Quantifying the Losses Caused by New Freeways

For the first time, Smart Growth America’s Divided by Design report quantifies the financial losses brought on by freeway construction and the demolition of homes.

As María Paula Mijares Torres explains in Bloomberg CityLab, “The report uses data from the US census, the Federal Highway Administration and local highway archives to analyze the land physically occupied by a small number of highways and the surrounding buffer zones in DC and Atlanta and compare it to the current tax rate of that area.” The report estimates that D.C. loses at least $7.6 million in annual property taxes on at least $1.4 billion in never-built housing.

“These numbers don’t take into account the commercial property taxes that could have been generated by the thousands of businesses that were destroyed for these freeways, according to Megan Wright, an economic development associate at Smart Growth America who worked on the report.”

Currently, the U.S. Department of Transportation uses ‘value of travel time savings’ to estimate the economic benefit of new highways, but doesn’t address the negative impacts. And while the federal government has expressed a commitment to tearing down and redeveloping highways, “Smart Growth America’s researchers called the $4 billion reconnecting communities initiative a ‘pittance’ compared to the rest of the infrastructure law, which gives localities wide discretion to build and expand highways.”