In addition to fixing deteriorating bridges and roads, the $2-billion-plus project to replace the Interstate-81 viaduct in Syracuse, N.Y., must also repair multi-generational economic and health damage caused by the freeway's destruction of the city’s Black community, activists say.
About 1,300 Black residents were displaced to make way for I-81, completed in 1968, resulting in the “irreversible loss of property and and business ownership, access to jobs, and social and community connections,” the New York Civil Liberties Union says in “Building a Better Future: the Structural Racism Built Into I-81, and How to Tear it Down,” a December 2020 report based on two years of interviewing and working with community members impacted by the project then and now.