A research atlas
The Atlas documents how urban renewal destroyed Mexican-American and African-American communities across the twentieth century, recovers the record of the people who organized against the policies, and carries what those organizers learned into the fights now underway in the twenty-first century.
The documented record
Place records report different units. Family, resident, business, land, and building totals remain separate and do not add to one displacement figure. Read the counting method.
Three goals at once
Record
Each essay names the blocks, churches, union halls, cafes, canneries, and corner stores that vanished. When the archives permit, it names the families too. A specific record lets a reader see each displacement as an act against specific people on a specific block in a specific year.
Recover
Communities have organized against urban renewal since the policies began. The Cooper Square Committee defeated Robert Moses on the Lower East Side in 1970. Eighty-two farmworker families bought Cabrillo Village as a cooperative in 1976. The Malone Community Center has anchored Black Lincoln since 1942. Their victories receive the same weight as the destruction.
Transfer
The site links every place to the organizing groups still active there. Where a historical case applies to a current fight, the essay names the parallel and identifies methods that present organizers might borrow from earlier campaigns. A forthcoming section on data-center displacement will carry the same method into rural and exurban counties.
Cities in version 5
San Pedro and Ventura County
Terminal Island cleared in forty-eight hours in February 1942. The Harbor Freeway cut through Mexican-American Wilmington and South Los Angeles in the 1950s. La Colonia in Oxnard faced a cancelled urban-renewal plan in the early 1960s. Cabrillo Village in Saticoy became a farmworker cooperative in 1976.
Read the city →Malone and the Antelope Valley
The Malone neighborhood, sometimes called T-Town, is the Black enclave that the Malone Community Center has anchored since 1942. Interstate 180 and the Antelope Valley Project redrew the ground between 1968 and 2012. The University of Nebraska extended eastward into Clinton and Hartley. The archival record is thin, and the Atlas treats the thinness as part of the subject.
Read the city →The Moses era and its afterlives
San Juan Hill became Lincoln Center between 1955 and 1966 at the cost of about seven thousand families and eight hundred businesses. The Cross Bronx Expressway displaced roughly sixty thousand people. The Cooper Square Committee defeated the Moses plan for the Lower East Side in 1970 and kept defeating successor plans. Columbia University carried the Manhattanville expansion into West Harlem after 2003.
Read the city →Maxwell Street and Bronzeville
The city cleared 630 acres for the UIC Circle Campus in 1961 and erased the open-air market that had anchored Jewish, Mexican-American, and African-American commerce for a century. The Chicago Land Clearance Commission bulldozed a wide corridor through the Black Belt after 1948 for the Lake Meadows and Prairie Shores towers. The DuSable Heritage Association and the Maxwell Street Foundation carry the record.
Read the city →Tremé and Iberville
The I-10 Claiborne Expressway cut the oldest continuously inhabited African-American neighborhood in the United States in 1966, destroying more than 500 oak trees and the Black commercial spine. HUD demolished the Iberville projects in 2013 under HOPE VI while tens of thousands of Black residents remained displaced by Katrina.
Read the city →Freedmen's Town and the Second Ward
Freedmen's Town, founded by African-American freedpeople in 1865 just west of downtown, laid its own brick streets and lost most of its fabric to Allen Parkway Village clearance, I-45 construction, and decades of downtown expansion. TxDOT's I-45 NHHIP proposes to take hundreds of homes, churches, and schools in the Second Ward and Fifth Ward now.
Read the city →Black Bottom and Paradise Valley
The 1946 Detroit Plan, the Lafayette Park urban-renewal superblock, and the I-75 and I-375 freeways together erased Black Bottom and the Hastings Street commercial corridor between 1950 and 1964. The Black Bottom Archives and Detroit People's Platform now carry the I-375 Reconnecting Communities removal fight.
Read the city →Rondo
Interstate 94 cut the heart of St. Paul's Rondo neighborhood between 1956 and 1968 and took 700 homes, 300 businesses, and 600 Black families. ReConnect Rondo now proposes a 21-acre land bridge over I-94 with 350 to 1,400 permanently affordable units.
Read the city →Overtown
Overtown held 50,000 African-American and Afro-Bahamian residents before I-95 and I-395 cut through its core in the mid-1960s. The Black Archives of South Florida carry the record. Climate gentrification and Brightline transit pressure now push new capital onto Overtown's high ground.
Read the city →Fillmore and Western Addition
Redevelopment Areas A-1 and A-2 displaced 20,000 to 30,000 residents of Japantown, the Fillmore, and the Western Addition from 1948 through the mid-1970s. WACO v. SFRA in 1968 won a rare federal injunction that forced replacement housing commitments. Japantown's CHESS plan carries the fight forward.
Read the city →West Side and HemisFair '68
HemisFair '68 cleared 2,239 residences and 686 businesses from the Mexican-American neighborhood east of downtown for the world's fair. COPS formed in 1974 and channeled that record into forty years of West Side bond campaigns, with its method now active against TxDOT I-35 expansion and Bexar County data-center siting.
Read the city →Barrio Logan and Chicano Park
I-5 and the Coronado Bridge, built through Barrio Logan in 1969, displaced approximately 5,000 Mexican-American residents. On April 22, 1970, community members occupied the bridge-pylon land and created Chicano Park. The murals painted on the pylons since 1973 make the park a National Historic Landmark and one of the rare full-victory cases in the atlas.
Read the city →West Oakland and the Cypress Freeway
The Acorn Redevelopment Project cleared more than 50 blocks and displaced hundreds of families through the 1960s. The Cypress Freeway (I-880) and I-980 took another 600 or more households. The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake collapsed the elevated Cypress structure; West Oakland organizers converted the removal into Mandela Parkway, one of the few freeway-to-boulevard victories in the United States.
Read the city →Southwest Quadrant
The DC Redevelopment Act of 1950 cleared 99 percent of the buildings in Southwest Washington and displaced more than 23,000 residents. The clearance produced Berman v. Parker (1954), the Supreme Court ruling that defined blight broadly enough to authorize private-use takings, which shaped urban renewal law across the country for a generation.
Read the city →Lower Hill District
The Civic Arena clearance displaced approximately 8,000 residents from the Lower Hill between 1956 and 1958. The organizing lineage of the displaced community runs forward through the Hill Community Development Corporation, Bethel AME, and the 2008 One Hill Community Benefits Agreement. August Wilson's plays give the Lower Hill one of the most fully realized literary records of any displaced neighborhood in the atlas.
Read the city →New in version 5
Version 5 extends the atlas's data-center track to eight anchor places documenting how data-center siting externalizes costs onto utility ratepayers and rural working-class communities across the South, Plains, Southwest, Mountain West, and Pacific Northwest.
About the project
Read the project motivation, the research methodology, the editorial standard, and the bibliographies that ground every essay.