(The Center Square) — The ReForm Shreveport Group met Saturday at Centenary College for the first public meeting on revitalizing the area surrounding Kings Highway, which is a key route through central Shreveport.
ReForm wanted the meeting to be more than just an introduction. After their presentation, they started taking ideas from the public and planning immediately for the area.
“We’re going to start with a blank page and we’re going to figure out what this community wants out of Kings Highway. The kinds of outcomes, the kinds of amenities that we want,” Chris Lyons, board treasurer, said. “And those are going to feed into a process that’s going to be completely driven by the people in this room.”
The group explained the issue first. Lyons described Kings as a stroad. Streets are good for building community wealth because they are safe, walkable, and good for getting to businesses quickly.
Roads are better for connecting places quickly, meaning they are highways with high speed limits.
According to ReForm, stroads are a mix of those two disparate thoroughfare types. They make intercommunity travel hard, expensive and dangerous. They also don’t get you to your destination via car quickly because speed limits must be lower when traveling through business and residential areas.
ReForm also said the value of the land along Kings Highway is decreasing and people are going out of business leaving giant, ugly lots and warehouses.
“Right now, King’s is not necessarily a wealth building place. The organizations, the entities, the businesses, the residents that are here are basically hanging on,” Lyons said.
To make matters worse, without a property making money, taxpayers are left holding the bill that pays to keep the highway together. People have moved away as a result, and Lyons says there are not enough taxpayers to maintain what they’ve built because of the declining population, thus spiraling the problem.
All that underutilized space is a breeding ground for crime and makes families feel unsafe going out in their own community.
ReForm pointed out two opportunities to begin improving the space.
The first is a project from Holly Street to Centenary Boulevard. Shreveport already committed to a resurfacing project to repave the asphalt, but it doesn’t include widening, but what happens between the curbs is up for discussion.
The second project is from Youree Drive to Samford. This is a longer-term project because it covers a larger area with business, residential, and educational spaces. The city is already in progress with a plan near the medical corridor to widen sidewalks, plant trees, create bus facilities while building a pedestrian overpass, crosswalks and medians.
“In essence, the Kings Highway project is already underway,” Lyons said of the initial movement by the city. ReForm wants to include themselves on the conversation of what comes next.
The goal is to first increase the value per acre, Lyons said. If you make the businesses along the highway more easily accessible, it will increase the value and tax because property tax is based on what’s built on the land, not just the land itself. Thus, less money out of a regular taxpayer’s pocket on road maintenance.
If the area is more accessible and vibrant with 24-hour businesses, it will be more family friendly, and thus bring in more business on a per hour basis.
For those concerned they’ll have less room for incoming customers by making their stroads into streets, Lyons explained that’s not always the case.
In the case of Government Street which just underwent a similar construction project, Lyons gave traffic statistics that showed an increase in traffic, meaning vehicles that went through, even with lowering the amount of lanes.
This also decreases traffic accidents and increases sales tax revenue.
ReForm’s plan is still in the developmental stage, but after this meeting and community feedback, the goals are clear.
“What we want is to build a vibrant, accessible, and community centric environment where local businesses thrive and where wealth is created and sustained over generations,” Lyons said.
