Quote Originally Posted by Hermod View Post
The article is crap full of J-school ignorance and lack of research.

1. The Chrysler Freeway including the I-375 stretch was conceived and planned by Detroit long before the suburbs were settled in any significant manner. The purpose of the freeways was to facilitate movement through the city and not to get suburbanites downtown.

2. The elimination of Hastings Street was not an unfortunate byproduct of the expressway. It was deliberately planned to run up Hastings Street in order to eliminate "the worst of the slums". Eliminating Hastings Street was touted as one of the "advantages" of that particular alignment.

3. The alignment of the expressways was in Detroit's master plan long before the feds developed the interstate highway system.

Like it or not, that is the truth.
Isn't number 1 the law of unintended consquences? Sure the freeways were thought of to facilitate movement in the city but it ended up that we could build freeways stretching out the suburbs where people could live and they could work downtown and take their car into downtown core. However, it did that then created auto/freeway-oriented development which aided in the depopulation of the city.

Number 2, ah yes a bunch of powerful white men standing around deciding what's best for a black neighborhood. Instead of helping turning the Hastings St. into a more liveable and viable neighborhood, they destroy it and build a freeway. Thus causing black residents to move into other neighborhoods that some were near white neighborhood or they tried to move into predominately white neighborhoods causing said white Detroiters to become nervous, then pack up and leave to the suburbs because they can live away from black people and have easy access into the city via the freeways mentioned above.