New Details Emerge About Pasadena’s Role in Historic 710 Freeway Displacement

During the City Council’s Monday, November 25 workshop on the future of Pasadena’s 710 freeway stub property, new revelations emerged about the City’s historical role in routing the freeway through predominantly minority neighborhoods in the 1960s.

“According to the UCLA study, the preferred route that Caltrans had selected in the 1960s was further west,” Assistant City Manager Brenda Harvey-Williams told the Council, explaining that this alternate route “would’ve gone through the parking lot of the Rose Bowl and it would’ve eliminated a lot, hundreds of fewer homes. But the City of Pasadena lobbied Caltrans for the current route.”

The 50-acre corridor, returned to City ownership in August 2022 with $5 million in state maintenance funding, runs from Union Street on the north to California Boulevard on the south.

The latest consultant report identified 60 homes were demolished within this specific relinquishment area, though some historical records indicate approximately 1,000 residents were displaced along the entire 710 corridor.

“One of the things I wanted to say is it was the trauma of it all and I think that we as a culture desensitized trauma because we have to push through,” stated one community member in video testimony presented during the meeting. “If you have a home that you own outright and then the City proposes to give you fair market value, which you know is not fair market value because institutional racism is alive and well, you then have to take those funds to go build or mortgage a new dwelling.”

The City has engaged Perkins Eastman as Master Plan consultant for a two-year planning process, with the next community workshop scheduled for January 25, 2025.

The project faces unique infrastructure challenges as the site is currently disconnected from City utilities.

Development potential is significant — To give you a little bit of a sense of how big this issue is, if you put the Empire State Building on its side, you’d fit three of them in the ditch” according to Vaughan Davies, principal at Perkins Eastman.

To address historical harms, Reconnecting Communities 710 Advisory Group Chair Danny Parker oversaw the appointment of a Restorative Justice Standing Committee within the project’s advisory group, which meets monthly. Six community-based organizations, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, are being engaged for targeted outreach.

The City is exploring various funding mechanisms, including an Enhanced Infrastructure Financing District. EIFDs are special districts with defined boundaries that use local property taxes to fund infrastructure projects and economic development. EIFD’s were introduced by the California Legislature in 2014-2015 and provide an avenue for financing infrastructure and economic development in California

Vice Mayor Steve Madison emphasized the need for concrete actions toward restorative justice.

Councilmember Justin Jones said, “The only way, and perhaps the proper way to reconcile… is to somehow reconcile the difference between what the fair market value of their properties were and how much they received for it, and set aside money to reconcile that for those families.”