Absent intervention, it was easy to imagine the former 15th Ward being colonized by fast-casual food chains, luxury condos, and urban development’s other weedy pioneer species. “I’m realistic enough to know that it won’t be shiny happy people holding hands and dancing in a circle after we knock down this barrier,” Driscoll said. And it wasn’t just the land immediately beneath the viaduct at issue. Replacing a hideous, polluting freeway with a pedestrian-friendly boulevard, many locals feared, would shock property values around the city, accelerate gentrification, and precipitate what one
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