'He points out that one result of the federal government’s racist redlining policies in the early decades of the twentieth century was systematic underinvestment in Black communities and the creation of what came to be called “blighted” neighborhoods. And then in the postwar years, federal, state, and city governments used highway policy in turn to eradicate those neighborhoods: “If Black neighborhoods were nails, freeways were a convenient hammer…. General Motors, for one, proposed using freeways to displace ‘undesirable slum areas.’”

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/10/05/toward-a-land-of-buses-and-bikes-crossings-ben-goldfarb/