Megan Kimble's book 'City Limits' offers a different vision.
When we think of what our communities need, we usually think of affordable homes, good schools, and grocery stores. Not wide towering highways. Yet, in the past 70-some years, highways have dictated community development in urban centers. They’ve torn through low-income communities of color, displacing families, homes, and businesses. As a result, people move farther away; we languish in traffic, get home from work later, and spend less time with our family.
By the time I-10 was opened in 1966, 1,220 structures were erased from the Fifth Ward, including 11 churches, five schools, and two hospitals. O’Nari started relying on car transport to get to school. Seven-hundred families left the neighborhood at this time. “When I grew up, it was just people everywhere. This used to be full of people, full to the brim,” Burleson says. But the “neighborhood grew quieter, streets emptier.
The history of the interstate highway system that Kimble unspools is a history of accumulated racist policies, flawed planning, and missed opportunities to make amends. Early on, Bragdon and transportation engineers noted the phenomenon of induced demand—meaning that when bigger roads are built, traffic increases to fill those roads, in turn reducing space for public transit. Yet successive federal and state transportation policies have only fueled this vicious cycle, committing money to highways over public transit at the behest of oil and auto industry lobbyists.
Many residents aren’t buying what the state agency is selling. Kimble follows community activists at door-knocking activities, protests, and numerous TxDOT hearings as they struggle to save their neighborhoods. In Houston, activists with Stop TxDOT I-45 won an agreement to address concerns around the loss of affordable housing and increase in air pollution.
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