What a Forgotten Baltimore Map Teaches Us About Louisiana's Looming Freeway Disasters
Routing the I-49 Connectors through historic inner-city Lafayette and Shreveport neighborhoods deliberately destroys established communities following the same playbook that has devastated neighborhoods across the country.
For decades, communities in Lafayette and Shreveport have lived under the long shadow of the proposed I-49 Connector projects. In both Lafayette and Shreveport these controversial plans to route massive interstate highways through the hearts of our cities have been debated, studied, and fought over, leaving a legacy of uncertainty and division. These projects are not simply a choice between progress and preservation; they represent a deliberate decision to follow a historically destructive path, despite fifty years of painful lessons learned across America.
In her new book Road to Nowhere, historian Emily Lieb tells the story of a never-built highway in Baltimore. Her book provides us with not just a cautionary tale; it also gives a documented step-by-step playbook of how Louisiana is actively choosing to inflict destruction upon itself. Her research reveals that the destructive power of a freeway does not begin with its construction. In Baltimore, Shreveport, and Lafayette, it started the moment a line was drawn on the map.
1. The Real Damage Is Already Happening: A Freeway's Shadow Is as Destructive as Its Concrete
The central, devastating lesson from Baltimore is that the mere threat of a highway can inflict as much damage on a community as the physical road. Emily Lieb's work demonstrates that the decades-long planning phase—the period of uncertainty, property seizures, and official neglect—creates a deep and lasting "scar" on a neighborhood. This protracted threat triggers disinvestment, decays property values, and hollows out a community from the inside, regardless of whether the highway is ever actually built.
As Lieb states, the common understanding of urban destruction is incomplete:
“The narrative is that highways that were built ruined cities. But no, it’s that highways that were planned ruined cities. There is no highway, but there certainly is a scar.”
This pattern of destruction-by-planning is mirrored in the ongoing sagas of the I-49 projects in Louisiana. Critics of the Lafayette Connector have pointed out the waste of spending "tens of millions of tax dollars on studies and design that will never be used." This endless cycle of planning and debate is not a harmless preliminary step; it is an active phase of blight, creating the very uncertainty and economic stagnation that destroyed Baltimore's Rosemont neighborhood decades ago.
2. The Myth of "Blight": Highways Don't Fix So-Called "Blighted" Areas; They Create Them
A common justification for routing highways through urban neighborhoods is the idea of "urban renewal"-clearing away supposed "blight" to make way for modern infrastructure. However, Lieb's research meticulously deconstructs this myth. Before the East-West Expressway was proposed, Baltimore's Rosemont was a "vibrant," "thriving" Black middle-class community with well-kept homes, local businesses, and a strong social fabric. It was the highway plan that systematically turned it into a "blighted" area.
Lieb argues powerfully that "blight is not something that happens... blight is something that powerful people impose on... and create." This is a cynical two-step process: planners first target a community, triggering disinvestment and decay through years of uncertainty. This manufactured decline is then cynically presented as pre-existing "blight" to justify the highway's construction. This is a historically destructive pattern now threatening to repeat itself in Louisiana. Routing the I-49 Connector through historic inner-city Lafayette or Shreveport neighborhoods is not a solution to blight; it is the deliberate destruction of established communities following a playbook that has devastated neighborhoods across the country.
3. An Outdated Blueprint: Urban Highways Were Designed to Target Minority Neighborhoods
The history of urban highway planning is inseparable from the history of racial segregation. When Baltimore officials sought an expert for their expressway system, they hired Robert Moses, a notorious planner known as the "father of negro removal." Moses callously dismissed the communities in the highway's path, stating the areas slated for destruction were "of no loss to Baltimore."
The racism of the process was explicit and systemic. Lieb’s research reveals a crucial sequence: Rosemont became a thriving Black middle-class community in the early 1950s precisely because Baltimore’s school board converted schools in the area from white to "colored," attracting Black families seeking better opportunities. Only after this demographic shift did highway planners redraw their maps. While Moses himself drew the initial 1940s map that avoided the then-white neighborhood, his white supremacist planning philosophy—which viewed communities as obstacles and residents as "eggs to be broken"—provided the blueprint for the city officials who later rerouted the highway directly through Rosemont after it had become a thriving Black community. This was a deliberate and predictable weaponization of infrastructure planning against a newly established Black community.
This is not an accident of geography, but a deliberate policy choice. It is the same choice being made today with the proposed routes for I-49. Local opposition to routing the I-49 Missouri-Arkansas Connector through the prosperous and predominantly white city of Bella Vista led to the Bella Vista I-49 Bypass. In contrast, local opposition in Louisiana has been ignored, repressed, and derogated.
4. The Future is Removal, Not Construction
While Louisiana officials actively pursue disruptive urban highways, forward-thinking cities across the United States are moving in the opposite direction. The era of slicing up cities with concrete is over. As the Shreveport-based community group Allendale Strong correctly states, "States are not building elevated freeways through cities any longer; they are removing them." Louisiana is choosing to squander billions on a demonstrably obsolete model of urban development.
A growing national movement is focused on dismantling the destructive infrastructure of the 20th century to reconnect and heal neighborhoods. Cities leading the way include:
Detroit (I-375)
Rochester (Inner Loop)
Syracuse (I-81)
New Orleans (Claiborne Expressway)
Baltimore (US 40)
Oakland (I-980)
These cities recognize that urban freeways are costly, obsolete, and damaging to a city's health and equity. By continuing to pursue the I-49 Connector projects, Louisiana is embracing a multi-billion dollar boondoggle that willfully ignores fifty years of painful lessons learned across the country.
Conclusion: Choosing a Better Road Forward
Emily Lieb's work proves that the scar of a planned but never-built highway is real, that "blight" is a condition manufactured by planners to justify destruction, and that the future of healthy cities lies in removing urban freeways, not building new ones. The urban interstate as model of development is a relic of a destructive past that has no place in the 21st century.
The Louisiana I-49 Connector projects do not present a choice between past and future, but between destruction and prosperity. Robert Moses planned from a "view from the sky," seeing people only as "eggs to be broken." In contrast, practical alternatives like the "business boulevard" proposed by Shreveport freeway fighters represent a "view from the street" built at a human scale, designed to serve communities and build local wealth. If both history and the nation's most innovative cities tell us the Louisiana Connectors are a disastrous mistake, why are we still letting an outdated map dictate Louisiana's future?
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The historical insights in this article are drawn from the work of Emily Lieb, historian and author of the newly released book Road to Nowhere: How a Highway Map Wrecked Baltimore.
