Highway Foes Emboldened as Buttigieg Puts Houston Project on Pause

Last month, the U.S. Department of Transportation took an unusual step in its decades-long history of designing, funding and overseeing interstate highway projects: It told a state to stop building a highway project.

Namely, the North Houston Highway Improvement Project, a $7 billion plan by the Texas Department of Transportation to widen I-45 and parts of I-10 and I-610 on the downtown edge of the state’s largest city. According to TxDOT’s environmental review, the NHHIP would remove more than 1,300 homes, businesses, schools and places of worship. Much of the impact would land in low-income Black and Latino neighborhoods, some of the same ones the highway’s original construction tore through in the 1950s and ’60s. On March 6, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) wrote to TxDOT, asking that the state pause the expansion until federal officials determine whether “further actions may be necessary” to address “serious concerns” in letters by opponents that the project would violate Title VI civil rights law.