A Transformative Opportunity for Infrastructure Equity
In November 2021, the federal government adopted the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that authorized $1.2 trillion in infrastructure funding for highways, bridges, dams, public transit, rail, ports, airports, water quality, and broadband systems. This landmark law represents the nation’s largest infrastructure and climate change investment in history and funds critically needed repairs and maintenance for aging roads and bridges, water distribution systems, and the electric grid. It also makes a down payment on infrastructure for a low-carbon economy including expansion of electric vehicle charging infrastructure.
History cautions, however, that such expansive investments could further structural inequality. Past freeway construction, urban development, and flood control systems divided and disenfranchised Black communities and this legacy continues. For instance, over the last three decades, more than 200,000 people lost their homes nationwide due to federal highway expansion, with more dislocations occurring in Black and Latinx communities. When opened in 1993, I-105, which bisects Watts and other Black neighborhoods in Los Angeles, displaced more than 21,000 people (LA Times, 11/4/21). Exclusionary housing and urban renewal policies further undermined the accumulation of Black generational wealth and related economic and educational advancement.
The new federal Justice40 policy responds to this legacy by promising to deliver forty percent of the benefits of new infrastructure investments to historically disadvantaged communities, but many questions remain about whether Black communities will benefit equally. Policy and legal frameworks for allocating funding and evaluating infrastructure equity are just emerging. Understanding long-term and emerging disparities in the lived experiences of impacted communities is particularly challenging and requires interdisciplinary, community-oriented research partnerships given the complex dynamics between infrastructure and natural systems, pollution, climate change, and social ecological processes.
UC Irvine’s Infrastructure Equity (IE) cluster confronts these challenges by solidifying UC Irvine’s leadership in addressing social, environmental, and racial disparities in infrastructure planning, design, and implementation through IE scholarship and policy and community engagement.