For too many decades, our city has been severed from its waterfront by highways that suppress property values, inhibit development opportunities, and impose a poorer quality of life on our city. More paralyzing, we’ve suffered from a staggering leadership void in the political and business communities, who both presume that right sizing this highway would be too great a task for which to fight; too difficult an argument to articulate; too offensive to suburbanites and commuters to even suggest.

So we’ve sat for decades with a highway consuming miles of the most valuable real estate in this region — only exacerbating a population exodus across all of our waterfront neighborhoods. The opportunity costs are staggering to even consider. Imagine the development that could have occurred along our waters’ edge if we hadn’t made such an epic mistake; imagine the property tax revenues; consider the image we would have projected to the world; consider the generations of people who would have stayed and the firms that would have prided themselves in being here.

The right sizing of Interstate 190 — from Riverside Park to Chicago Street in the Old First Ward — represents an opportunity that most cities would envy: a geographically extraordinary canvas fronting 7 miles of architecturally rich neighborhoods on the brink of revival.

At this inflection point in the arc of our region’s history, we are writing the narrative of our turnaround; we are branding our renaissance and recrafting our identity in the national consciousness. Our civic objective should be nothing short of building the most beautifully livable waterfront city in the world. We should not be constrained by the cynicism of our politics; by the inertia of our bureaucracies; or by the shortsighted objections of suburbanites.

The stale air of orthodoxy be damned — there is a grassroots movement afoot, rooted in the freshness of our thinking and the energy of our optimism. It was born of a simplistic but profound change: we’ve started to appreciate ourselves and our city in a broad based and pervasive way. For the first time in nearly six decades we realize that we deserve better than we’ve allowed ourselves to become, and we recognize the latent economic potential resting in our populace; and we see a breathtaking waterfront geography that will define us.

We are obligated to future generations to demand aspirational objectives and inspired leadership. Our city demands this of us, which would take more than a lifetime to give.