How America Can Stop Building New Highways – Slate
By David Zipper
The neighborhood of Allendale, in Shreveport, Louisiana, lies just west of downtown. Long a nexus for northern Louisiana’s Black community, Allendale’s population is now just over 4,000, down from 12,000 in 1980. But there are newer developments in the area, such as the public housing complex that opened earlier this year, and a number of homes where families resettled after fleeing Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Allendale’s gems include a park standing atop the site of a Civil War fort and a 19th-century waterworks, now a museum and a national historic landmark, that is the last steam-powered municipal water treatment plant in the United States.
All these structures could soon fall prey to a bulldozer. The reason: A proposed 3.5-mile highway, the I-49 Inner-City Connector, would smash through Allendale, wreaking havoc on everything in its path. “State officials call it ‘the Connector,’ ” said Kim Mitchell, a Shreveport architect who has been fighting the project, “but it’s really a divider—because it isolates Allendale.”
