Road to Nowhere

“Through an exploration of a single neighborhood, Road to Nowhere shows how failed development caused great harm to actual people and places caught in the entanglements of an inhumane bureaucracy in Baltimore. The book highlights the devastating human cost of speculative development and challenges any notion that residents were responsible for the destruction of their own neighborhood. Lieb shows that blight is a fiction made real when planners, politicians, and power brokers refuse to see or hear the people already on the land. This is a beautiful investigation, one that sees the human costs of real estate speculation through road construction. Urban historians and planners should remember the story of Rosemont and its residents.” -- P. Nicole King, coeditor of “Baltimore Revisited: Stories of Inequality and Resistance in a U.S. City” “As a child I puzzled over a 1960 picture of my father with his officemates at the city housing authority, and wondered, vaguely, why he was the only dark person in the photo and why he no longer worked there. When we went to church, or visited my aunt in Rosemont, I was struck by the iconic highway to nowhere on Franklin Street, which seemed somehow connected to the mushrooming numbers of liquor stores and emptied houses and people nodding on streetcorners. Smartly written and keenly perceptive, Lieb’s Road to Nowhere unveils the real nature of the deleterious racially segregated housing structural policies and practices of the era between 1950 and 1980. Effectively tying the growth of segregated education to the sprawl of urban segregation itself, Lieb exposes the sad fact that America created a segregated housing market to meet the requirements of a racial myth. More surprising than the devastation of the original sin of redlining was the municipal remedy for poor black homeowners of the early 1970s: ‘Banks, investors, and even brokers earned more money from the government when homeowners defaulted than they did when buyers paid their loans in full.’ One of the best telescoped digests of the decades-long commitment to racial housing segregation and a tour de force in the political history of Baltimore City, Road to Nowhere is an invaluable scholarly work. Moreover, it will contribute importantly to the contemporary socioeconomic justice movement in Baltimore, becoming a key piece of evidence for citizens’ groups like Fayette Street Outreach run by Ms. Edna Manns-Lake and Sonia Eaddy’s Southwestern Partnership Coalition of Poppleton Street.” -- Lawrence Jackson, author of “Shelter: A Black Tale of Homeland, Baltimore”