75-Year-Old Houston Advocate Refuses To Surrender to Highway Expansion Project
At 75, she didn’t think she’d spend her time fighting freeways.
“I did not think this is where I’d end up,” Susan Graham, a lifelong Houston resident, told me with a chuckle. “I don’t have any real qualifications to do this work, but here I am.”
Graham spent the majority of her career working as a medical professional, but in 2019, several years into retirement, she founded Stop TxDOT I-45. This was a response to the Texas Department of Transportation’s (TxDOT) plans to widen highways in Houston — the city that's already home to one of the widest highways in the world.
Katy Freeway, which boasts 18 lanes of traffic — 26 if you count frontage roads.
When the group was just starting out, it made headlines for ambushing a meeting in Austin with a larger-than-life banner on which the words “do not pave over us” glittered in red. A little over a year later, the advocates broke the news — both to Strong Towns and to their local audience — about TxDOT’s surreptitious acquisition and demolition of The Lofts at Ballpark, one of Houston’s transit-oriented developments.
Even Harris County’s lawsuit against TxDOT can be traced back to Stop TxDOT’s advocacy, though the latter was ultimately disappointed with the outcome. In short, the lawsuit was dropped and Houston reached a non-legally binding Memorandum of Understanding with the state agency. The result left advocates feeling like they lost an ally and an avenue of accountability.
While these setbacks are disappointing, the group has collected several wins in their nearly five years of operation. This is especially notable because, for most of its members, fighting highway expansion couldn’t be further from what they imagined they’d be doing in the 2020s. That’s definitely the case for Stop TxDOT’s founder, Susan Graham.
“I had so many friends discouraging me,” she conceded with a chuckle. “They said there’s no way you could do it. I think they still think I’m crazy. Luckily, we have a lot of other things in common.”
Graham learned of TxDOT’s plans during a neighborhood meeting. TxDOT was touring the Super Neighborhoods — Houston’s variant on community boards — within the vicinity of its North Houston Highway Improvement Project, or NHHIP. Super Neighborhood 51, where Graham lives, is situated about a mile from some of the proposed work.
“Imagine our kids having to walk to school underneath 20 or 26 lanes, imagine the pollution, and really imagine how much more isolated and disconnected we’re going to be,” she recalled thinking as the agency went through its script. “We’re going to be an isolated island over here where it’s going to be a pain to get in and out of our neighborhood.”
Afterward, she and her neighbors drafted a letter to TxDOT enumerating their concerns. Days turned to weeks turned to months, and they realized they were never going to hear back. They never even received an acknowledgment that their letter was received. For Graham, that silence was pivotal.
“Meanwhile, we were constantly hearing how essential this project was ... like it was necessary for the growth of Houston and the growth of the interstate system,” she said. “But the fact that we lived here … that wasn’t important enough. That stuck with me. Their total lack of caring about how what they were doing impacted people … even some of whose parents were displaced by the original [Interstate] 45.”
We Can Make Some Noise
Soon after, she had the opportunity to travel to Los Angeles where she and some colleagues were exposed to tactical urbanism. “We were so excited about tactical urbanism,” Graham told me. When they returned to Texas, she and Bike Houston, a local nonprofit, put together a pop-up bike lane, which turned out to be as productive of an intervention as it was provocative. “That’s how we got to know people in the city, within the planning department, and so on.”
That initiative spurred a friendship between Graham and Jessica Wiggins, who was with Bike Houston at the time. The two came up with the idea to fill the city with yard signs that read, “STOP TXDOT!” Graham launched a GoFundMe to purchase 200 signs and convinced her neighbor, who also served on the leadership committee of Super Neighborhood 51, to handle the design. Another friend in LINK Houston — a non-profit that “advocates for a robust and equitable transportation network” — composed a fact sheet to be dispersed at meetings, rallies and other gatherings.
This was the birth of Stop TxDOT. And as TxDOT continued its so-called public engagement tour, Stop TxDOT’s presence could not be missed.
In the ensuing months, the group's membership and influence grew. They gained allies in Air Alliance Houston, Texas Appleseed, the Make I-45 Better Coalition and Our Afrikan Family, to name a few. An organizer with Stop TxDOT, ER nurse Molly Cook, is even currently running for a seat in the Texas Senate.
Having partners well-versed in the jargon of transportation and governance has helped Stop TxDOT fight smarter, not harder. It also, according to Graham, has allowed the group to find its own voice. “We didn’t feel like we needed to be another organization focused on education because there were so many. The problem was that nobody was listening,” she told me. “We should be making noise.”
Noisemaking meant showing up to events and attracting press attention where Graham suspects there wouldn’t have otherwise been any. But being loud wasn’t just about scoring headlines — it was about proving to Houstonites, like the friends who discouraged her, that they don’t have to accept the NHHIP as an inevitability. “We have to understand that the world can change if we just show up in some organized fashion,” she said. “We’ve just got to show up.”
Building a Community
Stop TxDOT is hardly Houston’s first grassroots coalition opposed to highway expansion. “There have been lots of groups in Houston that have tried to stop freeways in the past, but for those groups, it was just about that freeway,” Graham explains. “They weren’t trying to change people’s minds about how we get around, what transportation can look like from point A to point B, how we can do that without displacing people, severing neighborhoods, and [contributing to] more sprawl in Houston.”
That’s what sets Stop TxDOT apart in her mind. A shared disdain for what TxDOT was proposing may have pulled the growing coalition of musicians, makeup artists, students, lawyers and many others into the battle. What’s kept them together, however, is the broader fight for a better Houston and the community they’ve built along the way.
“It’s the friendships that keep our organization together,” Graham added. It’s also made advocacy fun. “It was supposed to be hard … meanwhile, it's really the most fun I've ever had!” she says with a laugh. “That’s a big piece of it: it brings joy. The community brings joy. It’s not like, you're just gonna go out there with like, 10 tons of boulders on your shoulder every day.”
The level of care underpinning the movement is palpable. Among the routine check-ins, potlucks, picnics and protests, genuine friendships have formed. I’ve personally been witness to calls between the advocates concluding with, “Love you so much, see you soon!”
And everyone in Stop TxDOT knows that the culture they’ve built isn’t the natural byproduct of filling a room with a few dozen like-minded people; it’s something carefully cultivated. Graham tells me of a strict rule the coalition observes: “If you get upset with someone, you have to clean it up within 24 hours. And people surprisingly do it!” The idea is that if grievances are left to fester unaddressed, those involved may begin to slowly withdraw from the advocacy work, she explains.
Similarly, avoiding burnout is paramount. “Because we're just people, and we have lives, and we have kids, and we have parents, and we have sickness, and we have, you know, just all kinds of things happen to us in our lives,” she explains. “And we have to let people have the ability to take care of themselves and not feel like that’s at odds with being a part of this. If they need time off, somebody else will pick up their work and we’ll be here when they come back, no questions asked.”
With nearly five years behind them and an unknown number ahead, Graham knows what’s needed for the long haul. “We’ve got to be realistic. We’re going to get some little wins and we’re going to have some huge losses,” she explains. “But we're going to change people's minds as we go forward about what the city should look like.”
Susan Graham will be leading a session entitled "Ending Highway Expansion, Keeping up the Fight" at the 2024 Strong Towns National Gathering alongside fellow Stop TxDOT advocate Alexandra Smither. Join them May 14-15 in Cincinnati, Ohio!
Asia (pronounced “ah-sha”) Mieleszko serves as a Staff Writer for Strong Towns. A dilettante urbanist since adolescence, she's excited to convert a lifetime of ad-hoc volunteerism into a career. Her unconventional background includes directing a Ukrainian folk choir, pioneering synaesthetic performances, photographing festivals, designing websites, teaching, and ghostwriting. She can be found wherever Wi-Fi is reliable, typically along Amtrak's Northeast Corridor.