A Highway Continues to Haunt Shreveport, Louisiana

(Source: Wikimedia Commons/formulanone.)

In January of this year, residents of Allendale, a neighborhood in Louisiana’s third largest city, Shreveport, learned that the controversial Interstate 49 inner-city connector (ICC) would not go through their neighborhood. For Allendale Strong, a group vocal in its opposition to the ICC and on whose advocacy Strong Towns has reported extensively, this is a bittersweet victory. An update on their website states, “Going around Allendale is great. Building an inner-city freeway connector is still not ideal.”

Allendale Strong mobilized nearly a decade ago to combat the proposed I-49 alignment. “They don’t even take care of the stuff we have... They want to build a freeway, but won’t even put in enough asphalt to fill in a pothole,” said Dorothy Wiley (the group’s founder) of the ICC. The $600–900 million price tag, coupled with its limited benefits, has even earned the project a spotlight in a National Report on Highway Boondoggles. 

The current alternative under consideration—known as 3A—avoids Allendale, but impacts Shreveport’s downtown. According to a description of the route published by the Northwest Louisiana Council of Governments (NLCOG), 3A crosses over Cross Bayou twice, runs through St. Paul’s Bottoms Historic District, and appears to impact both the Downtown Shreveport Commercial District and the Shreveport Waterworks Museum, National Historic Landmark of local pride.

Liz Swaine, the Executive Director of Shreveport Downtown Development Authority, also observed the destructive impact 3A would have on newly built affordable housing units for older and disabled residents, and local working families. In a letter to the executive director of NLCOG, she remarked how ironic and incomprehensible it is that a fresh attempt to address poverty and a housing shortage would be short-changed for a highway. Even if some of the apartments could be salvaged, 3A would “condemn those living there to a life in the shadow of a high-speed roadway.”

Swaine asked that NLCOG reevaluate its commitment to studying the corridor, noting that the process is expensive and that it is categorically unwanted. There are also considerable consequences when large infrastructure projects loom over a city, noted LeVette Fuller, former city councilmember and co-founder of Re:Form Shreveport. Entrepreneurs and developers naturally might avoid investing in property located in the path of or adjacent to a potential highway, uncertain about its future. With studies at times spanning years, long-term divestment can devastate both the local economy and morale. “As a result, people don’t see opportunity here,” said Fuller.

Cedric Glover, Mayor of Shreveport from 2006 to 2014, agreed that the hint of a highway can effect just as much damage as its actual construction. “The real damage of this project is not that it ever actually happens,” he said in a recent piece for Bloomberg surveying the city’s decades-long fight against the highway project. In November 2021, the Shreveport Times published Glover’s open letter to President Biden, calling the unbuilt highway an “interstate highway version of the Sword of Damocles that has been hung over the Allendale neighborhood for more than three decades.”

“Furthermore, the inner-city connector in Shreveport is the most glaring example of federal highway funding keeping bad projects alive,” said Strong Towns President Chuck Marohn. “Once the people of Shreveport are free from having to fight a rear-guard action against the inner-city connector project, they can focus all their energy on Shreveport’s transformation. And then beautiful things will happen.”

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