This article was developed as part of the “roadsTaken” project, which documents the history of highway planning, construction, and displacement in Houston, Texas.
This section attempts to answer the project’s central research question: Why were Houston’s freeways built where they are?
The newly released highway database published by roadsTaken connects the proposed “Race Restriction Areas” from the 1929 Houston City Planning Commission to the eventual routes of the city’s urban freeways, adopted two decades later. The city planners’ strategy for segregation relied on “mutual agreement,” reducing the size of certain Black neighborhoods while expanding others, and noting that transportation infrastructure such as railroads can serve as “natural lines of demarcation.”[1] As the Houston freeway system was planned and developed over the next two decades, highways replaced bayous and railroads as the main lines segregating neighborhoods. They also simultaneously were built to clear city blocks that had “deteriorated into slum areas,” according to Texas Highway Department planners.[2]The consequences of highway displacement significantly reshaped the …