[Reason] Biden Admin. Deploys the Civil Rights Act To Stop a $7 Billion Highway Project in Houston

don't know anything about this. curious whether Houstonians think this highway project is a good thing or a bad thing--or both.

"Biden Administration Deploys the Civil Rights Act To Stop a $7 Billion Highway Project in Houston":

https://reason.com/2021/04/06/biden...-stop-a-7-billion-highway-project-in-houston/

long article, here's the intro:

Biden Administration Deploys the Civil Rights Act To Stop a $7 Billion Highway Project in Houston

The Federal Highway Administration is asking Texas officials to hit pause on a massive highway widening project while it examines whether it violates Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

CHRISTIAN BRITSCHGI | 4.6.2021 1:00 PM

President Joe Biden has grand visions for infrastructure projects, judging by his $2 trillion American Jobs Plan. Nevertheless, his administration is pumping the brakes on one particular infrastructure project, and it's using the Civil Rights Act to do it.

Last week, Politico reported that the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) sent a letter to the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) requesting that it pause contract solicitation on its North Houston Highway Improvement Project to give the agency time to evaluate complaints that the project violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.

The $7 billion Houston project—funded with a mix of state and federal dollars—would reroute I-45 near the city's downtown, add four managed express lanes to the highway, raise bridges, improve drainage to prevent flooding, and add bike lanes and pedestrian sidewalks at a number of cross streets.

In order to add those express lanes, however, TxDOT is planning to widen the highway by as much as 220 feet in some places. The road's expanded footprint will result in the displacement of about 600 private homes, 486 units of public or low-income housing, 344 businesses, five churches, and two schools, according to a TxDOT report.

That displacement, and the fact that it would be concentrated in largely minority neighborhoods, has provoked criticism from local activists who argue the project doubles down on the discriminatory effects of past highway construction.

"The direct effect of construction of these freeways has been to condemn and destroy Houston's principal Black-owned business district, homes and religious institutions located in what is now the right-of-way of these two highways," wrote Zoe Middleton and Christina Rosales of Texas Housers, an affordable housing group, in a January letter.

Any decision to move forward with the highway project "will pave the way to expand and make worse the harms TxDOT has inflicted on Black Houstonians" and thus violates Title IV of the Civil Rights Act, they write.

Neither that letter nor similar communications from Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D–Texas) and Air Alliance, a Houston environmental group, swayed TxDOT. In February, the agency issued a record of decision which finalized the environmental review process and announced the specific form that the project would take.

Normally the environmental review process, Politico notes, would be done by federal bureaucrats. Texas, however, is an "assignment state" which means its own officials are empowered to perform the environmental review required by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Other states that have this power include Alaska, California, Florida, Ohio, and Utah.

NEPA requires federal agencies to assess the impact of their actions on the environment—whether that's funding a new road or issuing a permit for a new coal mine—by preparing lengthy environmental reports.

The law is famous for raising the cost and completion time of infrastructure projects by allowing project critics to sue over environmental reviews they think aren't thorough enough. To avoid litigation, in turn, bureaucrats have taken to writing longer and longer environmental reviews that cover every conceivable objection project opponents might have.

"Today the average [Environmental Impact Statement] runs more than 600 pages, plus appendices that typically exceed 1,000 pages. The average EIS now takes 4.5 years to complete; between 2010 and 2017, four such statements were completed after delays of 17 years or more," wrote the Niskanen Center's Samuel Hammond and Brink Lindsey in 2020 report. "And remember, no ground can be broken on a project until the EIS has made it through the legal gauntlet."

Texas officials report that they've been able to shave a year off the average "environmental assessment"—a less onerous form of NEPA review than an Environmental Impact Statement—by bypassing the FHWA's process and doing NEPA reviews themselves, according to a 2018 report from the Government Accountability Office.

But being an assignment state isn't a silver bullet for getting infrastructure projects built. Despite TxDOT spending close to 10 years preparing the environmental impact statement for its Houston project, it's managed to get hit with a NEPA lawsuit from Harris County (which contains Houston) in March.
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more at the link

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got you to look

 

I made a conscious choice there. for predictable reasons

 

you say trolling, I say informing

 

seriously though, does that section of I-45 need widening and improvements?

 

because if it does, that would make this a relatively straightforward (which is not to say "simple") utilitarian case of the benefits to the many outweighing the interests of the few.

 

the devil is in the details . . . what's "proper" is always contested.

someone who would never sell their house "for all the tea in China" will never feel that they have been properly and fairly compensated

 

my edit happened too late. again, someone who doesn't want to sell may never believe that they've been treated fairly and justly

 

I also think that one of the reasons why this case matters, is that 2 trillion dollars worth of infrastructure investment is going to raise an awful lot of environmental justice and environmental racism problems