Freeways and Fortnite - Wednesday Wrap-up Jan. 6, 2021
Why some urban expressways are relics; gamers head back to the mall; and historic preservation hits the surburbs.
1. Renewed Push for Urban Highway Removal
I’ve been a transportation nerd since I saw this sign appear on the way home from a family trip to Carolina Beach in 1991. Crews had just finished construction on the last segment of I-40 to Wilmington, helping us avoid the two-lane state highway with its speed-trap sheriffs and slow-moving farm equipment. The fact that the same road stretched across the continent left a huge impression on my 8-year-old mind. (The sign is popular; it’s been stolen and replaced at least 4 times since)
That last piece of I-40 was one of the final projects in the Interstate Highway Program begun during the Eisenhower administration in 1956. It’s the type of large-scale federal infrastructure project that seems politically impossible today (states and local governments now provide nearly 80% of all infrastructure funding). But the interstates required their own political maneuvering. To gain consensus, politicians couched the roads as defense highways that would enable quick evacuation from nuclear attack. The program’s cost and schedule overruns won’t surprise anyone who follows road and transit construction today. It took three times as long (35 years) and cost four times as much ($114 billion) as initially planned to build the roughly 50,000-miles of divided highways.
Most of the construction took place in the 50s and 60s, and most of the routes followed former rail lines, bypassing smaller towns for quicker routes between urban hubs. While many of the towns that had been reliant on passers-through along old state highways saw their downtowns wither in the years to come, the interstate’s benefits were clear. Along with standardized container shipping (whose inventor, Malcolm McLean, was also from eastern North Carolina), the interstate system would facilitate the movement of domestic and international goods that would open rural areas to industrial development as increased mechanization rapidly reduced the need for agricultural workers. (Marc Levison’s book on containers, The Box, is a great overview of containerization. Really, it’s fascinating.)
In larger cities, suburbanization and redlining had already taken a toll on urban neighborhoods. A second federal program - urban renewal - combined with the interstate system to allow cities to use federal funding to build their own expressways through urban areas, often clearing out older industrial hubs and poorer, predominantly black neighborhoods to build them.
With a goal of increased traffic flow, these urban expressways might have made it easier for suburban commuters (for a while), but they ultimately constrained urban growth. As demand for urban office and residential space grew in the 1990s and 2000s, urban highways became noisy barriers to pedestrian activity and place-making, sitting on increasingly valuable land.
This was particularly true of highways along waterfronts. As heavy industry moved away from urban areas, opportunities for brownfield or waterfront redevelopment became possible, but highways in river cities like Louisville and Saint Louis stood in the way. Louisville’s is the most egregious example I’ve seen. There’s nice greenspace there but it’s hard to enjoy it with a six-lane highway and multiple junctions above.
Neighborhood opposition killed some planned urban projects, but the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989, which led to the collapse of the portion of elevated roadway along the Embarcadero in San Francisco, became the most visible symbol in the push for demolishing urban highways.
Since 1987, the Congress on New Urbanism reports at least 20 downtown or waterfront freeway segments have been demolished. Others have chosen to reroute highways underground, most infamously Boston’s “Big Dig.” Most recently, Seattle removed the Alaskan Way Viaduct along its downtown waterfront.
The Congress on New Urbanism’s Freeways Without Futures list reimagines what some US cities might look like without their “apple-corer” urban freeways. They also coordinate advocacy efforts for cities and community groups pushing for highway removal.
Work from home arrangements that reduce traffic volumes, especially in urban cores, present an opportunity to reconsider how urban freeways constrain the type of urban growth that creates places people want to live and play. This summer, as my hometown of Charlotte was putting the final touches on its comprehensive plan, a tongue-in-cheek movement to turn the I-277 downtown loop into a river with a waterfront made its way around Twitter. The thread is great for a laugh, but this rendering, showing enough space for a linear park and the river is a great visual of what we gave up for faster travel times.
2. Gamers Head Back to the Mall
Interstates also made the suburban shopping mall possible. Since the early 2000s, though, indoor shopping centers have lost a lot of luster. The large department-store-anchored buildings aren’t easy to repurpose, leaving them especially vulnerable to newer competition. The rapid growth of e-commerce, especially during the pandemic, is likely to intensify the rate of mall closures. Business Insider put together a nice explainer video on the rise and fall of the mall below.
It’s become common to see social services or local government offices set up shop in abandoned anchors. Call centers in older big box centers have also proved popular. But a New Year’s weekend announcement hints at a more hopeful director for some malls.
Epic Games, the software developer behind the popular world-building online game Fortnite, announced plans to buy the Cary Towne Center Mall in North Carolina’s Raleigh-Durham market, turning it into a global HQ. Epic joins companies like Google, which converted the Westside Pavilion mall in Los Angeles (featured in the 1995 Gen-X Zeitgeist classic “Clueless”) into tech offices, Rackspace, which turned the defunct Windsor Park Mall in San Antonio into an HQ nicknamed “the Castle,” and Ford, which converted a old Lord and Taylor store in Dearborn, Michigan, into offices for some of its engineers.
Some commercial real estate thinkers have speculated that campus-style offices could become more popular in light of social distancing requirements and broader suburbanization. While that remains to be seen, the movement of a video game company into an old mall, whose heydays coincided with the peak of arcade culture, is a “full circle” moment.
This clip from a 1982 Boston fight over arcade games, in addition to some hilarious quotes, shows how zoning might have had something to do with the rise of the arcade. After complaints, neighborhood stores and laundromats in mostly residential areas were zoned out of offering arcade games. They moved to “commercial” areas like malls.
3. Historic Preservation Heads to the Suburbs
As you can tell from the last item, suburban shopping malls evoke nostalgia among Gen-Xers and older millennials who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s. While its hard to think of shopping malls as “historic,” many of these malls, and the suburban environments surrounding them, are becoming old enough to qualify for historic preservation protections.
Rules vary from city to city and district to district, but as a general rule, buildings 50 years or older can qualify for the National Register of Historic Places. As of last week, that means buildings from 1971 or earlier could qualify for some protections. As early as 2003, some wonks raised red flags about the idea of strip malls taking advantage of historic preservation tax breaks.
This brings up the question, when do buildings change from “old” to “historic?” Reading newspapers from the 1950s and 1960s, complaints about “obsolete” Victorian homes and shopping promenades were common, yet today many of these surviving buildings are considered antique treasures. It will be interesting to see what suburban subdivisions or shopping malls might qualify in the future.
EXTRA. Book Review: One Billion Americans and The Riches of This Land
I have a review out in ArcDigital of Matthew Yglesias’ One Billion Americans and Jim Tankersley’s The Riches of This Land, two books that present broad proposals for the future of the American middle class. Yglesias argues for a tripling of the population through natalist policies and an increase in immigration. Tankersley argues that recapturing the spirit of the Civil Rights movement will help promote inclusive economic growth. From the review:
“The narrative that the rise of the global poor has come at the expense of the American middle class hampers our ability to compete on the global stage, Yglesias argues. And the narrative that the rise of a black and Hispanic middle class has come at the expense of the white middle class, Tankersley writes, limits our ability to cooperate within the United States. Ultimately, for both, an American resurgence demands that we abandon self-defeating narratives.”
I recommend checking both books out.