Using $2 million in federal grant funding, Baltimore officials will start developing a plan to reconnect Black neighborhoods by potentially demolishing a stretch of thoroughfare that displaced hundreds of families amid a failed highway construction project decades ago.
The city’s so-called “Highway to Nowhere” was designed to connect the downtown business district to interstates surrounding Baltimore, and officials used eminent domain to demolish nearly 1,000 homes in the 1960s and ’70s, cutting a wide swath through predominantly middle class neighborhoods in majority-Black west Baltimore.
But construction of the thoroughfare was never finished — partly because residents in whiter, more affluent communities successfully campaigned against it — and the endeavor became largely pointless.
The project has received renewed attention in recent years as Baltimore leaders seek to address longstanding sources of inequity that have helped shape the city, which remains heavily segregated along racial and economic lines.
Click here to read the rest of the article written by Lea Skene over at NBC Washington
