BIDEN VICTORY NOT ASSURED
change as Biden tries to push the plans through Congress.
Given the thin Democratic majorities in both the House and the Senate, the legislative battle is likely to be intense and highly partisan, with no assurance the White House will prevail.
Republicans have objected to the corporate tax increases Biden has proposed to fund this phase of his agenda, and they have accused the president of using the popular banner of “infrastructure” to sell what they call unrelated liberal priorities — including many of the programs White House officials say will advance economic opportunity for disadvantaged people and areas.
But liberal economists say the spending on transportation, housing and other areas of Biden’s initial plan could help advance racial equity, if done correctly.
“This is a promising start,” said Trevon Logan, an economist at Ohio State University whose work includes studies of how government spending projects, like the one that built the interstate highway system, have excluded or hurt Americans who are not white.
The biggest single piece of the plan’s racial equity efforts is not a transportation or environmental project, but a $400 billion investment in in-home care for older and disabled Americans. It would lift the wages of care workers, who are predominantly low-paid, female and not white.
“It’s the first jobs program that is focused primarily on work done by women of color,” said Mary Kay Henry, the president of the Service Employees International Union. “It’s going to transform Black, brown and Asian lives, and entire communities.”
White House officials say the $100 billion the plan allocates to improve and build out broadband internet will disproportionately help Black and Latino families, who have less access to affordable broadband than white families do.
Half of the $40 billion the plan would spend to upgrade research labs across the country would be reserved for colleges and universities that historically serve Black and other students of color.
Republicans have complained that much of the bill does not fund what they call traditional infrastructure like roads and bridges. “Biden’s plan includes hundreds of billions of spending on left-wing policies and blue-state priorities,” the Republican National Committee wrote in a news release, including “$400 billion for an ‘unrelated’ program for home care that ‘was a top demand of some union groups.’ ”
Administration officials say concerns over racial inequality are an animating force of the infrastructure push. They peppered a 25-page explanation of the jobs plan with references to racial equity, and they included two specific examples of the sort of communities they hope to lift with the $20 billion for economic revitalization: the Black neighborhood in Syracuse that was partially bulldozed to make way for Interstate 81, and the Claiborne Expressway in New Orleans.
Government infrastructure spending is meant to make the economy work more efficiently. Freeways and rail lines speed goods from factories to market. Roads and transit systems carry workers from their homes to their jobs.
But for some communities of color, those projects devastated existing economies, leveling commercial corridors, cutting Black neighborhoods off from downtowns and accelerating suburbanization trends that exacerbated segregation.
Eric Avila, an urban historian at UCLA, said a consensus during the Eisenhower administration on the need to invest in highways that would connect neighborhoods to cities led to the exclusion of minority communities.
The federal government also used “urban renewal” or “slum clearance” redevelopment programs that often led to the clearing of the way for giant infrastructure projects like highways.
“These highways were essentially built as conduits for wealth,” Avila said. “Primarily
white wealth, jobs, people, markets. The highways were built to promote the connectivity between suburbs and cities. The people left out were urban minorities — African Americans, immigrants, Latinos.”
Avila pointed to how plans for the Inner Belt highway in Cambridge, Mass., were halted after protests by faculty members at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
And in New Orleans, Avila said, plans for a highway called the Riverfront Expressway were canceled after officials faced pressure from protesters in the French Quarter. But Black protesters were not able to spare Treme, one of the nation’s oldest communities of free Black residents, from the construction of an elevated six-lane stretch of Interstate 10 along Claiborne Avenue.
Amy Stelly is reminded of that freeway each morning when the truck traffic causes her home to shudder. The emissions from the interstate a block away have turned jewelry that she placed near her window jet black.
“Anyone who lives near an urban highway knows what we’re breathing in everyday,” said Stelly, an urban designer and activist against the project. “There’s a layer of silt that sticks on our properties and houses.”