Most communities have a few examples of “bulldoze the city to serve commuters” street projects and in my hometown of Dallas, they're particularly prevalent. You’ll be walking through a delightful streetcar suburb with its safe and navigable gridded streets, surrounded by historic homes, four-plexes and courtyard apartments when you’ll suddenly encounter a high-speed road with long curves that make it impossible to see if it’s safe to cross. It feels out of place because this kind of road was forced on a neighborhood that was never designed for it.

Destroying our City to Save It?

Like most inner-city neighborhoods in the US, Old East Dallas fell upon hard times in the 1960s and 1970s as new highways offered the promise of swift transport to the newly built subdivisions away from the city center. Today, Old East Dallas is one of the more charming and coveted neighborhoods in Dallas, so it’s hard to understand why the City thought it was a good idea to demolish houses for new roads. Some digging into newspaper archives from the time reveals that, at the urging of the Chamber of Commerce, a whole slew of street-widenings were planned across the area.

Many of these projects were described by the business leaders as efforts to make commuting and shopping more convenient. The logic fell along the lines of “If we can just make our streets as fast as the highways, merchants can compete with the convenience of car-based shopping in the new suburbs.”

Fortunately, many of these projects, like the four-lane expansion of Junius Street, a quiet residential street, never came to pass, which means that the home values and safety of the neighborhood were preserved.