Hi First name / friend,
Flying from DC to California is expensive, especially around the holidays… but for two adults, driving costs more. So why exactly did we drive all that way? Well, my partner Geoff had just come out of campaign mode at work and he said he “needed to drive for spiritual reasons.” Basically, I think he wanted space to zone out and just be.
Rather than fly back by myself, I opted to do the return drive with Geoff and our dog Winnie. Though it would have been nice to have a week at home alone (with Olive 🦊) to prep for the new year and get ready for my winter urban design class, I’m glad I did it. I have pretty intense driving anxiety on freeways these days, so I spent a lot of time staring out at the scenery and googling just about everything that popped into my head — mostly questions about the places we drove through, including Route 66.
Route 66 has a fascinating history. It was glorified in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath as the “Mother Road” and appears in a ton of mid-century and modern pop culture. It’s the path many took during the Dust Bowl, leaving the plains in the south central U.S. to head for supposed greener pastures in California.
(Here’s a
great timeline on the Dust Bowl from the University of Nebraska’s National Drought Mitigation Center. Give it a skim — the Dust Bowl was about so much more than drought.)
It’s basically impossible to talk about housing without talking about land use policies. The way people move (and the reasons why they move) all impact how communities form and take shape. All along Route 66, an industry started to form to cater to travelers and truck drivers — from diners and motels to kitschy roadside attractions — and this continued well into the post-WWII period when more people could afford cars.
Because this is America, Route 66 wasn’t a grand ol’ time for everyone. “
On Route 66, every mile was a minefield. Businesses with three “K”s in the title, such as the Kozy Kottage Kamp or the Klean Kountry Kottages, were code for the Ku Klux Klan and served only white customers,” writes Candacy Taylor in
a 2016 article for
The Atlantic (TW: this article describes gruesome violence).
This is where guidebooks like the Green Book came into play, designed to help Black people travel through the country without the risk of embarrassment over being turned away, or worse.
Route 66 wasn’t uniquely racist, but the “open road marketing,” as Taylor describes it, is deceptive. Today’s nostalgia tourism along the historic route presents an incomplete picture at best, a whitewashed version of the history at worst. That said, I think it’s possible to reshape the way we experience places while also acknowledging the hurt.
It’s pretty wild to imagine a major highway running right through the center of several small towns (cars near people generally = dangerous), and at the same time, many of those towns existed
because the road went through them. As historian
Daniel Milanowski wrote, “Migration and tourism shaped towns along Route 66 even before the road was officially established in 1926. But the Interstate Highway System decimated many of these communities when it circumvented Route 66 in the late 1970s and early 1980s.”
Route 66 is no longer part of the Interstate Highway System, but the Historic Route remains a huge tourism draw.
In 2019, a federal grant program that helped bolster towns along the route ended. In the nearly four years since then, the tourism industry as a whole faltered thanks to covid. This whole story makes me wonder if it’s possible to eke out a prosperous life outside of a big city (according to my urban econ professor, no, not in the long term. He and I are not on the same page lol).
I spend a lot of time thinking about the barriers to housing access in large cities like Washington, DC. At the same time, I’m increasingly curious about the economic situation in smaller cities and former boom towns, like many of the ones we drove through last month.
Housing is expensive just about everywhere in the U.S., but it’s relative. Our ability to afford the place we live depends greatly on our ability to find a job that pays enough. And in a town that relies on tourism, what are the options when the tourists don’t come?
While I have no intention to move to a small town (for now), our journey did make me think about the value of tourism dollars and where we spend them. Should a goal of intentional travel be to visit places that need the tourism money more than, say, the destinations on a best-of list? I’m not sure what the answer is, but I want to keep digging.
(Candidly, I hope to do more travel-based, place-based exploration this year, though much of this depends on my finances and whether I take on a summer internship.)
Feel free to reply (or leave a comment on the site) with your thoughts. I would truly love to hear them!
Until next time,
Dominique
PS — For those curious, our drive took 7 days and our stops were Barstow, CA → Winslow, AZ → Santa Fe, NM → Oklahoma City, OK → Memphis, TN → Bristol, VA → DC.
