Interstate Highways

Many thought it disparaging that Cleveland was enduring a housing crisis when hundreds of homes were being demolished for highway construction. Some people proposed moving houses slated for demolition. William Mural, the owner of a construction company, insisted that it cost the city and tax payers less to move a house than building new houses or rehabilitating old ones in slums. Many thought that “the complications and expense of moving a big home from Rocky River across town to the Hough Area” was not cost effective.[1]

By the 1970s highway planners began to realize the social costs of interstate highways and intended to consider such costs in future highway development. In 1970 the Department of Highways acknowledged that the poor and elderly paid the greatest price and benefited the least from interstate highway development and “since access to private automobile transportation is a monotonically increasing function of income this means that the burdens of relocation must often be borne by that segment of the population least likely to participate in the benefits of the highway improvement which displaces them.”[2]