Research led by Paul Ong, director of the Center for Neighborhood Knowledge at UCLA Luskin, will help guide a master plan for rebuilding Pasadena neighborhoods razed decades ago to make way for the 710 Freeway extension, a project that has now been abandoned. Pasadena Now covered Ong’s presentation before a city task force considering the future of the undeveloped acreage the size of 40 football fields, once the site of 1,500 homes occupied by mostly low-income and minority residents. Ong’s team will assess the historical impact of freeways on segregation in Pasadena by examining census data, policies and practices over more than seven decades. The 710 Freeway project came “at a juncture in our history that involved struggles around civil rights, around suburbanization of white flight, around post-industrial development and around immigration-driven demographic changes,” Ong told the task force. “Freeway development … occurs within a larger context, a societal transformation.”