Billions of dollars are being funneled into projects in New York state, meant to reconnect communities separated by large highways or routes. The most prominent are the Reimagining I-787 project in the Capital Region, the Kensington Expressway project in Buffalo and the I-81 viaduct project in Syracuse.
I-81’s shadow has loomed over one of the area’s oldest public housing communities, dividing Syracuse for generations. Leaders say once the project is completed, the area will see increased affordable housing, but residents moving to accommodate construction wonder, at what cost?
“We were planning to be here for our whole life,” Emmanuel Licea, a McKinney Manor resident, said.
Licea and his family have been living in McKinney Manor for the past nine years, and soon they’ll have to leave it all behind.
“Everything we built is going in the gutter,” Licea said. “Just gonna have to start from scratch again, living in a new place that we don’t know about yet.”
The residents of McKinney Manor are the first to be moved as part of the East Adams Transformation Project, which is meant to reconnect a once thriving, historically Black neighborhood, while providing quality housing and improved access to education and economic opportunities.
As part of the transformation, homes like the one Licea and his family live in will be demolished.
“They just want to clear it out,” Licea said. “They don’t care how, they just want it cleared out.”
The Syracuse Housing Authority, which owns the East Adams Neighborhood, is working to make this transition easier by providing residents temporary housing or Section 8 vouchers.
Licea says those options don’t work for his family.
“At this point, we have nowhere to go, we’ll just wait until the last minute and after that, we’ll see what happens,” Licea said.
But for some residents, the demolition marks the start of a new, brighter chapter.
“I told my realtor, 'I said I can’t stop smiling,'” Theresa Durham, a McKinney Manor resident, said.
Durham grew up in the East Adams Neighborhood and has lived in McKinney Manor for the past 18 years. The displacement prompted her to purchase a house of her own — something made possible under the state’s Affordable Home Ownership Opportunity Program.
Durham said her granddaughter has seen the effects of housing insecurity, and she’s most excited to give her a stable place to live.
“When the governor came and we got a chance to go inside, and she was already picking out her room, ‘this one’s gonna be mine’,” Durham said, “And you know, it was just so happy.”
That’s the best-case scenario.
While not all McKinney residents have had such positive experiences, leaders say they’re working to make the inconvenience of construction worthwhile.
“These are peoples’ lives, their homes,” Syracuse’s Mayor, Ben Walsh, said. “And we want to make sure that we are minimizing the disruption and ideally, putting people in better situations.”
But in light of the current housing crunch, Licea says he’s still waiting on that better situation.
“We’re willing to move, just give us a place to live in, a good place to live in, but they haven’t given us nothing, we gotta go from here to a worse place,” Licea said. “We’re trying to move forward, not backward.”
McKinney Manor is being evacuated in phases and residents were given a 90-day notice to pack up and move out.
The Syracuse Housing Authority says all residents are on track to be out by their evacuation date, but that statement conflicts with what residents told a Spectrum News 1 team.