Road to Nowhere

A road that was never built still managed to hollow out a neighborhood. We sit down with historian Emily Lieb to unpack how Baltimore’s “Road to Nowhere” took shape on paper, and why that was enough to destabilize Rosemont—a Black middle-class community of sturdy daylight rowhouses—through years of uncertainty, disinvestment, and policy misfires.

This conversation isn’t just about Baltimore. It’s about how plans, incentives, and vague labels shape markets and lives long before construction begins. We dig into the human toll of being told you’re “elected to be the sacrificers,” the choice to protect a cemetery over living homeowners, and the core question planners must face: is a city a place to live or a corridor to drive through? If we want the former, we have to align dollars, definitions, and decisions with the people already there.

If this episode moved you, follow the show, leave a review, and share it with someone who cares about housing, transportation, and urban justice. Your support helps more listeners find these stories and join the conversation.

Show Notes:

• Author Recommended Reads: 
  • Crime novels are a good way to understand cities (ex: Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead, The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler, The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett)
  • Colossus of New York by Colson Whitehead
• To help support the show, pick up a copy of the book or any of the recommended readings through our Bookshop page at https://bookshop.org/shop/bookedonplanning or get a copy through your local bookstore!
• To view the show transcripts, click on the episode at https://bookedonplanning.buzzsprout.com/

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Chapters

• 0:00 Sponsor, Show Setup, Book Intro
• 2:46 Why A Unbuilt Highway Still Harmed Baltimore
• 5:31 School Segregation Creating Segregated Neighborhoods
• 11:06 Tyson Street Spared, Rosemont Targeted
• 18:10 How “Blight” Became A Self‑Fulfilling Label
• 26:40 The Win That Wasn’t: Afterlines And Fallout
• 33:20 Citywide Activism And The Long Slowdown
• 41:30 The Human Toll: Being “Elected” To Sacrifice
• 48:05 FHA’d And Ruined: Section 235 Backfire

Transcript

Stephanie Rouse: 0:00

This episode is brought to you by Marvin Planning Consultants. Marvin Planning Consultants, established in 2009, is committed to their clients and professional organizations. Their team of planners has served on chapter, division, and national committees, including as the Nebraska Chapter President. In addition, they are committed to supporting their chapter in various APA divisions. You're listening to the Booked on Planning Podcast, a project of the Nebraska chapter of the American Planning Association. In each episode, we dive into how cities function by talking with authors on housing, transportation, and everything in between. Join us as we get booked on planning. This was a really interesting continuation, I think, of all of the transportation books that we were covering at the end of last season.

Jennifer Hiatt: 1:12

Yeah, and I have to admit that I'm a little ashamed about everything that I knew about Baltimore before reading this book. Either came from the wire or the serial podcast. So it was actually kind of interesting to dig in. Leakin Park was like a big scene in the serial podcast. So to see it pop up again and again and learn more about Baltimore. I was aware of its unfortunate racial game, but I did not realize how terrible it was.

Stephanie Rouse: 1:39

Yeah, in the conversation we talk about it, and it's goes more in depth in the book, but it's a really interesting story about how not actually building the highway was just as detrimental as if the highway had gotten built, which is not usually the story. I mean, usually the success is not building it, but all of the dragging out of the process and blighting the area and giving the owners zero confidence that they might be able to retain their homes actually led to the neighborhood declining and becoming a blighted area.

Jennifer Hiatt: 2:09

Retain their homes or even get fair market value out of them, really, as everything just kept dragging on and on. And as we point out in the episode, just the line on a map almost destroyed an entire neighborhood. So let's get into our conversation with author Emily Leib on her book, Road to Nowhere, How a Highway Map Wrecked Baltimore.

Stephanie Rouse: 2:31

Emily, thank you for joining us on Bookdown Planning to talk about your book, Road to Nowhere: How a Highway Map Wrecked Baltimore. Your book is unique amongst the many books that have come out recently on the harms of the highway system. It focuses on the story of what wasn't actually built. What drew you to this particular story of neighborhood destruction resulting from lines on a map? Thank you guys so much for having me so excited to be here.

Emily Lieb: 2:54

I backed into this story. I absolutely just fell into it. When I was in graduate school, I am not from Baltimore. I'm from Pennsylvania. Western Pennsylvania was born there and ancestral Pennsylvanian. So near Baltimore, but not in it. And when I was in graduate school at Columbia, I was fishing around for a dissertation topic, as one does. And I happened to go first to Baltimore to visit the city archives. Again, I whatever it is I thought I was looking for, I don't remember. That's not, it wasn't this. And at the time the Baltimore City Archives had sort of open stacks, which is listeners will know, not typical of archives and not the way that the Baltimore City Archives works anymore. So I was in the stacks and I was just sort of digging around and I came across a box that was really dusty box that was labeled like HCD 1969. And it was a box full of photographs, old photographs of houses. A couple of them are reproduced in the book. And HCD was Baltimore City's Department of Housing and Community Development. And the houses in the pictures, some official had taken them, and the houses in the pictures were falling down on themselves. Like awnings are falling down, windows are broken, you know, porches are coming off. And I knew enough about Baltimore vernacular residential architecture to know that these were not old houses in the pictures. You know, if you visit Baltimore and you go to the oldest parts of the city close to the water, Federal Hill, Fells Point, you'll see really tiny row houses, right? They're very narrow. It was a walking city. You had to get everywhere on foot. So houses were really dense, right? These weren't that kind of row house. They were row houses, but they were what's called daylight row houses. They sit back from the street. They have front yards, they have big front porches, they have bay windows. And so I knew that these houses were built in the 19 teens, 20s, maybe 1930s. I knew that they had been built to be sold to homeowners. I knew they were solid houses. I knew they were built for working class, middle-class buyers who were going to stay in them and love them and care for them. And I knew that what I was seeing was houses that this was 30, 40 years after they were built, right? So why were they falling down in these pictures? What was I looking at here? This doesn't make any sense to me. And really, this book, Road to Nowhere, is a very long-winded answer to that question of what happened to these houses.

Jennifer Hiatt: 5:19

So one of the things that struck me about the book is that school segregation played a major role in setting the stage for Rosemont, which is the neighborhood that the book primarily focuses on. So Rosmont's neighborhood transformation, can you talk about how that situation with the board of school commissioners' decision to what at the time they were calling convert schools started that neighborhood's transformation?

Emily Lieb: 5:42

So to rewind a little bit, so the answer to the question, the very, you know, like 30,000-foot view of the answer to the question of what happened to these houses is that, as you say, and I'll explain in a minute, Baltimore created a black neighborhood, Baltimore exploited that black neighborhood, Baltimore labeled that black neighborhood blighted, and then plotted an expressway map through the middle of it in the name of renewing it. And then the expressway map plan fizzled. We could talk about that. And then that's the moment when these photographs were taken. So then rewinding, when I say Baltimore created a black neighborhood, what do I mean? So this was actually a surprise to me when I was doing my research. I think people, certainly planners, people who think about cities, people who think about neighborhoods and communities, are aware that we currently in 2026, our public schools in this country are segregated. They are, I believe, more segregated than they have ever been, although fact-check that for me, please. And that they have been segregated. And our neighborhoods are also segregated by race, by class. And I sort of always assumed, and think people assume, and certainly school officials talk about it and have historically talked about this, as though the arrow of segregation goes like from neighborhood segregation to school segregation, right? We have segregated schools because we have segregated neighborhoods somehow, just question mark, right? Like underpants, gnome. What? And then therefore, because schools are tied to neighborhoods, then our schools are segregated and whoopsie, that's a bummer. But instead, in Baltimore, the opposite was true. And I would argue in other cities as well, but Baltimore for sure, the opposite was true. Segregated schools very deliberately created segregated neighborhoods in Baltimore. So how that all worked was listeners may know that Baltimore is a sort of city that is both northern and southern in a lot of ways, but it was a Jim Crow city. Legal segregation was in place. Listeners probably do know that in places across the American South, Jim Crow kind of manifested in different ways and everybody had kind of different laws and regulations. But in Baltimore, the schools from the 1870s onward, the schools were segregated legally by the race of their students. The way the school system was numbered, you know, it's like PS2 or PS500. And that numbering system indicated whether a school was for white pupils or black pupils. And, you know, sometimes it'll say over the door, they were known as colored schools or just, you know, sort of schools, right? The normative is school and then it's colored school. So that is something that was sort of ongoing. Baltimore also had pioneered many technologies of segregation that were then sort of exported from Baltimore to cities across the country. One of them in the teens, 19 teens in the progressive era, were actual segregation ordinances or laws that said where people could and could not live. That was very short-lived for legal reasons, but also like practical ones. This does not work. And then, you know, also restrictive covenants, which is something that it's not a law, but it's a thing on your deed, the deed of your house, part of the contract that says who can and can't sell your house to. And that too was pioneered in in Roland Park, which is a sort of schmancy neighborhood in Baltimore. So Baltimore experiments with lots of different ways to segregate the city. But the backdrop, and they sort of drop in and out, sometimes the court knocks them down, sometimes they just don't work. But the longest running one and the backdrop to all of these other technologies that they try is legally segregated schools. So on the theory that people won't live where their kids can't easily get to school, that's sort of how they maintained residential segregation without saying the law says you can't live here. You just don't live here because this is where your kids can go to school and this is where they can't. And what happened was as Baltimore's black population grew, schools designated for Black pupils got more and more crowded. And so what the school board would do is they would do something they called converting schools that had been white schools to schools to serve Black pupils. And that is sort of how the city of Baltimore shaped and steered migration to what is known as old West Baltimore. There's sort of a wedge of West Baltimore that was where the city's black population was concentrated through the end of the 1940s. And then starting at the end of the 1940s and really accelerating in the early 1950s, the city converted the schools that were in this part of what was white West Baltimore, known as Rosemont, which was the neighborhood of the pictures, right? A homeowner's neighborhood. It's out by, if listeners are aware of Quinn's Falls and Lake In Parks. So out sort of at the edge of West Baltimore. So the school board converted the schools to serve Black students in the area that would become Rosemont. And the way that the newspaper and the school board describe it as sort of like an overnight migration, now that their kids can go to school out in this relatively new, suburban, very Sylvan, lovely place, start to buy houses and move out into this part of West Baltimore, Rosemont. In 1952 and 1953, there's a quote in the book that the school board says it's like the most unprecedented population movement in Baltimore. Like this is a neighborhood that goes from being a white neighborhood to a black neighborhood over the course of a summer functionally. And again, I think that that sort of idea of, you know, white flight or whatever, like the sort of notion of neighborhood transition at mid-century is not something that listeners are unfamiliar with, but the mechanism for it was that school board action to convert those schools that were in that neighborhood from schools that served white peoples to schools that served the children of the new Rosemonters who moved there.

Stephanie Rouse: 11:06

So one of the interesting things in your book is a demonstration of how a white middle class neighborhood was treated versus a black middle class neighborhood in Rosemont from the highway construction. Tyson Street was very quickly removed from the map or the highway route, whereas Rosemont was left in and there was a lot of challenges and the community really had to advocate around it. What were some of the factors behind one being quickly removed from this highway map and the other remaining condemned for over a decade?

Emily Lieb: 11:34

That's a really good question and with a long and complicated answer. So in Baltimore, starting in the 1930s, the city of Baltimore wanted to build a highway system through the city. Here's Robert Moses. Robert Moses is always like lurking behind like a silent cabinet, pops up and to screw things up. So he came to Baltimore in the 1940s. His engineering firm came to Baltimore and mapped an expressway system through the city. Part of that was called the East West Expressway, which is what it sounded like. It was an expressway that ran across the middle of the city from east to west. Subsequently, a number of plans, this is a common theme in this story that you'll hear today is like there was never a final plan, right? It just like constantly changing, constantly tweaking. Some other guy comes in and you know fiddles with it a tiny bit. And so people are fiddling with it. But one thing that was consistently true before Rosmond became a black neighborhood in the early 1950s was that that East West Expressway came across the center of the city and then turned down, turned to the southwest. And if folks see the cover of the book, I hope that you will see the cover of the book. You can see the line, the ultimate line that was the expressway plan. But so if you imagine that line turning down instead of up, basically, and went out of the city. So we avoided the Rosemont neighborhood. In the early 1950s, as I said, Rosemont became a black neighborhood. And in 1957, the city produced an expressway plan that for the first time turned that road up instead of down and out of the city, turned it up and ran it out of the city right through the middle of Rosemont. The 1957-58 plan was really important because for the first time there is actual money behind it, right? There's a possibility that it might get built. As listeners probably know, before 1956, 1957, cities that wanted to build highways needed to find a way to pay for them. But the interstate highway system, the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System, introduced a mechanism by which the federal government would pay 90% of the cost of building expressways. So for the first time, now cities have a way of building expressways that they want to build for, you know, basically free. And this is an infrastructure project functionally, what this money is aimed to do is to jobs and construction and all sorts of things. And so in 1957, this new plan that sears the road through Rosemont for the first time is something that might actually get built. Another piece of this plan, as you say, would have seared part of this expressway system through a little neighborhood, functionally, if folks are familiar with Baltimore, Mount Vernon, sort of near downtown, close to the train station, would have sent an expressway through this little street called Tyson Street. Tyson Street was older, it had tinier row houses, right? And it had been a poor black neighborhood. However, in the years immediately preceding the expressway plan that would have obliterated it, Tyson Street had gentrified, basically. Lots of people were moving in. White people with money were moving in, buying these little houses. They're very charming, fixing them up. This is a sort of nascent gay community in Baltimore. A lot of the folks that were moving in were artists, were gay men. There were, you know, not a lot of people with children, but couples moving in and putting a lot of money into renovating these historic row houses, right? So this was private money that has revitalized this street. And I surmise that the reason that the road was run through it was the people who mapped it weren't that hip. So they didn't know that they were running it through this gentrified now artist's neighborhood instead of but the like all this press around it, right? Like design magazines come and they talk about all the work that people have done in these houses. And, you know, oh, the coffee table looks like this. And oh, there's a Picasso, and oh, there's a an old chair. And so the folks who lived there by the late 1950s were white. They were pretty well connected. A lot of them worked for the city. They certainly knew reporters, they knew attorneys. And they acted very quickly to try to stop the road from being built, you know, right through the, they were like the way they described it is right through their kitchens, and it would have been right through their kitchens. One reason they were able to be so successful is that the housing act of 1954, for reasons actually that are connected to Baltimore, but I will not go into them because they're frankly boring. Part of the Housing Act of 1954 required cities that were getting housing funds, this is you know urban renewal money from the federal government, required them to sort of include what they called private enterprise, private landlords, private property owners, to rehabilitate houses, which is exactly what had happened here on Tyson Street, right? So on the one hand, the federal government can't be saying to people, and people pointed this out, right? You can't be saying on the one hand, hey, put all this money into your private property and fix it up like we told you to do in this housing act, but then this other arm of the federal government, another piece of the urban renewal project is gonna then come through and bulldoze it, like whoopsie, sorry, right? That that was gonna be a hard sell. Why would anybody, right? And this is a question that comes up in Rosemont later too. Like, why would anybody put money into a house that may or may not get bulldozed? So that's part of it. But part of it really just is that people in Tyson Street were well connected. They knew how to call the newspaper, they had all kinds of they would have tours, they would do walking tours, right? They really worked hard to keep their little corner of Baltimore in the public eye. And they managed to act fast. And in I think 1958, very quickly, um, got the Maryland state legislature to pass what was called the Tyson Street Rider, which basically said, you know, you can do what you want, you can build interstate highways however you want to in Baltimore, but they cannot go through Tyson Street. So it was just a a sort of flexing of, you know, people, we can speculate. I'm not in the in the business of speculating, but had it been larger, you know, had it been more of a big deal, would people have fought harder? It's like a two-block thing. So Tyson Street gets spared. Also, Tyson Street was closer to downtown, so would have been more quickly bulldozed because just of the way that the process of building highways goes like from the inside out in Baltimore. Also, crucially, the way that Baltimore condemned land for highway projects was different than the way that most other cities in the United States did it. And so, like here in Seattle, for example, when they mapped I-5 through downtown, the condemnation process was for the whole route, right? In Baltimore, you had to break it down into these tiny little chunks. So it's pretty easy actually to get things moved because you know, your city counselor is trying to protect your name, and then you just bump it into somebody else's neighborhood, somebody else's district, let them deal with it. So part of it is just where they were and the power that they had. So as a result of the way that the condemnation process worked, things went very slowly. So it was never totally clear to the people who lived in Rosemont. It took years to emerge, really. Number one, that maybe this highway was actually going to be built, right? This wasn't just more, you know, chit-chatting about maybe building a road. Number two, where exactly the route was, because it was changing all the time, right? As I said, every time you get a new mayor, every time you get a new director of planning or whatever, they hire a new consulting firm. The amount of money that sloshes around is crazy. You just hire consultants, hire engineers. And each person draws a slightly different plan because honestly, nobody, and there's a somebody said it, there's a quote in the book, nobody wanted to be the guy the sort of when the music stopped, whose thing actually got built, right? Because people were gonna be really mad at you. So you just kick it, kick the can down the road. The maps that were published in the newspapers of the highway route were really vague. Often there weren't streets on them. So you could just see a line around your neighborhood, but it wasn't completely clear that it was gonna go through Rosemont. Public hearings that were held on this part of the route were held in East Baltimore, very far away from Rosemont. Nobody in Rosemont was aware that the meeting was happening, which was deliberate. That is one of the ways ultimately that the highway was stopped, was that fiasco over that hearing that nobody knew about. And so it just wasn't as clear to the people who lived in Rosemont how much threat they were under until the sort of mid-1960s, when it started to become clearer, like, oh, actually, this thing, it's my yard, it's my house. When people start getting condemnation notices from the city is when they it really becomes real to them. So again, part of it is just the well-connected sort of nature of the people who lived on Tyson Street, part of it is the small size of Tyson Street, part of it is what the city and state capably see as gentrification. And we, you know, whether that's good or bad, the fact is that they have put a lot of money into these houses. They see gentrification when white people are doing it. Functionally, Rosemont is also a gentrified neighborhood, right? But they don't see gentrification when black middle class people are the ones fixing up their houses and making them lovely. So it was just sort of like ongoing confusion, the sort of idea that there's this like sort of Hanging over the neighborhood and like swinging lower, but nobody is quite aware of it. There's a lot of other things to worry about, a lot of other kind of threats to the neighborhood's integrity. It just takes a while for people to figure out like, oh, uh oh, this is actually us here.

Jennifer Hiatt: 20:14

We actually in November read Eric Grera's Overbuilt, which is a history of the highway system. So going into your book with the knowledge that that book had provided for me, every time I saw date, I was like, oh no. Oh, that's not a good date either. Oh shit. We're getting, we're getting closer and closer to that one to nine match.

Emily Lieb: 20:34

Yep, yep, yep.

Jennifer Hiatt: 20:37

And in the book, you describe this concept that I thought was very fascinating of blight as a fiction made real by planners and politicians for the Rosemont neighborhood. And as you've been talking about, it was a nice middle-class neighborhood. People were investing in their homes. It just also happened to be a black neighborhood. So, how did city officials wield the term or the label of blight to actually ultimately justify the condemnation actions of what is ultimately a vibrant neighborhood?

Emily Lieb: 21:09

That's a really good question. And again, a sort of complicated answer. So I think we all, as we were talking about before we started to record, I think the word blight, when like lay people hear it or when we hear it with like our ears, like just regular person ears on, I think there is a sort of physical qualities that we sort of see in our heads, right? And so we're like, oh, right, you know, houses are old, they're falling down, whatever it is. Like if I say blighted neighborhood and you're like not thinking too hard about it, you sort of picture something and that seems bad, right? And to be clear, particularly in the older parts of the city, you know, houses were built, houses long predated indoor plumbing, for example. And so there were houses in the old parts of old, what was known as old West Baltimore that like the bathroom was was what was called a yard hopper, like in the yard, right? These kinds of things were what officials pointed to when they talked about blight. So like people are like, well, that does sound bad. Maybe we should be doing something about that. But what blight does is it's a word that doesn't really mean anything. The way there's a quote in the book, the city officials, the Urban Renewal Housing Authority of Baltimore describes Blight in the 60s in a publication that having a blighted neighborhood is a neighborhood that has a constellation of properties that are not found in unblighted neighborhoods or something, something like that. Like, oh, that's incredibly clarifying. But the way that the urban renewal system, the federal project, depended on throwing around this word blight, again, assuming that people who most people who heard it weren't really gonna think too hard about it. And so they would say, well, we're gonna knock down this blighted neighborhood to build public housing or this blighted neighborhood to build a hospital or this blighted neighborhood to build an expressway. And that sort of just becomes its own justification. And people, again, who don't know what they're looking at or don't know how this word is being used, just sort of assume it's true, right? And so, like, who's gonna argue about like taking down what I'm picturing when you say blighted? The argument that what will come in this place will be better than what it replaced. People sort of just assume that that's true. But functionally, what blighted meant in Baltimore and in cities nationwide was just do black people live here or not? And so part of it is this sort of blinkered notion of number one, it's easy to use a word that doesn't really have a definition to justify whatever you want to do. Number two, it is both explicitly and implicitly, you know, a sort of racist description of who lives in a place or who doesn't. But then number three, the process that I just started to describe, wherein this highway map hangs over this neighborhood for years, right, does start to encourage things like disinvestment, right? As we talked about re-Tyson Street, you aren't going to put money into a house that may or may not get knocked down. You're not going to fix the roof. You can't get a loan to fix the roof, you can't get insurance, et cetera, et cetera. So what started to happen, despite residents' best efforts, was by the late 1960s, the label blight, which had not had any relationship to the sort of conditions on the ground in Rosemont. So we can argue about whether this is a useful way of thinking about anything. But the fact is that in this particular instance, whatever we think of when we think about blight did not exist in Rosemont, except that the people who there were black. But by the late 1960s, those kinds of conditions had started to creep into the neighborhood because disinvestment was sort of mandated by this choice that officials had made to build this highway through the neighborhood. And so then it kind of justifies itself, right? Then officials can point to these conditions and say, see, it is blighted. And one of the things that keeps happening, and one of the reasons why this kept dragging on, is that even after officials agreed not to, and by agreed not to, that's a big asterisk because they didn't agree that vigorously, not to build the expressway in the late 1960s, that's uncertainty remained. And then state highway officials, city officials kept coming back to that expressway plan that they had agreed not to build and literally said the damage is done. We might as well just do it. We might as well just knock it down because it's it's, you know, look, all this blight, which was, you know, number one, an invented concept that number two was a lie. And then number three, insofar as it became true, it became true because of one and two, right? And so this kind of transitive, what I call the transitive property, which may I don't remember if that's what it is in algebra, but this idea that you are justifying urban renewal, officials are justifying urban renewal by saying urban renewal is for blighted neighborhoods. And this neighborhood is going to be renewed. Therefore, this neighborhood must be a blighted neighborhood because we said it's for blighted neighborhoods. So we wouldn't be urban renewing something that wasn't blighted. This kind of made-up thing that is the backdrop of this whole conversation over time starts to become, despite the best efforts of the people who lived in Rosemont, starts to become true in a concrete way and then used again to continue to justify itself over time.

Stephanie Rouse: 26:07

So you're starting to lead into this next question. So you were talking about the late 1960s and how the area was actually starting to become blighted because there was this axe hanging over everyone's head, not knowing is there a highway coming, why would I reinvest? But the condemnation lines expired in 1971 in Rosemont and began a new era that, quote, was going to be as bad to Rosemont as a bomb. Not building a highway would seem to be a win in this case, but it wasn't. Why is that?

Emily Lieb: 26:33

To be clear, it is good that no expressway was built. That is a win. But that was not a solution to the problem because the damage had already been done, right? So much harm had already been caused by this map. The subtitle of the book is How a Highway Map Wreck Balksmore, right? The map alone had already caused so much damage that just not building the highway was not an answer. So in a lot of cities, Seattle, I keep saying this and then I keep not looking it up, but I believe that construction on I-5 here in Seattle started in like 1959, 1960, quickly, right? A lot of cities, again, because of the way that city systems worked, were able to start building their expressways pretty quickly. Well, everybody still sort of thought this is a great idea, right? Like, not the people who were losing their houses, but you know, people kind of writ large, people who weren't in the immediate path of the expressways, sort of were like, yeah, this seems terrific. We can get in and out of downtown. What a boon to suburbanites, what a boon to business, whatever it is. Because Baltimore moved so slowly, by the late 1960s, it had become very clear to not only the people who lived in places like Rosemont, neighborhoods that were threatened by the expressway or places like Tyson Street, but also people beyond those neighborhoods, those communities, could see how much damage things like I-5 in Seattle had caused, right? So they're starting to extrapolate, like this seems to be actually quite a bad idea. Also by the late 1960s, there are a series of new tools that are available to people who are trying to stop urban renewal projects that had not previously been available. There are a lot of new environmental laws that were passed, federal laws that, and a lot of new requirements around doing environmental studies, et cetera, et cetera. A lot of requirements now around community engagement, you know, so talking to people who are going to lose their houses. Historic preservation movement is now in full swing. People, number one, by the late 1960s, are pretty good at being activists, right? They've learned to be activists. They're looking around and they're seeing the anti-war movement, civil rights movement, women's movement, right? They're seeing that maybe like people can actually stop things. And we have all these new tools to use to slow them down. In Baltimore, again, this is an expressway system. This is not just this, what I'm calling the East-West Expressway, because otherwise it gets too confusing, but it was I-170 and I-70. It was just a part of the expressway system. There were other parts of it that would have, again, if people are familiar with Baltimore, would have eviscerated Federal Hill and Fells Point, which were two neighborhoods kind of flanking the inner harbor. They are very old, they are very historic. I-95 and I-80, I think, would have sort of run right through them. And so the whole city is kind of under threat. And again, these have been moving around too. The whole city is kind of under threat. And so what happens in 1968 is neighborhood groups from around the city of Baltimore. So the Rosemont Neighborhood Improvement Association in Rosemont is one, the relocation action movement, which is also in Rosemont, was another, but there's also all kinds of groups from all over the city that get together to form an organization called Movement Against Destruction or MAD that sort of took as its task to stop the road system from being built. People might be familiar with the became the Maryland Senator Barbara McCulski. She was at the time a community activist in Southeast Baltimore. All of these people are working together. The Sierra Club, the lawsuit that slows us down the most, has to do with the Sierra Club and like flowers in the park, not anything to do with people. So work together, slow it down. For example, the first designated historic district in Maryland, Fells Point, I believe, was established in response to the highway plan, right? Like you can knock it down. We're historic. Like, ha ha. And so it is a win. It's a win for community organization. It's a win for obviously there's no highway there. However, no one ever says, this is the uncertainty thing again, right? No one ever says, actually, we're not going to build this highway through Rosemont. They say, we see now that this is kind of a bummer. So let's tweak it a little bit. Let's tweak the route of it a little bit. These are the highway engineers. Let's tweak the map of it a little bit. So instead of taking it would have taken a thousand houses, right? Instead of turning up and taking a thousand houses, we can sort of route it down through the cemetery that had always been there, by the way. So it's sort of a sidebar that it is interesting, I suppose is a way to put it, to think about that even if you stipulate that sure, we should have this East-West Expressway, right? If it had really just been about building a road, it could have gone through the cemetery the whole time, right? So it would have done lots of damage in other places. But when it came to Rosemont, like there was really no reason that it needed to take 1100 houses. It could have taken 300 and gone through the cemetery, but the cemetery was a cemetery proceeded with a white church. White people were buried in it. And a lot of civil rights activists pointed out correctly that they would say things like dead white bodies are more important to the city of Baltimore than live black ones, which is accurate. I mean, demonstrably the case. So the the houses it had been condemned in Rosemont for that first version, well, not first, like 32nd version of the road, stayed condemned, even as they agreed not to build the road. So now you have a house that isn't gonna have a road through it, somebody is telling you, but also it's still condemned. And again, there have been so many plans, right? Nobody trusts that we're not gonna go back to the, especially since officials are openly saying things like, well, it's blighted now, let's just go back to the original plan. And so even when the condemnation lines expired in 1971, which they seem to have done just sort of because the people just sort of forgot to renew them, no one knew for sure that there wouldn't still be the highway through the 70s, even when they're renovating these houses, renovating it quotes, to be resold. They still might get a road through them. And no one definitely says that we are not going to build this expressway until the early 1980s. And the reason that they ultimately abandoned it was that the city ran out of money to build it. So that was that. And so it was a win. It is good that it was not built. It was a win for the community, but so much damage, so much harm, that map had caused so much harm already that just not building it and being like, well, all right, cool, we're out, wasn't enough and wasn't going to solve the problem. And that's where we are seeing that those photographs that I was looking at in the archive were from after the moment the city had already agreed, again, vaguely, not to build the road, yet we have this destroyed houses already, anyway. And this is before the city goes on to destroy them further.

Jennifer Hiatt: 32:48

The poor people in Rosemont throughout this multi-decade situation, they were always elected to be the sacrificers in this ongoing saga. And it comes up time and time again. So, what were the actual psychological impacts on the Rosmont residents who were forced to be the sacrificers over and over? Some left, some left and came back, some had their property just kind of unceremoniously ripped from them. So, what were the neighborhood members thinking about as this was happening to them?

Emily Lieb: 33:16

In the book, I talk about what I call the three swindles. I sort of alluded to at the beginning of our conversation. The people who lived in Rosmont were robbed, I mean, figuratively robbed, but then also actually had their property stolen three times. First, when Rosmont became a black neighborhood, second, when they decided to build an expressway through it, and then third, after they had decided not to build the expressway through it. And so you're losing your house. The sort of notion that you are not securing your property. One of the things that is really very interesting and very awful is the people who lived in Rosemont were middle class people, right? College educated, professional people, lawyers, teachers, et cetera. They see themselves as middle class people, right? They think of themselves as property owners. When they talk about when they, you know, organize the Rosemont Neighborhood Improvement Association, they talk all the time about how they are citizens, property owners, right? Their identity is very wrapped up in, you know, I'm a middle class homeowner, which is the way that middle class homeowners think. And so from the beginning, when the city starts to come for their neighborhood, which it did even before the highway city wanted to take a number of their houses, build an elementary school, mind you, across the street from a vacant lot where that school currently stands. So again, no reason to have done any of this. They approach city officials with that logic. They approach city officials like, hey, you're a middle class guy, I'm a middle class guy, you own your house, I own my house. You know, we all know that this isn't what the city does. Like, this is ridiculous. Let me have my property, right? Somebody from the school board, as part of the conversation around this elementary school construction in 1957, says, as you said, says, Well, listen, somebody needs to sacrifice and you have been elected to be the sacrificers. Okay, by whom, right? Again, we don't see you as fellow middle class property owners. We see you as just black people. So they're having two very different kinds of conversations. They're sort of talking past each other. And so that sense of having literally been told by the city that you have been elected to be the sacrificers, it sucks, right? Like it wears on you. These are organized people, they have incredibly organized community groups. They fight, they win sometimes and they lose other times. But they fought and they fought and they fought. But again, this is not, you know, the people who lived on Tyson Street, for example, fought to save their houses from the expressway, but it wasn't a permanent situation, right? Like, oh, they're gonna build a highway through my house. It was a mistake because they didn't realize that actually the person who lives here isn't a poor black renter, which is who they thought lived there, but actually a rich white gentrifier. And like, oh, we all agree that was a mistake and you know, we're never gonna do that again. And then you can sort of move on with your life, right? At no point are people in Rosemont able to just move on with their life. Like we did that, we had that fight, and then it was over and we kept going, right? So if the only fight in this neighborhood had been about that elementary school when the school board official told them that they'd been elected to be the sacrificers, if the fight had been we're gonna take your houses and build this school, and then they had agreed not to build the school, and then that had been that, that again is not pleasant and it's stressful, and it wears on you. It doesn't wear on you as a permanent condition. The sense that this is never finished. And even when they tell us it's finished, it's not finished, evidenced by the fact that three months later, here they are again. Try to take my house again. And then, as you say, people did get their houses taken, right? The people whose houses were condemned had to take remarkably, I mean, people I think cannot wrap their heads around what happens when your property gets condemned for a road and how little money you get. And so, as you say, it's a psychological sort of burden. It's a financial burden. If you leave, you have to buy another house in order to get some money, you have to move again, you have to start this whole thing over again, you have to now you're in more debt than you were. And it just wears. And there are people who are still older folks who still live in Rosemont who have been there through most of this and have been fighting the entire time they have lived there. An interesting conversation I had. Um, I did a book event in Baltimore and I was talking to a woman who lives in Rosemont. And she was saying this book ends in 1975-ish. And as I said, it sort of documents the three swindles, three times the people who lived here were robbed. And she was saying, listen, if somebody needs to write the second half of this book, which I agree they do, she said, I can count three more swindles since 1975. So it never ends, right? That pressure, the sense that nothing you have is yours. And I don't know what was in the hearts of city officials. I don't know what was in the hearts of highway officials. But I would argue, I would surmise that that pressure, that sense of nothing that belongs to you actually belongs to you. It actually belongs to us. You know, so you are sort of using your own property at our pleasure till we decide to take it. That wears. And that is something that I think, you know, I'm a white person, I'm a middle class person, my own house, people in situations like mine. I don't think we think about how tenuous our hold on our property is because our hold on our property is not that tenue. I mean, it is, we're seeing, particularly in 2026, maybe my confidence is misplaced. But certainly the sense that, like, oh, this isn't yours. This you think it's yours, it's not yours, it's ours. And we're letting you keep it and we'll let you keep it for two more years. I mean, that that is an enormous pressure. The, I mean, I can't even imagine. You can't even wrap your head around how much stress and pain and uncertainty and dislocation that causes.

Stephanie Rouse: 38:26

Yeah, it's interesting to put yourself in their shoes and in that situation of what would it have been like to not really know if you're gonna keep your house? Where would you even go if you had to sell it? What kind of concessions are you willing to make in order to get out early, or do you stick it out? It would just be a terrible situation to be in. Yeah. So in the book, there was an attempt to try and right the wrongs in this neighborhood and to repair the damage that all of this caused and creating the substandard blighted conditions. But you note that the neighborhood had been FHA'd and to be FHA'd is ruined. Why, on its surface, a program that looked like it was gonna rehab these homes and put them back into use and kind of help build the neighborhood back up actually turned out to be detrimental.

Emily Lieb: 39:10

Another really hard question. And people, you're gonna have to read the book to understand what I'm talking about here, but I will try to explain it as quickly as I can. So in 1967, the city condemned, as I said, about a thousand houses in Rosemont for the expressway. In 1968, very early 1968, the city decided we're not gonna build this expressway. So, what happens when your house gets condemned is you get a letter that says, you know, surprise your house is condemned, and it says negotiations will commence. That's a lie. There are really not negotiations, they just tell you. And again, this is another thing that drags on forever and nobody can have any certainty because they're not, they're telling you they're gonna take your house and then you don't hear from them for eight months, right? And so people are like writing letters begging the city to just like tell me what you're gonna pay me and pay me so I can leave. So some people left, some people stayed and did not take the city's offer. But the city, by let's say, 1969, the city owned. Of the thousand or so houses that it condemned, the city owned about half of them. They are, again, still condemned houses. Nobody lives in them. No one has lived in them now for let's say a year, two years. No one had really invested very much money in them for the couple of years, even preceding that, for all the reasons that we discussed. So they're sitting on a bunch of houses. These are the houses in the photographs I found. They're not irretrievably in bad shape, but they are in pretty bad shape because they've been empty. And they, you know, the city tried to stick some renters in some of them just to like have eyes on the street, but it didn't, it didn't really work. So they have all these houses. They need to do something with them, to be fair, I suppose, to the city officials. They didn't have many choices, right? You have all these houses, you have to rehabilitate them somehow. You have to get people back in them somehow. There isn't any money to do this, right? The choices available to them were pretty limited. In 1968, the federal government passed a housing act that was meant to remedy a lot of the listeners will be familiar with redlining, the processes by which black buyers were systemically excluded from conventional mortgage markets, the kind of mortgages that built white wealth. And so the 1968 Housing Act, as part of an effort to kind of undo the harms that that had caused, made redlining illegal and part of it introduced a new kind of loan, federally insured mortgage loan for low-income people that covered the mortgage and it subsidized part of a monthly payment for houses. So great, like it's gonna make homeownership, again, in theory, more affordable. The thing about public policy, though, is that it's all about incentives and it works according to the incentives that are involved. So what this law was really trying to do was to put a bunch of federal money to sort of slosh a bunch of federal money back into the housing market in the United States, mortgage lenders, home builders, people in the real estate industry, right? Like this is this is a law that is designed to enrich them while incidentally housing poor people and getting them into housing. By the way, this also corresponds with the federal government basically stopped building uh public housing, except for elderly folks in 1968. So, really, if a poor family wanted a place to live now under the sort of new policy regime, they kind of had to buy it. And they did so with the aid of what was called section 235 of this housing law. But number one, poor people don't see that money. It goes to the housing industry to encourage them to build these houses and restore them. So what happens is Baltimore takes a bunch of money from HUD from the Federal Housing and Urban Development Department to rehabilitate the houses that the city owned now in the condemnation corridor and resell them to low-income buyers using this Section 235 mortgage program. Again, to be fair, this was one of not many choices available to the city of Baltimore. They could have looked a little harder for, but like the fact is, this was the way the federal government was going to give you the money to kind of clean up some of these things. So the City Department of Housing and Community Development takes over these houses and hires, they have to hire two construction companies to again rehabilitate them. And that's in quotes, as we'll see, and then resell them to low-income buyers. Now, number one, in the heads, I think, of policymakers, this will sort of bring back Rosemont. Well, low-income buyers wasn't who lived in Rosemont to begin with, right? So again, this sort of fungibility of black people in the view of white city officials. Like they just don't see. It's like we're not building the same community that we destroyed, right? We're building a different community in the place that we destroyed. But these construction companies basically took the money and did nothing. So they gutted the houses, they made them worse. People whose houses they had been kept saying to the city, like, can I just have my house back? Can I just buy my house back and I will fix it up and you will get out, right? Like, I need this is ridiculous, and we need to be done here. And the city kept saying, No, we can't, because by the terms of the, again, the way that they were getting money, they had to be for low-income buyers and these folks weren't low-income buyers, and so you can't have your house back. So they would take the houses, they would destroy them, and then they built them back in just terrible, terrible shape. People moved into ruined houses, right? People bought houses, they ruined them. The other piece of this is that because again, of the incentives here, mortgage lenders get paid a percentage of the price of the house, right? So houses that had been purchased for the first time by their owners for, let's say, $8,000 in the 50s or 60s, the city paid $3,000 for that. Was their, you know, quote unquote fair market value in the late 60s when the city said we're gonna buy your house. The city bought the houses back from the federal government for a dollar. The surrounding houses that were not part of this program were now, you know, quote unquote, worth $3,000, $2,000 because they're right next to a bunch of condemned houses. What the city is charging these low-income buyers for these properties is like $15,000, $16,000, $17,000. A lot of money for these houses that are, again, ruined. And two buyers who are, by definition, low-income folks who don't have a choice, right? It costs what it costs. It's not like when you buy a house and you're like, you know, I'll put in an offer and we'll see if they know, like it costs what it costs. The lender was who the lender was. It was take it or leave it. You want a place to live, like here it is. And so what you get by the mid-1970s immediately is people who are living in ruined houses that they can't afford, they can't fix, and they can't sell because nobody is going to buy the house that you paid $16,000 for that like is across the alley from one that's worth a thousand dollars, right? You can't, you're your step. And so people before they even move in, they have to, they're borrowing money from kind of scammy roofers because the roof already leaks. They're borrowing money from scammy like electrical companies because the electricity doesn't work. So you're into this huge loan on your house, and then you're into another loan for stuff that the city was supposed to have fixed. And so you're just trapped by this time. Very savvy people, they have the reporters on the blower, call reporters, come look at this mess. It's a mess. You know, the bathtub's falling off the wall. Like it's just, it's truly bizarre. And and this is associated with in the end, the it turned out the guy who was running the construction wing of the Department of Housing and Community Development was convicted soon in Bessler. So so like money was being stolen. So when you're tallying up all the different robberies, one of them is that you just have these like shady companies. And you know, again, this is not defamatory because one guy did go to prison. So it was like just a slush fund for everybody who wasn't a person that might need a place to live. And the people who needed a place to live were getting stuck in these terrible falling down houses. And again, people still live there. They made the best of it. Some of the people, I mean, I've met lots of folks, I've been to their houses. They're like lovely, right? You know, it's not a death knell. It's not that this is a completely unlivable place. It is not that people did not continue to fight and do all they could to keep their houses and to make them nice. They did all of those things. But the fact is that a lot of people lost their houses. There was a functionally a subprime crisis in Rosemont that predated, and Baltimore, as folks may know, was one of the ground zeros for the 2008 subprime crisis. And we had a sort of preamble of that in Rosemont because people, again, were into their houses for too much money. The houses were falling apart. So they're losing money to the roofing guy. They're losing, they're losing their house to the roofing guy, they're losing their house to the plumber. And so, again, the stress and the strain and the incredible difficulty of maintaining the kind of neighborhood that people wanted to live in, which was again a nice middle class. Like, this is not people did not move here because they wanted to be fighting all the time. They moved here because they wanted to live in a 1950s suburb with like the barbecue and the kids on the bikes and like the hedges. They wanted to worry about their hedges. So that is the short version. It's not particularly short, but that is the short version of what happened after the road plan was again ostensibly abandoned and everything got made so much worse.

Stephanie Rouse: 47:50

So it's very clear that lines on the map have and potentially can have some detrimental impacts that are very lasting and can kind of build over the years. What should planners, engineers, architects, city officials, people that have the capacity and are working on creating plans do to avoid situations like this that happened in Rosemont?

Emily Lieb: 48:10

That is such a good question. And I am not a planner, I'm a historian, so I don't know. I don't have to know. But I mean, that's a really hard question. I don't know. I have a very good friend who no longer is at HUD, but worked at HUD for a really long time. And whenever she and I talk about this, like she really points to rightly, I think this question of, again, incentives and thinking a little bit harder and a little bit more critically about the choices that policymakers, planners who are not ultimately, you know, mining gold to pay for things, right? They're getting money from programs that tell you basically what to do. So thinking more critically and more thoughtful about what you're being asked to do and seeing the ways in which this could go awry. Again, I know that that's not easy. That I make that sound easy. It's not easy. The money comes from where it comes from. The rules are what they are. You gotta do what you gotta do. But to be more skeptical and to see what, again, where these incentives are, right? Think about the incentives. Who is being rewarded here and who is being harmed. I think that's part of it. And I think part of it, and this is incredibly simplistic and ridiculous, but again, I'm historian, so I can say this, is to just remember to think about who cities are for, right? And what we want them to be. Very end of the book, an activist from MAD, the anti-road organization, a white environmental activist, said something like the question before us is whether a city is to be a place to live or a place to drive through and exploit. You know, unfortunately, I think even when we are better now at like thinking, and again, who knows, but have been better in the recent past about thinking about like, hey, let's not knock this whole joint down to build a highway, right? We still think of cities, not think of them, but sort of act as though cities are places not to live in, but to exploit, right? This is real estate, it's not a home. And that's much easier said than done. It is much easier said from my point of view as somebody who doesn't have to make these choices and doesn't have to make these compromises and doesn't have to keep a job in a planning authority. That thing, this is like hippie nonsense, right? I get I get all that. So I understand that I am calling on a lot of people to do a lot of vague things that are perhaps not that doable. But I think that just keeping an eye on the incentives, keeping an eye on who's benefiting and keeping an eye on what is this really for and who should be really making these decisions and aiming for that kind of community development, as opposed to just like let's wring as much money out of this land as we possibly can.

Jennifer Hiatt: 50:43

Well, Stephanie and I are here for some hippie nonsense. Always our last question on Book Down Planning. What are some books that you would recommend our readers check out?

Emily Lieb: 50:51

I'm gonna cheat. So two things. One, I think to understand cities, again, this is more kind of hippie nonsense, right? Cities as a place of as a as a whole, a place to be in, to live in. I think actually crime novels are really good. So, like, think about Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles, Dashell Hammett, San Francisco, Folsom Whitehead's Harlem Shuffle, right? Those are books that are about crimes and detectives. And The Big Sleep is one of my favorite books. I don't know what happens in it. I don't even think Raymond Chandler, I think famously also didn't know what happens in it, right? But what you get is a sense of this is what Los Angeles was at mid-century, right? You get the sense of the place so viscerally. And that is how you understand what cities are, how they work, how they you sort of grow or don't, who has power, who doesn't. Again, back to incentives. When I teach, I often start with Colson Whitehead again, his book, Colossus of New York from 2003. It's just a series of essays about New York City. And the first piece is called City Limits, and it makes me cry every time I read it. And it's just a sort of story about Colson Whitehead living in New York City, right? Moving to New York City and the place as it was. And what it really pushes us, and the reason I start with it in my classes, is because I want my students to see and to understand that cities are, you know, they are politics, they are power, they are exploitation, they are capitalism, they're also experiences and really I mean, I love cities. That's why I write about cities. I love living in them, I love moving through them, I love asking questions about them. And what this essay, City Limits, does is it like really thinks about constancy and change. He says something like, There's eight million people in New York City and eight million different New York cities. And we all see what was there when we got here, right? Like he says something like, You become a New Yorker when that Chinese restaurant becomes a dry cleaner and you say that used to be a Chinese restaurant, right? Like when you can see the layers, when you can see the changes even behind what's there. What makes me cry is he has this really beautiful piece about how the thing about cities is that, you know, at some point you're always closer to saying goodbye than you are to saying hello. So like at some point you cross the threshold of your apartment and you didn't know it, but you were closer to the last time than you were to the first time. And and now every time you cross the threshold, you're just saying goodbye. And that I think is a really beautiful way of thinking about cities. And he also says something along the lines of our old buildings matter because we saw them. And that too, this idea of like pelimpsest or layers or thinking about my Seattle is not the same as anybody else's Seattle because I see a different Seattle than anybody else sees, because I see things that were here and other people see things that were here even before that, that I never saw. And so the way that cities grow and change and behave and become part of us, even though that's not particularly, you know, scholarly or particularly related to my work, I do think like fundamentally what the people who lived in Rosemont were saying was this place matters because we're here. These houses matter because they're ours. And this is what is important. This is our city. Baltimore is for us, and you can't take it from us. And Baltimore's position is yes, yes, we can, right? But being able to see the stories behind the stories, being able to move through cities and ask questions about them and be curious about them, understanding that, you know, my Seattle isn't anybody else's, or my New York isn't anybody else's. I'm going back to New York for the first time in a couple of days, and I haven't been since before COVID. And I'm like, I don't know what I'm gonna make of this because that's not my New York anymore. So, you know, number one, crime novels, go read the Maltese Falcon. But number two, the Colossus of New York and particularly the City Limits essay. New York people will maybe cry. And, you know, city people, it will just speak to city people's like souls, I think, which is important too sometimes.

Stephanie Rouse: 54:27

Yeah, no, I love these recommendations, especially the uh recommendation to read crime novels to learn a bit of fun, fun fiction.

Emily Lieb: 54:34

Yeah, yeah. And it and, you know, again, read the big sleep and you'll be like, what? What happened? But it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It's a perfect book.

Stephanie Rouse: 54:43

Well, Emily, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast to talk about your book, Road to Nowhere, How a Highway Map Wrecked Baltimore. Thank you so much for having me. It was great to talk to you.

Jennifer Hiatt: 54:53

We hope you enjoyed this conversation with author Emily Leib on her book, Road to Nowhere, How a Highway Map Wrecked Baltimore. You can get your own copy through the publisher at University of Chicago Press by supporting your local bookstore or of course supporting the show through our affiliate page at bookshop.org slash shop slash booked on planning. Remember to subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts and please rate review and share the show. Thank you for listening, and we'll talk to you next time on Booked on Planning.