SYRACUSE: REDLINING & DEMOGRAPHICS

Red-lining's legacy remains in Syracuse, where the city's demographics differ sharply from neighborhood to neighborhood, corresponding roughly to the racial grades from the 1930s map. I-81 acts as a racial dividing line through the center of the city, with the vast majority of Syracuse's BIPOC population living to the west of the freeway.

The @congressforthenewurbanism has named I-81 one of it's top 10 "freeways without futures," calling for its removal. Various proposals exist to remove I-81, but any project undertaken must be done with significant local community involvement to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.

According to the @congressforthenewurbanism, "The construction of Interstate 81 in Syracuse came with the forced displacement of nearly 1,300 residents from the city's 15th Ward [SegByDesign note: this number only counts those displaced by the freeway itself and does not include subsequent urban renewal projects in the 15th Ward, which brought the number up 2,500]. It devastated a historic black community, severing the social fabric of the community and razing swaths of buildings, and with them, affordable housing options. Neighborhood deterioration, a glut of surface parking lots, and citywide population loss followed.

As written in a March 2016 article in The Atlantic, ‘The completion of the highway, I-81, which ran through the urban center, had the same effect it has had in almost all cities that put interstates through their hearts. It decimated a close-knit African American community. And when the displaced residents from the 15th Ward moved to other city neighborhoods, the white residents fled.’”