Nearly five months after taking over as New York governor, Kathy Hochul announced her first state budget for the fiscal year 2023 on Tuesday.
Within the $216.3 billion spending proposal is a five-year, $32.8 billion capital plan to strengthen roads and bridges and “reconnect neighborhoods that were severed by asphalt highways.”
Highways like Buffalo’s Kensington Expressway, the major artery for commuters going from downtown to the suburbs, was mentioned by name in Hochul's speech.
Constructed in the 1960s, the Kensington cuts through several neighborhoods in Buffalo’s predominantly Black East Side and often seen as a sign of the city’s previous segregationist policies, but University at Buffalo Department of Urban and Regional Planning Professor Dr. Henry Louis Taylor Jr. said the expressway's history is deeper than that.
“The Kensington Expressway was a blatant example of how public policy decisions are used both to destroy Black neighborhoods and communities, but also enormous modes of exploitation,” he said. “We talk about redlining in Buffalo, but the Kensington Expressway had nothing to do with redlining.”
The neighborhoods along the expressway routes were, prior to its construction, predominantly white neighborhoods, Taylor said, but within a decade, those neighborhoods became predominantly Black.
“What the real estate industry, in cahoots with the white community, did was to start to sell those housing units to African Americans,” he said, “because they knew the Kensington Expressway was coming and the houses there would be devalued.”
Those neighborhoods now suffer from higher rates of respiratory problems than other parts of the city, Taylor said, because of automobile pollution from the expressway.
Hochul has not laid out a detailed plan of what is to become of the Kensington, but many local urban development organizations have called for the filling in of the one-mile stretch of the expressway underneath the Humboldt Parkway, somewhat returning the parkway to the design of architect Frederick Law Olmsted.
But any discussion of work being done on the Kensington must include equity, Taylor said.
“Who will get the jobs,” he said of the possibility of covering the expressway. “We’re talking about millions of dollars. Those are wages and salaries and contracts. And where those dollars ultimately end up will generate all kinds of opportunity.”
Taylor would like to see that money reinvested into the communities he feels have been exploited and have had their wealth extracted from them for generations. That starts with awarding contracts and jobs to minorities and people in the community working to build for the community.
“Historically and in the present, we think of these activities only through the lens of the extraction of wealth from the African American community, not the investment of wealth,” Taylor said. “So the problems of public policy created in the first place, when they come in and fix the problem, they’re really creating jobs and opportunities for white people.”
Any expressway plan and project the state offers should have an agenda for community building and reinvestment, Taylor said, and until then he will remain skeptical about which communities the plan purports to serve.
