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