Freeways, Redlining & Racism

One of the world’s most famous sports venues is located in Southern California. Opened in 1922, the Rose Bowl in Pasadena has hosted Olympic matches, FIFA World Cup finals, Super Bowl games, and sold-out concerts. It is the long-time home of the UCLA Bruins football team. The iconic stadium is the centerpiece of one of college football’s most noteworthy games, representing a sunny reprieve from the gloomy winter weather across the rest of the country. To most, the Rose Bowl is an example of idyllic Southern California.

But for thousands of Black Pasadena residents during the mid-20th century, the venerated stadium was something else entirely. The protection of the stadium and its natural surroundings became part of the City of Pasadena and state freeway planners’ justification to upend Black neighborhoods. 

In the 1950s and ‘60s, planners and other local officials built upon decades of disinvestment, redlining, and urban renewal projects to push a new route of the Foothill Freeway/Interstate 210 through the northwest neighborhoods of Pasadena, resulting in the displacement of nearly 3,000 predominantly Black residents. An alternate route — running largely through uninhabited parkland along the eastern edge of the Arroyo Seco valley by the Rose Bowl stadium parking lot — was rejected.

Even two decades after construction, the freeway depressed home values in the adjacent neighborhoods relative to changes in home values across the city.

Before World War II, northwest Pasadena was seen as a place of possibility for Black residents. Amid an otherwise hostile suburban Los Angeles, these parts of Pasadena were some of the few neighborhoods of color outside of Los Angeles’ core. Northwest Pasadena was a thriving Black neighborhood and commercial district. It boasted “some of the city’s highest concentration of classic Victorian and craftsman style architecture, [which were] within walking distance of local stores, the downtown business district and the city’s Civic Center,” according to one resident. Residents fought racial discrimination in housing: A 1944 California Supreme Court ruling allowed a Black family to remain in their Pasadena home despite a racial covenant. By 1960, northwest Pasadena was significantly more diverse than Los Angeles — 80% of residents there were people of color, compared to just 19% residents of color in the county and 20% in the City of Pasadena overall.

But as covenants and other blunt tools of racial oppression were ruled illegal, local officials turned to less overt but no less effective methods of displacement: neighborhood demolition and rebuilding projects best known as “urban renewal.” These neighborhoods, fondly remembered by their residents, were labeled as blighted by the city in its 1962 General Plan. It was no coincidence that northwest Pasadena and other neighborhoods around it were the same that were “redlined” by the federal mortgage evaluators HOLC in the 1930s. They were the neighborhoods where Black Pasadenans lived. 

The city followed this same circular logic to determine the siting of the Foothill Freeway. After the planners and the local officials debated between a handful of alternatives, the “Green route” — which drove right through the neighborhoods with majority residents of color — was ultimately selected because it fit best with the City’s General Plan. The General Plan, of course, was informed by the HOLC maps, which were themselves largely products of the racial make-up of the city at the time. It is hard to interpret this series of events as anything other than a coordinated effort by local officials over decades to displace Black residents.

This conclusion becomes especially clear when assessing the impacts of the various alternatives that were available for the freeway spur at the time of the siting. The “Blue route”, which ran through the parking lot of the Rose Bowl, would have displaced far fewer individuals, almost eight times fewer homes, and a population wealthier and 22 percentage points whiter than the Green route. The Green route was chosen regardless.

Lawyer and journalist Loren Miller, who represented the family in the 1944 anti-covenant California Supreme Court case, summarized freeway siting in the Los Angeles region best:

Take me to a strange city where I’ve never been before and point out the areas in which Negroes live, and I will lay you some neat odds that I can point out the route of the city’s next freeway. There’s nothing magic about it. I don’t know whether it is a required subject in engineering schools or not, but I do know that one of the cardinal articles of faith among highway engineers is that the areas of Negro residence offer the best, the most feasible, and the most economical routes for highway construction.

Thousands of homes and businesses were demolished to clear the path for the Foothill Freeway. Property owners were reimbursed according to “fair market values”; however, property values were considerably depressed due to historical redlining. And displaced residents of color struggled to find housing in the rest of Pasadena due to continued segregation.

Already lower, home values adjacent to the freeway grew less than home values across the city for years. Over the next two decades after construction, the number of housing units dropped not just from demolition for the freeway, but also in adjacent areas, due to its negative secondary effects.

The freeway presented a health hazard to remaining residents of the area. Likewise, noise pollution is particularly acute when a freeway is above ground or elevated — and tellingly, the I-210, while sunken for much of its path through central Pasadena, elevates when entering northwest Pasadena.

Northwest Pasadena was not the only Los Angeles suburb confronted with a freeway expansion project in the early 1960s. In fact, their direct neighbor — South Pasadena — reckoned with an extremely similar set of circumstances, but the outcome could not have been more different.

South Pasadena was once a “sundown town,” where people of color were not welcome after dark. Astute observers of contemporary maps may notice that the freeway cuts off abruptly just before the South Pasadena border, despite the fact that the chosen routing was slated to run through both South Pasadena and northwest Pasadena. This was no coincidence — unlike their neighbors to the north, South Pasadena’s political organizing against freeway construction was recognized by freeway planning authorities. The freeway extension through South Pasadena was delayed and finally canceled.

Through northwest Pasadena, meanwhile, those living near the freeway extension still deal with adverse health effects. The historical injustices of the urban renewal era live on in our backyards.

A Dense Street Network Connected Neighborhoods in NW Pasadena to the City’s Commercial West Side Prior to the 210 Freeway (n.d.). izi.TRAVEL, NAACP Pasadena Branch.  https://izi.travel/en/c2e9-walking-tour-of-the-african-american-history-of-pasadena/en .

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Pasadena Planning Commission (1962). General Plan. City of Pasadena.

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U.S. Census Bureau (1963). Census of Population: 1960 (Vol. I: Characteristics of the Population; Part 6: California; Section 6: General Social and Economic Characteristics, Cont.; H. Brunsman, H. Shryock, D. Kaplan, and P. Glich, Eds.). U.S. Census Bureau.  https://usa.ipums.org/usa/resources/voliii/pubdocs/1960/Population/Vol1/12533879v1p6ch06.pdf .