The North Carolina Department of Transportation plans to spend $3.2 billion expanding Interstate 77 from uptown to the South Carolina line with two express toll lanes in each direction.
But new renderings of the highway through uptown have alarmed residents, who worry the wider highway will decimate their neighborhoods.
At a recent meeting of the Charlotte Regional Transportation Planning Organization, some residents asked for help, like Al Austin, a former City Council member who is the president of the Third Ward Neighborhood Association.
He said the new plan echoes decades past, when mainly Black communities were split to make way for highways.
“I watched my community get torn apart when I-77 and I-85 pushed through our neighborhoods at LaSalle and Newland roads,” Austin said. “I watched families disappear and move away and friends disappear.”
He said communities such as Lincoln Heights, Double Oaks, Oakland Park and McCrorey Heights were sliced in half.
“Now after decades and decades, instead of repairing and reconnecting these communities after past harm, we’re asked to accept even more construction, more destruction, more concrete,” Austin said.
The widening project will require a complete rebuild of the highway. Most bridges over I-77 will need to be torn down and rebuilt. Some interchanges will also be redesigned, such as the interchange with the Belk Freeway south of uptown.
The DOT has two proposals for I-77 through center city.
One is to build the highway at-grade. That would have the largest footprint. It would cut through Frazier Park and part of Pinewood Cemetery. It would also demolish some homes in McCrorey Heights.
The other option is to elevate the express lanes, creating a narrower path.
Sean Langley, a 20-year resident of McCrorey Heights, said his neighborhood was cut off from uptown in the late 1960s and early 1970s when I-77 and the Brookshire Freeway were built.
“Imagine how we must feel (for the state) to expand the I-77 freeway once again through our historic, quaint, angelic neighborhood,” he said at the CRTPO meeting. “Pure disgust.”
Though elevating the toll lanes would spare homes in McCrorey Heights, Langley said that’s not a good option.
"(I’m) not in favor of the elevated highways either,” he said. “It’s a visible eyesore, and it compromises our quality of life and increases noise and air pollution.”
He said the DOT should start over and place that section of I-77 underground.
Cities like Seattle and Boston have done that, and Austin is planning to bury parts of Interstate 35 and place a cap over the highway.
Austin is doing that to connect neighborhoods in the east part of the city to downtown. The city plans to build a greenway and other pedestrian-friendly infrastructure on top of the highway.
DOT officials did not address Langley’s request at last week’s meeting.
But in an interview with WFAE earlier in the week, DOT engineer Brett Canipe said he wants to work with residents.
“We simply don’t want to impact people,” he said. “I mean that’s just part of our job, to minimize impacts.”
The DOT plans to hire a private developer to build and manage the toll lanes. That’s what the state did for express toll lanes on I-77 in north Mecklenburg, where the Spanish firm Cintra has a 50-year contract to operate them.
Placing part of I-77 below the surface would likely add hundreds of millions of dollars to the project.
In Austin, the city is planning to contribute to the cost of capping the highway. Most of the construction costs in Charlotte will be covered by future toll revenue, though the DOT will likely contribute some money to the project.
If the City Council and CRTPO wished to place part of the highway underground, the city could, in theory, help pay for that with money from the new transportation sales tax that was approved by Mecklenburg County voters three weeks ago.
The tax is expected to generate more than $100 million in its first year for roads.
