Detroit has a lot of problems: crime, corruption, economic depression, packs of wild dogs, etc…, but Joe Biden thinks the most pressing issue is a one-mile long “racist” highway. That’s why the illegitimate president and his gay Alfred E. Newman impersonator Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg, are giving the city $105 million to remove this offending roadway.
The AP reports:
A long-delayed plan to dismantle Interstate 375, a 1-mile (1.6-kilometer) depressed freeway in Detroit that was built by demolishing Black neighborhoods 60 years ago, was a big winner of federal money Thursday, the first Biden administration grant awarded to tear down a racially divisive roadway.
The $104.6 million is among $1.5 billion in transportation grants handed out to 26 projects nationwide thanks to increased funding from the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law.
It allows Michigan to move forward on its $270 million effort to transform the stretch in Detroit into a street-level boulevard, reconnecting surrounding neighborhoods and adding amenities, such as bike lanes.
For all those people who said, “Detroit wouldn’t be such a terrifying shithole if only the city had bike lanes” will now get their chance to be wrong.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has said he would make racial justice a priority in his department’s funding awards, pledging wide-ranging help to communities. Black Bottom and Paradise Valley, two of the city’s predominantly African American neighborhoods, were razed as part of the 1950s creation of an interstate highway system, displacing 100,000 Black residents and erecting a decades-long barrier between the downtown and communities to the east.
100,000 residents were displaced to build a mile-long highway? I question that particular stat because the population density of NYC is 27,013 people per square mile. This highway isn’t even a square mile it a mile long. How did 100,000 black people manage to live there?
“This stretch of I-375 cuts like a gash through the neighborhood, one of many examples I have seen in communities across the country where a piece of infrastructure has become a barrier,” said Buttigieg.
I question that this highway is a barrier as well and the AP story tells us why:
Detroit’s project would create a slower-speed boulevard that aims to improve safety by removing a steep curve and adding LED lighting, while removing 15 old bridges and two stormwater runoff pump stations and building out wider sidewalks, protected bike lanes and pedestrian crossings.
There are 15 bridges over a mile-long stretch of highway? That’s a bridge every 352 feet and about as connected as you could possible hope for.
What makes this complete waste of money an actual piece of comedy is this however:
Still, advocates cautioned that Michigan’s plan to build a six-lane city boulevard risks simply replacing one busy roadway with another. Some long-time Black residents, meanwhile, worry they could be priced out of the city by new business development and shiny condo buildings that promise direct links to downtown.
They are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to tear down a “racist” highway as a form of restorative justice and to connect black people to downtown but that will lead to gentrification so no black people will be able to afford to live there.
That’s democratic party-solving in a nutshell: waste money on something that isn’t a problem and make matters worse in the process. Absolutely brilliant.
