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Originally Posted by Pedestrian
And yet that didn't happen in San Francisco (and New York and some other places).
In San Francisco, the neighborhoods that were abandoned were fairly quickly refilled with newcomers, many of them famously gay, who renovated them and made them nicer places to live than ever. And the freeway construction was halted by citizen action. Whatever parking lots there have been in the city for decades have been almost entirely transitional--a way to make money from land intended for eventual development while money for such development was accumulated and/or the bureaucratic approval process was navigated.
The closest SF came to the process you are describing came in only two neighborhoods: The Fillmore and a portion of South of Market around 4rd and 4th Streets once known as "Skid Row". Both those areas were bulldozed for redevelopment like in other cities but have, by now, been pretty much rebuilt and are once again active neighborhoods (if different in character--the Fillmore's active jazz club scene has never really revived and Skid Row's low income housing has been replaced by luxury hotels and apartment towers along with Moscone Center).
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Yes that's great! Of course the same level of destruction didn't happen in every city, but many (maybe most) suffered due to the wholesale demolition of buildings and neighborhoods to build expressways and more car-friendly businesses. Just check out hte link in my original post--you can view other cities outside the midwest as well here:
http://iqc.ou.edu/urbanchange
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Nobody said "unscathed" but it didn't have it's downtown destroyed or any important neighborhood and that doesn't mean the Fillmore, which was the principal neighborhood affected wasn't changed for the worse. But the changes were minor and marginal looked at from the perspective of the city as a whole.
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Right. My original point exactly... the original post was simply saying what happened to urban America in the 1950s and 1960s, it certainly wasn't mean to be a pissing contest of which cities suffered the most lost density during that period. Phoenix may have suffered MORE than San Francisco, but that's beside the point--both saw changes in their urban landscape due to a shifting attitude towards urban density.