If you ever want to understand mid-century urban renewal and the harm it left in its wake, go for a stroll on Freeway Drive. It’s a high-speed, poorly lit road sandwiched between the I-280 highway and the train tracks in Orange. Cars whizzing by on both sides makes the heart quicken as you cling to a tiny sliver of pavement reserved for pedestrians.
Before the 1960s, this fearful place didn’t exist. Homes and shops overlaid where the highway is today. It was a living, breathing neighborhood. Like so many places in the U.S., the Oranges were fractured by urban renewal. It was an era that loved cars and feared cities and our government invested millions to build highways that often cut right through the heart our downtowns.
There have been many books written about urban renewal and its harms. But Dr. Mindy Thompson Fullilove’s Root Shock – published 20 years ago – was the first to tell the story from the perspective of a clinical psychiatrist, delving into the emotional toll of living in places that foster fear instead of human connection, and what city dwellers need to heal.
“Root shock is the traumatic stress reaction to the destruction of all or part of one’s emotional ecosystem,” Thompson writes.
Born in the 1950s, Fullilove grew up in Orange when U.S cities were experiencing two major upheavals: urban renewal, which gave way to the crack and AIDS epidemic.
“That led her to ask questions about what had happened in U.S. cities and why they look and feel different from the neighborhoods we knew growing up,” said Molly Kaufman, Fullilove’s daughter and co-founding director of University of Orange. “It became a question about what role cities, neighborhoods, and society places in our health overall.”
Last month, Kaufman’s organization celebrated Root Shock’s two-decade anniversary with a series of discussions and readings, including one at the Orange Public Library. Gathered in the basement of the library, where Fullilove said she spent much of her childhood, the presenters – including community organizers and one of Fullilove’s graduate students – gave emotional affirmations of this book and how it shaped them.
Perhaps the reason readers react so emotionally is because it strikes at the core of what makes us human – our health, our homes, and our relationships with neighbors.
“These are personal stories of loss and the larger societal story that so many of our city’s downtowns were hollowed out,” Kaufman.
One of those to express gratitude for the book was Zaki Michael, a community organizer at the Orange HUUB, who said he uses Root Shock as a tool for “collective recovery.” One of his regular meetings is with local residents and business owners. While the purpose of the meeting is to brainstorm ways to counteract displacement and gentrification, it also serves as a way to gather people and restore bonds with his community, which is at the heart of milieu therapy, Fullilove’s prescribed method for healing.
Two questions, Michael said, are at the core of his work. “What brought you to this place? And the second is, what do you need to stay in this place?” he said. “Those questions have been very useful in understanding the testimony of our residents and some of the issues they face here in the city.”
Those two questions are even more vital given the pace of construction happening the last few years in Orange. These new apartment buildings have the opportunity to “reknit our fractured communities” as Kaufman calls it. But they can also potentially cause more harm by displacing more residents, erasing local history and landmarks, and leading to more broken human bonds.
Fullilove said the highway still acts as an imaginary dividing line through the city that isolates its residents. “They’re only thinking about one thing – how do we build more apartments,” Fullilove told the Four Orange. “This has to be approached holistically – how do we light these streets and make them more beautiful? That will encourage people to walk from the north side to the south.”
