When we think of what our communities need, we usually think of affordable homes, good schools, and grocery stores. Not wide towering highways. Yet, in the past 70-some years, highways have dictated community development in urban centers. They’ve torn through low-income communities of color, displacing families, homes, and businesses. As a result, people move farther away; we languish in traffic, get home from work later, and spend less time with our family. We’ve accepted growing air pollution as the inevitable cost of the lives we’ve built around our cars and the neighborhoods we’ve built around highways. For many of us, we’ve never seen or imagined an alternative.
But in her new book City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequality, and the Future of America’s Highways, Megan Kimble, a journalist covering transportation and housing (and former Texas Observer editor), tells Texans: It wasn’t always this way, nor does it have to be. By interweaving the history of the interstate highway system with stories from past and present community members of Houston’s Fifth Ward, East Austin, and Dallas’ Deep Ellum, Kimble shows that these urban neighborhoods were not always designed around never-ending highway expansion. And by spotlighting the current struggles of activists resisting the Texas Department of Transportation’s (TxDOT) efforts to widen highways there, the author reimagines our cities’ futures.
