Keith v. Volpe (Century Freeway)

(Still being edited)

In one of the nation’s first successful “environmental justice” cases, CLIPI obtained a six-year injunction on building the I-105 Century Freeway through economically disadvantaged, predominantly minority South Central LA neighborhoods. Following preparation of court-ordered environmental and housing studies, CLIPI’s lawyers negotiated a comprehensive 1981 consent decree that 1) redesigned the freeway to include HOV lanes and construction of Green Line light rail along the median strip, 2) mandated extensive action programs to provide jobs and businesses opportunities for impacted areas residents and businesses that ultimately doubled normal Caltrans’ minority and women participation rates, and 3) funded development of at least 3,700 affordable housing units to replenish residences destroyed by freeway construction, a figure that ultimately exceeded 8,500 units in the freeway corridor.

As originally planned, the ten-lane Century Freeway —envisioned as the most expensive freeway, mile-for-mile, ever to be built—would run seventeen miles south from the Los Angeles International Airport. Routed through South Central Los Angeles and other areas comprising the most impoverished, heavily minority areas of the Los Angeles Metropolitan Region, the behemoth freeway would destroy fully 8,250 low and moderate income housing units and would uproot more than 21,000 people. 

Seeking an end to Caltrans' "freeway mentality" of the fifties and sixties and thinking there must be a better way, CLIPI’s lawyers launched their CEQA/NEPA litigation against the Century Freeway in early 1972. CLIPI's lawyers alleged that Caltrans officials had moved ahead in planning the freeway without fully evaluating the overall transportation needs of the region and without analyzing the effects of their plan on air pollution. No consideration had been given to alternative means of moving people through and be- tween these communities. Although thousands of affordable housing units would be removed and tens of thousands of individuals displaced, no comprehensive plan had been prepared for relocating these people.

To underscore the "environmental justice" roots of the litigation, CLIPI's lawyers organized a unique plaintiff's coalition, which included both environmental (the Sierra Club and Environmental Defense Fund) and civil rights (the NAACP) groups. Alleging discrimination in the choice of the freeway's path, they pleaded a claim for relief under the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution.

Within months, then Federal District Judge Harry Pregerson issued an injunction prohibiting further site acquisition or any freeway construction until adequate Environmental Impact Reports were prepared under CEQA and NEPA. Some five years later in 1977, the draft environmental studies were released. The studies revealed the depth of the housing and transportation planning problems associated with construction of the freeway, and helped convince state and federal freeway planners that fundamental changes in the freeway's purpose and design were appropriate.

At that point, CLIPI's lawyers proposed that a cooperative, rather than confrontational, approach be taken. In 1979, a far-reaching settlement was announced. The US Secretary of Transportation called it a" precedent for the rest of the United States." An LA Times editorial proclaimed that the settlement's "real meaning" is that "the good old ways are gone."

• The landmark settlement reduced the freeway's size from ten to eight lanes, with two of the eight lanes dedicated to high occupancy vehicles. Within the freeway median, the "Green Line" light rail route was designed to become the start of Los Angeles' still-growing Metro system, for the first time providing lower income residents within the project impact area with public transit access to jobs in more affluent areas.

• The settlement also established employment-hiring goals for minority and women workers in order to provide them with access to the freeway's more than 20,000 jobs. By the time construction ended with the freeway's opening in 1993, a pre-apprenticeship job-training program had trained thousands of entry-level minorities and women. Caltrans' hiring of minorities had more than doubled what it was for any other freeway in Caltrans history, and its hiring of women was many times what it was anywhere else. The settlement's minority and women business enterprise goals also ensured that hundreds of millions of dollars in freeway contracts went to MBE/WBE enterprises.

• The settlement provided hundreds of millions of dollars to replenish the affordable housing supply lost to freeway construction. Approximately halfway through the expenditure of these funds, the housing program was privatized in order to increase its efficiency. The funding ultimately subsidized more that 8,000 units, effectively replacing the affordable units initially destroyed to make way for the freeway.

• Approximately three-quarters of the 21,000 people displaced as a result of freeway acquisitions were assisted by the Office of the Corridor Advocate, a service organization established to assist Century Freeway displaces in obtaining their full acquisition and relocation benefits under state and federal law

The Century Freeway case brought enormous social and monetary benefits to the Los Angeles community. It also enabled the Caltrans freeway-planning establishment to rethink the basic purpose and design of the Los Angeles freeway system, and, for the first time, it prompted them to view freeway planning within the greater framework of mass transit options.