The red shaded area is now owned by the city of Pasadena (Photo – Sharon Hawley)
The 710 freeway was to be just another expansion of the freeway system in Southern California.
by Sharon Hawley
The final section is where the long-held philosophy about freeways ran amok. The idea that we need more of them has given way to mass transit, bike paths and working at home. The proposed 710 extension has been scrapped. But not before Caltrans purchased hundreds of properties for the right-of-way and constructed half a mile of freeway at the north end. That portion, now called “The Stub”, has been ceded to the City of Pasadena from Union Street south to Columbia Street. The City presented a preliminary plan for Stub Repurposing at a meeting on September 25 at Washington Park Community House.
After designing the freeway, condemning and buying property, and constructing part of the 5-mile gap in the 710, Caltrans butted against South Pasadena politics and went down in defeat. Now Caltrans owns hundreds of properties that they must get rid of. Negotiations, lawsuits, and displaced residents have risen in disgust. Even employees of the City of Pasadena expressed disagreement with Caltrans at the September 25 meeting.
The City now owns the northern, already constructed Stub, and seems bewildered about what to do with a failed freeway—the half-mile south from the 210 before it splits it into “temporary” ramps for Del Mar and California Streets.
The City has budgeted $7 million to study options that various parties have proposed and has contracted with consultants, Perkins Eastman and Vaughan Davies to study alternatives.
It has long been the practice of engineers and architects in writing Environmental Impact Statements, to consider the several options for any project in comparison with the no-build option. In this case, “no-build” means doing nothing, leaving the Stub just as it is, with only minor changes along its sides. All other options must be compared with this. These options require demolition of the existing half mile of freeway, redirection of traffic, and re-planning of the entire Stub area, converting the existing freeway-to-freeway interchange into a freeway-to-local-street interchange. But the option of doing nothing appears low on the City’s list.
Members of the AME church, for example, whose building was bought and destroyed by Caltrans, think that their church should be restored. Many small businesses, treated likewise, feel that restitution of some kind is in order. And many of the 1,500 homeowners whose houses were taken think they deserve justice.
It’s a complicated problem with no promise for a quick solution.
Answering the question: what happens when you try and build a freeway through a white neighborhood?