Who Was Displaced by Houston’s Freeways?

Interstate 10, Houston, Texas. Photo by Ken Lund (CC BY-SA 2.0).

Every day at The Overhead Wire we sort through over 1,500 news items about cities and share the best ones with our email list. Each week, we take some of the most popular stories and share them with Urban Milwaukee readers. They are national (or international) links, sometimes entertaining and sometimes absurd, but hopefully useful.

A rainway vs an atmospheric river: Vancouver BC had just completed a new rainway, an engineered creek that would collect and filter water instead of releasing it into the storm drain. Just after completion, the new green infrastructure would face its biggest test, an atmospheric river that would dump more water on the city than seen previously. The rainway preformed it’s job and no water was seen spilling into the overflow which showed its value. The next test will be if the city sees a drought. (Christopher Cheung | The Tyee)

Highway displacement in Houston: Using historic maps and data, the Baker Institute at Rice University has taken a look at who was displaced as Houston’s highway system was constructed between 1946 and 1974. They found that 41% of folks displaced by highway expansion were Black as 11,000 structures were destroyed or moved to build the road. The research also serves as a model for other cities and regions to follow as they think about rebuilding or replacing their highways. (Edward M. Emmett et al. | Baker Institute of Public Policy)

Rise of self storage in Philly: As rising interest rates and the housing shortage made it harder for families to move into bigger homes, the self storage industry boomed. While the need has subsided a bit since the pandemic, Philadelphia’s self storage industry continues to grow. Customers don’t want to travel too far from their storage site, so more spaces are built near where people live and Philly will soon have 7.3 million square feet of storage space. (Jake Blumgart and Ryan W. Briggs | Philadelphia Inquirer)

Impacts of homeless sweeps: After a recent Supreme Court decision, more US cities are doing sweeps of homeless encampments in order to keep people from staying in any one place for long periods of time. But during these sweeps, a lot of personal belongings are destroyed or thrown away. Pro Publica looked into the items that were lost and how those losses set people’s progress back. (Ruth Talbot et al. | Pro Publica)

New perspective on visual impairment: An art installation/research project at Brown University put together by students shared how visually impaired people experience sidewalks and intersections. People can look through a viewfinder at an intersection and flip through dials to experience different conditions such as macular generation or cataracts. The students hope that it shows what blind people go through when navigating space and creates more of an understanding for design and public policy. (Maggie Spear | Brown University News)

Quote of the Week

Any change to the street — whether it is adding something or removing something — I would expect very likely to cost the same as installing something. And also consider it’s not just taking out some bollards for the bike lanes. It’s the signage, the pavement marking, the operational changes to the intersections. So it needs to be well-planned and designed to understand what’s the scope of the change.

–Margaret Parkhill of Arcadis in Global News Canada discussing the costs of the Ford government’s wishes to remove bike lanes in Toronto.

This week on the Talking Headways podcast, we’re joined by architect Vishaan Chakrabarti to talk about his book The Architecture of Urbanity: Designing for Nature, Culture, and Joy.

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