This is an excerpt from "The Unfinished Metropolis: Igniting the City-Building Revolution" (Island Press, October 2025), which is available wherever fine books are sold as well as via Amazon.
Imagine freeways along Lady Bird Lake in Austin, through Georgetown in Washington, along the beach in Santa Monica, through the French Quarter in New Orleans, or bisecting Cambridge between Harvard and MIT. Freeway builders had their sights set on all these places. They would’ve had their way, too, if not for the meddling protesters who foiled their schemes. The freeway revolt of the 1960s and '70s changed the course of American history, saving some of the nation’s oldest and most-beautiful neighborhoods.
But its legacy is defined as much by the communities that weren’t saved as those that were.
San Franciscans did not have to imagine what freeways would do to the most cherished places in the city. In the 1950s, they looked on in horror as the Embarcadero Freeway went up along the city’s downtown waterfront. Since the turn of the 20th century, the view down Market Street had been punctuated by the Ferry Building’s elegant clock tower, with the great blue of San Francisco Bay stretching out beyond. But now, that view was blocked by the freeway, and the Ferry Building was cast in permanent shadow.
It was clear that planned freeways in other scenic locations, like in Golden Gate Park and the Marina District, would have a similarly calamitous effect. Just a month after the Embarcadero freeway opened in 1959, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted against the construction of seven out of nine planned freeways across the city, defying the wishes of the governor and mayor. In doing so, they effectively rejected $280 million in federal funding, the equivalent of nearly $3 billion today.
If money talks, saying no to those kinds of figures was a powerful statement. All of a sudden, grassroots anti-freeway campaigns gained a new sense of confidence. In New York City, a group of activists led by Jane Jacobs stopped Robert Moses’s Lower Manhattan Expressway that would have cut through Greenwich Village.
Many other leading freeway fighters were women — like Barbara Mikulski in Baltimore and Nancy Rising in Bellevue, Washington — who would go on to have illustrious political careers. In contrast to the hypermasculine, “straight line crazy” ethos of the highway builders, these women were grassroots activists who were steeped in their communities. They highlighted the street-level impacts of freeways that builders and politicians refused to see. For this, they took a great deal of sexist abuse from highwaymen like Moses, who dismissed his adversaries as "nothing but a bunch of mothers."
Eventually, the powers that be came to see that the freeway fighters, mothers or not, had a point. Over the course of the 1960s and early '70s, a series of policy changes were enacted making it progressively harder for highwaymen to built — and easier for activists to stand in their way. These changes culminated in the National Environmental Policy Act, signed by President Richard Nixon in 1970, which required all major federally funded projects, including Interstates, to undergo an environmental review process that gave activists the opportunity to challenge or alter planned freeways.
Then, in 1971, a lawsuit against a freeway that would cut through Overton Park in Memphis resulted in a Supreme Court decision that gave courts a wide latitude to review administrative actions, setting the stage for more successful legal challenges against freeways.
There were impressive moments of racial solidarity in these freeway fights. One reporter described the fight against Moses’s Franklin Expressway in Baltimore as "the greatest boon to race relations here in years." But in other ways, the freeway revolt only reinforced the racial and spatial divides that defined the freeway-building era. Many of the places that were saved, like Beverly Hills and Brookline, were already wealthy and white. Others, like the Haight-Ashbury and Greenwich Village, were experiencing the early waves of what would be termed gentrification.
By contrast, in low-income urban neighborhoods unable to halt the freeway, properties that could have become nest eggs for generations were razed when they were worth pennies on the dollar of their current value. In Washington DC, the construction of I-695 and I-395 resulted in the loss of nearly half a million dollars in home equity for each of the 1,400 homes that were destroyed. In St. Paul, the home equity lost to the construction of I-94 resulted in a $160 million loss in value by 2018. In Portland’s Lower Albina district, the construction of I-5 and other urban renewal projects wiped out an estimated $1.4 billion in home equity. Freeways were thus a significant contributor to the racial wealth gap, illustrating how the harms of decisions made decades ago can compound over time.
The same goes for the disparate health impacts of freeways. While many white neighborhoods were spared from these pollution conveyor belts, nearby communities of color were left to bear the burden of foul air for generations. Exposure to car and truck exhaust is linked to increased risk of heart disease, lung cancer, and asthma. Research also shows a connection between vehicle emissions and cognitive, neurological, and reproductive problems.
As with freeway-driven displacement, there has never been a comprehensive, nationwide accounting of the pollution or climate impacts of freeways. But we do know that transportation is America’s single largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, of which cars and trucks make up the largest share. Vehicles in Texas alone are responsible for 0.5 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, more climate-warming gases than many countries produce.
When it comes to the health impacts of all this pollution, the anecdotal ac- counts of people who live next to freeways speak volumes. Marcia Ladiana’s house directly faces the Kensington Expressway in Buffalo. The freeway never lets her forget it. The smells and sounds of the cars constantly stimulate the senses, making it difficult to sleep. Whenever she dusts her home, Ladiana finds a layer of black soot covering every surface. Her neighbors have been afflicted by an all-too-familiar list of health conditions: heart disease, deafness, lung cancer.
"People are getting sick left and right," Ladiana said. “You really can’t escape it."
From chapter 7, pages 156-159, of "The Unfinished Metropolis: Igniting the City-Building Revolution," copyright © 2025, by Benjamin Schneider by permission of Island Press, Washington, D.C.
