This week, journalist Megan Kimble talks well-nigh housing and highway fights in Texas: TXDOT’s political pressure, the organizations fighting back, and why throughput remains king in the Lone Star State.

For those of you who prefer to read rather than listen, trammels out the edited highlights unelevated the player. If you want a full, unedited transcript, be our guest by clicking here.

Jeff Wood: Well, you’ve gone so far as to start writing a typesetting well-nigh transportation, highways, etc. So, apparently, you’ve gotten this far lanugo the rabbit slum to go that direction. But what was the spark that got you to think well-nigh writing the book, which is coming out hopefully soon?

Megan Kimble: Books take a long time so, I’ll come when on the podcast when it comes out considering it’s going to be a couple years. So, I wrote a story for the Texas Observer in late 2019 well-nigh Austin’s effort to update its land-development code. So, Austin, at that point, it was eight years in to an effort to revise its zoning code. Most of the municipality is zoned for single-family housing. The municipality was trying to indulge increasingly middle [income] housing, increasingly kinds of housing all throughout the city, increasingly affordable development. It was this very contentious fight. It fell untied transiently the year before. It was a very high-emotion fight and I wrote a story well-nigh it; it was on the verge of passing in the spring of 2020.

I wrote that, when it was like one vote yonder from passing, it did not pass. I will let listeners know — spoiler alert! — a lawsuit stopped it. Anyhow, though, I wrote this story well-nigh the Austin zoning lawmaking and, two months later, the Texas Department of Transportation voted to intrust nearly $5 billion to expand I35 through Austin. No one at that time had really made the connection between the booming growth of Austin suburbs driven by housing affordability, that it’s absolutely, plane in early 2020, unaffordable to live in inside Austin. So most working-class people, middle-class people were moving north on I35 to suburbs like Round Rock and Pflugerville, or south to Kyle and Buda.

Those were precisely the endpoints of this highway expansion that TXDOT said was urgently necessary to fix congestion in the Austin metro area. I knew that those suburbs were booming considering of housing reasons. So, then the reason TXDOT, I midpoint it’s a very rational response, [said] let us expand this highway to unbend this growth of all these people that are coming into the city. Yet I felt like no one was talking about, why does this highway need to be expanded? It’s a housing story; it’s sprawl; it’s we have not unliable unbearable people to live in the municipality of Austin or given them options besides driving to get the places they need to go. So I started writing my I35 [story] and trying to make to really write well-nigh housing and transportation as the same story, and that’s what got me into TXDOT.

Once I started writing well-nigh TXDOT, the Texas Department Transportation, it’s this like never-ending well of insanity, frankly. There’s so many unquestioned assumptions that go into how we plan highways in the state of Texas, how we unbend car travel whilom all other priorities and values. As a journalist, I felt like this very rich zone that, again, not very many people were covering. A lot of people were writing well-nigh highway fights in Houston. There was this very contentious one. There are unconfined reporters in Houston writing well-nigh that highway fight. There’s a one in Dallas, unconfined reporters writing well-nigh that. I had been tent I35 in Austin but I felt like no one had really washed-up a zoom-back squint at TXDOT, the Texas Department of Transportation, as a state organ funded with our tax dollars.

So that’s what really got me into the larger story of highways in Texas and, indeed, the interstate-highway system.