How urban renewal and highways destroyed Overtown, Miami’s historic Black neighborhood
Architect chats with curator of Miami-Overtown exhibit
Stephen Robb
Oct 1, 2024
Urban renewal and mass transit were the topics of discussion during an Instagram live discussion last week between Jordan Rogers, museum curator for the “Anything But a Slum: Miami-Overtown Before I-95” exhibit at the Black Police Precinct & Courthouse Museum, and architect Adam Paul Susaneck, creator of Segregation by Design.
Segregation by Design is a website that documents how red lining and urban renewal harmed Black populations. Susaneck used his knowledge to expand on Rogers’ exhibit, sharing how mass transit has affected the Black populations of Overtown and Miami.
Susaneck explained how Overtown was the only central location where Black people were allowed to live, essentially serving as a source of labor for the larger population.
“Miami sold itself with the image of Black servitude,” he said. “In the advertising the workers at the hotels, like bellboys, were all Black. That was the selling point with these places, where you can live like a rich plantation owner. Basically you can live like a wealthy capitalist. It’s pretty obvious when you look at the advertising, what they’re saying, (the Black workers) were always in a subjugated position. So the presence of Overtown was actually … a necessity.”
This was the culture prior to World War II, when, though American cities were racially segregated, they were also dense, meaning people still lived in close proximity.
However, this all changed after the war. Due to the rise of the automobile, white communities and governments began to see the opportunity to broaden their horizons. In came the G.I. Bill of 1944.
“The G.I. Bill provided heavily subsidized mortgages for returning vets for newly built houses in the suburbs,” Susaneck said, explaining the onset of white flight. Though technically open to Black veterans, he said restrictive covenants and other public and private segregation policies kept Black veterans from taking advantage of the subsidies.
People began to leave the downtown area, moving south to areas like Kendall, Susaneck said. All the while, Broward is getting built up and Palm Beach starts spreading west.
“So now, Overtown is viewed as an expendable slum,” Susaneck said.
“The tax base of the inner city becomes less and less,” he added, “so there’s physical deterioration that sets in as the tax bases are dried up. Municipal services are cut back.”
Meanwhile, those who emigrated from Overtown’s surrounding areas still nevertheless work there, causing increased traffic between the suburbs and downtown. The roads had not been built to handle the influx of traffic, bringing in a need for highways.
Susaneck said these issues prompted the 1949 Federal Housing Act and the 1956 Federal Highway Act.
“This becomes the government solution to this problem that cities across the country are having,” Susaneck said. “The highways become a means to better connect the suburbs to downtown, to alleviate the pressure, and urban renewal becomes a means to deal with the decay that was caused by the loss of tax base.”
“And it’s up to the states to implement this. The theory is … we will provide states with funding to destroy decaying neighborhoods and replace them with more modern facilities … but in reality a lot of that never really materializes,” he added.
The end result, Susaneck said, was the destruction of Overtown.
“They destroyed Overtown, displaced all these people,” he said. “They don’t build public housing for these people, so many of them had to leave the city. What happens then is that much of the land that was formerly Overtown is now part of downtown. So rather than build facilities for people who are displaced, they take the land they recaptured and retain some of that labor and capital that’s been leaving for the suburbs.”
City planners used these federal acts to their advantage.
“Because of the policies of red lining, it’s a slum from a financial standpoint, so urban renewal becomes a means to remove these, quote unquote, undesirable populations to replace them with facilities that are designed to stop white flight and attract people back, attract white people from the suburbs.”
In the end, Overtown was torn down under the guise of urban renewal.
“Urban renewal wipes out these neighborhoods that it describes as slums, and sometimes they genuinely are, but more often than not, it’s just the Black neighborhoods,” Susaneck said.
Susaneck explained how business leaders responded to white flight by leveraging federal funding to remake downtowns and make them more “commercially attractive.” Residents were told that the community would be destroyed, but that it would be for the greater good.
“Everything I said can also apply to freeways,” Susaneck said. “Freeways are a large part of urban renewal plans, but you can view highway construction as the same thing. It is a means to connect to the suburbs to solve that traffic problem. But the physical way it’s routed is to the remove undesirable populations and make it easier for the suburban folks to get to downtown. That’s why you see a lot of downtowns surrounded by highways.”
He described how the Black population of Overtown was displaced as a result of the I-95 highway. The communities moved north to communities like Miami Gardens and Opa-locka, which is why these cities are predominantly Black today.
“The same thing that happened in Overtown happens in Brownsville,” Susaneck said. “The tax base collapses, the government lets it fall apart, sidewalks fall apart. Sewers fall apart. They weren’t destroyed by the highway, they were destroyed by disinvestment.”
He further touched on how Black property owners were not given just compensation. They were offered $800 for their property, never informed that they didn’t have to accept the offer.
To conclude, Susaneck offered a recipe of solutions: “We need to build affordable housing, once you have that, then you can talk mass transit. Then it’s restricting personal traffic and make the busses better. And eventually build more trains.”
He said mass transit has to be made more accessible.
“Look on the map at Palmetto; their park-and-rides are tucked behind a Home Depot and next to canals, so it’s even harder to drive to them,” Susaneck said. “Miami has the bones of a fine system, most of these cities don’t even have a metro. Miami has two train lines, it has two metro lines and the metro mover, (but) they have to build affordable housing.”