Roads Taken: Mapping Highway Displacement in Houston

“Houston today is the American present and future,” wrote Ada Louise Huxtable in 1976. This poster seeks to uncover a part of Houston and America’s past that was paved over by the infrastructure of the future. As Houston’s population quadrupled from 1940 to 1980, city planners designed and built one of the largest networks of urban freeways in the world. Heralded as marvels of the modern age, these superhighways had an intense cost under their concrete. In the three and a half decades from 1946 to 1980, highway construction cleared over eleven thousand structures and displaced at least twenty thousand residents from both old and new neighborhoods. This poster presents a new methodology for cataloging the demographic information of displaced Houstonians as well as mapping the historical built environment erased by highways.

Using local and state archives, the research constructs a comprehensive database and map of the buildings and people in Houston displaced by freeway building. By cross-referencing right-of-way records, census rolls, census tract statistics, Sanborn fire insurance maps, city directories, tax assessor maps, and historical aerial photography, the database identifies the residents displaced in Houston from 1946 to 1980. The compiled historical data is open to the public for download and is displayed in a series of geographic overlays on the poster and the project’s interactive website. The methodology could serve as a model for similar research in other U.S. cities.

This poster uses the newly-constructed highway database to connect Houston government planning maps to segregate the city to the routes of the city’s urban freeways adopted decades later. Texas Highway Department planners also spoke of neighborhoods that had “deteriorated into slum areas.” By comparing these maps–along with HOLC “redlining” maps, railroad maps, and maps of industrial areas–to the neighborhoods that in the opinion of city and state planners were “suffering from urban blight,” such the predominantly Black Fourth, Fifth, and Third Wards, the poster argues that these Texas and Houston planners created plans that disproportionately displaced Black Houstonians. The database shows that Black residents were more than twice as likely as the average Houston resident to be displaced by urban freeway construction.