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Interstate 49 currently ends in a tangle of overpasses in Shreveport, Louisiana. 

Interstate 49 currently ends in a tangle of overpasses in Shreveport, Louisiana. 

Photographer: Christiana Botic/Bloomberg
CityLab
Transportation

A Highway That Doesn’t Exist Is Strangling a Black Neighborhood

In the Louisiana city of Shreveport, residents of Allendale have spent decades fighting a highway expansion. Even if they succeed, the neighborhood is already losing.

By
Megan Kimble

In the summer of 2006, Dorothy Wiley and her husband, Charles, moved into a tidy three-bedroom house with peach siding and navy-blue trim in Shreveport, Louisiana. 

They’d grown up in Shreveport but had been living in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit. After being trapped in the Superdome for a terror-filled week, Wiley was determined to make a fresh start, and she joined a tide of evacuees heading north to Shreveport, where she’d grown up. Resettling there with family, she heard about a national nonprofit building homes for Katrina evacuees in a neighborhood called Allendale, just west of downtown. 

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