Tom Perumean
After years of planning the I-45 Expansion project, the first shovels turned on Wednesday, kicking off the controversial project.
The celebration of the project’s beginning took place at Pitch 25, a sports bar and venue at the intersection of St. Emanuel and Walker Streets in East Downtown.
The fete featured a cadre of politicos and professionals from Mayor John Whitmire to J. Bruce Bugg, Chairman of the Texas Transportation Commission, the overseer of the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT). One professional, Greater Houston Partnership head Steve Kean says the project reflects the spirit of Houston.
“We will come together, this is a place that comes together to solve our problems, we don’t ignore them, we fix them. A lot of great cities have problems—big problems—but we fix them here.”
But the afternoon wasn’t all pomp and circumstance. Protesters took to Walker Street to decry the project as destructive to the community. Chloe Cook with Stop TxDot I-45 had this to say: “TxDot has written in their own environmental assessment documents that this project disproportionately affects Black and Hispanic neighborhoods. They know this is racist,” Cook said. “They know from the data that what they’re doing won’t fix traffic. But, to say that this is bringing economic prosperity to Houstonians is a bold-faced lie.”
Cook says the project will obliterate St. Emanuel Street and kill the family-run businesses along it and displace many of them from the area. It will also affect the value of many new EaDo high-density housing projects as a new freeway is constructed two blocks closer to them.
Rerouting I-45 through East Downtown Houston is a complicated, controversial, and pricey proposal.
The gargantuan project will lay two freeways beside each other through East Downtown from the I-45/US59-69 merge to the I-10 interchange. After merging into a straightened I-10, I-45 will reconnect with itself north of Downtown and continue. The northbound path will be improved in both directions from the 45-10 interchange to Beltway 8. In all the project will cost $13 billion.