Breaking News for Others: Still Bad News for the Eastside

By Betty Jean Grant

Betty Jean Grant

The Scajaquada Expressway will be converted to an urban boulevard with trees, a light rail lane and a regular lane for cars traveling 30 miles per hour. Gov. Kathy Hochul announced that the Scajaquada Boulevard, at the Kensington 33 Expressway junction, will extend all the way to Delaware Park. She also stated that Environmental Assessments will be done for the Scajaquada Expressway, Phase 2 Initiative.

Meanwhile, the poor, sick and sometimes dying residents on Humboldt Parkway are not even thought worthy enough to have the NYSDOT conduct an Environmental Impact Statement to see how sick they have become by living so close to the Expressway. They even want to further harm the Humboldt Parkway homeowners by leaving the ‘killer’ Expressway in place and doubling down by putting a carbon monoxide and other pollutants, toxic tunnel in the homeowners front yard!

This is Environmental Racism, 2024 style. African Americans have always had a ‘hard row to hoe’ in Buffalo, and whether the local leaders are Republicans or Democrat, nothing changes for the hardworking, Black citizens on the Eastside. One can say what they want, but both you and I know that if the residents of Humboldt Parkway were white, they would not be forced to breathe air more toxic than it is right now. All the residents are asking for is to be treated the same as residents who live on the Scajaquada, 198 Expressway.

And yet, if the Governor and NYSDOT continue with their efforts to put an unwanted and ill-conceived tunnel smack dab in the middle of a residential community, there will be many more residents sick with lot more of them succumbing to COPD and other respiratory diseases.

Think about this for a moment: how many times have you driven down Humboldt and and saw homeowners or their family members sitting on their porches or in their yards? Number one, it is too noisy, and number two: the air is probably too toxic for them to breathe.