all set within a wide right-of-way. Depression of the central artery to separate its grade from that of the intersecting streets will be only a matter of construction, and is desirable.
In general, however, city administrations have been deterred from following these inspiring examples by what appear to be the literally stupendous difficulties and expense involved—difficulties and expense partly of an engineering nature, but first and usually in much the greater measure generated by the acquisition of right-of-way and the damage to, or obliteration of, private property. In the improvement of Woodward Avenue in Detroit, the property damage and right-of-way cost was $9,806,400 of a total cost of $11,127,900. Twenty years ago, it has been said, the right-of-way could have been obtained at a cost of about $250,000.Widening of this important artery affords needed space for the large number of vehicles moving over it. It does not dispose of the problem raised by the interruption of the heavy stream of traffic at the cross streets. The recently completed traffic survey indicates that eventually it will be necessary to consider the construction of express highways across the city and into its central business section which will serve through traffic without frequent cross-street stoppage.
In the circumstances it is easy to understand and sympathize with the hesitation of the city administrations.Yet the problem remains and is becoming more acute with each passing year. Soon it must be faced; and the strongest reasons urge against delay. To present them properly requires a brief digression.
Reference has previously been made to the leapfroglike movement of traffic from the periphery of the cities over intervening areas to their centers. The motor vehicle itself is the primary cause of this phenomenon. It made possible the outward transfer of the homes of citizens with adequate income from the inner city to the suburbs and it now conveys these citizens daily back and forth to their city offices and places of business.
The former homes of the transferred population have descended by stages to lower and lower income groups, and some of them (each year an increasing number, and generally those nearest the center of the city) have now run the entire gamut. (See pl. 50.) Almost untenable, occupied by the humblest citizens, they fringe the business district, and form the city’s slums—a blight near its very core! Each year a few of these once prouder tenements, weakened by want of repair, tumble into piles of brick, not infrequently taking a human life in their fall. Each year a few of them make way for parking lots unsightly indexes to needed facilities of higher dignity! Each year the city “takes over” a few of them for unpaid taxes. And now—the Federal Government is beginning to acquire them in batches in connection with its slum-clearance projects. Heralds of a better future though they are, these acquisitions comprise one of the reasons for avoidance of delay in dealing with the problem of transcity highway connections and express highways.
Another reason lies in the fact that, here and there, in the midst of the decaying slum areas, substantial new properties of various sorts are beginning to rise—some created by private initiative, some by public.
There is growing danger that these new properties, sporadically arising, and the more compact developments by the Government in its slum-clearance projects, will block the logical projection of the
