Remove Highway 99: A Crazy Idea in “Deep” South Park

State Road 99 in South Park. (Source: The Urbanist.)

In my old, working-class neighborhood in Anchorage, Alaska, my family lived in an area I called “Deep Spenard” because it was full of artists, craftspeople, and musician types. But the “deep” part also fit because you had to really mean it to get there. 

There is a polluted creek on one side, railroad tracks on the other, and busy stroads cutting it off from other neighborhoods. It’s not connected to a broader street grid because most of the houses were built one by one on homestead land in the 1940s and 1950s, by families, instead of in large, tract-style developments typical of the Alaska oil boom of the 1970s and 1980s. Many of the streets are curvy and have dead ends. 

Spenard used to house the red-light district and now it’s got the green-light cannabis retail district. It’s also home to many more charming small businesses, especially in the restaurant and retail vein. But there is a 5–6 lane, high-speed arterial called Minnesota Boulevard/Walter Hickel Expressway that carries commuter traffic heading downtown from the suburbs. It cuts off the main residential part of the neighborhood from the main retail section. 

You can’t easily walk from the homes in Spenard to its commercial areas without negotiating 50 mph traffic, unless you walk a quarter mile to intersections. Still, the neighborhood has a unique mystique of its own and it’s affordable. So many of us worked hard—and still do—to see Minnesota Boulevard/Hickel Expressway necked down, narrowed, and slowed so it’s not a river of highway-speed traffic cutting our neighborhood in two.

Another immigrant, working-class neighborhood, this one on the way to SeaTac Airport from downtown Seattle, Washington, is also hard to reach and affordable—a bit of an outlier in one of the nation’s fastest-growing cities. It’s split in two by Highway 99 and residents are working to reconnect the community by removing a mile of the freeway from the central business district, just like we’d like to do in Spenard.

But South Park is several steps ahead, despite even bigger challenges. This past week an underground effort there has gone mainstream, according to a Seattle Times article, which features the advocacy work of longtime Strong Towns collaborator Coté Soerens.

Soerens has been a leading voice championing South Park and the work to reconnect the fabric of the community, torn by the construction and rebuilding  of Highway 99 over the past 100 years. 

Soerens moved there and opened the Resistencia coffee shop with her husband, Tim,  in 2018. It’s been a crucial “third place” for the diverse neighborhood to organize, a project my colleague Rachel Quednau featured in The Bottom Up Revolution podcast. 

A parklet in South Park. (Source: The Urbanist.)

What was once a fringe idea to convince the state of Washington to turn a section of Highway 99 over to local control has grown into a publicly-funded action. It received its first major legislative victory last session when the Washington Legislature budgeted $600,000 to study the feasibility of decommissioning the section of highway and placing the land into a community trust. 

Soerens calls decommissioning “a no-brainer” in the Seattle Times piece, and she added that she “refuses to shut out skeptics from the process.”

“The project is called Reconnect South Park,” she told the Times. “It’s not, ‘we have this ideology and we want to impose it on everybody.’ … I think there are alternatives short of full removal. We are approaching it with an open mind right now.”

The study doesn’t guarantee this section of highway will be turned over to South Park residents, but it’s a major step forward from what was once considered a crazy idea.

(Click to enlarge. Source: The Urbanist.)

Urban highways are ubiquitous in pretty much every city across America. They cut through neighborhoods, make navigation challenging, decrease property values, and bring exhaust and noise into our communities. But they also help people move quickly from one end of the city to the other, which is why they were built in so many cities, especially during the suburban boom of the 20th century, when they helped people travel from jobs in the city to homes in the suburbs.

Today, there’s a movement to stop building and expanding these highways, and Strong Towns is a leading voice in that fight. There’s also a movement to try to undo the harm that they’ve already caused and remove them—or parts of them—altogether. The federal Infrastructure Bill included $1 billion for this purpose. The amount allocated for construction is limited, but the $250 million for planning will fund an unprecedented number of studies for replacing freeways with surface streets.

The cohesiveness of the South Park vision might be hard to quantify, but you know an intact, healthy, neighborhood when you see it. Even when the odds are stacked against them, these places have a spirit and a sense of unity. People may not all have the same color campaign signs, but they agree on the basics: walkable, diverse, small business centers are surrounded by housing and a broad-based demography.

Like the Redhook neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, or “Deep” Spenard, Alaska, you know when you are there. South Park has “deep” community pride and an agreed-upon identity - and that’s half the battle.  

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