Sometimes, with everything else that’s going on in the world, I forget that the I-45 expansion is still out there, looming like a battleship in the harbor. But there it is, and we can’t not worry about it.
For Tanya Debose, Independence Heights is rich with history. Before it became a Houston neighborhood, it was a city, one of the oldest — if not the very first — Texas cities to be founded by African Americans. Debose’s great-grandfather became one of the city’s original homeowners in 1924; now, as executive director of the Independence Heights Redevelopment Council, Debose imagines tours taking visitors to sites such as Harris County’s first African American city hall.
So when the Texas Department of Transportation released an analysis of how the I-45 expansion would impact historical resources, Debose scrolled through the document looking for what the agency had to say about the project’s impact on Independence Heights, where dozens of homes and a storied church lay in the right-of-way.
Independence Heights is bounded on the south and east by I-610 and I-45, respectively, and while the 2,309-page report mentioned that the community could potentially be impacted by the project, it did not address specific effects.
The omission could impact how the neighborhood, listed in the National Register of Historic Places, is compensated for any historical losses.
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Independence Heights has been impacted by highway construction before. In the early 1960s, Loop 610 was built through the neighborhood, with 330 residences demolished to make way for the highway, according to Lone Star Legal Aid.
Since then, Independence Heights has been listed in the National Register of Historic Places, a preservation program that also has roots in highway construction.
Here is the draft Historical Resources Survey Report, which is 2309 pages long, so you may be excused for not having read all the way through it. The revised design schematics for I-45 are here, so take a look at what may be in store near where you live. It’s coming, and we better be ready for it.
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