It takes hard work, time and trust to build a community. Destroying one? That’s easier.

That’s the takeaway from historian Emily Lieb’s new book, “Road to Nowhere: How a Highway Map Wrecked Baltimore,” which chronicles the rise, fall and failed rebuild of a West Baltimore neighborhood.

When I picked up the book, I assumed Lieb had written about Harlem Park, Poppleton, or another one of the neighborhoods that straddles the “Highway to Nowhere” — the 1.3-mile stretch of trenched highway between Franklin and Mulberry streets.

But Lieb focuses on a neighborhood that hadn’t been on my radar: Rosemont.

Rosemont sits more than a mile northwest of the Highway to Nowhere, nestled against the eastern edge of Leakin Park. As originally conceived, a highway cutting east-west across the city was supposed to continue through Rosemont, into the park and link up with Interstate 695.

In the end, we did not ram a concrete highway into an urban forest. But we did condemn about 900 homes in Rosemont in preparation for a highway that never materialized. Lieb skillfully documents the economic destruction caused by the “ghost highway” and the people who profited from it.

Lieb is a historian who taught at Seattle University for more than a decade, but she avoids academic prose and punctuates her sections with short, punchy sentences. There is no single family she follows. Instead, she uses Rosemont itself to craft a tightly worded 171-page book.

Lieb spent years digging through property records, newspaper archives and letters to city agencies from homeowners in the path of the bulldozer. She summarizes accounts of residents, contemporaneous surveys and other history books and reports, blending them into a straightforward narrative.

The title, “Road to Nowhere,” undersells the book, which is about more than a road; it’s a history of West Baltimore and segregation.

The book opens in post-Civil War Baltimore, when people of different ethnicities and races often lived intermingled in and around the city center. As the city grew, schools came to define neighborhoods, Lieb explains. White neighborhoods surrounded white schools. Black neighborhoods surrounded Black schools.

And in West Baltimore, Black schools were long limited to an area within “Old” West Baltimore. In the 1950s, overcrowding pushed Baltimore to build Black schools past Fulton Avenue, an unspoken racial barrier. That kicked off white flight in the area and predatory real estate schemes known as “blockbusting.”

Real estate professionals snapped up property from departing white families. Then they jacked up the prices and financed the sales to Black families, who were eager to access better housing conditions.

The overall result was a massive transfer of wealth from Black families to white families, aided by the federal government, Lieb writes. Despite these challenges, middle-class Black families created their own prosperous communities in formerly white neighborhoods like Rosemont.

Then came the highway, or at least the idea of a highway.

Its origins can be traced to a 1944 report by New York’s Robert Moses, a powerful bureaucrat whose ideas influenced many urban planners. To Moses, the area along Franklin and Mulberry streets was a slum, a “disgrace to the community.”

“Nothing which we propose to remove will constitute any loss to Baltimore,” he wrote of an area where hundreds of Black families lived.

But it wasn’t until the 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Act that Baltimore finally had the money to start building the ambitious arterial project.

In Baltimore, the Greater Baltimore Committee, a booster organization for the region’s business community, advocated for the highway, creating a highway subcommittee and sending a representative to community meetings. As Lieb points out, almost all the subcommittee members lived outside the city.

To the people in Rosemont, the proposal meant trying to build a life while a guillotine’s blade loomed overhead. Many organized and fought back against the highway, but the planned destruction of Rosemont discouraged people from investing in their homes. When homeowners left, landlords and speculators stepped in.

Perhaps the most eye-opening lesson from this book was how slowly Baltimore’s highway project moved — like an elderly turtle wading through wet concrete.

Lieb quotes The Baltimore Sun reporting that a “whole generation of Baltimoreans have grown up, married and become parents while hearing ‘once and for all’ decisions as to the mythical East-West expressway.”

Rather than build the entire highway, Baltimore opted to do it in segments, Lieb writes. Homes in the path of the Highway to Nowhere weren’t razed until 1969. Then “the world’s longest vacant lot” sat for six years until construction started. Lieb writes that the road opened in 1979 and cost $100 million (nearly half a billion dollars adjusted for inflation).

By then, funding for highway construction was petering out, and nearly everyone agreed that continuing the East-West expressway was a bad idea.

That conclusion came too late for Rosemont, much of which had been condemned a decade earlier, Lieb writes.

One resident compared the condemnation notices to “taking a double-barreled shotgun and shooting into a crowd of people … Everybody just scattered.”

Baltimore tried to salvage Rosemont using a new federal program, called Section 235, that helped poor people buy vacant homes. That made things worse, Lieb writes.

The program incentivized contractors and real estate professionals to renovate the homes as cheaply as possible then sell them at artificially high prices, she writes. Lieb described Section 235 as a “wildly lucrative operation” to middlemen like the Rouse Company, a mortgage company led by Columbia’s founder Jim Rouse. The homes frequently needed repairs that residents could not afford without taking on secondary loans.

When Lieb dug through public records, she found that most people who bought Rosemont homes using the Section 235 program eventually lost them.

This part of the book was the most frightening, given that Baltimore is once again undertaking an ambitious and complicated plan to tackle vacant housing.

The book does not touch on these current plans, but it still feels like a timely read.

I would recommend “Road to Nowhere” to anyone curious about urban policy. If you appreciated Lawrence Brown’s “The Black Butterfly” or Antero Pietila’s “Not In My Neighborhood,” you will want to read Lieb’s book.