Even freeways that don’t get built leave a scar. How one Bay Area city is healing
HAYWARD, Calif. — Eight lanes of freeway would be slicing through what’s now Debbie Frederick’s house if everything had gone to plan.
Instead, the retired nurse practitioner gazes through her home’s picture windows on clear afternoons to take in a vast sweep of the San Francisco Bay. With binoculars, she can spot a spire of the Golden Gate Bridge 30 miles away.
She had rented this three-bedroom stucco house in the East Bay city of Hayward for nearly a quarter century when, just over a decade ago, her absentee landlord, the state of California, finally gave up on plans to build the proposed 238 Freeway.
The state began selling off hundreds of properties, and, in 2013, Frederick bought the house for $250,000.
“I’m sitting on a gold mine by accident and good luck,” she said.
Her real estate coup marked a happy ending in one of the many decadeslong battles that blighted swaths of cities around the nation: roads that were planned but never built.
“The narrative is that highways that were built ruined cities,” said Emily Lieb, a Seattle-based historian who has studied the legacy of such projects. “But no, it’s that
