I-45 rebuild must fit Houston’s needs
Unless TxDOT can make major changes, the plan should not go forward.
The streets, humming with hymns on Sundays, Zydeco in the evenings and drumming with the steps of people headed to work in the morning, were threaded by ice cream parlors and candy shops, the favorite routes of schoolchildren running home, and the familiar faces of neighbors greeted by name.
This was the heart of the Fifth Ward before it was a highway.
Before a vibrant artery of Houston’s black community was hauled off, paved over, striped and severed from the city and from itself.
Historian Kyle Shelton, for his book “Power Moves,” once counted the Fifth Ward landmarks lost to a single highway interchange, I-59 and I-10, built in the late 1960s to usher suburban commuters downtown: 686 homes, 101 businesses, 11 churches, five schools and two hospitals.
Progress is often someone else’s plight. But in Houston, communities of color had to pay a disproportionate price as patterns of destruction repeated themselves. Freedman’s Town. Third Ward. Independence Heights.
Now comes a new project, bigger than any before, and there’s reason to believe the Texas Department of Transportation’s $7.5 billion expansion of Interstate 45 will leave more wreckage in its wake. Houston, we can’t let that happen.
The project, while urgently needed in some ways, should not proceed without major changes, especially regarding transit, housing and the environment, including increased flood protection, that can lessen the pain to affected neighborhoods and earn wider support for one of the largest public works projects in Houston history.
The best and perhaps last hope for reform may come as soon as Monday, when Mayor Sylvester Turner is expected to deliver a letter to TxDOT demanding major changes to the plan after more than a year of intense scrutiny by experts, public officials and hundreds of citizens.
In an interview with the editorial board, Turner said he is seeking more than the mere tweaking of flaws in this much-maligned plan. His aim is more audacious, imploring the state’s transportation officials to do something few highway projects ever have: to leave the city as a whole — and not just its traffic patterns — better off.
That will require a “paradigm shift,” at TxDOT, Turner said, away from measuring success in highway miles and prioritizing the transport of cars and trucks over the movement of people themselves.
“It’s not just about expanding roadway capacity to move more vehicles,” Turner said. “It’s about a shift in thinking so that we design these projects to move more
people from point A to point B, not just more vehicles — and to do that in such a way that we are not dividing or decimating communities.”
We applaud the mayor’s sustained engagement on this issue — especially amid a global pandemic — and encourage him to stand firm in the coming weeks, when negotiations with the state will test his resolve. Turner must rally ordinary Houstonians to support his demand that TxDOT build a highway that enjoys the support of the city through which it will run.
Every Houstonian should ask: Is shaving 15 minutes off someone’s commute from Kingwood — a temporary fix since traffic will likely overwhelm the added capacity in a few years — worth slicing through someone else’s church? Flooding someone else’s living room? Polluting someone else’s front porch breeze?
We argue no. Houston deserves more from this project. That’s what Turner is asking of TxDOT — that the project be more than that.
The I-45 expansion has the potential to benefit all of Houston and the wider region as well — and not just by making it easier and therefore cheaper to move people and goods throughout the city and its suburbs, something that has helped Houston grow so fast while at the same time remaining comparatively affordable.
Parts of this plan will improve neighborhood connections, reverse years of bad engineering that has left I-45 flooded during periods of heavy rains, and provide smoother commutes for many.
It will take leadership for Turner to resist the pull of economic and political expediency that would have him see this as merely another highway expansion and keep focused on what matters longterm for our city: quality of life, continuity of communities and, yes, the movement of our people in all modes of transportation.
Specifically, the expansion must enhance transit options, especially Bus Rapid Transit, reduce Houston’s postHarvey vulnerability to flooding and strengthen, rather than further divide and displace, communities through which the rebuilt freeway travels.
If the agency rebuffs the mayor and others who have demanded improvements, then the project will be a tragic mistake and a colossal waste of money.
To its credit, the agency has welcomed the city’s year-long effort to influence the project, despite how far along the agency is in its development. On Friday, a Houston-based spokesperson for the agency declined to say how much flexibility TxDOT has with regard to the design of the project, but pledged to “respect the mayor’s vision.”
“TxDOT will await the definitive ask from Mayor Turner,” Raquelle Lewis said. “Upon receipt, we will respectfully and judiciously consider his request and work together to define our path forward.”
The agency has also long acknowledged many negative consequences of its plan.
Roughly 345 places of businesses and 1,000 residences are in the potential path of the bulldozer. As is, the project would mean:
• The condemnation of dozens of buildings in Independence Heights, the first city in Texas incorporated by African Americans, including the historic Greater Mount Olive Baptist Church, which will be relocated.
• Increased air pollution for schools and other facilities near the widened highway and the elimination of green space in others.
Turner said that’s why, in its current design, the project would be bad for the city. With changes, though, he’s convinced it could be “transformative.”
“The way I have evaluated this,” the mayor told us, “is to consider the consequences of saying, no don’t build it at all. Just leave it alone. But those of us who have traveled I-45 thousands of times know that in its present configuration, I-45 is a bad freeway. It floods. It’s dangerous. And it is working against the neighborhoods adjacent to it.”
He knows he’s urging TxDOT to do something that’s not easy or even second-nature to an agency that has for so long been focused on highway capacity as a main metric of success.
“That’s a tall order, but that’s what we are after,” he says.
We agree. If the project can be improved, and redesigned where needed, it could lead to an improved transit network, reconnected neighborhoods and reduced flooding — in addition to dislodging congestion.
Three areas to address
So far, despite all the city’s Herculean efforts, the talks between Houston and TxDOT have been just that — talk. With the agency nearing the release of its
Final Environmental Impact Statement — expected anytime this spring — it’s time to turn the discussions into action.
We urge significant changes in three broad areas:
1. Incorporate the expansion of commuter buses that voters overwhelmingly endorsed in last year’s Metro bond vote. Dedicated lanes would allow buses to run at least as well as a commuter train on tracks. Metro and TxDOT have decades of successful collaboration to build on.
2. Mitigate the displacement of people. The highway’s imposing footprint must be narrowed through methods such as reducing frontage roads from three to two lanes. People whose homes must be moved must be compensated and provided for. There must be a concrete plan, funded by TxDOT, and the Houston Housing Authority, to relocate residents to improved, nearby affordable housing.
3. The project must be designed to help, not harm, the environment where it can, including by reducing air pollution and boosting its role in reducing flood risk.
We’ll address specifics in the coming weeks. Bottom line: If TxDOT can’t or won’t work with Houston to make these or similar changes, the project shouldn’t be built.
TxDOT’s demonstrated willingness to evolve gives us hope. A decade ago talk of expanding a freeway with a focus on transit and neighborhood revival would have gone nowhere. Instead, TxDOT has embraced the idea that its giant highway project must serve more than drivers.
As Thomas Lambert, president and CEO of METRO, told the editorial board last week: “It’s a 50-year project, not a one-year project. It will have lasting impact.”
What’s yet to be seen is whether Turner can convince TxDOT, in the building of this highway, to take the high road.
We need to know that this monumental project will truly make our city a better place to live and work. That growth, this time, cannot come at the expense of people in its path. That Houston’s destructive pattern of plowing thoughtlessly through communities of color in the name of progress is indeed in the rearview mirror.