The Reconnecting Communities Program Isn’t Undoing Highway Expansions—It’s Decorating Them

The Tremé neighborhood in New Orleans—with the Claiborne Expressway running through it. (Source: Flickr/NewUrbanism.)

"Transportation can connect us to jobs, services, and loved ones, but we've also seen countless cases around the country where a piece of infrastructure cuts off a neighborhood or a community because of how it was built," said Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg at the launch of a $1 billion five-year initiative pledging to reconnect cities bisected and burdened by past infrastructure projects. On February 28, 2023, the first round of grantees for the Reconnecting Communities Pilot Program was announced. For some, the program symbolizes an auspicious reversal of values that have characterized the past 70 years of transportation planning. For others, it's business as usual.

Urban planner and freeway fighter Amy Stelly grew up feet from the Claiborne Expressway, known locally in New Orleans as “The Monster.” She lived through its construction in the 1960s and has since been championing its removal: “I hated the highway growing up, and always wanted to change it,” she told Metropolis Magazine. 

When the Biden Administration highlighted the Claiborne Expressway as a symbol of shameful planning in need of money to remediate the damage it caused the Tremé neighborhood, Stelly decided to apply for Reconnecting Communities. Through her nonprofit, the Claiborne Avenue Alliance Design Studio, she asked for $2 million to explore a future for New Orleans without the Claiborne Expressway. The proposal begins with a narrative reminiscing Treme’s pre-highway history:

“There was a grocery store, a linen shop, a hardware store, and a restaurant on the [block]. And that’s just on this side of the street.” Not far was a movie theater, three pharmacies, and a coffee grinder. This world abruptly collapsed on Ash Wednesday, 1966, when bulldozers uprooted the oak trees and began replacing them with concrete columns.

The Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development (LaDOTD) also submitted an application. The state organization asked for almost $100 million in funding to give the expressway’s underpass a facelift, tackle its maintenance backlog, and potentially remove some of the ramps that slice through Tremé. The proposal enumerated adjacent plans to host businesses and concerts under the freeway. Absent from the proposal was any consideration to remove the expressway, altogether. 

Both applications acknowledged the expressway’s expiration date: It was built to last only 50 years. LaDOTD figured that was a good reason to tackle its maintenance. Stelly thought otherwise. Rather than invest in extending its lifespan, she would prefer to see that money go towards revitalizing the neighborhood it destroyed. This, she argues, can’t be accomplished through innovating the underpass to host businesses and a performance space—pointing to the failed attempts to do so in recent years—but by getting rid of it altogether. Ultimately, her proposal was not awarded. However, she can’t say that LaDOTD fared better. The organization secured $500,000, a fraction of its request for $100 million. 

Stelly and LaDOTD represent the two types of lead applicants the pilot program encountered: community-based organizations and government agencies. However, according to America Walks, only three of the nearly three-dozen projects funded were led by the former. “If USDOT is serious about developing reconnecting communities solutions tailored to local needs, it should aim to fund more community-based organizations so they can bring information and professional expertise from outside the normal channels of infrastructure development that in the past haven’t served residents,” the nonprofit insisted.

Back in November, America Walks also authored a letter, cosigned by Stelly’s nonprofit and dozens of other organizations, calling on the USDOT to reject proposals by municipal and state agencies that ultimately support highway infrastructure. That letter highlighted, among others, the Louisiana DOTD’s application, characterizing it as inconsistent with the goals of the Reconnecting Communities program. 

With this first round of awards, it appeared that the USDOT listened. While most of the recipients were municipal and state governments, if not their respective transportation agencies, proposals to expand highways were not funded. However, one grantee that resurfaces some of the apprehension America Walks articulated is Little Rock, Arkansas. The city secured $2 million to construct a park over Interstate 30, without halting its expansion. 

For Strong Towns President Chuck Marohn, this isn’t a flaw as much as it is a feature. “Fundamentally, this tiny program meant to spur innovation is couched in a trillion-dollar infrastructure bill that supports highway expansion,” he said. “It’s insulting.” Furthermore, Marohn is skeptical that the departments responsible for advancing highway projects would be invested in their own undoing, noting that “transportation agencies are good at one thing.”

For this reason, he’s concerned that funded initiatives will resemble the Rose Quarter Improvement Project, in which the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) dressed a highway expansion in the language of racial equity and reconciliation. The mismatch between what’s on the “marketing brochure” and what’s budgeted by the transportation departments is par for the course with highway projects, according to Marohn. 

In fact, Joe Cortright of City Observatory referred to the Rose Quarter Improvement Project as a hallmark case of “woke-washing”:

ODOT slashed through the area with three major highway projects in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, leading to a two-thirds decline in neighborhood population. Today, it is trying to sell its massive 10-lane-wide freeway-widening project—which would increase traffic and pollution—as a way to remediate the damage to the neighborhood.

Renderings that accompanied the expansion’s press materials showcased greenspaces, housing, a career development center, and other amenities that were accounted for in neither the funding nor planning of the expansion. “There’s no funding for any of them as part of the Rose Quarter ‘Improvement’ Project,” Cortright pointed out, calling the marketing misleading and even fraudulent.

In fact, ODOT applied for Reconnecting Communities requesting $100 million to the completion of the Rose Quarter Improvement Project, including the construction of a highway cover. The application was rejected. Instead $800,000 in federal funds was allocated to a joint proposal put together by the Portland Bureau of Transportation and Albina Vision Trust, a Portland-based nonprofit that previously collaborated with ODOT. Despite a resemblance between the proposals, some advocates still see ODOT’s loss as a win for Portland, in part because the victorious proposal is not necessarily contingent on a freeway expansion. At the same time, this award doesn’t suggest the highway is off the table, either.

notable that @AlbinaVisionPDX got a grant from the first round of federal Reconnecting Communities grant program but @oregondot’s application for funding for the Rose Quarter was rejected 😎 https://t.co/azWP2XkDUw

— NOMOREFREEWAYS (@nomorefreeways) February 28, 2023

Chuck Marohn admits his misgivings about the program would look different if it weren’t couched in a law that will fundamentally kindle highway expansion. Even so, he maintains that many “utterly transformative” projects don’t need to be the type of massive undertakings that programs like this encourage. He acknowledges that decommissioning and subsequently demolishing a highway may require millions of dollars and hundreds of hours, but reconnecting communities doesn’t start and end there. “In the end, cities should not be sitting around waiting for federal money to pursue local projects,” he said. “They already have what they need.”

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