Highway Foes Emboldened as Buttigieg Puts Houston Project on Pause

Last month, the U.S. Department of Transportation took an unusual step in its decades-long history of designing, funding and overseeing interstate highway projects: It told a state to stop building a highway project.

Namely, the North Houston Highway Improvement Project, a $7 billion plan by the Texas Department of Transportation to widen I-45 and parts of I-10 and I-610 on the downtown edge of the state’s largest city. According to TxDOT’s environmental review, the NHHIP would remove more than 1,300 homes, businesses, schools and places of worship. Much of the...