Colorado asks: Is there a better way to build a highway?
Colorado’s transportation department has taken on some unusual responsibilities – including pledging to build classrooms and supporting affordable housing and job-training efforts. It’s even hired babysitters.
The sitters provided child care during neighborhood meetings the department, known as CDOT, held as it developed a proposal to renovate an Interstate 70 viaduct that broods for several blocks over the impoverished and largely Hispanic northeast Denver communities of Globeville, Elyria, and Swansea.
Federal highway authorities, mindful of past patterns of bulldozing over the concerns of poor and minority communities, have called CDOT’s efforts unprecedented. People in Globeville, Elyria, and Swansea are less impressed and have turned to the courts to push for CDOT to do more.
Indeed, across the country, as the ambitious infrastructure projects of the last century are nearing the end of their useful lives, the even more ambitious civil rights legislation of the same period is being brought to bear in discussions about 21st century roads and bridges.
For Evelyn Valdez, history is personal. Her parents moved from southern Colorado to Denver in search of work six decades ago, when she was 13. Her father got a job laying sidewalk curbs and her mother was a seamstress.
As Ms. Valdez remembers it, Elyria felt like a village. Neighbors greeted each other from their front yards and strolled to collect milk, eggs, fresh juice, and ice cream from the dairy.
“Oh, that ice cream,’’
In Texas, an agreement‘All of our … fights are connected’Offers of help, viewed with skepticismIn California, unintended consequencesStriking a balanceNo longer towns, but still a community
