The cost of progress

I496 discussion amplifies voices of the displaced

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In 1955, Mary Jane McGuire and her husband, Cyril, moved to 1609 W. St Joseph St. during a time when black families and business owners ruled the west side. The couple practically rebuilt their 40-year-old property over the 10 years they lived there with their three children.

“I was a teaching in the Lansing school district and my husband worked in Oldsmobile,” Mary Jane McGuire said. “We considered ourselves settled.”

That all changed in 1965, when they received a letter from the Michigan State Highway Department informing them they would have to move to make room for the construction of I496.

Next Tuesday, McGuire, now 94 will share her memories on a panel organized by the Michigan Department of Civil Rights to mark the 51st anniversary of the federal Fair Housing Act. Topics will range from the anti-discrimination law, redlining and the aftermath of losing Lansing’s thriving black neighborhood to the I496 highway.

“While redlining is no longer a legal activity, the legacy of decades of discrimination it created continue to undermine efforts in Michigan to restore and revitalize our neighborhoods and communities,” said Agustin V. Arbulu, the department’s director, who will lead the discussion.

The panel will also include Alexander Hosey, a 16-year-old East Lansing High School student and activist whose efforts led to including a history of housing discrimination in his school’s curriculum, and Lansing resident Homer Hawkins, who wrote his dissertation on the displacement that the highway construction brought.

Between 1963 and 1970, close to 890 families in Lansing received letters from the state demanding they relocate for the construction project.

The state offered a lump sum equal to a home’s estimated market value. But homeowners said offers didn’t consider renovations or the racist real estate climate that forced many minorities to buy their homes on land contracts – meaning they didn’t own the home and couldn’t accept the payout — and made moving extremely difficult.

A Michigan Civil Rights spokesman said a lot of the past talk about the implementation of I496 is about the loss of the mansions that existed there before. Lost in the conversation is that the highway destroyed the economic structure of the black community living west of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

Today, the only remnants of the Lansing neighborhood are in the hearts of the displaced, such as Mary Jane McGuire.

The McGuires

McGuire, and her husband, Cyril, never planned on leaving their West St. Joseph home. They remodeled the living room, refurbished the kitchen and installed light fixtures and a water heater. The renovations totaled about $4,500, which brought their total home value up to $22,000, McGuire said.

The State of Michigan Highway Department said it was worth $16,000. The McGuires negotiated with the department for six months before they were ordered to appear in court in 1966. Two years later, they reached a settlement and the McGuire’s received a small increase.

“The project was going to continue whether we went to court or not,” said McGuire. “They were going to take our house.”

When McGuire was researching real estate in the Greater Lansing area, she was encouraged by her agent to make an offer on a two-story home on Hayford Avenue. The owners, who were white, accepted the offer.

“When my husband and I went together to sign, the owners refused,” McGuire said. “So what they did was they revised their offer to make an addendum that banned Negros.”

With fewer than nine weeks before their house would be torn down, the McGuires ended up buying a house from a friend on Verlinden Street in an area that McGuire described as “not ideal.” Their new neighborhood was primarily occupied by white-collar families who worked in real estate, at Michigan State University or in ministry. A handful of white residents left immediately upon the news of a black family moving in.

“We had gone through the redlining, we had gone through the condemnation, we had gone through the process of property purchasing. We had been through it all,” McGuire said.

A brief history of highways and housing discrimination

I496 was part of the 1956 Federal Aid Highway Act under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, which authorized the construction of a national network of interstate highways. The project took 35 years to complete and possibly displaced hundreds of thousands of ethnic communities. This was made possible through redlining, the now-illegal practice of refusing loans in certain areas based on race. Redlining in Lansing segregated the city street by street.

After the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Shelley v. Kraemer in 1948, racial segregation in housing continued under the guise of inflated home prices, forcing many African Americans and other minorities to buy property on land contracts. Buyers took on the responsibilities of the home, but did not benefit from the security and equity growth a mortgage offers.

These tactics resulted in segregated neighborhoods that gave birth to black-owned businesses and churches that thrived within the community. An interactive map created by students at MSU Residential College of Arts and Humanities indicated that “colored clubs” popped up in the west side to provide housing and unify various ethnic enclaves. While the City of Lansing described west of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard as “the ghetto,” the inhabitants had cultivated a self-sustaining economy and network that should have been guaranteed for generations to come.

“Facilitating conversations like the panel will help us all have a better understanding of how this history continues to damage our communities today, and more importantly, help us all work towards finding solutions to break this cycle of discrimination,” Arbulu said.

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