Published February 23, this is a companion article to Bloomberg’s An Unbuilt Highway Takes a Toll on a Shreveport Neighborhood.
A Highway Continues to Haunt Shreveport, Louisiana
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.”