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BIRMINGHAM, Ala.—Driving north on Alabama Highway 79 in late October offers a stunning vista of the rolling Appalachian foothills. Splashes of yellow, orange and red have emerged among the green, tree-covered hillsides as fall arrives outside Alabama’s largest metro area. 

The road narrows to two lanes about 15 miles outside of downtown Birmingham, but this stretch could be almost anywhere in rural Alabama. Mailboxes along the highway indicate residences hidden among the trees. The only non-residential properties are the Agape Church, Leeroy’s Dynamite Fireworks store and the Pinson Truck Equipment Company, a trailer repair business. 

But this quiet, rural countryside may not stay rural or quiet for very long. 

Someday it will become part of the Birmingham Northern Beltline, a $5 billion project to build a 52-mile stretch of interstate highway north of the city and complete a full loop. 

“It’s sad to see this highway leave a huge scar and a big hole through a beautiful mountain,” said Sarah Stokes, senior attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center. “And this is a one-mile segment. So that’s what they’re going to do for 52 miles, is go through the mountains and put this big eyesore of concrete.”

For decades, elected officials and business groups have touted the Northern Beltline as a way to jump-start development in the sparsely populated areas north of the city. Birmingham experienced a massive White-Flight emigration from the city to sprawling suburbs to the south beginning in the 1960s, prompting the construction of Interstate 459, a semi-circular beltway around the southern edge of the city that runs through populous suburbs like Hoover and Vestavia Hills. 

Since I-459 was completed, chatter has turned toward a northern beltway, dubbed I-422, that would complete the loop. Many public officials have stated the finished highway would bring the same kind of growth north of the city that has already been realized in the south. 

“In the movie, ‘Field of Dreams,’ they said, ‘Build it, and they will come,” U.S. Rep. Gary Palmer said at a media event last year, misquoting the 1989 Kevin Costner film. “That applies to infrastructure.”

Palmer, whose district includes Birmingham’s suburbs and not the city itself, called the project “critical” and said Alabama’s congressional delegation was “committed” to seeing it completed.

But a growing school of thought says building a highway is not the best way to spur development, and the four-decade old analysis of roads equaling growth is out of date. 

Stokes, in a news release called the project “a literal and figurative road to nowhere.”

The Southern Environmental Law Center commissioned a report by economists from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte examining the economic analysis claiming the project will spur massive growth. 

The report issues a scathing rebuke of Alabama’s economic justifications for the project. 

“People are mistakenly thinking if you build this beltway in this northern region, which isn’t heavily populated right now, that somehow it will spur development and growth in that area,” Matthew Metzgar, the report’s lead author, told Inside Climate News.

Metzgar said Alabama has it backwards. First you need growth, he said, then you build the infrastructure to support that growth.

“They think, you know, if they build it, people will come,” Metzgar said. “It’s just not really true.”

The central cog in the economic argument for the road project is a 2010 study by the University of Alabama’s Center for Business and Economic Research, which projected significant economic growth from completion of the roadway. 

The 2024 Metzgar report says that analysis “radically overstated” the number of jobs that would be created by the project, and that the state highway department has not updated its economic analysis since that 2010 report, despite a separate study in 2012 that found flaws in the Alabama analysis. 

Metzgar said that because the Birmingham metropolitan area isn’t currently growing much by population, the project would likely only attract people from the southern suburbs to move north of the city. Not creating growth; simply moving it around. 

“Nothing really warrants putting in this massive 52-mile road, again, in a mostly rural area, that there’s just no demand for it,” Metzgar said. 

The estimated total cost of the project was pegged at $5.4 billion in 2013 by the Federal Highway Administration, but even those figures may be out of date. 

Metzgar and colleagues said the total cost of the project could result in mostly temporary construction jobs at a cost of $500,000 or more per temporary job. 

“The current reevaluation of the Beltline project continues to use outdated and inaccurate numbers,” the Metzgar report said. “As such, the benefits of this project have been dramatically overstated while the costs have not been fully considered.”

Alabama officials are undeterred in their pursuit of the beltline project. 

Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey said last year that “need for the project has grown,” and that the release of new federal funding was “an exciting day for Jefferson County,” where the project is located.

The Jefferson County Commission passed a unanimous resolution of support for the project in September, and mayors of cities along the route have been enthusiastic supporters of the project. 

Officials with the Alabama Department of Transportation did not respond to Inside Climate News’ questions about the Metzgar report. The state’s most recent re-evaluation of the project—an 832-page document released this year—relies on the 2010 economic growth study for its projections. 

Decades of Delay

The idea of creating a beltline around Birmingham has been batted around since the 1960s, with some progress being made in the past decade. 

The first environmental impact statements for the project date back to 1995. From then, it would be almost 20 years before the first shovel hit dirt in 2014, when the state broke ground on the first 1.86 miles of the beltway. 

Construction halted in 2016 when the federal funding ran out, with only grading and engineering work completed on a stretch of highway in the middle of the proposed route, from Alabama highways 79 to 75. Construction resumed this year on that segment, which is expected to be completed in 2026. 

Gov. Ivey announced last year that the state had secured $489 million in federal funds to build the next section of the roadway, a 10-mile stretch from the end of the current roadwork west to U.S. Highway 31, near Gardendale. 

The Alabama Department of Transportation said it began reaching out to property owners and conducting surveys along that part of the route in July. 

Most of that funding, $369 million, came from the Infrastructure Act of 2021. Palmer received criticism for trumpeting his efforts to secure funding for the beltline while voting against the bill that provided it. 

Initial estimates said the project will be completed by 2050, at a total cost of $1.9 billion. Both figures seem unlikely. A 2024 Final Environmental Impact Statement for the project states that the process of acquiring property and construction work on the western half of the beltway “are not scheduled within the next twenty years,” meaning that it would be after 2044 before construction is even contemplated on the western half of the loop. 

Project Would Foul Alabama’s Beloved Wilderness Areas

About 2.5 miles south of where construction of the beltway began a decade ago lies the Turkey Creek Nature Preserve, one of the Birmingham area’s most beloved natural recreation spots. 

In the hot summer months, stretching from roughly March to October, dozens if not hundreds of cars will park along the narrow, two-lane road through the tree-covered forest to get out and swim in the cool, shallow spring-fed creek waters and float down the rocky shoals. 

Beyond its recreational value, Turkey Creek is home to five endangered fish species, including the vermilion darter, which is found nowhere else in the world. The Turkey Creek watershed is also home to two species of protected bats, one threatened turtle and one impaired flower species.

And that’s just one tributary that would be impacted by construction. 

Opponents of the project say the chosen route crosses miles of pristine forest land, mountain foothills and critical rivers and streams that provide the entirety of the region’s drinking water.  

“The entire belt line is 52 miles, and it’s going through some of the most scenic, beautiful mountains in Alabama,” said Stokes, at the Southern Environmental Law Center. “It is going to destroy over 3,000 football fields worth of forest and cross and permanently alter the Black Warrior and Cahaba River tributaries in 90 different places.”

The vast majority of the city of Birmingham and surrounding areas get their drinking water from treatment plants on those two rivers. 

“It is a very destructive environmental project that has no utility, or very little utility,” Stokes said. “It will have little traffic impact. It will have little economic growth impact. So it’s such a shame we are putting so much money into this project and going to cause so much destruction to our Earth for little or no gain.”