John Petro

Lessons from Jane Jacobs

A new book about urban theorist Jane Jacobs is a wonderful reminder about how close New York City was to being destroyed by the urban renewal plans of the middle of the 20th century. Plans were drawn up that would have placed a ten-lane elevated expressway through what is now SoHo, Little Italy, Chinatown, and the Lower East Side. Jacobs led the fight to stop the expressway and save these neighborhoods, a battle that, in hindsight, was one of the most important ever fought in New York City.

Reading a new piece in the New York Review of Books, I remembered exactly what these grand plans were all about: channeling federal dollars to New York City. The Lower Manhattan Expressway, or Lomax as it was to be called, was slated to receive 90 percent federal funding.

It was the federal commitment to building expressways that has largely shaped the way that our cities and suburbs developed after World War II. If the federal government had supported transit on the same scale as superhighways, it is likely that the Second Avenue Subway, now slated to open sometime in 2017, would have been completed 50 years ago.

We still have a situation in which the federal government favors highway projects over transit projects. "But no one rides transit," say the conservative and libertarian pundits. But of course, if you don't build viable transit options, no one will ride transit. Now we're seeing huge transit ridership in cities that have made new investments in light rail like Charlotte, Denver, and Salt Lake City. That's not to mention the 5 million daily trips made on the New York City Transit system.

Some cities are stuck with the superhighways that were carved into their urban fabric fifty or sixty years ago. Some communities are working to have these inducers of blight removed. The little-used Sheridan Expressway in the Bronx has been targeted by community groups for demolition, following in the footsteps of other cities like Milwaukee and San Francisco who have also torn down urban expressways.

It seems that nearly 50 years after Jacobs' Death and Life of Great American Cities was published, we are finally implementing her common sense teachings about how cities that are made for people work well, and how cities made for cars work less well.

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Posted at 3:12 PM, Jul 31, 2009 in Urban Affairs
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