The Great Uprooting

Monday, Mar. 24, 1958

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Once upon a time there lived in Inglewood, Calif, an earnest young man wallet-deep in difficulties. The young man had lost his $140-a-week welder's job, his wife had been ill and he owed hospital bills. Mortgage payments were due on the $9,300 house he had bought three months earlier, and the bank was prepared to foreclose. Then up popped the young man's fairy godmother in the bureaucratic guise of the California Division of Highways. Negotiators informed him that the San Diego Freeway was headed through his living room. Twenty days before the bank was to take the house, the State of California paid $10,999 for it. The young man saved his $600 equity and recovered the $700 he had spent on a patio. He satisfied his debts, found another house, landed a new job, and as far as the highways department is concerned, lived happily ever after.

As the nation is ripped and razed, leveled and linked with freeways, toll roads and a 41,000-mile, $40 billion interstate highway system that represents the greatest road-building program ever undertaken, hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens are having their lives abruptly changed—but not always with the gentle touch of a fairy godmother. Cities and towns are slashed up the middle. Quiet neighborhoods become the home of screeching tires and carbon monoxide; farmlands are sliced into pieces that can no longer be economically worked. The uprooted may agree with Seattle Art Dealer Zoe Dusanne, whose home and gallery overlooking Lake Union will soon disappear before the Everett-Seattle-Tacoma Freeway. Says she: "I'm a great believer in progress. But what a pity progress has to cost so much."

Polo & Fruit Trees. The typical U.S. highway invasion begins with rumor. After engineers agree on where the road will go, rumor is confirmed by the appearance of a smiling but noncommittal appraiser, who scrutinizes each parcel of property along the right of way and then disappears. Next comes the negotiator, who operates shrewdly and by a well-tested procedure.

Good negotiators know from experience that each small cluster of homes has one householder who is regarded as the pacesetter of the neighborhood. Negotiator's rule of thumb: find the key man, sign him and his neighbors will follow suit. But property owners have their code too. Few ever admit to satisfaction with the appraisal; all complain, often with justification, that intangibles are involved that the state never takes into consideration.

Chicago Paper Manufacturer Paul Butler surrendered 230 of his 3,800 acres for the Northern Illinois Toll Highway, including fox-hunting runs and part of one of his eleven polo fields. He got $2,000,000, considered that hardly adequate for a stretch of choice land. In the Los Angeles suburb of Westchester, Aircraft Mechanic Roger Ransom will probably lose the back tenth of his lot to the San Diego Freeway. He has been offered $900, considers that hardly adequate for the spot where his orchard was going to grow. Some 15 miles west of Santa Rosa, N.Mex., on widening Highway 66, Moises Lucero lost the bar, gas station and dance-hall which he bought seven years ago with his life savings as a ranch hand. Small Businessman Lucero demanded $60,000, got $40,000, laments: "Where can I buy another home and business like this for $40,000?"