Day: September 25, 2025

Watching the space between two nations shrink became a regular pastime for Detroiters over the past decade as the segments of the Gordie Howe International Bridge gradually grew, extending meter by meter from Ontario on one side and Michigan on the other.

The gap finally closed in July 2024 with the two halves coming together in a long-awaited kiss.

The official grand opening of the bridge was originally scheduled for fall of 2025, but it seems now likely to be delayed into 2026.

I’m a sociologist who has worked alongside neighborhood revitalization projects in Detroit for the past 15 years. I’ve observed the bridge project – and the many tensions around it – from the perspective of adjacent communities of Delray and Mexicantown, communities that are largely home to low-income Latino, Black and white residents.

The costs and benefits of this binational behemoth are complex and intertwined.

Clearing a chokehold

Boosters on both sides of the border have spoken frequently of the bridge’s expected benefits.

Detroit and Windsor would finally be free of the perpetual chokehold produced by the privately owned Ambassador Bridge.

Auto parts will flow more freely over the border, according to the Cross-Border Institute at the University of Windsor. And the Detroit Greenways Coalition is celebrating that its advocacy led to the inclusion of free pedestrian and bike lanes.

People living close to the existing bridge will gain some relief from truck traffic and pollution. But this burden won’t simply disappear – it will be shifted nearby, where others will have to cope with increased traffic flowing over six lanes 24 hours a day.

A political football

The costs and benefits of the bridge were contested from the beginning.

In the early days, the debate concentrated on who would own the bridge and who would pay for it.

Once just a concept known by the acronym DRIC, or Detroit River International Crossing, the project became real under former Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder. In July 2018, representatives from both Ottawa and Washington broke ground on the bridge situated in an area of Detroit empty enough to contain its significant footprint and bear its weight without fear of sinkholes from underground salt mines.

“Every Michigander should thank every Canadian,” said Snyder at the time, alluding to the agreement that Canadian taxpayers alone would pay for the bridge’s construction in exchange for collecting all the tolls.

The bridge’s designers attempted to honor the cultural and natural history of the region. It was named after the legendary Canadian hockey player who was also a longtime stalwart for the Detroit Red Wings. The bridge’s towers are adorned with murals by First Nations artists.

But serious questions remain.

Today the debates center on whether the Trump administration’s increased tariffs and trade conflicts with Canada could negatively affect the value of the bridge – and if it will ever pay for itself. Even before President Donald Trump took office for the second time, truck traffic on the Ambassador Bridge was down, falling 8% from 2014 to 2024.

One bridge was always a bad idea, (nearly) everyone agreed

Residents and politicians have long agreed that having a single, privately owned bridge connecting Detroit and Windsor was a bad idea. This felt especially apparent after the 9/11 terrorist attacks laid bare the possibility of suddenly losing critical infrastructure.

For many years, travelers’ only other connection between Canada and Detroit has been a tunnel that runs underneath the Detroit River. However, the tunnel doesn’t offer direct access to interstate highways, making it less suitable for commercial trucks.

Adding another bridge makes it harder to disrupt trade and transport.

But the project has had one stalwart critic. Matty Moroun, the trucking billionaire who purchased the Ambassador Bridge in 1979, ferociously protected his asset against potential competition. He actively sought to thwart the construction, launching numerous lawsuits against the state of Michigan and the Windsor-Detroit Bridge Authority, the entity managing construction of the new bridge.

Those lawsuits continued even after Moroun’s death in 2020, as his heirs asserted significant damages to the value of their property.

Was enough done for nearby homeowners?

Others have criticized the attempts to compensate the residents of Delray, a once-vibrant neighborhood that has been impacted by industrialization since the 1960s.

Benefits negotiated for residents and homeowners affected by the construction have not increased as the project’s costs ballooned and the timeline to complete it stretched out.

The cost of the Gordie Howe bridge is now estimated at around $6.4 billion Canadian – or about $US4.7 billion. That is $700 million more than the original projected cost. The project is at least 10 months behind schedule.

Simone Sagovac, director of the SW Detroit Community Benefit Coalition, said they did not anticipate the immense scale of the development and its continued effects on the community.

“That scale affected health and quality of life significantly every day, with years of continuous industrial dust causing sinus problems, headaches, and increasing asthma, and then there will be thousands of daily truck impacts to come,” Sagovac wrote to me in an email.

A baseline health impact assessment, issued in 2019 by University of Michigan researchers working closely with the coalition, expressed concern about the heightened airborne pollution that would likely activate asthma, especially in children. Matching the findings of so many other epidemiological studies, the assessment found that residents living within 500 feet (152 meters) of a truck route reported a significantly higher likelihood of experiencing asthma or allergies affecting their breathing.

Sagovac wrote that the project took 250 homes, 43 businesses and five churches by eminent domain, and “saw the closing of more after.” One hundred families left the neighborhood via a home swap program funded as a result of the benefits agreement administered by a local nonprofit. Two hundred and seventy families remain, but most businesses have left the area over decades of decline.

The families that remain are often long-term residents wanting or needing a cheap place to live and willing to put up with dust, noise and smells from nearby factories and a sewage treatment plant.

“They constantly face illegal dumping and other unanswered crimes, and will face the worst diesel emissions exposure and other trucking and industry impacts,” Sagovac wrote.

Heather Grondin, chief relations officer of the Windsor-Detroit Bridge Authority, wrote in an emailed statement
that they have taken steps to minimize impacts from construction and that they regularly meet with the community to hear concerns.

“Construction traffic is using designated haul routes to minimize community impacts, traffic congestion and wear and tear on existing infrastructure while maximizing public and construction safety,” Grondin wrote.

According to Grondin, cars will be forced to follow a “no idling” rule on the American side to minimize pollution. Other aspects of the Community Benefits Plan included $20,000 in free repairs for 100 homes, planting hundreds of trees and investing in programs addressing food insecurity and the needs of young people and seniors, Grondin wrote.

An updated Health Impacted Assessment is expected to be released later in 2025.

History lost

Lloyd Baldwin, a historian for the Michigan Department of Transportation, was tasked with evaluating whether local landmarks like the legendary Kovacs Bar needed to be preserved.

“Kovacs Bar was one among many working-class bars in the Delray neighborhood but stands out for its roughly eight-decade association as a gathering place for the neighborhood and downriver Hungarian-American community,” Baldwin wrote in one such report.

The bar was nonetheless demolished in November 2017.

This was not MDOT’s only loss. While the agency made some sincere efforts to leverage other benefits for residents who remained, dynamic factors at many levels were out of the agency’s control.

For one thing, the numerous lawsuits filed by the bridge company over parcels of contested land limited MDOT’s ability to talk openly to the public about the land acquisition process.

In the period of legal limbo, Baldwin said, “the neighborhood imploded.”

Baldwin gave the example of the Berwalt Manor Apartments, built in the 1920s and located on Campbell Street near the bridge entrance. MDOT committed to preserve the historic building and proposed to mitigate the environmental impacts on mostly low-income residents by paying for new windows and HVAC units once the bridge was built.

But the speed of development outstripped the pace of community compensation. The building passed through probate court in 2018 and has since changed hands multiple times, so it is now unclear whether there are any low-income residents left to benefit from upgrades.

Benefits yet to be measured

On the brighter side, environmentalists have pointed to the expansion and connection of bicycle trails and bird migration corridors as long-term benefits of the Gordie Howe bridge.

On the Canadian side, the bridge construction falls largely outside of Windsor’s residential neighborhoods, so it caused less disruption. As part of the project,bike lanes, enhanced landscaping, and gathering spaces were added to an approach road called Sandwich Street.

Cross-border tourism spurred on by a proposed system of greenways called the “Great Lakes Way” may provide new opportunities for people and money to flow across the Detroit River, improving the quality of life for communities that remain.

But if the trade war between the Trump administration and Canada continues, observers may question whether the bridge is a graceful gift of infrastructure to two nations or one of the world’s longest and skinniest white elephants.

Paul Draus is affiliated with the Downriver Delta CDC and Friends of the Rouge. The Fort Street Bridge Park, a project that Draus is affiliated with, received a donation for a public sculpture from the Windsor Detroit Bridge Authority in 2020.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

Imagine a protest outside the funeral of a popular political leader, with some of the protesters celebrating the death and holding signs that say things like “God Hates the USA/Thank God for 9/11,” “America is Doomed” and “Don’t Pray for the USA.”

No matter the political leanings of that leader, most Americans would probably abhor such a protest and those signs.

What would tolerate such activities, no matter how distasteful? The First Amendment.

The situation described above is taken from an actual protest, though it did not involve the funeral of a political figure. Instead, members of the Westboro Baptist Church protested outside the funeral of Marine Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder, a U.S. service member killed in Iraq.

Through demonstrations like this, members of this group were conveying their belief that the U.S. is overly tolerant of those they perceive as sinners, especially people from the LGBTQ community, and that the death of U.S. soldiers should be recognized as divine retribution for such sinfulness.

Snyder’s family sued for intentional infliction of emotional distress, among other claims. A jury issued a US$5 million jury award in favor of the family of the deceased service member. But in a nearly unanimous decision issued in 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court found that the First Amendment insulated the protesters from such a judgment.

This holding is particularly instructive today.

The Trump administration has vowed to crack down on what it calls hate speech. It has labeled antifa, a loosely organized anti-fascist group, a terrorist organization. And it has sought to punish figures such as TV host Jimmy Kimmel for statements perceived critical of conservative activists.

What the First Amendment makes clear is that it does not just protect the rights of speakers who say things with which Americans agree. Or, as the Supreme Court said in a separate decision it issued one year after the case involving the funeral protesters: “The Nation well knows that one of the costs of the First Amendment is that it protects the speech we detest as well as the speech we embrace.”

But free speech is not absolute. As a legal scholar who has studied political movements, free speech and privacy, I realize the government can regulate speech through what are known as “reasonable time, place, and manner” restrictions. These limits cannot depend upon the content of the speech or expressive conduct in which a speaker is engaged, however.

For example, the government can ban campfires in an area prone to wildfires. But if it banned the burning of the U.S. flag only as a form of political protest, that would be an unconstitutional restriction on speech.

Protected and unprotected speech

There are certain categories of speech that are not entitled to First Amendment protection. They include incitement to violence, obscenity, defamation and what are considered “true threats.”

When, for example, someone posts threats on social media with reckless disregard for whether they will instill legitimate fear in their target, such posts are not a protected form of speech. Similarly, burning a cross on someone’s property as a means of striking terror in them such that they fear bodily harm also represents this kind of true threat.

There are also violations of the law that are sometimes prosecuted as “hate crimes,” criminal acts driven by some discriminatory motive. In these cases, it’s generally not the perpetrator’s beliefs that are punished but the fact that they act on them and engage in some other form of criminal conduct, as when someone physically assaults their victim based on that victim’s race or religion. Such motives can increase the punishment people receive for the underlying criminal conduct.

Speech that enjoys the strongest free-speech protections is that which is critical of government policies and leaders. As the Supreme Court said in 1966, “There is practically universal agreement that a major purpose of (the First) Amendment was to protect the free discussion of governmental affairs.”

As the late Justice Antonin Scalia would explain in 2003, “The right to criticize the government” is at “the heart of what the First Amendment is meant to protect.”

Restrictions on government action

The First Amendment prevents the government from taking direct action to curtail speech by, for example, trying to prevent the publication of material critical of it. Americans witnessed this in the Pentagon Papers case, where the Supreme Court ruled that the government could not prevent newspapers from publishing a leaked – and politically damaging – study on U.S. military involvement in Vietnam.

But it also applies when the government acts in indirect ways, such as threatening to investigate a media company or cutting funding for a university based on politically disfavored action or inaction.

In 2024 the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the state of New York’s efforts to punish companies that did business with the National Rifle Association because of the organization’s political positions violated the group’s First Amendment rights.

Similarly, in recent months, courts have ruled on First Amendment grounds against Trump administration efforts to punish law firms or to withhold funds from Harvard University.

And just last week, a federal court in Florida threw out a lawsuit filed by President Trump against The New York Times seeking $15 billion for alleged harm to the president’s investments and reputation.

Nevertheless, some people fear government retribution for criticizing the administration. And some, like the TV network ABC, have engaged in speech-restricting action on their own, such as taking Kimmel temporarily off the air for his comments critical of conservative activists in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s killing.

Before Kimmel’s suspension, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr described his negotiations with ABC’s parent company, Disney, to take action against him. “We could do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said. And Trump said that some media companies might “lose their license” for criticizing the president. It is encouraging that, in the face of these threats, ABC has reversed course and agreed to put Kimmel back on the air.

The First Amendment protects speech across the political spectrum, even speech Americans do not like. Both liberal comedian Jon Stewart and conservative commentator Tucker Carlson have recently agreed on this. As Carlson said recently, “If they can tell you what to say, they’re telling you what to think. … There is nothing they can’t do to you because they don’t consider you human.”

Just last year in the NRA case referenced above, the Supreme Court clearly stated that even indirect government efforts to curtail protected speech are indeed unconstitutional. In light of that ruling, efforts to limit criticism of the administration, any administration, should give all Americans, regardless of their political views, great pause.

Ray Brescia does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation