With growing support for infrastructure overhauls across America — President Trump has vowed to “streamline
and expedite” road and bridge projects — the expansion here could serve as a harbinger for communities facing similar choices in the months ahead.
Many roads are crumbling, leaving officials with decisions
that will have lasting effects on the families living nearby, including residents of Elyria-Swansea, a low-income and overwhelmingly Latino community still reeling from the road’s construction back in 1964.
And I can do the right thing by the people who we are relocating.”
Section of Interstate 70
Many people say that is not enough, and the project is among the most controversial in a city buzzing with construction.
“We shouldn’t be the people carrying the city on our backs,” Candi CdeBaca, 30, said at a community meeting
that erupted in cheers of support for an alternate plan.
“Their childhoods were robbed of them because of asthma,” said Ms. Sanchez, 40, who suffers
from a severe version of the disease, along with Leonardo, 8, Olivia, 11, and Ruben, 16.
Already, children living by the highway have asthma hospitalization rates 40 percent higher than Denver as a whole,
and residents die of heart disease at a rate 13 percent greater than the rest of the city, according to city data.
It also sent many highways rolling through black, immigrant
and low-income urban communities, saddling people from the Bronx to Los Angeles with pollution, disease and blight.