Residents of Lafayette are wary of a project that has dragged on for decades, but they believe that their community — where vehicles hit buildings and pedestrians — has few options.
LAFAYETTE, La. — These days, the McComb neighborhood of Lafayette is dotted with deserted homes, ravaged by neglect and the merciless weather of southern Louisiana. Many businesses, including the last supermarket, fled years ago, taking jobs with them. And cutting through the community is the Evangeline Thruway, a half-dozen lanes packed with cars and 18-wheelers rushing through on their way to somewhere else.
Yet residents with deep roots in McComb can recall a time when the neighborhood was a destination. Bustling streets were lined with locally owned shops; homes for the families of craftsmen, rail yard workers and musicians; and the Zydeco dance halls that helped define Lafayette as the capital of Cajun and Creole Louisiana.
Many in the neighborhood, yearning to reclaim some of the promise of the past, are fighting to stanch the decline, recapture McComb’s sense of identity and encourage redevelopment. And some are looking for hope anywhere they can find it, even in an unlikely place: the construction of a new highway.
“We get a chance to experience construction, which brings jobs, opportunities, growth,” said Gerald Boudreaux, the state senator who represents the area, which is where he was raised. “That’s the crystal ball I’m looking through.”
Across the country, there is a growing push to tear down highways that cut through urban areas and to block the construction of new ones. Activists, researchers and officials including Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg argue that such developments have been vehicles of oppression, dividing poor and nonwhite neighborhoods from more prosperous communities and severing access to opportunity.
But in Lafayette, where state transportation officials have stepped up longstanding efforts to replace the Thruway with an elevated highway, the proposals have generated a more complicated reaction — exasperation but also a pragmatic recognition that it might be the only viable alternative. The status quo, some residents say, offers only more decline.
The project — an expansion of Interstate 49 — has been debated for decades, forcing the neighborhood into a paralyzing limbo as officials weighed plans and made fitful starts without achieving significant progress. And in all that time, residents have been left to contend with the dangers of the Thruway, where vehicles traveling along two separated sets of one-way lanes slam into houses and plow over pedestrians with regularity.
“Living on the Thruway, you have to constantly worry about the traffic,” said Trincella Bonnet, whose house a block away rattles when trucks screech to a halt.
Many residents view the state’s plans with suspicion, all too familiar with previous efforts that ultimately stalled. They have difficulty believing that the kind of project with a lengthy track record of hurting communities like theirs might, this time, be a source of salvation.
Even so, some critics are resigned to the highway’s arrival. “We can’t say this isn’t going to work for us,” said Tina Shelvin Bingham, who serves on a community advisory committee and is Ms. Bonnet’s daughter. “We don’t have the power in that capacity.”
State officials say their approach to the project has been informed by the failures of the past, and they describe ambitious notions of what it will provide. The elevated highway will be safer for pedestrians, officials say, and there will be a surface-level boulevard, roundabouts, green space — all of which, they say, will improve the quality of life and lure businesses.
“By building an interstate that is sensitive to that environment, we actually create economic opportunity,” said Shawn Wilson, the state secretary of transportation, who lives in Lafayette.
On one point, there is near universal agreement: Things cannot stay as they are. Residents said that while the highway project has hung in the balance, there has been little incentive for officials to take consequential steps to improve the condition of the Thruway or mitigate its threats.
The danger was underscored recently when a 30-year-old woman trying to walk across the Thruway at night was killed after the driver of a pickup truck struck her and sped off.
More broadly, the uncertainty has only added to the slow-motion collapse of the neighborhood, which is predominantly African American and located in North Lafayette. Nonprofits and community groups have pursued small-scale efforts to reinvigorate the area, like building new houses and a community center and planting a garden.
Yet it has not been enough to change the course of the neighborhood’s momentum, which some argued has been propelled by structural segregation.
McComb has, for as long as anyone can remember, been separated in one way or another from the city’s nucleus. In the late 1800s, a railroad formed a dividing line; in the 1960s came the Evangeline Thruway, splitting McComb from Lafayette’s compact downtown.
As a child in the 1960s, John Freeman, a retired telecom executive, crossed what was called Clay Street before the Thruway arrived, delivering lunch bags to his stepfather, a saloonkeeper who ran several clubs in the neighborhood known for its contributions to Zydeco music. Some of the best known performers — Buckwheat Zydeco, Clifton Chenier and Lil’ Buck Sinegal — lived within a few blocks of his family’s home.
Mr. Freeman, a former leader in the city’s Chamber of Commerce, pushed in the past for the highway expansion to be completed. His support has eroded into skepticism.
“Everybody was excited” when the Thruway came, Mr. Freeman said. “That Thruway didn’t prove to be any kind of economic benefit.”
The new highway, a connector that would thrust Interstate 49 through Lafayette, where it currently terminates, to New Orleans, is part of a broader undertaking to create an energy transportation corridor between the oil fields of Canada and the petrochemical belt on the Gulf Coast. The project has been regarded by supporters as the region’s most urgent economic development project since the federal government formally began studying it in 1987.
The work had been stalled for years, with federal funding out of reach. But the project benefited from an infusion of federal funds last year from stimulus legislation spurred by the coronavirus pandemic.
Cost estimates today reach $1 billion. Louisiana has already spent $47 million on planning and the purchase of properties to make way for the highway’s interchanges, embankments, pilings and a possible signature bridge.
Still, some critics question whether it can achieve what its supporters are expecting. During a past iteration of the project, a federal environmental impact statement published in 2002 found that the connector, particularly the stretch of elevated concrete, could establish a barrier hemming in Black families in North Lafayette.
“It’s not going to make it better,” said Amy Stelly, a designer and planner in New Orleans who has pushed for the dismantling of the Claiborne Expressway, an elevated highway in that city’s Tremé neighborhood. “It’s going to exacerbate the conditions that were there. If North Lafayette were ripe for investment, that would have happened already.”
Officials say the project would improve traffic flow, bring jobs and create a pathway for commerce. The highway would help with hurricane evacuation, an increasingly pressing issue as Louisiana has been repeatedly pounded by powerful storms. It would also alleviate the dangers posed by the Thruway.
When the Tapo family lived along the Thruway, their house was struck by cars twice. “I’ve seen motorcycle wrecks,” said Carl Tapo Jr., who grew up in the neighborhood. “I’ve seen a guy get hit by a bus. I’ve seen a guy killed. I’ve seen a guy run over on a bike looking at an accident on the Thruway.”
“It got to a point,” he added, “that you got so used to it.”
His father, Carl Tapo Sr., a retired railroad engineer, said that he taught his children to “respect the highway,” and that they mostly played in a spacious backyard instead of going out into the neighborhood. He has become reluctantly open to the prospect of an elevated highway.
“Now, what you do have to be concerned about is vagrancy,” the elder Mr. Tapo said. “Well, we got that now anyway.”
For Ms. Bonnet, one of the worst effects of the connector would be the displacement of the community garden that she has spent so much time and energy nurturing. She tilled the soil and harvested vegetables.
It is part of a land deal to make room for a water plant displaced by the interstate’s right of way. Her old house, where she lived with one of her daughters, was also bought by the state. Now, she lives in a repurposed shipping container, a prototype project by the local Habitat for Humanity.
The garden, planted on property lent to the McComb Veazey Neighborhood Coterie by the local school district, sits on sloping land beside a wastewater treatment plant. In a neighborhood that has endured so much decline, those two acres were a bright spot where she could see things take root and flourish.
“We did all this work to get it where we want it,” Ms. Bonnet said. “Now, we got to start all over again.”
Christiaan Mader is the editor and founder of The Current, a nonprofit news organization covering Lafayette and South Louisiana, and an occasional contributor to The Times.
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