Cities
The atlas at research depth
Fifteen cities anchor the historical atlas. Each entry carries its own essays, georeferenced maps, and sources. Open a city to reach the places inside. Version 5 also carries eight data-center anchors, reached through /data-centers.
Chicago metropolitan area
Chicago
Maxwell Street and Bronzeville carry Chicago's record of clearance, the first under university expansion, the second under Title I toward Lake Meadows and Prairie Shores.
2 places
Metro Detroit
Detroit
Black Bottom and Paradise Valley held Detroit's African-American commercial and cultural core. Lafayette Park urban renewal and I-375 erased both between 1950 and 1964.
1 place
Houston-The Woodlands-Sugar Land
Houston
Freedmen's Town and the Second Ward hold Houston's record of Black and Mexican-American displacement, from the 1865 freedpeople's settlement to the ongoing I-45 NHHIP takings.
2 places
Lincoln metropolitan area
Lincoln
The Malone neighborhood, the Black enclave the city calls T-Town, which the Malone Community Center has anchored against every round of freeway construction and university expansion since 1942.
1 place
Southern California
Los Angeles
San Pedro and Ventura County carry the record of Mexican-American displacement across Southern California, from Terminal Island in 1942 to the citrus-camp evictions of the 1970s.
3 places
Miami metropolitan area
Miami
Overtown held 50,000 African-American and Afro-Caribbean residents before I-95 and I-395 cut through its core in the mid-1960s. The community fell to about 10,000 by 1980.
1 place
New Orleans metropolitan area
New Orleans
Tremé holds two generations of displacement. The I-10 Claiborne overpass cut the Black commercial spine in 1966. The Iberville demolition followed in 2013 under HOPE VI.
2 places
Greater New York
New York City
The Robert Moses era and its afterlives in the Bronx, Manhattan, and Brooklyn, plus the Cooper Square victory and the Centro-led recovery of the San Juan Hill record.
6 places
San Francisco Bay Area
Oakland
West Oakland's Black waterfront community lost more than 5,100 housing units between 1957 and 1985 to the Cypress Freeway, the Acorn Urban Renewal Project, BART, and I-980. The community rerouted I-880 in 1992 and built Mandela Parkway on the former freeway corridor.
1 place
Pittsburgh metropolitan area
Pittsburgh
The Lower Hill District clearance demolished 95 acres, 1,300 structures, and 400 businesses and displaced approximately 8,000 residents, 67 percent of them Black, between 1956 and 1958. The One Hill Community Benefits Agreement of 2008 was the first CBA in Pennsylvania history.
1 place
San Antonio-New Braunfels
San Antonio
HemisFair '68 cleared 2,239 residences and 686 businesses from the Mexican-American neighborhood east of downtown. COPS formed in 1974 and turned that displacement record into forty years of West Side organizing.
1 place
Southern California
San Diego
Barrio Logan lost roughly 5,000 residents to the I-5 corridor in 1963 and another 1,500 families to the Coronado Bridge approach in 1969, then took back the land in a twelve-day community occupation on April 22, 1970.
1 place
San Francisco Bay Area
San Francisco
Redevelopment Areas A-1 and A-2 displaced between 20,000 and 30,000 residents of the Fillmore and Western Addition from the late 1940s through the 1970s, including most of Japantown and the Black wartime migration community.
1 place
Twin Cities
St. Paul
Interstate 94 cut the Rondo neighborhood in half between 1956 and 1968, displacing 600 Black families. ReConnect Rondo now proposes a 21-acre land bridge to restore the ground.
1 place
Washington metropolitan area
Washington, DC
The Southwest Quadrant clearance displaced approximately 23,000 residents, 69 percent of them Black, and demolished 99 percent of structures in 560 acres between 1952 and 1963. Berman v. Parker (1954) made the clearance the constitutional template for urban renewal nationwide.
1 place