When Modesti Cooper returned home to Houston in July 2019 after more than a decade overseas with the United States military, she moved into her dream house on the corner of Nance and Grove streets in Houston’s Fifth Ward. She’d bought a parcel of land and designed the home from scratch in her downtime while touring from Kuwait to Afghanistan to Iraq. It was a relief to finally move in. “It’s a calm, cool, nice area,” Cooper says. “Besides the traffic, there’s no violence, no noise. It’s so quiet, it’s unbelievable. I had rockets and mortars and missiles blown over my head. To come home to peace of mind and say, OK, this is my forever home.”
Cooper, 35, had barely unpacked when she started receiving letters from the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT). The agency was planning to expand Interstate 10 as part of the North Houston Highway Improvement Project: a $7.5 billion initiative to expand I-45 from downtown Houston north to Beltway 8 and rebuild and reroute parts of the downtown loop.
When Cooper started getting letters, the project was working its way through the years-long environmental review process required by the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA). The agency couldn’t yet compel Cooper to sell her forever home through eminent domain to make way for a new overpass. “At first, it seemed like they were going to work with me,” she says. “But once I actually got to the TxDOT office and met with everyone, it was more like: you’re going to lose your house. You might as well just give it up to us.”
