Will DiBella's WRIT-150 Blog

 After World War II, the federal government determined that the best way to improve the country was to invest heavily in the highway system. Early in urban development African Americans were put into small corners of cities, the least desirable areas that no white person wanted to live in. These neighborhoods were targeted as urban blight and removed as the government subsidized slum clearance and urban renewal. This article explains how the “separate but equal” decision made in Plessy v. Ferguson led to the government allowing and even encouraging redlining and segregating African Americans due to the subsidies provided to build highways as urban renewal. City leaders targeted African American communities to be destroyed to build these highways which contributed to the development of the suburbs and how since white taxpayers left city centers the city couldn’t provide for the African Americans left who didn’t have the money to take care of themselves. Ultimately cities should tear...

New Orleans’ Claiborne Avenue was once a wide street with a collection of diverse citizens that provided an important color to New Orleans’ downtown. Creoles, Haitian refugees, white Creoles, and Caribbean and European immigrants all called Claiborne home. It wasn’t particularly wealthy but it was an important part of New Orleans’ diversity. It was an example of good urbanism with oak trees planted along the ground, growing to provide shade in the hot, swampy summers of the South. It also included green spaces and a waterfront for its residents, had mixed commercial and residential buildings, and people walked all along it, not needing cars to get anywhere. However, America’s car dependency soon destroyed this vibrant community. An expressway was built right through Claiborne and poverty, blight, and crime now run rampant. It was hit especially hard by Katrina in 2006. The best way to right the wrongs done to Claiborne is something that should happen all across the country: the removal...