Timothy Williams’ family has lived in the same community for over 150 years, but he is afraid that they are one big storm away from losing it all.
Eight years ago, the Alabama Department of Transportation widened the highway that runs just a few yards from Williams’ home in Shiloh. Since then, every time it rains, water has flowed down the highway, flooding his land with enough force to erode over a foot of soil every single storm.
The dilemma has already cost him and his neighbors, who live in a rural, majority-Black community, thousands of dollars and led to him losing his home insurance.
As he has learned more about the history of highways and their connections to Black land loss, Williams has a word for what Alabama has been doing to Black communities with its highway projects: “intentional.”
So when he heard that the state was pushing forward on a 52-mile highway around Birmingham that would pave over wetlands and streams, making flooding more likely, it felt like another example.
“It seems though they would have graduated from that,” he said, about building new roads in floodzones.
The state has asked the federal government for permission to fill over an acre of wetlands with concrete to build a highway through rural, but growing areas around Birmingham. The project, critics argue, will push water onto other communities the same way U.S. Highway 84 pushed it onto Williams.
“This is a part of a pattern of plowing through and not considering the harms that may result,” explained Robert Bullard, a professor at Texas Southern University who is often referred to as the “father of environmental justice” for his work documenting environmental racism since the 1980s.
The story of American highways and Black communities is not new. From the 1950s onward, the Interstate Highway System was routed through Black neighborhoods, displacing an estimated 475,000 families and demolishing communities from Birmingham to Baltimore. But the pattern did not end with the interstate era.
Since 2020, more than $1 trillion in federal infrastructure investment has followed a boom in domestic manufacturing, the growth of e-commerce warehouses, and freight traffic. The infrastructure funding has led to a growth in road and highway expansions that are increasingly being routed through low-income communities of color with little environmental review and fewer protections than their predecessors.
The result is more 18-wheelers, air pollution, and flooding, advocates argue.
The towns surrounding the proposed Alabama highway are 55% Black. Officials have acknowledged that the $4 billion project won’t significantly lower traffic congestion. However, the state argues, much like it did with Highway 84, the highway will be an economic boon. Alabama has seen substantial manufacturing and transportation growth in recent years and is now home to more than 4,000 manufacturing companies.
The proposed highway loop would strip the watershed of the natural flood absorption that streams and wetlands provide. Across the state, flooding has caused well over $100 million in damage since 2014, a toll worsened when roads, bridges, and stormwater systems are built without accounting for how they can intensify the effects of extreme rainfall.
In Shiloh, climate models suggested Williams’ property had just a 4% annual chance of flooding, but since 2018, he has seen at least 15 major flooding events.
Bullard, who was born in Elba, the community where Shiloh is located, has spent over 40 years documenting how highways have intensified environmental harm. In practice, across every region of the country, “you end up basically following a pattern of least resistance and allowing government-funded projects to disenfranchise Black people, steal or flood their land and their inheritance, and put them and our ecosystem in harm’s way,” he said.
America is building new roads from coast to coast
In Alabama, the communities that end up downstream from highway projects have tended to look like Shiloh — majority Black.
Decades of racist land-use and transportation policies routed highways and major roads through Black areas, often in low‑lying areas and floodplains, while starving those same areas of basic stormwater infrastructure and road maintenance. As climate change drives heavier rain and more frequent storms, these vulnerabilities are turning ordinary streets into flood channels, cutting residents off from work, schools, and emergency services and repeatedly damaging homes and cars.
At the same time, large‑scale flood and infrastructure investments have historically favored wealthier, whiter communities, leaving Black neighborhoods under‑protected before disasters and with fewer resources to recover afterward.
These days, Williams takes notice of the snakes and frogs surrounding his property as they inch toward his home in search of the natural landscape that is now gone and paved over. He can’t help but wonder what will happen to the ecosystem around Birmingham.
Currently, the state is also attempting to expand U.S. Highway 43 and State Route 69 from two lanes to a four-lane divided highway, involving 23 new bridges over streams and flood plains. The project runs through majority-Black rural counties in the Black Belt region, and environmental advocates have raised concerns about the drainage infrastructure.
The pattern, advocates argue, is being actively accelerated.
In his first week in office, President Donald Trump eliminated the Justice40 initiative, which had required that 40% of federal environmental and climate program benefits flow to disadvantaged communities. The administration also shut down all environmental justice offices within the federal government, wiping out programs that had existed for decades. Then, in June 2025, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy unveiled sweeping revisions to the Department of Transportation’s permitting procedures. The agency cut environmental review requirements in half, increased the number of projects that were exempt from the process, and barred federal agencies from conducting assessments to understand if certain demographic groups would be disproportionately harmed by the projects.
The administration also rewrote the criteria for federal BUILD transportation grants, removing references to climate change, disadvantaged communities, equity, and environmental justice from the program that distributes over $1 billion in infrastructure funding annually.
All the while, the money for highway projects — and the number of projects in the pipeline — increased.
“There is less protection, more deregulation, and more fast tracking permitting and elimination of oversight by state regulatory as well as federal regulatory agencies,” Bullard explained. “This means that the risk will increase, and the environmental health disparities in our communities will grow.”
Even in states that pride themselves on environmental leadership, the impulse to build has proven difficult to resist.
In California, transportation planners and the Metropolitan Transportation Commission are pursuing a $500 million project to widen and raise State Route 37, a highway built on the marshes of San Pablo Bay north of San Francisco. Portions of this road are already expected to be permanently inundated by coastal flooding by 2050.
“Highway expansion does not solve congestion and will worsen climate change,” Zack Deutsch-Gross of TransForm CA, a sustainable transportation advocacy group, told Grist. “This project is pretty egregious,” because the highway “in the long term will be underwater.”
The pattern repeats from the Georgia coast to Florida’s barrier islands, where communities are racing to harden roads against storms and seas — often in ways that ecological researchers warn will accelerate the very erosion they’re trying to prevent.
In Alabama, experts also say the economics behind a lot of these projects don’t add up.
“People are mistakenly thinking if you build this beltway in this northern region, which isn’t heavily populated right now, that somehow it will spur development and growth in that area,” said Matthew Metzgar, an economic professor, in 2024. “Nothing really warrants putting in this massive 52-mile road, again, in a mostly rural area, that there’s just no demand for it.”
For longtime Alabama residents like Williams, the conversation is ultimately about land and power. “Ownership is power,” he said, “ These projects are pushing us out and soon enough, we won’t have anything.”
