At a Sept. 10 Baltimore City Council meeting, longtime Reservoir Hill neighborhood resident Angel St. Jean took the podium to tell the story of her community over the past decade. “Step by step, chip by chip, our voice has been taken away,” she said.
For years, residents in the 85% Black neighborhood have worked together to stifle elements of gentrification. All the while, they’ve found themselves on the front lines of a fight that may upend all their work: an Amtrak train tunnel project that could irreversibly alter the neighborhood’s character.
The proposed $6-billion tunnel project, which is being named for Frederick Douglass, is touted as a critical public investment set to modernize the Northeast’s rail infrastructure. But for residents, the project feels hauntingly familiar—a reminder of past infrastructure projects that upended Black communities. To complete the project, Amtrak will need to purchase properties, displace public property and Black property owners, and partake in a tunnel-digging endeavor that will cake the neighborhood with potentially hazardous dust.
Community members allege that Amtrak has employed hostile tactics when engaging with residents, including leveraging the threat of eminent domain and even routinely misspelling
“Frederick Douglass” in promotional materials. Residents have pointed out the tone-deaf nature of invoking the Black abolitionist’s name for a project that at one point was mapped out to run under the graves of formerly enslaved people.
The treatment of the community is “unforgivable,” said Reservoir Hill resident Adrienne Smith, “especially given our country’s gross history of profiting off the backs and sacrifices of Black people.”
As residents continue with their advocacy, Amtrak’s own poor planning could mean more delays, longer construction time, and calls for even more public funds to complete the project, the company’s inspector general said in an audit released to the public last month.
With a civil rights complaint filed to the U.S. Department of Transportation, Reservoir Hill residents are demanding a project design that respects their health, history, and hard-won progress. Amid promises of modern transit, residents and urban developers face a tricky question: Can we build out the nation’s necessary infrastructure without harming people?
“Over and over and over again, these decisions are being made at the expense of majority-Black communities,” Kendra Prier, a resident and community advocate, explained.
Work crews tear down a building in Baltimore’s Reservoir Hill neighborhood to make way for an Amtrak train tunnel project. (Courtesy of the Reservoir Hills Association of Neighbors)
The Biden administration has touted plans to reverse the harmful effects of 20th-century highway expansion projects, including one that displaced roughly 1,500 majority-Black Baltimoreans to build a highway connection that was never even completed. To do so, the administration has funded and subsidized a record number of mass transit projects, like Amtrak expansions and subway and bus projects, to offset communities’ reliance on vehicles and highways. Yet, despite the Biden administration’s historic investment of over $1.2 trillion in infrastructure aimed at promoting equity and sustainability, many Black communities are still facing displacement and adverse health impacts from ongoing infrastructure projects.
The situation may worsen in the coming years as an impending Trump administration shows signs that it will reinvest in the original highways and roads that have displaced Black families.
Read More: Why a Civil Rights Act Victory Isn’t Enough for This Flooded Alabama Community
On paper, the investments offer outsized positive benefits for Black communities, which are more likely to rely on public transit than any other race, and offer many positive climate benefits by decreasing pollution and traffic congestion in Black neighborhoods where highways are typically found. Mass transit rail systems like Amtrak produce 76% less greenhouse gas emissions per passenger mile than cars and dramatically lower the amount of air pollution for people living within a mile of the stations.
But the tradeoff of the construction of these projects is often displacement and gentrification. It has raised urgent questions about the true effectiveness of these investments in achieving racial equity.
Read More: Can ‘Biden’s Billions’ Deliver True Environmental Justice?
“I do strongly believe that there could be investment without displacement,” said Stephanie Gidigbi-Jenkins, a former Department of Transportation official under the Obama administration.
“I think that the main struggle comes from the fact that with new dollars – the ‘Biden Billions’ – flowing in a different way, we’re not seeing the level of intentionality that is needed, which is why we might still be seeing a displacement of not just Black people, but also the displacement of Black culture.”
Gidigbi-Jenkins, who now helps support organizations attempting to tap into the $1 trillion earmarked for community infrastructure improvement, said the Biden administration’s goal to support Black and disinvested communities by ensuring that 40% of the “benefits” of these projects go to historically disadvantaged communities is “unprecedented,” but it is not the whole story.
Where the funding ultimately goes and what kinds of projects actually get constructed is mainly decided by state governments, who are not always following the Biden administration’s cues. Roughly 90% of the funding, she explained, goes directly to states, “so when Biden talks about Justice40, it’s really 40% of the 10% that’s leftover, so we’re really talking about 4 cents on the dollar.”
A sign marks Amtrak’s train tunnel project in Baltimore. (Courtesy of Reservoir Hills Association of Neighbors)
Amtrak receives considerable subsidies from state and federal governments but is managed as a for-profit company. Much of the tunnel project is funded through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, one of the main spending pools for the Justice40 program.
“Their opinion is really all we should be doing is trying to negotiate for a ‘better’ project, but stopping the project or calling out the structural racism that’s embedded in a project is beyond what they’re willing to pursue,” Prier said.
The agency says it has made extensive outreach efforts since 2014 and will continue to do so. “We are committed to doing the right thing, and that includes working with community members through every stage of the Frederick Douglass Tunnel Program,” Amtrak spokesman W. Kyle Anderson said earlier this year.
The path of least resistance
Over the past fifty years, Reservoir Hill has become a prime example of the pitfalls of transit development, closed off from a neighboring well-resourced white neighborhood by two state highways that bring in copious amounts of air pollution. The infrastructure and segregation, Prier said, has everything to do with her neighborhood having among the worst health outcomes in the city, including high rates of asthma.
The proposed path of the new tunnel zig-zags past several majority-white neighborhoods in order to carve through theirs. All of Amtrak’s 14 proposed route alternatives ran through predominantly Black areas. (The Federal Railroad Administration in partnership with the state ultimately finalized the proposed route of the tunnel, prompting the community’s ability to call for a federal civil rights investigation.)
A map shows the proposed path of the Frederick Douglass Tunnel. (Courtesy of Amtrak)
Due to several examples of new infrastructure projects harming Black communities, including one that prompted another civil rights investigation in rural Alabama, the DOT issued a policy directive this summer focused specifically on “addressing climate change, ensuring racial equity, supporting wealth creation, and removing barriers to opportunity” in Black communities.
While Reservoir Hill residents await the result of the federal investigation spurred by their civil rights complaint, they said larger organizations focused on transportation equity, which are typically majority-white, have been slow to offer their fight support. Within the transportation equity movement, mass transit options like the one Amtrak is expanding are usually championed, so coming out against the project would stray from their talking points.
But Ward and other residents say it shows how elements of racial discrimination and not valuing Black perspectives still permeate movements around transit and environmental justice. “There is a real need for public transit over highways, but public transit should work for the community instead of gentrifying or harming it,” she said. “Everyone is turning a blind eye and ignoring Amtrak’s bad behavior.”
Eric Costello, a Baltimore city councilman, took offense to St. Jean’s testimony in September, and other claims from concerned residents. “Let me make sure that we do not conflate representation with agreement,” he said, adding that it is not an elected official’s duty to always agree with the sentiments of their constituents.
Amtrak is currently expanding through most regions of the country, including other Northeast cities like New York, across the Midwest, and even in the South, but the tunnel project is its largest current infrastructure initiative. The project is planned to address issues in the aging Baltimore and Potomac (B&P) Tunnel. The existing tunnel has sunk and suffers from water intrusion, necessitating constant maintenance, and its current iteration with sharp curves limits train speeds to 30 mph, leading to frequent delays.
Supporters, including Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, argue that the new tunnel will ultimately alleviate congestion in the Northeast Corridor, reduce community noise and pollution by prioritizing electrified passenger trains, and inject $50 million into local investments. (The new tunnel is primarily “designed for all-electric passenger trains” — although diesel-powered trains haven’t fully been removed from future plans.)
A medical center, several churches, and many more homes are set to be demolished. Residents fear they’ll be undercut by prices. Amtrak already used eminent domain to purchase 29 residential properties and 19 commercial ones for demolition, but they’ve only had to pay $267,500 for the combined properties.
“They felt like our community would be the way of least resistance,” said Prier. “So part of this work is about showing as much resistance as possible, so that hopefully in the future, they’ll understand that actually, disrupting Black life is not the easiest way forward.”
It really comes down to a message that she keeps in her email signature, a reminder of the significance of her community’s fight: “Nothing about us without us.”
The post Baltimore Needs Modern Transit, but a New Project Rehashes Historic Trauma appeared first on Capital B News.
