Infrastructure's Big Moment Is Coming

Infrastructure is high on the agenda at the American Planning Association’s National Planning Conference, which began this weekend. The location—New York City—is a veritable showroom of projects. I took a sold-out Acela train that glided into Penn Station and carried on under the Hudson River, where a new tunnel is planned. The Second Avenue subway is up and running; north of town, a new Tappan Zee Bridge is being built. The city planning directors from around the country who convened for this annual gathering got a tour of Hudson Yards, rising up near the convention center, and learned about the financing innovations that made it possible, including value capture—harnessing a portion of the massive increases in property values associated with the extension of the 7 subway line.

But not far away, there’s a reminder of how urban infrastructure can go wrong: the Sheridan Expressway, a few miles away in the Bronx. The short stretch of highway opened in 1963 in the Hunts Point neighborhood, part of the road-building frenzy orchestrated by New York’s legendary get-things-done czar, Robert Moses. Like many other extensions through urban neighborhoods under the Interstate Highway Act, the jumble of asphalt and steel accelerated blight in the community, and, some would argue, further facilitated white flight to the suburbs