A City Ripped Apart by Urban Renewal Tries for Reinvention

Editor's Note: This article appears in Governing's Winter 2025 magazine. You can subscribe here.

Standing at the corner of State and James streets in New Haven, you can’t see the Mill River. But if you look up, you will see its yellow-green reflection bouncing around the underside of Interstate 91. And if you walk behind the nearby municipal ice hockey rink and down a short dirt path, you’ll find yourself in an unexpected riverside space. The weeds and shrubs are shaggy but under control, a concrete footbridge crosses the river and the highway cutting high overhead creates a sort of open-air atrium, as Caroline Tanbee Smith, a member of the city’s Board of Alders, described it one afternoon last October.

But the space is clearly not all that it could be. Smith is leading an effort to reimagine the underpass as a public park, working with a group of high school students, neighborhood leaders, volunteers and the Olympic skateboarder-turned-architect Alexis Sablone. The vision isn’t fully defined yet but calls for a skateboard park, basketball court and kayak portage. The funding to overhaul the space is far from collected, but Smith says it seems like the right time to dream big. “This area has fascinated people for a long time,” she says. “You can kind of feel the opportunity.”

New Haven is known for Yale University, clam pizza and urban renewal. Across the nation, many cities were reshaped during the 1950s and 1960s by the construction of the interstate highway system and massive urban renewal projects that wiped entire neighborhoods from the map in favor of new development. Such efforts were especially extensive in New Haven. Entire books have been written about the Connecticut city as a failed example of urban renewal. That has left lots of spaces in New Haven like Smith’s atrium: underneath a highway, next to a highway, on top of a highway, within earshot of a highway. In decades past, leaders wanted “to do something to replicate the attractiveness of the suburbs,” says Norman Garrick, a retired urban planning professor at the University of Connecticut. “The only way you can do that in a densely built-up city is by destroying the city.”

There are now efforts underway all around New Haven to reshape its character. It’s plain to city planners today that tearing down dense housing in downtowns to make room for highways was a bad idea. Incremental, small-scale development is what gave the densest parts of New Haven and other cities their identity. Cities in general are now clamoring for more housing and trying to mitigate the impacts of air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions caused by highways.

In contrast to 20th-century planners, today’s visionaries are working on a more modest scale. New Haven is now seeing an accumulation of small projects. There’s a decent network of bike lanes traversing the central part of the city. New traffic signals with protected space for pedestrians and bicyclists make it easier to cross some of the widest roads. Reconfigured streets are lined with bioswales and other green infrastructure, planted with native grasses. Some blocks have been temporarily closed to cars to encourage gatherings and nightlife. New housing developments in the city — about 500 units a year over the last decade — are starting to alleviate the need for new parking garages downtown because more residents have the chance to live close to work.

For the past two decades, the city has been working on a project called Downtown Crossing in the footprint of the former Route 34 Oak Street Connector, a highway that was never completed. The project has involved redesigning crossings over the highway, trying to connect the partly destroyed neighborhoods with downtown. “In the past, there was so much focus on using cars to facilitate people living in a single-family house in the suburbs, and over time, people have realized that doesn’t necessarily provide the best opportunities for someone to be a whole person,” says New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker. “This project is one example of creating spaces where people will choose to be, that make people better people by facilitating interactions.”
Like city dwellers everywhere, New Haven residents inherit a place shaped by decisions made decades before they were born. In their case, it’s a city that still works mostly in accord with the vision of mid-century planners. The contemporary ability to reimagine its future is constrained by the hard edges of the highway network. And the tools they have are far weaker than those of their forebears, who were swimming in federal cash. On a per capita basis, New Haven got almost three times as much urban renewal money from the feds in the 1960s as any other city.

Countless cities were reconfigured by the interstate highway and urban renewal programs of the mid-20th century, but few were altered as profoundly as New Haven. The center of the city was bulldozed to build portions of I-95, I-91 and the Oak Street Connector, the stretch of highway that was never finished. Blocks of tightly knit homes and businesses — slums in the parlance of the day — were cleared for new housing, roads and parking. The city tore down around 3,000 buildings that housed about 7,000 families. Urban renewal projects displaced more than 2,200 businesses and precipitated the decline of small-scale retail. The Oak Street project alone displaced more than 880 families and 350 businesses. New Haven lost a quarter of its population between 1950 and 1980. “Urban renewal, inextricably intertwined with a program of highway construction, did more to change the built city than had any single intervention in New Haven’s three centuries of history,” Douglas Rae, a Yale political scientist and former New Haven chief administrator, once wrote.

Standing at the end of the Long Wharf Pier, you can gaze south across Long Island Sound, or you can turn around and take in the Tomlinson Bridge, carrying Route 1, or, directly behind it, the Q Bridge, carrying I-95. More than 150,000 cars cross those bridges every day. Downtown New Haven is larded with space for parking, too — wide open surface lots, stand-alone parking garages designed by mid-century architects, and newly built car parks for life sciences hubs.

Charlie Nixon, who is 65, grew up in Farnam Courts, a former public housing project not far from the planned Interstate 91 underpass park. The highway, he recalls, was built right against the back of the project starting when Nixon was 7 or 8 years old. He and his friends used to climb up and slide down the big piles of dirt dug out for the construction. After the highway was opened, he used to climb up the hill and run across it to get to the store. One of his friends, a boy named John Hobby, was killed doing the same thing. “It sort of created a borderline, I guess,” Nixon says. “We just sort of fell into a pattern of not even going in that direction.”

The errors of the urban renewal era in New Haven — the destruction of much of the city’s fabric, the acceleration of white flight, the isolation of poor and minority neighborhoods — became clear to most people fairly quickly after it ended. Others knew it was a bad idea all along. Successive leaders have tried to improve some of the most glaring damage to the urban landscape. Elicker is the third mayor to hold office during the long gestation of the Downtown Crossing project. The project has been fueled by federal infrastructure grants but it was made possible by the demand for life sciences workspaces.

The new crossings over the Oak Street Connector are being built out alongside a cluster of biosciences facilities connecting tech startups, the Yale New Haven Hospital and the Yale School of Medicine. These projects have been a boon to New Haven’s tax rolls — at least in the short term; Yale may ultimately take over the properties, making them tax-exempt. They’ve certainly provided construction and maintenance jobs. And they’ve also included programming to help expose New Haven high school and college students to the life sciences industry. “We want young people to see themselves as future bioscientists,” Elicker says.

Although meant to repair some of the damage wrought by Route 34, Downtown Crossing is not a highway removal project. It has laid new sidewalks and bike paths across the highway, but some urbanists have been critical of the streetscaping, the lack of new crossings, and the abundance of new parking that accompanied the early projects. “One of my classic examples of how the damage never totally goes away is that the dimensions of the original Route 34 have been reproduced in the footprints of the so-called repair projects,” says Alan Plattus, the founding director of the Yale Urban Design Workshop.

In her downtown office, Anstress Farwell keeps two aerial maps showing the presence of parking lots and garages in the city in both 1951 and 2008. The latter map is dense with parking spaces, reflecting the city’s ongoing attempt to lay out the red carpet for cars. To Farwell, the president of the New Haven Urban Design League, it’s a frustrating example of how deeply ingrained the autocentric logic of city building is among planners and leaders. New Haven’s expansion of parking supply coincided with a reduction in urban jobs and residents, while other New England cities, such as Cambridge, Mass., have seen growth in those areas after limiting the development of new parking.
Gradually, leaders are trying to let go of the impulse to build more parking with every new development. The newest building in the Downtown Crossing project doesn’t include a parking garage of its own. The executive director of the city’s parking authority, Doug Hausladen, is a former member of the Board of Alders and was also director of transportation for the city. In overseeing the city’s public parking garages, he’s advocated for changes to parking policy and investment in different types of transportation infrastructure. The parking authority has backed zoning changes pushed by the group Desegregate Connecticut, including a call to eliminate parking requirements in new developments, which would encourage more bicycle and pedestrian space and could help lower the cost of housing construction. Hausladen has also pushed to establish a bike-share program through the parking authority.

Today’s leaders recognize that previous generations may have had the best intentions as they made their biggest mistakes. The so-called slums did, after all, offer substandard living conditions. “It’s maybe only in hindsight that we see how valuable having the housing infrastructure there was,” says Laura Brown, New Haven’s planning director. “There may be things that we are considering obvious and the ways that we have to do planning now that people will look back on and say, ‘What were they thinking?’”

Now, some of the neighborhoods that were most impacted by urban renewal are developing their own plans to ameliorate the effects of mid-century infrastructure decisions. Last year, developers broke ground on 56 units of affordable housing in the West River neighborhood for a project planned partly by a local community group. The site had been vacant land taken by eminent domain and cleared for Route 34 but never used. The new development required years of planning and nearly a dozen sources of local, state, federal and private financing to get it off the ground.

Bigger projects are on the horizon too. The public housing authority is planning a major mixed-use project on a vacant lot across from New Haven’s Union Station, one of the busiest intercity rail stations in the country. A housing project that sat on the lot was knocked down in 2018. But even as New Haven residents entertain alternate visions for the city’s future, they remain attached to various aspects of its past.

Last October, Farwell of the Urban Design League convened an afternoon tour of the largely industrial Mill River district. Speakers took turns showing a few dozen residents around a string of sites — describing the demographic history of the area, highlighting industrial-to-residential conversions and pointing to the need for environmental remediation. The centerpiece of the tour was English Station, an abandoned thermal power plant looming on its own island in the middle of the river. It seemed impossible to imagine how it could be redeveloped for safe, healthy, contemporary use. But people are imagining it anyway. In addition to her work to create an underpass park beneath I-91, Smith led a city application for a federal Reconnecting Communities grant to plan for a whole series of improvements around the city, including street upgrades and the potential reclamation of the English Station site.

Nixon, who grew up near Interstate 91, met Smith as part of the planning for the underpass park. He spent countless hours as a kid going through that space before it was home to a highway, fishing for bass, trout, sunnies, bluegills, frogs and turtles. Now Nixon is working on the plan to re-envision it. He hopes it includes all the amenities people are asking for, such as places for skateboarding, basketball, art and music, as well as green infrastructure to help keep highway runoff out of the water. “A safe space for people to come to. A beautiful park,” he says. “I can’t imagine how nice that would be.”