The Invisible Trillion

The Highway in the Bronx

What It’s Like to Live Next Door

In 1948, East Tremont was one of the nicer neighborhoods in the Bronx — a stable, mostly working-class area, Jewish and Italian and Black and Puerto Rican, with tree-lined streets, sturdy apartment buildings, small businesses on the avenues, a synagogue, a hospital, decent schools, low crime, and rising property values. People bought apartments there expecting to live in them for thirty years and pass them to their children.

In 1955, Robert Moses decided that the Cross-Bronx Expressway needed to cut through it. In The Power Broker, his 1974 biography of Moses, Robert Caro documented that alternative routes were available — including one two blocks north that would have used an existing rail right-of-way and displaced almost no one — and that the route through East Tremont was chosen instead. Caro’s account is that Moses did not visit the neighborhood or meet the residents. He looked at a map, drew a line, and the line went through their lives.

About 60,000 people lost their homes to make way for the trench. Eviction notices arrived with ninety days’ warning and compensation set by a city formula that, Caro documented, systematically undervalued what families were losing. The construction took most of a decade, and during it, and for years afterward, the neighborhood began to come apart in ways that were not immediately obvious as collapse.

Property values for the buildings next to the trench dropped first, because nobody wanted to live next to a freeway. Falling values meant owners couldn’t refinance to maintain the buildings, so maintenance was deferred, which made the buildings worse, which dropped values further. Owners sold at a loss. New owners, paying less, had less to spend on upkeep, and some sold to absentee landlords with no personal stake in the neighborhood.

By 1965, the businesses on the commercial streets began to close. The synagogue closed in 1968. By 1975 came the fires that became the iconic image of the South Bronx — buildings worth more burned than standing. By 1980, East Tremont was one of the most devastated places in America.

Hold the timeline in your head, because it is the one this chapter is about: 1948, stable working-class neighborhood. 1955, decision made by someone who did not live there. 1958, evictions. 1965, decline visible. 1972, irreversibility. 1980, ghetto. Twenty-seven years from the last good year to total collapse. By the halfway point, anyone paying attention could see the trajectory. By the three-quarter point it was irreversible — the capital had left, the institutions had closed, the people with options had moved out.

Caro’s was not a unique story. The same pattern recurred where Interstate 375 cut through Black Bottom and Paradise Valley in Detroit, where I-95 took out Overtown in Miami, where I-10 went through Tremé in New Orleans, where I-94 destroyed Rondo in St. Paul — a neighborhood that, historians have documented, the city’s planners chose partly because they expected the residents would have difficulty fighting back — and where I-40 took the Jefferson Street corridor in Nashville.

The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 authorized 41,000 miles of interstate, and the urban portions destroyed an estimated one million American homes between 1956 and 1972, disproportionately in Black and working-class neighborhoods. None of those neighborhoods looked like ghettos when the highway decisions were made. Most became ghettos within twenty-five years. None came back.

I open the chapter this way because the pattern I want to describe — what is happening now, in 2026, as AI data centers are built near residential areas — rhymes with the highway pattern closely enough that the comparison is worth taking seriously. It is being executed with newer legal tools, by a different industry, in some of the same kinds of neighborhoods, and the same twenty-five-year trajectory is available to anyone willing to look ahead.

Whether a given neighborhood follows that trajectory is not fixed — sometimes communities organize and stop a development, sometimes a facility is sited or designed so the cascade never starts — but absent any of that, the trajectory is the default. This chapter is about what it is like to live next to one of these facilities. The two that follow are about how the developments get approved, and about the mechanics of the cascade itself.

All 19 chapters of The Invisible Trillion · Library · All courses