Joe Biden hailed the beginning of $3.3bn in infrastructure spending on US projects on Wednesday “to right historic wrongs” with efforts to reconnect city neighborhoods riven by interstate highways that plowed through Black, brown and Hispanic communities decades ago.

The US president was in Milwaukee, where he traveled to officially open his election campaign’s Wisconsin office in the vital swing state, and announce new infrastructure investment.

Biden is striving to make an impact on the campaign trail in a number of swing states this week after his fiery state of the union speech last week.

The White House declared that $3.3bn in federal funding is being allocated in more than 40 states to help areas “divided by transportation infrastructure decades ago and [that] have long been overlooked”.

Biden announced a $36.6m federal grant on his Milwaukee visit as part of the administration’s infrastructure legislation, to upgrade sidewalks and create cycle lanes, greater access to mass transit and more greenery in the South 6th Street area of Bronzeville, a historic majority African American neighborhood.

Biden said the construction of interstate highways there led to the demolition of roughly 17,000 homes and 1,000 businesses, disproportionately impacting Black and poor neighborhoods in the 1960s, with a losses of prosperity and opportunities “that still reverberate today”.

He pledged “to right historic wrongs and, in the process, deliver environmental justice to disadvantaged neighborhoods”.

The US transportation departments estimates that at least a people and businesses in the US were displaced by decades of harmful urban renewal projects in the buildout of the federal highway system, a statement from the White House said.

Biden said: “The story of Bronzeville here in Milwaukee is one we see all across the country. Our interstate highway system laid out in the 1950s was a groundbreaking connection of our nation, coast to coast … but instead of connecting communities, it divided them.”

He added: “These highways actually tore them apart … along with redlining, they disconnected entire communities from opportunities, sometimes, in an effort to reinforce segregation.”

Other projects are set to take place in Atlanta, Georgia, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Portland, Oregon, among other towns and cities.

Biden also took a jab at the former president and prospective 2024 Republican nominee, Donald Trump, and his conduct in dealing with the coronavirus pandemic in 2020.

“My predecessor failed at the most basic duty any president owes the American people – the duty to care,” he said.