Secrecy, Death and Deceit: This Is What We’re Up Against

Secrecy

Peggy Daly-Masternak learned of the Ohio Department of Transportation’s (ODOT’s) plans to widen Interstate 475 in Toledo, Ohio, by accident. Even though the interstate runs right past her front door, she never received official notice from ODOT.

Instead, a council member she'd befriended years ago forwarded her an agency newsletter. She was especially struck by how heavily the newsletter encouraged public participation. “Excessively so,” according to Daly-Masternak. It was ironic, seeing how she and her neighbors were completely in the dark.

In any case, once she knew, she was determined to get involved. She wrote to the ODOT Public Information Officer, asking (among several other questions) why she and her neighbors were kept in the dark about these plans. In response, she was assured that ODOT had identified a team of stakeholders tasked with representing the community, sharing local updates with the project team and providing input on project elements. However, Daly-Masternak wasn’t told exactly who had been identified as a stakeholder. 

“So if I'm a concerned citizen, who do I turn to if I don't have a specific name or even a location?” she asks. “Even if I wanted this project to move forward, I wouldn’t know who to get in touch with.”

After failing to pry names out of the agency spokespeople, she filed an open records request. A month later, she got her answer — and realized that the difficulty of getting to this point was only the tip of the iceberg. First, she noticed that several names on the list of stakeholders belonged to individuals who either no longer resided in the region or never had. A former rabbi at the local synagogue was listed despite having relocated years ago. Representatives from companies located in Atlanta and Chicago seemingly had more seats at the table than the locals.  

Next, Daly-Masternak was surprised by the handful of names she did recognize on the list, so she called them up. Phone call after phone call, she was met with surprise. Some knew that they were listed as stakeholders for the incipient ODOT project, but the fact that so many didn’t roused her concern. “It's almost as if they said, ‘Uh-oh, we need to come up with a list; let's open the Yellow Pages and see who we can add,’” she joked. 

Daly-Masternak did not expect to encounter this much confusion when she first inquired about the project’s stakeholders. She was seeking an avenue of accountability for a project that was going to irreversibly transform the world right outside her front door. This is what we’re up against.

Death

In January 2012, teenager Michelle Murigi was killed while crossing Fruitridge Road in Sacramento, California. Murigi was in an unsignalized crosswalk, trying to get from the school building to the bus stop after tutoring younger students at Mark Twain Elementary, adjacent to her high school. At the time, Sacramento police reported that the car in the far eastbound lane closest to Murigi had stopped to allow her to cross, but the car in the inner eastbound lane continued through the crosswalk and struck her. The second driver alleged that he couldn't see Murigi because of the stopped car.

Murigi’s death pained the community. “Her death was a big deal,” Isaac Gonzalez, a dedicated resident of Sacramento and founder of Slow Down Sacramento, told me. “It happened in an underserved community and on a notoriously terrible road that we’d now call a stroad.”

Though, it wasn’t just the loss of a neighbor that incensed Gonzalez. It was the city’s inertia. “The city wasn’t saying that they wouldn’t fix this — rather, that this intersection was number 20 or so on their list in terms of priority,” Gonzalez recalled. “And if they install one traffic light a year, maybe 20 years from now, this intersection would see change.”

For everyone touched by Murigi’s death, this was unacceptable. And so, her classmates, relatives and local pedestrian advocacy organizations worked together to keep the pressure on Sacramento’s elected leaders and city agencies. As expected, they were not only met with resistance but with relative silence. They kept up their fight, however, and a year and a half later, the city and school district mustered up the money to fund a traffic light, Gonzalez recalls.

This was undoubtedly a victory, but in the future, those fighting on behalf of Murigi could only hope that the city would be proactive and not reactive. She shouldn’t have died in the first place. This is what we’re up against.

Deceit

“I can’t do anything downstairs,” Brad Sibley lamented. “I can’t watch TV down there, and when people come over, they’re too afraid to sleep on the first floor.” 

Sibley is one of the hundreds of Farmers Market District residents who live right on Cesar Chavez Boulevard, formerly known as the South Central Expressway, in Dallas. In fact, when Sibley first moved to the area in 2013, he recalled receiving mail still addressed to the road’s former name. Since then, however, the area has only grown denser, with retail, amenities and homes all within walking distance. Yet, other than a new name, the nine-lane road steps from his window hasn’t changed at all. “If this continues, I don’t know if I can’t take it,” he added. “I might have to leave.”

“Someone’s going to get killed,” cautioned Sibley’s neighbor Karen Pierre, a fourth-generation Dallas resident and real estate agent. Another neighbor, Sana Syed, a multi-hyphenate professional who lives just across the street, joked that Pierre likely broke the “Guinness World Records of number of photographs of the intersection.” Pierre documents all of the collisions she witnesses right outside of her window and relays them to her local officials in the hopes that the city will actually transform this highway into the boulevard she bought into. “It’s a weekly occurrence,” she said.

Pierre is willing to wait however long it takes to get the boulevard she was promised. She was born just a mile from where she now lives, and her first date with her now-husband was at the farmer’s market. Her investment in the neighborhood has too much sentimental value. 

“I don't want to leave. I want to see this get better and I want to be able to say: ‘Hey, I helped get this done,’” Pierre exclaimed. “But I want to see it done.”

They were promised a boulevard. What they got was a highway. This is what we’re up against.

This Is What We’re Up Against

These vignettes are part of the reporting I’ve done for Strong Towns in the last year. They so plainly illustrate the stakes advocates face and the warped priorities of our places that double down on death-toll-inducing roadways and a development pattern that keeps us locked out of prosperity.

These are the stories from your movement, and it’s through your support that I’m able to tell them. Furthermore, it’s with your support that they’re entering the mainstream. The Wall Street Journal reported on stroads earlier this May. The Washington Post asked its readers to “rethink parking lots” back in March, following an article by The New York Times which referred to cities as “awash in asphalt.” Highway expansions are routinely bad-mouthed in major publications nowadays and incremental housing is having a renaissance.

As Strong Towns ideas enter the mainstream, I’m reminded of something Daniel Herriges wrote in 2019: “If we win, really win, you won't hear about it — because the vast majority of the change we produce won't be attributed to us at all. It will be embedded in the broader culture.”

In 2024, it feels like we’re slowly but surely winning. But there’s good reason to be cautious, even as we ride this wave.

“If the name 'Strong Towns' is on 10 times as many tongues as today, but the same sort of bad investments are still being made with the same frequency as today, that will be a failure,” Herriges warns. “If people who say they agree with us are finding themselves unable to apply our analysis in their actual work — because the institutional barriers are too high, or because they don't see the opportunities — that's a failure.”

Your support not only ensures that we remain a vehicle for storytelling, but that those stories move the needle in the right direction. You know what we’re up against.

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