Rebecca Santana/AP Photo
The elevated freeway running along Claiborne Avenue in New Orleans crosses over Canal Street in this photo taken on May 11, 2021.
Deka Dancil sees opportunity in the demolition of a small section of highway. In the late 1950s, Interstate 81 cut through the South Side, a predominantly African American neighborhood in Syracuse, New York, displacing more than 1,300 local families. Dancil, president of the Urban Jobs Task Force (UJTF), a nonprofit group that helps create job opportunities for Syracuse residents, believes that residents of the South Side should have first dibs on any jobs tied to the removal of the I-81 viaduct.
“Priority [for jobs] should be given to those who are going to be directly impacted or bear the brunt of the construction, [the] economically disadvantaged, people of color,” Dancil says. “We know there are people in the city who want to work and want to take these jobs.”
Under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act Congress passed last year, cities and towns can apply for federal funds to tear down highways, re-establish long-abandoned connections, and provide jobs for neighborhood residents. But local leaders will have to scrutinize these projects to determine whether these new undertakings lift up the people of color who were literally bypassed as outlying white areas reaped the economic and commuting benefits.
BANNER
The Federal Highway Act of 1956 authorized construction of more than 40,000 miles of interstate highways across the United States. The new system facilitated transcontinental travel and established new regional connections between cities and suburbs. But faster travel for white suburbanites meant that many of these highways intentionally cut through Black and brown neighborhoods, stunting economic development in places like Syracuse.
Originally built to connect Pennsylvania to Ontario, I-81 is the main north-south artery through the city; it also provides direct access to downtown Syracuse from the surrounding suburbs. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul announced in January that the aging, 1.4-mile-long viaduct that looms over the South Side will be removed and replaced with a street-level grid. The Urban Jobs Task Force, the city of Syracuse, and the New York State Department of Transportation (NYSDOT) have applied for a grant through a federal pilot program that allows the city to prioritize hiring people in the neighborhood to work on the viaduct demolition and streetscapes reconstruction projects slated to begin this year.
The Federal Highway Administration pilot, known as the Special Experimental Project 14 (SEP-14), allows grant recipients to hire workers based on several factors, including local or other geographic hiring preferences. The project will create approximately 25,000 jobs, according to NYSDOT. “The UJTF is expecting every effort to be made to meet a 15 percent local hire goal for the project,” which is the target the group has recommended to NYSDOT, says Dancil.
In its 11 years of existence, the Urban Jobs Task Force has never worked as closely with the city as it did during the drafting of the SEP-14 application, according to Dancil. The group finally got the chance to actually lead discussions during these meetings. And together, the city and the task force conducted a significant amount of research to ensure that they were making compelling arguments for hiring local residents, ones that the community could actually follow through on.
Faster travel for white suburbanites meant that many of these highways intentionally cut through Black and brown neighborhoods, stunting economic development in places like Syracuse.
In New Orleans, residents are already thinking about job creation in the initial discussions about what might replace the Claiborne Expressway. In the late 1960s, the city rammed the road through two predominantly Black neighborhoods. The project gutted the Tremé business district—along with a row of famous century-old oak trees along Claiborne Avenue—and destroyed hundreds of affordable homes in the Seventh Ward, according to Amy Stelly, of the Urban Conservancy, a New Orleans environmental and racial justice organization.
Stelly, who grew up in the Claiborne Corridor and lives a block and a half from the expressway’s elevated deck, has long been a proponent of the expressway’s removal. “[The expressway] devastated the economy, it put people out of work [and caused] a huge loss of business, so it’s only fair that those of us who were directly affected by the building of the highway be considered first for hiring and economic development opportunities that are going to come with its removal,” she says.
She also sees the highway removal as an opportunity to teach residents historic preservation techniques, which, along with other job skills, can be applied to maintaining the area’s centuries-old buildings. “That’s what makes New Orleans beautiful,” Stelly says. “There’s a lot of opportunity to put people back to work, but also to train people in the building trades that are really special to New Orleans, so we can maintain the character of the city.”
Keeping residents employed beyond short-term highway construction jobs is Detroit’s major goal, according to Lauren Hood, chair of the city’s Planning Commission. Construction on Interstate 375 started in 1959 and displaced residents and Black-owned businesses in Detroit’s Black Bottom neighborhood, a celebrated hot spot for Black-owned bars and clubs throughout the 1950s. The project, replacing the mile-long highway with a boulevard, begins in 2027.
“Think about all of the intergenerational wealth that could [have been passed down] if Black folks [kept] a hold on their properties and their businesses; all those sorts of things were decimated when that neighborhood got bulldozed,” Hood says, adding, “It’s not legitimate repair unless the compensation matches the harm done—if they’re just construction jobs, they’re just over a few months of time. Then what happens to those folks?”
Some communities remain skeptical about local hiring promises, fearing that these projects will perpetuate existing harms and offer few jobs and fewer permanent changes. In Denver, the $1.2 billion Interstate 70 expansion project, which began in 2018, forced about 65 families out of their homes, according to Alfonso Espino of Globeville, Elyria-Swansea Coalition, a local health and housing justice group. The ten-mile reconstruction project removes a viaduct, replaces a lowered section of highway with a park, and adds one lane in each direction. Residents have suffered through significant noise and dust pollution from the construction, which also cut off many small businesses from the rest of the community. I-70 provides travelers with regional connections to the Denver International Airport, and due to the region’s rough terrain, is one of the few roads connecting the metro area to Colorado’s popular resorts for skiers. “We were never really going to be the primary beneficiaries,” says Espino, who lives in Elyria-Swansea, a Latino immigrant neighborhood.
Roughly 680 people from 15 surrounding ZIP codes have been hired to work on the I-70 expansion since November 2018, according to Stacia Sellers, the Central 70 communications manager for the Colorado Department of Transportation. According to Sellers, CDOT began studying the I-70 corridor in Denver in the early 2000s to understand the issues that both commuters and community members face.
CDOT found that the Globeville and Elyria-Swansea neighborhoods have unemployment rates that are ten times higher than other neighborhoods in Denver. “That was one of the things they touted, that there was going to be local hiring,” Espino says. But the community leader explains that when dozens of residents tried to apply for I-70 positions, they got the runaround: They were sent to multiple offices to apply, but never got a clear explanation of what the exact procedures were, which discouraged many job seekers from applying.
A CDOT map shows 68 residents from the 80216 ZIP code—the Globeville and Elyria-Swansea neighborhoods—have been hired for the project. Even if CDOT’s local hiring efforts were more robust, Espino does not believe that the jobs—ones that the community never asked for—can compensate for the displacement and environmental damage caused by the project.
The Globeville and Elyria-Swansea communities would rather see the unused land that had been taken through eminent domain returned to them, a move that could be tantamount to reparations, according to Espino. “We’re demanding that land back: Reparations are defined by the people that [the harms] impact,” he says. “We believe that reparations can be done here in our community in the form of land; it’s 40-some acres that they’ve accumulated that they don’t know what they’re going to do with.”
Vigilant oversight is essential. In Syracuse, as cooperative as city and state DOT officials have been, Dancil of the Urban Jobs Task Force does not yet know how many jobs will be available to local residents. But the group remains committed to a job creation strategy that is a step out of the social and economic shadows that I-81 has cast for seven decades.
This article is part of our ongoing series on sustainable mobility, transportation, and climate.
