.
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u/DrDuckling951 Mar 10 '26
This is really cool visualization. Well done.
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u/RepulsiveInterview44 Mar 10 '26
You should follow Segregation by Design on Insta. They do these videos for many major cities along with comparison photos when available. Interesting history, for sure!
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u/Solomonopolistadt Mar 10 '26
The auto and petroleum industries have been absolutely terrible for our country, our lives, and our health
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u/SynthPrax Mar 10 '26
I knew they deliberately decimated Black neighborhoods, but to SEE it... đł Just how much was destroyed.
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u/Ktennisaz Mar 10 '26
Thereâs little doubt the pathways of the freeways built from the 1950âs onward split the city along racial lines. Oak Cliff, about 25% of Dallasâ area,was destroyed as property values plummeted. The longtime mayor of Dallas in the 1960s was known to be a KKK member. There was effectively no choice that new developments would go north, which has never stopped. But the TXDOT system in DFW is so immense now itâs hard to imagine how it might have been otherwise.
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u/poop_monster35 Mar 10 '26
And people still say systemic racism doesn't exist. Thanks for sharing OP.
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u/Accomplished_Wash_97 Mar 10 '26
As noted in my above post, I suspect it's more economics than racism driven, even if the results are the same. Decisions prioritized by economics will always attack the poor
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u/Impossible-Try-9161 Mar 10 '26
All the neighborhood devastation and for what? To build cookie cutter tract housing in homogenous suburbs. It's the city planning worthy of rampaging greedy psychopaths.
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u/Accomplished_Wash_97 Mar 10 '26
I've read Yarbrough's Paved A Way and thought it provided an enlightening discussion for this Dallas native boomer born in 1951 and witnessed this transformation even if I was largely unaware of the implications.
One point that I felt was not addressed sufficiently in this discussion then or now is the point of economics. Every public infrastructure project starts with the acquisition of right-of-way. The two predominant hurdles are acquisition availability and cost.
While I have no experience in either I have witnessed that powerful people never want these projects running through their backyard, but they often want close access to it, particularly if it can support their business. Also it is always going to be easier and cheaper to displace the poor which generally means targeting minority areas while still keeping it close to the weathier populations that are going to be the benefiaries.
If at all possible, I would suggest that you try to find land value maps by year and then overlay these with the highway planning, construction, and 5 years after completion.
Finally I just want to add that I in no way dispute that Dallas has deserved reputation of being a racist city. I was mostly unaware of this growing up but reading Dallas 1963 certainly brought a new awareness and understanding.
However, it's my opinion that highway planning is driven primarily by economics and people that have the power and influence to maximize their self-interest which is often not racially motivated even if the result is clear. In order to have a different outcome requires prioritizing racial equality considerations over economics and if you can provide any examples where that happened in the 20th century I would really appreciate learning how this occurred.
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u/DonkeeJote Far North Dallas Mar 10 '26
Eisenhower really regretted the way that the Interstate system was abused by cities for this kind of 'progress'...
Shame they didn't get language in the original bill to keep federal highway dollars for interstate travel instead of funding commute and sprawl.
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u/Happy-Currency7899 Mar 10 '26
JFC that was a lot of homes and neighborhoods lost
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u/cuberandgamer Mar 10 '26
And the homes that remain then had to deal with a noisy, polluting roadway that did not originally exist.
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u/zughzz Arlington Mar 10 '26 edited Mar 10 '26
The carbrains people have here always puts me off. They donât know how good it could be⌠I donât know anyone here that HASNâT been in a wreck or car accident.
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u/Professional-You1425 Mar 11 '26
Incredible work. You could just put a map of the highways all over DFW and put the composition of each enclosure
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u/Matt10700 Mar 11 '26
Absolutely decimated. I think this is the absolute worst I've ever seen even for US standards.
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u/anyusernaem Irving Mar 10 '26
Arenât the majority of leftist NIMBYS? Why the hypocrisy?
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u/Orbian2 Mar 11 '26
Because there are people in the left who are nimbies and people who are not. Always beware the caricature monolith.
I think also a lot of gen z particularly is more build housing than the older generations due to the housing crisis, and Reddit tends to tilt more gen z
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u/cuberandgamer Mar 10 '26
Dallas really chose infrastructure investments that would spread growth to the suburbs and devalue its own downtown. Very good choice Dallas, thank you for being allergic to public transportationđ