A well-timed look at highway expansion projects’ human impact

This review is part of a special collaboration between Planetizen and Booked on Planning, a biweekly podcast where AICP planner Stephanie Rouse and Jennifer Hiatt chat with authors of the latest books shaping urban planning today. Listen to the episode with today’s author in the player below. 

When the Infrastructure Investments and Jobs Act funneled millions into equity projects intended to take down highways that cut through neighborhoods, Texas chose to double down on its highway expansion projects. The resulting battles between the state and residents who feared displacement is the premise of author Megan Kimble’s book: “City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequality, and the Future of America’s Highways.”

“City Limits” focuses on the long drawn out fights against three specific highway expansion projects in Texas: I-35 through Austin, I-345 through Dallas and I-45 through Houston. Kimble follows the stories of twelve individuals who the highway expansion projects directly impacted:  from displacing the Escuelita del Alma childcare center, a community bedrock, to Modesti Cooper, who fought to save the brand new house she built when she was finally ready to settle down after years of military service. At Escuelita del Alma, owner Dina Flores was ready to retire, but held off to ensure the school found a new home, despite the high prices of Austin real estate, to avoid closure that would leave hundreds of families, like Matt Rutledge, without childcare. Through her writing, Kimble shows the human cost of Texas’ highway expansion projects.

In discussing growing suburban sprawl that’s predicated on the need for ever expanding highways to move people farther and faster, Kimble vitally brings to light “a growing movement to resist this form of development, to recalibrate our bargain with speed.” She follows the creation of Stop TxDot I-45, beginning with one person attending an information session, recognizing the detrimental consequences if the highway plans were realized, and then working to organize others into a formal advocacy effort that fought back.

Kimble highlights the disadvantaged funding system that “perpetuates highway construction as virtually the only solution to transportation problems that most cities and States can afford to choose.” Since the Reagan era, “highway programs receive 80 percent of federal transportation funding while transit gets only 20 percent.” There was hope that the IIJA would change this, but the imbalance remained. “City Limits” is well timed, serving as a perfect documentation of what should change in the current Surface Transportation Reauthorization bill, The Build America 250 Act, which Congress is debating now.

Kimble provides a hopeful narrative that highlights the determination and spirit of everyday residents fighting against highway expansion projects. It is important to learn about these stories first hand because it makes the highway fights real and shows that it is worth the effort to push back. Even highway battles lasting decades, which would wear on even the most committed person, didn’t discourage the residents whose lives were upended by Texas’ three proposed projects. They may not have stopped the highway expansions in the end, but they succeeded in slowing down the projects and altering them just enough to lessen the negative impacts. As Beth Osbourne is quoted in the book “My head might crack before I get the change, but I will set the stage for somebody who will finally push it through.”