East End transit push sparked change
WHENyou take your first ride on Metro’s newly opened Green Line, remember that while the ride is smooth, the process to get wheels on the tracks wasn’t. Houston, however, is better for the struggle.
Despite their slick renderings and advanced engineering, constructing transportation projects like light rail is an inherently messy process. Public projects such as the Green Line are as much the result of social and political debate as traffic modeling or financial considerations.
Those debates, however, shouldn’t be viewed as frustrating squabbles. They should be embraced as a valuable source of ideas that can improve projects and agencies. In fact, if the East End community hadn’t demanded better transportation options 40 years ago, it might not have the Green Line that it enjoys today. Fed up
For much of the past century, East End communities have faced mobility barriers, despite their proximity to downtown. The area’s mostly working- and middle-class Mexican-American residents lacked political power in Houston prior to the 1960s and 1970s, and their communities received little in the way of public resources.
Streetcars were removed from the area’s main corridors prior to World War II, and private bus companies offered infrequent routes, failing to fill the void. Meanwhile, the community’s proximity to the Port of Houston and the Ship Channel meant that truck and freight train traffic dominated local streets. Roads crumbled under the weight of semi-trucks, and freight trains blocked intersections for hours at a time.
During the 1960s and 1970s, Mexican-American East Enders routinely complained to the Houston City Council about the toll this traffic took on their neighborhoods. Instead of listening to those concerns, the city and the Texas Highway Department aimed to broaden the area’s use as an industrial traffic corridor with plans to build the Harrisburg Freeway, an extension of State Highway 225, campaign to create the Metropolitan Transit Authority of Harris County, city leaders cultivated the approval of the East End’s Mexican-American voting bloc. Community leader Ninfa Laurenzo — the legendary Houston restaurateur — was named to the authority’s interim board and worked diligently to convince voters of the project’s merits.
Metro committed to serving minority neighborhoods, promised to employ minority Houstonians and set aside a percentage of construction and maintenance contracts for minorityowned businesses. The transit authority also set an important precedent by holding exhaustive public feedback sessions ahead of the vote. The push paid off. This time, the city’s MexicanAmericans joined the majority of other voters to support the agency’s creation.
Since Metro’s inception, East Enders have continued to push the agency to fulfill its promise to bring effective transit to the community. Nowhere has this pressure — or its limitations — been more obvious than the debate around the building of the Green Line. Metro and city officials incorporated citizen input into Green Line plans more than they did with any previous project in the area.
Still, the project hit snags. In 2003, Metro officials unveiled a long-range plan that included an expansion to its original Main Street Light Rail line. The now-open Green Line was part of those plans, but some East Enders argued it didn’t extend far enough into their community. They threatened to oppose a referendum on the plan if the East End line was not extended to Gulfgate Mall and Hobby Airport.
Metro lengthened the proposed line initially, but before it could be built, the route was cut and returned to its original vision due to political and financial controversies that embroiled the agency. Though the revision frustrated residents, the fact that any line existed when other lines were scrapped from the plans altogether quieted most critics.
Despite the setback, Metro worked to keep East End residents engaged once construction began. Two of its most effective initiatives were the convening of a Citizens Advisory
Board to facilitate communication with residents and the formation of a business assistance fund to financially aid merchants along the light rail route during construction.
These measures weren’t perfect and couldn’t prevent yet another debate. Metro and the city initially planned an overpass across the Union Pacific railroad track between Altic Street and the Magnolia Park Transit Center. But they acceded to critics who believed the overpass would disrupt the community and settled on an underpass instead. Metro reverted to its original plans, however, after unexpected environmental contamination prevented them from digging.
While the line that opened last month is incomplete — the overpass won’t be finalized until May 2016 — the process to reach this point has been one of the most thorough in Metro’s history. The agency, like many government entities, has come a long way in its engagement with the public during its nearly 40 years of operation. Public pressure, like that applied in the East End, has played a huge role in that maturation.
Opening civic choices to public input leads to conflict, debate and NIMBYism. It can add millions of dollars and years of delays to projects. But it also reflects what’s best about our modern democracy: the right of all citizens to have their voices heard and their votes counted. Shelton (twitter.com/ kylekshelton), a postdoctoral fellow at Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research, is writing a history of Houston’s infrastructure.