WHITE ROADS THROUGH BLACK BEDROOMS.

A Guardian report by Johnny Miller points out the downside of the Social Engineering Vice.

Nowhere is infrastructure so obviously divisive as with the vast interstate highway system. Ubiquitous, generally free and heavily used, it’s undeniably a vital part of the American experience. There are more than one million miles of federal aid highways in the US, which cost $105bn a year to maintain. If American highway spending were a country, it would have the world’s 63rd largest GDP, just behind Morocco. But while these roads unify and connect millions of the country’s citizens, they’ve also excluded and destroyed many black communities.

That was deliberate, both in a Sundown Towns sort of way, and in an Urban Renewal sort of way.

In the 1950s, a vast increase in cars was beginning to clog the roads to and from the new suburbs. The federal government poured money into the brand new interstate system, encouraging radials, arteries and thoroughfares through dense urban neighbourhoods. This also presented city planners with what seemed an unprecedented opportunity – to use federal funds to clear out “slums” and open up vast tracts of land.

Yes, vast tracts of land for parking craters, for in some cases roads to nowhere, or roads that later were removed, or perhaps for which the only possible use is a sports arena. But that will be a rant for another day.