Will a pilot program in the infrastructure bill help reshape Kansas City’s inner-loop?
Carmeletta Williams used to sit at the edge of her grandmother’s front porch at 2700 E. 55th street and listen.
On Friday and Saturday nights, her grandmother cut hair for the men in the neighborhood. Their stories and jokes and laughs would fill Williams’ ears.
Then the highway came.
Williams’ family was one of the more than 1,700 mostly Black families displaced in the 60s and 70s for the construction of Bruce R. Watkins Drive.
Three generations that had lived in the neighborhood — Williams, her mother and her grandmother were born within a few blocks of each other — were scattered to other parts of the city. Her grandmother moved east, her aunt to the south.
“People were pushed out of their homes and their spaces and their comfort to make it easier for people who did not live in their neighborhoods and did not share their history and their stories,” Williams, who is now the executive director of the Black Archives of Mid-America in Kansas City, said.
Her family’s story is a common one. As the government built the vast network of highways connecting the country in the 20th century, the construction often plowed through city neighborhoods, displacing Black, Hispanic, immigrant and low-income families to provide a convenient commute for white suburbanites.
Now, as Congress attempts to pass its largest infrastructure bill in decades, there is an attempt to repair some of the damage to the neighborhoods.
Along with billions to fix roads, bridges and passenger trains and billions more to expand public transportation and electric vehicle charging stations, lawmakers allocated $1 billion for a program to address how the highways carved up neighborhoods.
Called the Reconnecting Communities Pilot Program, the provision will allow the U.S. Department of Transportation to fund projects that would remove or retrofit highways and try to connect the neighborhoods surrounding the road.
Highway removal projects have been completed in cities like Boston, Oakland, Milwaukee and Rochester, N.Y. Now, local officials are hoping the federal funding helps similar efforts in Kansas City.
“We’re in a moment where we’ve got some fresh planning around some different ideas around particularly how the highway system ought to function in the Kansas City area,” said Ron Achelpohl, the director of transportation and environment at the Mid-America Regional Council. “So we’re fairly excited about the opportunities we see in the infrastructure bill Congress is working on.”
Projects with potential
There are already projects that jump to the minds of those who focus on infrastructure and transportation in Kansas City, mostly around the northern and southern sections of the inner loop downtown.
At the southern end, officials have been working on a project that would cap I-670 and turn it into a park, creating a better connection between the Crossroads neighborhood and the downtown business district.
On the northern side, there’s an ongoing effort to connect the River Market and Columbus Park neighborhoods by making changes to Highway 9. Several options have been proposed, including lowering the highway to street level and turning it into a boulevard to get rid of the man-made barrier separating the neighborhood that used to be home to the city’s Italian immigrants.
“For some of these projects, it’s just as important to be community ready as shovel ready,” said Jason Waldron, the director of transportation for Kansas City. “And with the Highway 9 project and the lid project, there has been that work, there has been that community buy-in.”
There has also been discussion about potentially changing the northern part of the loop, including completely removing that segment of the highway and replacing it with parks or buildings.
While those projects would potentially be eligible for federal funding under the reconnecting communities pilot, they aren’t in the minority communities most affected by new highways, like west side Hispanic families displaced by I-35 and the Black families on the east side with the advent of I-70 and Bruce R. Watkins Drive.
Jacob Wagner, the director of urban studies at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, said that while the northern and southern parts of the loop merit attention, they are not the roads that left the most damage.
“That doesn’t address, really, the racial inequality that resulted from what happened on the West side and the East side,” Wagner said.
As part of its effort to reduce the number of pedestrians killed in traffic accidents, the city has been examining projects to improve the safety of Bruce R. Watkins Drive, the highway that broke up Williams’ neighborhood.
While the road was built in an era of increased awareness of what the interstate had done to neighborhoods — there was an effort to make the road into more of a parkway than a highway —it’s still one of the city’s most dangerous for pedestrians.
The city has been exploring several ideas for improving safety, ranging from better lighting and longer signal time to pedestrian bridges for people to walk or bike across.
Maggie Green, a media relations manager for Kansas City, said sometimes basic infrastructure, like sidewalks and crosswalks, can sometimes be a more attainable way to make a neighborhood more pedestrian and bike friendly than a large-scale project.
“It may not mean a big fancy new thing necessarily,” Green said. “Sometimes in a lot of cases it really is a basic type of improvement.”
Along with funding for construction, the infrastructure bill offers grants for studies looking into new projects. Waldron said the city was willing to consider big new ideas to address some of the problems created when the highways were first built.
“Some of these big infrastructure projects we’re talking about in the past have left some fairly big scars, whether physical or the other,” Waldron said. “And it’s going to take some big ideas, big solutions that are going to require some outside source funding from our federal partners.”
Roadblocks ahead
The highway reform movement has only been around since the late 80s, energized by San Francisco’s decision to remove rather than replace roads after the 1989 earthquake. Milwaukee, Chattanooga and other cities followed in the early 2000s.
So far, there have been 11 completed highway removal projects across the country — including efforts to cap them or to direct them underground for a total of 17 miles of interstate, according to data collected by the Congress for the New Urbanism.
That’s about .036 percent of the country’s interstate system.
“This isn’t ‘destroy the interstates,’” said Ben Crowther, a program manager with The Congress for New Urbanism. “This is rather let’s think about where highways are out of context and where they’re causing the most damage to the people living around them.”
While there have been relatively few attempts to remove highways, more and more cities appear to be considering the idea. But the projects can be expensive. One on track in Syracuse, N.Y. is expected to cost $2.2 billion, more than double the entire amount allocated in the federal pilot program to reconnect communities.
“As it stands now it’s going to be very competitive,” Crowther said. “The $1 billion price tag isn’t really up to the task. There’s a lot of demand for these types of projects.”
U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a Democrat from Kansas City, also has a personal history with how the highway carved up Kansas City. He pastored for three decades at St. James Methodist Church, originally Cleveland Avenue Methodist Church before it was forced to move for the construction of I-70.
Cleaver said he is disappointed by how little money was allocated for the reconnecting communities program and that he’s working to get more into the upcoming budget bill, which Democrats are calling “Build Back Better.”
Still, he called the program a “step in the right direction.”
“The fact that this is only a pilot program leaves me hopeful that we can provide additional funding down the road,” Cleaver said. “However, whatever the final funding amounts to, I will do everything in my power to ensure some of it is allocated for projects in the Fifth Congressional District of Missouri.”
When asked if she thought it was a good idea for people to look into reconnecting communities like hers that were splintered by the highway system, Williams said it was “deserved.”
“We acknowledge that it happened, that it was real, we’re honest about it,” Williams said. “And then we do what we can to rebuild.”