The issue of who benefits and who bears the burden of highway infrastructures goes beyond the physical spaces taken from communities to build these urban roadways. In addition to this history of displacement, urban communities near highways face ongoing impacts to quality of life today.
By contrast, the suburbs of the Twin Cities were built with the highways, motivated by racialized ideas of urban renewal that justified the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) and other agencies to sacrifice swaths of our region to enable suburbanization as many white residents fled the city centers based on conceptions of urban blight, crime, and race and class-based biases.
As highway removal continues to gain grassroots momentum and support from forward-thinking public officials, it’s important to remember and recognize what’s at stake. Highways and their attendant harms continue to harm Twin Cities communities, subjecting people to a variety of environmental justice concerns.
This push for reforming highway infrastructures is accompanied by a legislative push to create policy approaches to mitigate the cumulative impacts of highways on adjacent communities. Our Streets, with a growing coalition of impacted communities and advocates, is calling on Legislators to pass cumulative impacts law for transportation to take the first steps toward repairing these historic and ongoing harms.
About This Analysis
Many Black residents lost their homes, businesses, schools, churches and other shared spaces in Near North, Cedar-Riverside, Old Southside and Rondo. In the decades that followed, white flight led to new housing development, population growth and wealth-building opportunities in suburban communities built with the aid of highways while being insulated from their harms.
The legacy of these policy and planning decisions still shape the Twin Cities today, creating a tale of two cities: those living alongside highways and those who don’t.
To assess how highways affect quality of life, we should first examine the communities most impacted by these roads. This analysis relies on publicly available census, public health, transportation and housing data to understand the conditions in communities along Twin Cities highways. These indicators are not solely influenced by the presence or absence of a highway, but they help create a high-level understanding of key trends in these communities.
I considered areas within a quarter mile of a major highway corridor in Minneapolis and St. Paul for this analysis. This is not to say that highway impacts do not extend beyond these areas but is consistent with how MnDOT defines study areas on some of its major projects, including Rethinking I-94.
For comparison, I chose suburban communities based on the timeline of their development. In the 1970s-1980s following the most significant highway construction in the Twin Cities, 11 communities ranked as the fastest growing in the metro, becoming home to white residents leaving Minneapolis and St. Paul to live and build wealth while still accessing downtown employment and cultural opportunities (think of Orchestra Hall, the Guthrie Theater, the Science Museum of Minnesota and more).
These communities include:
- Apple Valley
- Bloomington
- Brooklyn Park
- Burnsville
- Coon Rapids
- Eagan
- Eden Prairie
- Edina
- Maple Grove
- Minnetonka
- Plymouth
Minneapolis and St. Paul’s combined metrics (“MSP”) served as a benchmark for the quality of life metrics, as a point of comparison to communities sacrificed for highway construction.
Who Lives Along Highways Today?
Communities near highways are home to 224,364 people or roughly three out of 10 Minneapolis and St. Paul residents. Of these people, 25,069 are under 10 years old and 24,616 are 65 or older, two groups that are vulnerable to highway-related health effects.
In Minneapolis and St. Paul, 33.79 square miles of land sit within a quarter mile of a highway corridor, nearly 30% of the cities’ combined land area. This area is 10 times larger than downtown Minneapolis and 30 times larger than downtown St. Paul.
Serving these and nearby residents are 15 nursing homes, 6 hospitals, 163 licensed childcare providers, 25 school buildings and 169 parks, parkways and green spaces located within a quarter mile of a highway.
Black residents are disproportionately likely to live in communities near highways. Nearly 24% of residents in these communities are Black, higher than their share of the population across both cities at 17.8%. Indigenous and multi-racial Minnesotans also live along highways at higher rates.
Low-income residents also disproportionately live near highways, with 25.5% percent of households earning $30,000 or less, 15% more than in suburban communities and roughly 5.5% higher than Minneapolis and St.Paul as a whole.
Housing Justice
Communities along Minneapolis and St. Paul highways have been largely excluded from wealth-building opportunities — in particular, home ownership — afforded to suburban counterparts.
Communities near highways see homeownership rates at a staggeringly low 22.2%. That’s 51% lower than suburban communities and 26.4% lower than Minneapolis and St. Paul as a whole.
This inequity appears in home values as well, with the median home value at $175,873 for communities near highways. That’s less than half of the median home value in Minneapolis and St. Paul combined and about $144,000 less than the suburban median home values.
Suburban communities benefited from uninterrupted wealth-building through homeownership, enhanced by highway access to cities. In contrast, communities burdened by highway construction faced displacement, lower homeownership rates and reduced property values. Like in other cities, the disparity has likely resulted in billions of dollars in lost generational wealth for Black and other marginalized communities.
Health and Environment
Health and environmental data likewise paint a more dismal picture of the quality of life near highways. Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) air-quality scores in communities near highways are above healthy recommended levels, scoring 1.62, half a point more than the 1.12 score in the metro area’s suburban communities.
Eighty-six percent of the area within a quarter mile of a highway has traffic emissions as the highest pollution source, exposing communities to harmful pollutants such as PAHs, Benzene, Butadiene and PM2.5 — a kind of particle small enough to evade even the best air filters — from tires and brake wear. All of these pollutants have been linked to significant health effects, ranging from asthma to cancer.
Further, roads and the areas around them often have fewer trees and more paved surfaces. This makes them much hotter than the areas around them, a phenomenon often dubbed the “urban heat island.” In fact, these highway-adjacent areas can be up to 30 degrees warmer than suburbs and wealthy areas, acting like hot spots in the city. This heat island effect leaves residents vulnerable to worse air quality and more heat-related health risks.
Together, the exposure to health and environmental risks leaves communities near highways with worse health outcomes. The age-adjusted asthma hospitalization rate in these areas are higher compared to suburban communities. Moreover, people living near highways have a life expectancy nearly five years shorter than those living in suburban areas, also lower than the state average of 80.8.
Transportation
Beyond housing, health and environmental indicators, highways do not serve the mobility needs of people living along them. Ironically, more households along highways do not have cars compared with Minneapolis and St. Paul or suburban communities.
One in five households near highways live without access to a personal car, nearly 15 percentage points higher than suburban communities and 6 percentage points higher than the Minneapolis and St. Paul average.
Nearly 10% of workers over 16 in the city commute by transit, four times higher than suburban rates and slightly above the Minneapolis-St. Paul average. This reflects the city’s strong transit infrastructure, where robust service makes car-free living both accessible and practical. But it also is the result of income inequality that presents a barrier to entry for expensive car ownership.
An Inequitable Twin Cities Landscape
It’s time to change lanes and rethink our logic of the benefits and burdens of Twin Cities highways. In a historic moment of re-evaluating highways, we need to think big in addressing the multi-issue impacts felt by so many of the region’s residents.
In this historic moment — as we rethink highways like I-94 and Olson Memorial Highway and call on the legislature to do more to address cumulative impacts — let’s not focus solely on infrastructures but on power structures. Let’s uplift communities along highways to the same standard of living that suburban communities have enjoyed for decades: access to fair housing, community health, a stable environment and transportation options that truly serve the community at large.
We also must understand, and build policy around, the cumulative impacts transportation infrastructures have on communities, a push that will continue at the Minnesota Legislature this year. Tell your legislator to support this important policy.
Editor’s note: “Street Views” appears in Streets.mn twice monthly. Respond to columnist and board member Joe Harrington directly at [email protected].