Tracing the Destruction of the Highway Baltimore Never Built

This review is part of a special collaboration between Planetizen and Booked on Planning, a biweekly podcast where AICP planners Stephanie Rouse and Jennifer Hiatt chat with authors of the latest books shaping urban planning today. Listen to the episode with today’s author in the player below. 

Every planner knows the devastation midcentury highway projects wrought on neighborhoods across the country in cities like New York City, Boston, and Seattle. But what about the highway projects never started? Can a simple line on a map be catastrophic to a neighborhood? In "Road to Nowhere: How a Highway Map Wrecked Baltimore," historian Emily Lieb delivers a masterful autopsy of urban planning gone wrong. While many histories of the American interstate system focus on the physical destruction caused by bulldozers, Lieb’s work offers a more haunting revelation: a community can be dismantled by a mere line on a map, even if a single yard of concrete is never poured.

At the heart of the book is Rosemont, a West Baltimore neighborhood. Lieb reveals the interwoven tragedies of how segregated school policies, redlining, and prejudicial lending worked in tandem to trap the residents of Rosemont in a cycle of disinvestment. For 40 years, Rosemont was held hostage by shifting maps, causing property values to plummet and inviting predatory real estate practices.

Rosemont was established as a middle class white neighborhood, but over the course of one summer in the mid-1950s, Rosemont had “gone white to negro” according to a Baltimore Sun headline, transforming into a vibrant hub for the Black middle class. Lieb lays out the case that this transformation in demographics was by design. The Baltimore Board of School Commissioners made the decision to designate a school near the Rosemont neighborhood a “colored” school, following their Jim Crow restrictions and creating a housing need for the Black families whose children attended the school. Blockbusting became rampant as real estate investors used racial scare tactics to buy out white residents low and sell high to black residents. This was the first step toward Rosemont, built on the aspirations of families seeking their share of the American Dream, becoming collateral damage for the proposed East-West Expressway (I-70).

The next step was a new highway design intended to renew downtown Baltimore. At first, residents of the Rosemont neighborhood were unaware they needed to worry about these designs. Government officials were continually reconsidering the design of the proposed East-West Expressway. When the lines on the map finally settled, Rosemont was square in its path.

Lieb argues that the threat of the highway was as destructive as the road itself. The Baltimore City Council condemned Rosemont in preparation for construction. Some Rosemont residents sold quickly and left the neighborhood to start again. Some stayed, waiting to see if they would ever be forced to leave. The decades of uncertainty left people unable to invest in their homes. What was left was a neighborhood pocked by vacancy and disinvestment, left to deteriorate as the bureaucratic process slowly ground to halt. Ultimately, nothing was ever built through Rosemont but what happened to the neighborhood was “still as bad as a bomb.”

While the focus is hyper-local, Lieb effectively uses Rosemont as a window into a national scandal. She shows how federal programs like the FHA’s Section 23, intended to help low-income buyers, were exploited by speculators to profit from the neighborhood's decline. Once Baltimore officials determined no highway was going to get built, they turned to federal assistance programs to try to rebuild the neighborhood. However, lack of oversight, shoddy construction, and misaligned incentives continued to contribute to Rosemont’s decline. Despite the inhumane bureaucracy, Lieb highlights the ingenuity and persistence of the residents who fought to stay in their homes.

"Road to Nowhere" is an absorbing, meticulously researched indictment of how blight is often a manufactured condition rather than an organic one. It challenges the notion that residents are responsible for their neighborhood's decay, placing the blame squarely on the shoulders of the planners, politicians, and power brokers who refused to see the humanity of the people in their path.