Like so many other unwary cities, Grand Rapids allowed itself to be dismantled by the American Dream of cars, suburban homes, and freeways. Its residents helped pay for emptying their town and facilitating the suburban boom.
 
In 1960, bulldozers cut a 500-foot-wide slash across the city’s west side for an elevated freeway, U.S. 131, forcing more than 1,000 families from their homes and leveling dozens of historic buildings. Three years later, it happened again on the city’s north side for I-96: Crews tore down warehouses, homes, and commercial and government buildings (including a historic City Hall), dug a 207-acre hole, and erected steel and glass office buildings and large concrete plazas. These massive, multi-million-dollar projects, financed largely by federal and state tax dollars, unleashed powerful, unexpected economic and social consequences.

Before Grand Rapids’ new highways, two-thirds of its metropolitan population lived in the city. Two generations later, the 197,000 people who live in the city account for less than 25 percent of the 850,000 people who live in the two surrounding counties. Of the 300,000 jobs in metropolitan Grand Rapids, approximately 7 percent are located downtown.
 
In a move recalling the federal government’s simultaneous funding of tobacco farming and cancer research, 2004 saw the city opening a new $22 million downtown transit center while the state finished its $700 million South Beltline expressway, which will accelerate sprawl south of a downtown that’s striving to remain the Comeback City.

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