A Brief But Spectacular take on improving community health outcomes near urban highways

Geoff Bennett:

Amy Stelly is an urban planner, designer and artist in New Orleans, where her family has lived for four generations.

She has been fighting to have the Claiborne Expressway removed. It's a highway that the Biden White House has called an example of historic inequity.

Tonight, Stelly shares her Brief But Spectacular take on improving community health near urban highways.

Amy Stelly, Urban Planner:

I don't like interstate going through Treme. I have never liked it. It's loud. It's dirty. It's nasty. It's ugly. There's nothing to love about the interstate going through Treme and the Seventh Ward.

Growing up, I would enjoy taking the ride to visit my grandparents. My grandparents lived off of the famed St. Charles Avenue. So it was a beautiful ride from downtown New Orleans to uptown New Orleans. It was green, it was pleasant, it was lush.

But then, when I came back home, I was faced with this huge piece of gray infrastructure that just loomed over what we call the neutral ground here. I was never clear about why our neighborhood had to be so ugly and other neighborhoods, like uptown New Orleans, were still beautiful. It puzzled me as a child.

I began to understand the race and class divide much later, as an adult. As a child, I decided that it would be my mission in life to get rid of the interstate. I intuitively knew that that interstate did not give us the quality of life that, first of all, my family bought into when they bought into the neighborhood 70 years ago.

But it also doesn't give us, as Black people, anywhere in the United States the quality of life that we deserve. When you put an interstate through a neighborhood, you invite people to go through the neighborhood. They don't stop. They don't support the neighborhood. They don't contribute to the economic vitality of the neighborhood.

Claiborne was really, in its day, a Black Wall Street. There were all types of Black businesses there. Unfortunately, the interstate ran all of that away, because it's a very, very difficult environment to live in and to do business in.

We're looking at 50 years of disinvestment now. There is nothing there. So it ruined the Black community. As a planner and designer, I began to see exactly how land use and land use decisions impact people, especially minorities, people of color, older people who don't understand the language or who haven't been exposed to it.

So I really felt compelled to make sure that these things were clear and understandable with regard to land use decisions. If they don't happen with you, they will happen to you.

By and large, those interstates have wrecked our lives. So we have to take the bull by the horns and we have to speak up.

My name is Amy Stelly, and this is my Brief But Spectacular take on urban highways.

Geoff Bennett:

Hmm.

And you can watch more Brief But Spectacular videos online at PBS.org/NewsHour/brief.