Mike Blake/Reuters/File

Solar installers from Baker Electric place solar panels on the roof of a residential home in Scripps Ranch, San Diego, in 2016.

For all its tough trade rhetoric in the past year, especially against China, the Trump administration’s first enforcement actions of 2018 will have a measured and temporary impact.

In the most closely watched case, involving solar panels, new tariffs announced Monday will slow adoption of the technology in the near term – and create a new set of winners and losers. Many fans of solar power are understandably voicing loud concerns. But industry analysts don’t expect the tariffs to cause long-term damage to the fast-growing industry of wiring up the United States with solar power.

Homeowner installation costs will go up about 4 percent, says ClearView Energy Partners, a Washington-based research firm. For utility-scale installations, costs will go up about 10 percent, it says. 

“At the end of the day, it won’t have any major implications for the industry from a manufacturing perspective,” says Angelo Zino a senior industry analyst with ‎CFRA Research. “Things could have been a lot worse.”

In short, the tariff won’t kill solar power, but also won’t create momentum for new investment that could push the industry forward.

“The tariffs are going to expire in four years. That doesn’t give somebody much incentive to build a factory” in the US, says Varun Sivaram, author of “Taming the Sun,” a soon-to-be-released book on solar power.

Nor does it give companies reason to invest in the next-generation solar technologies that Mr. Sivaram sees as both economically promising and an answer to environmental concerns about global warming.  

What the tariff does mean is fewer jobs installing solar panels, for now. For months, America’s solar installation industry had made dire warnings about what the Trump administration might do. The International Trade Commission had called for 35 percent tariffs on imported solar panels. The two US-based manufacturers that had pushed for protection wanted even higher penalties. In the end, President Trump opted for a 30 percent penalty, not unlike what the Obama administration had imposed before.

The difference is that the new tariff applies worldwide, as opposed to just specific Asian countries, so solar-panel makers in Europe as well as in China saw their share prices fall in trading Tuesday.

In a separate action, Mr. Trump imposed a steeper 50 percent tariff on imported washing machines, but its effect is much more narrow, helping US-based Whirlpool Corp. fend off low-price competition from South Korean manufacturers Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics.

Whirlpool chairman Jeff Fettig said Monday that the trade action "enabled new manufacturing jobs here in America and will usher in a new era of innovation for consumers everywhere.” The company said it would add 200 new full-time positions at its Clyde, Ohio, manufacturing plant, adding in a statement that "the new hires are just the beginning of increased investments in innovation, manufacturing and additional manufacturing jobs for Whirlpool and its vendors."

Jobs were at the core of the solar-panel case. Thanks to low-cost panels from China, the solar industry has been soaring. Employment nearly tripled between 2010 and 2016 to 260,000 as solar installations picked up in the United States. The Solar Energy Industries Association opposed the tariff because solar-panel manufacturing is such a small part of the industry, amounting to about 2,000 jobs. With the new tariff, the SEIA estimates the industry will lose some 23,000 jobs this year as increased panel costs force utilities and other customers to scale back billions of dollars in investment.

Still, the industry avoided a more severe scenario.

“While we believe the decision will be significantly harmful to our industry and the economy, we appreciate that the president and the administration listened to our arguments,” Abigail Ross Hopper, SEIA’s president and chief executive, said in a statement. “Our industry will emerge from this. The case for solar energy is just too strong to be held down for long.”

Even one winner in the case, while complimenting Mr. Trump, raised a note of doubt whether the tariff would be enough. “We are still reviewing these remedies, and are hopeful they will be enough to address the import surge and to rebuild solar manufacturing in the United States,” said Juergen Stein, chief executive and president of SolarWorld Americas, in a statement.

The tariff may convince some overseas solar manufacturers to locate factories in the US. Already, a Chinese manufacturer may be behind a request for $54 million in state and city incentives to build a solar-panel factory in Jacksonville, Fla., according to the Jacksonville Daily Record.

The other big winner is Arizona-based First Solar, which makes an advanced thin-film solar panel that isn’t subject to the tariff, says Mr. Zino of ‎CFRA. Thin-film technology, while not yet cost-competitive with silicon-based panels, is slowly getting more attention from the industry, particularly in specialized installations. The company’s stock jumped Tuesday morning on news of the tariffs.

But to grow US solar manufacturing, Trump will need far more than a tariff, say experts, who point to research and development support and an advanced manufacturing strategy as key components for a turnaround.

Sivaram, a technology expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, says that despite China's rise to dominance in solar panels, other nations still have an opportunity to invest.

“There are super promising technologies,” he says.

Why not just let China take the lead, and continue to offer increasingly low-cost solar power to the world? “The problem is solar power currently provides about 2 percent of world electricity,” and isn’t near a glide path toward the much larger scale that’s possible, Sivaram says.

That faster glide path is needed, scientists say, to reduce the human-created emissions behind climate change.  

Government support has a big role to play in solar technology, experts say, because for the private sector the big potential rewards are matched by big up-front risks. Yet, even as Trump imposes the solar tariff, his administration is aiming to slash R&D funding for new energy technology.

That may be the bigger concern than any tariff fallout, for the future US role in solar power.

Yet the tariff moves this week could have another important ripple effect, if they prompt retaliatory moves by China, as well as legal challenges to the tariffs through the World Trade Organization.

The question of a possible trade war – or, alternately, successfully nudging China toward global norms in its trade practices – is one that goes beyond solar power or washing machines. It’s a challenge that experts including Sivaram say will be best met by collective global efforts, rather than by unilateral US moves.

Staff writer Mark Trumbull contributed to this story from Washington

Martinez Monsivais/AP

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis walks out to greet President Trump at the Pentagon on Jan. 18.

Last week the Trump administration released a new National Defense Strategy – plans for what threats the Pentagon should prioritize and how officials should organize forces to meet them.

Many national security experts so far give the effort pretty good reviews. They say the strategy’s emphasis on a return of big power geopolitics, which it lists as a higher priority danger than terrorism, is a welcome recognition of reality. They applaud its call for the US to focus more on developing cutting-edge defense than simply expanding the size of current forces.

But plans are words on paper. Implementing the strategy’s shifts will require money Congress has yet to appropriate and agreements with allies that haven’t yet been struck. Perhaps most important, it is unclear whether President Trump really supports some of the National Defense Strategy’s pillars, including its emphasis on the need to rely on alliances and its inherent acceptance that Russia has been running influence operations inside the United States.

“This is definitely a reassuring document to a lot of people, but it is only reassuring if you ignore what’s going on across the river from the Pentagon,” says Peter W. Singer, a strategist and senior fellow at the Washington think tank New America.

The public portion of the National Defense Strategy is a short, 11-page summary of a classified document that goes into greater specifics about the programs linked to particular priorities. It is the heir of a longer document issued by past administrations named the Quadrennial Defense Review. It is intended to be marching orders for the Pentagon, linked to overarching goals set forth in a presidential National Security Strategy, a document President Trump personally released last December.

Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis outlined the NDS in a speech at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies on Jan. 19. His main point was that the Pentagon must alter its threat priority list.

“Though we will continue to prosecute the campaign against terrorists that we are engaged in today ... Great Power competition, not terrorism is now the primary focus of US national security,” Mattis said.

Russia and China are “revisionist powers” that want to shape a world in their own authoritarian model, according to the NDS, gaining veto power over other nation’s economic, diplomatic, and security decisions.  

Three ‘lines of effort’

Mattis said that three “lines of effort” will help the US reenergize its defense and emerge from what the NDS calls a period of “strategic atrophy.”

The first line of effort is to increase the lethality of the military. Among other things, that will include prioritizing a push into new technologies ahead of increasing the sheer numbers of Navy ships, Air Force planes, and Army divisions. These new technologies include advanced computing, big data analytics, artificial intelligence, robotics, directed energy, hypersonics, and biotechnology, according to the NDS document.

The second line of effort is making friends. The US needs to strengthen traditional alliances and build new partnerships, according to Mattis. The Defense secretary, nodding toward a favorite theme of the president, said that increased prosperity means old allies should pay more for the common defense. But he strongly emphasized the necessity to stand together in mutual defense.

“In my past, I fought many times and never did I fight in a solely American formation. It was always alongside foreign troops,” said Mattis, who served over 40 years in the Marine Corps.

The third line of effort is increased efficiency, according to the Pentagon chief. That means the Pentagon needs to work better. But he also stressed the necessity for stable, predictable military budgets – something that’s been lacking in an era of congressional budgetary brinkmanship.

Many defense experts in Washington found the NDS to be concise, refreshingly free of jargon, and reflective of security trends that have been building for years. In that sense it perhaps recognizes reality.

“I thought the analysis was good and the general main message, that we are in a great power competition, I thought exactly right,” says Thomas Wright, the director of the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution.

Will money be in the budget?

In some ways the strategy may represent continuity as much as change. The Obama administration, with its much discussed proposal to “pivot to Asia,” wanted to move past terrorism and focus on great power rivalry too. (The rise of the Islamic State militant group, and continued war in Afghanistan, interfered with those plans.)

The desire to leapfrog over current weapons technology and gain an asymmetrical military advantage by pouring money into robotics, artificial intelligence, and so forth was the theme behind the Obama-era Third Offset plan, as well.

“It’s an evolution,” says Christine Wormuth, undersecretary of Defense for policy from 2014 to 2016 and current director of the Adrienne Arsht Center for Resilience at the Atlantic Council, of the Trump National Defense Strategy.

But these plans outline efforts that won’t be cheap, Ms. Wormuth adds. The forthcoming Department of Defense budget for fiscal year 2019 will say a lot about what is really changing.

Budget caps resulting from the Budget Control Act have hurt Pentagon procurement and readiness, says Wormuth. But that reflects a partisan tension – Democrats want domestic spending to go up to alongside any military increase.

So when the Trump budget comes out in March, “Step one is you will want to see the budget request reflect capabilities over capacity. Step two is, what happens to that budget request when it gets to Congress? Is Congress going to be able to make a deal?” says Wormuth.

White House priorities

Then, of course, there is the president himself. In his December speech releasing the National Security Strategy, Mr. Trump spoke a lot about allies paying more money. He made asides about China, and generally went off-script, at least compared to the document he was nominally presenting.

The National Defense Strategy holds out Russia as perhaps America’s chief rival. Yet Trump speaks admiringly of Russian President Vladimir Putin and has seemed reluctant to criticize Russian geopolitical moves that could be seen as aggressive. He has at times dismissed the notion that Russia interfered with the 2016 election – yet the NDS talks of Russian influence operations in the US and other countries.

“We’ve never had something like that. It’s stunning,” says Mr. Singer of New America.

Yet the president is the American military commander-in-chief, of course. Others draw up the White House budget but its spending proposals, overseen by an Office of Management and Budget, are supposed to reflect Oval Office priorities.

“At critical moments he will need to make the decision ... to actually uphold this world view,” says Thomas Wright, director of the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution, of President Trump.

Disgusted by daily reports of men killing women in his native Turkey, film director Dersu Yavuz Altun made his protest in the way he knows best: on the big screen.

“Ayaz” left some women physically shaking after its first showing here in November. An intense morality play, it was inspired by a real-life murder case in which, amid pressure to restore "honor,"  a man kills his brother's wife when she leaves him for someone else.

The film delves deeply into gender violence and inequality in Turkey, exploring the country’s “manly man” macho culture and the corrosive impact of the crime beyond its immediate victim.

 “I thought I killed a woman, but I killed myself and everyone left behind” as well, one prisoner told Mr. Altun as he researched his film.

The director was struck by a realization, he says. “It’s like a civil war in the country, it’s like a war against women by men.”

That “war” is raging against a complex backdrop, where Turkish aspirations to Western-style modernity clash with profoundly conservative social attitudes and an increasingly authoritarian government. Shockingly, Turkey also has one of the world’s highest rates of femicide – the murder of a woman on account of her gender.

In the first seven months of 2009, official figures showed, there were 953 cases of femicide, about one every five hours. The public outcry at this revelation – and the steep, inexplicable rise leading up to it, according to official numbers – was so great that the government has not published comparable statistics since.

Such figures stand in dismal contrast to the progress Turkey has made toward some aspects of gender equality, unusual in a part of the world governed by strict social mores.

Many women work in corporations and law firms. Turkey was ruled by a female prime minister, Tansu Çiller, from 1993 to 1996. The country has a vocal women’s rights movement, and, spurred by European Union (EU) membership dreams a decade ago, parliament has done much to enshrine equal rights and protections for women in law.

But the country is sliding backward, analysts and activists say, as social and religious conservatism reasserts itself amid a crackdown against civil society that has helped turn women’s status and safety into a battleground.

Not long ago, hope reigned among women’s rights activists. In 2011, feminist groups were invited to parliament for the first time to help draft what became law No. 6284. That piece of legislation allowed courts to issue restraining orders against abusive men for up to six months, keeping them away from the wives they had victimized. 

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

Tugce Canbolat is a senior administrator at Mor Cati, the only private women's shelter in Istanbul and an organization that has been at the forefront of Turkey's women's movement since the 1980s. So-called "honor killings" take the lives of several hundred Turkish women each year.

“People’s minds were changing, because the government was doing a lot of things to change the minds of people, to make social change,” says Çiçek Tahaoğlu, an editor at the “Bianet” website, which specializes in tracking gender issues.

The change was little more than skin deep, however, and the legislative defenses protecting women’s rights are fragile, argues one legal academic in Ankara who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of such issues. 

“When you look at the picture it is perfect, you have all the [laws] that you need,” she says. “In the Constitution you see all this equality and freedom, and even abolishing the death penalty.” 

But President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has repeatedly indicated that he supports reimposition of capital punishment, she points out. “That’s why you can’t feel sure about the freedoms and the rights you have. It can change so easily.”

Backsliding?

And the mood in Turkey has changed in the wake of a failed military coup in 2016 that instilled a deeper mistrust of civil society in the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). Once a supportive voice for women, the party has backed away from women’s issues in parallel with its fading interest in meeting EU standards in social affairs. 

“In the AKP’s first years it was doing a lot of good things, there was a lot of progress,” says Tuğçe Canbolat, a senior administrator of Mor Çati, a shelter for battered women in Istanbul. But “the AKP no longer works with women’s groups as they used to.” 

Indeed, there are signs that the government may be preparing to amend the landmark 2011 law protecting wives from their abusive husbands. The conservative, pro-AKP newspaper YeniAkit published an article last month, for example, linking an “explosion” in the murder rate of women to the legal restraining orders, suggesting the law was made “without paying attention to Turkish family structure."

It quoted a sociologist who suggested that imposed separation of a husband from his wife and the lack of a place to stay can “turn into anger” and “feelings of revenge against his wife.” Another YeniAkit article in late December claimed that law No. 6284 “has destroyed the family nest."

Women’s groups marked the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women last November with a march in Istanbul to protest what they called the AKP’s “misogynist policies.”

The groups’ spokeswoman, Mine Doğru, noted that the AKP was trying to make divorce more difficult when nearly half the women killed in 2017 lost their lives while they were trying to divorce or leave their partners.

The mood change is not restricted to the ruling party. Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, leader of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), appeared to justify domestic violence recently when he said baldly that “if a man is unemployed, if not enough money comes into the household, and if the pot is not boiling in the evening, this man will take it out on his wife.”

Wife beating is common well beyond poor households, however, to judge by figures from the official Turkish Statistical Institute. That government agency reported in 2015 that no fewer than 40 percent of women in Turkey “experience violence from their husbands or the partners that they live with.”

The 2016 version of the report, however, inexplicably offers no update on that statistic, stating simply that “married men and women are happier.” 

This official tendency to conceal or gloss over the extent of violence against women undercuts Erdoğan’s rhetoric on the issue, critics say.

His recent talking points have encouraged some women’s activists. “Anyone who commits violence against women should be punished,” the president said in November. “What did our prophet say? ‘Heaven is at the feet of our mothers.’ What I am doing here today is not simply a protocol; it is part of my wider duty in the struggle for women’s rights.”

Erdoğan used the speech to announce a new “action plan” for women; he claimed that the AKP had carried out “historic reforms for women,” and noted that his government finances 81 women’s shelters across the country.

But it was only three years ago that Erdoğan said equality between men and women was “contrary to nature.” And the authorities are doing little to challenge the social norms that sanction the violence against women that puts them in such shelters in the first place.

A long way to go

So others are taking up that challenge.

“Talking with women is not enough,” says Bahar Aldanmaz, a researcher at the Gender and Women’s Studies Research Center at Kadir Has University in Istanbul. “As a feminist, I love having men in my education training programs, I love talking with them and trying to understand their perspective, because masculinity, and the definition of masculinity, is an important reason why we are experiencing all this.”

“Being a man in Turkey, you have to be powerful, you have to be strong, you can’t cry,” Ms. Aldanmaz points out. Men feel they have the power to do everything, and then – boom – we have all this [violence against women] happen.”

The problem is deeply cultural, she says. “The TV series we are watching, it’s crazy, it’s all about men owning women. There’s violence, there’s jealousy, and people love it. It’s about controlling, it’s the definition of relationships in Turkey. That’s why it’s not shocking to have these rates of violence.”

Aldanmaz says she has seen attitudes shift, and that she is not “super pessimistic” about the prospect for more change.

But Turkey has a long way to go, cautions Ms. Tahaoğlu, the editor with Bianet.

“Gender roles are so strict in Turkey,” she says. “If you are a woman you need to cook, you need to clean your house. The belief in these gender roles is so deep, and so integral to our culture and our society, that when you change them a little bit, people think it’s a really provocative thing to do.” 

“The solution is, first, we have to start seeing women as equals – that is the first step that has not happened in Turkey,” she says. “Without doing that, everything else is artificial and ineffective.”

Donna Bryson

Artist Thomas Scharfenberg works on a mural under the Interstate 70 viaduct. He lives in the Globeville-Elyria-Swansea neighborhood.

Colorado’s transportation department has taken on some unusual responsibilities – including pledging to build classrooms and supporting affordable housing and job-training efforts. It’s even hired babysitters.

The sitters provided child care during neighborhood meetings the department, known as CDOT, held as it developed a proposal to renovate an Interstate 70 viaduct that broods for several blocks over the impoverished and largely Hispanic northeast Denver communities of Globeville, Elyria, and Swansea.

Federal highway authorities, mindful of past patterns of bulldozing over the concerns of poor and minority communities, have called CDOT’s efforts unprecedented. People in Globeville, Elyria, and Swansea are less impressed and have turned to the courts to push for CDOT to do more.

Indeed, across the country, as the ambitious infrastructure projects of the last century are nearing the end of their useful lives, the even more ambitious civil rights legislation of the same period is being brought to bear in discussions about 21st century roads and bridges.

For Evelyn Valdez, history is personal. Her parents moved from southern Colorado to Denver in search of work six decades ago, when she was 13. Her father got a job laying sidewalk curbs and her mother was a seamstress.

As Ms. Valdez remembers it, Elyria felt like a village. Neighbors greeted each other from their front yards and strolled to collect milk, eggs, fresh juice, and ice cream from the dairy.

“Oh, that ice cream,’’ Valdez says, a wistful note in her voice.

When I-70 and I-25, which intersect in her neighborhood, were constructed in the late 1950s and early 1960s, “we had to put up with the traffic, the dust. They took out a lot of houses. A lot of businesses went, too – good businesses,” Valdez says. “Now it’s even going to change us more. We don’t know where we’re going to land.”

Valdez’s corner of Denver was essentially “sacrificed for the transportation needs of the city,” as Zachary Lewis, a Colorado State University historian, has written.

“Other Denver communities that held more economic sway were able to avoid the growing web of roads, but many working-class neighborhoods were not,” Mr. Lewis wrote. In a 2016 speech, former Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said planners “have to acknowledge that the fabric that was woven into past decisions was not an inclusive fabric. But that doesn’t mean that’s how it has to be going forward. We can choose a different path.”

Some observers see the foundation for a different path in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, adopted the year the I-70 viaduct was completed over Valdez’s neighborhood.

In Texas, an agreement

In Texas, for example, residents of the predominantly African-American community of Hillcrest in Corpus Christi argued they would unfairly bear the brunt of a proposal to rebuild their city’s Harbor Bridge, which was built in 1959. They filed a complaint in 2015 under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits racial discrimination in projects that receive federal funding. Federal funds account for $291 million of the total estimate of $700 million for the Harbor Bridge project.

After an investigation by the Federal Highway Administration’s Office of Civil Rights, the Texas Department of Transportation agreed to increase the number of people it had planned to help move out of the neighborhood to make way for a new bridge. Other agencies pledged to ensure that low-income housing would be available for those displaced.

The construction of Interstate 37 in 1961 forced the relocation or demolition of homes in Hillcrest. Over the decades, refineries began to dominate the landscape.

“There’s no schools, there’s no stores, there’s no nothing,” says the Rev. Adam Carrington, whose Brooks AME Worship Center is in Hillcrest. He says that while residents feel a strong sense of community and connection, many decided the new bridge would bring more noise and pollution and make continuing to live in their homes impossible.

In the end, 160 to 170 residents were expected to be relocated, Mr. Carrington says. “My next battle is fighting for affordable housing,” he says.

Carrington says his community did not feel it was being heard until the civil rights complaint was filed.

“There are other cities that are going through this elsewhere,’’ he says, adding his advice to them is to “keep protesting. You have to keep going. Don’t stop until you get the result you want.”

‘All of our … fights are connected’

In Denver, Candi CdeBaca lives in the Elyria-Swansea house that her grandparents once owned. Ms. CdeBaca says her parents fought the viaduct in the 1960s, but “they didn’t have civil rights to lean on.”

Now, “I feel like there is a movement across the country and all of our little fights are connected,’’ she says.

For its part, CDOT says the highway needs renovation and widening to increase safety and reduce traffic congestion. Public discussion of how to achieve that dates back more than a decade.

Community outreach efforts have been undertaken by officials who acknowledge highway construction in the 1950s and 1960s hurt Globeville, Elyria, and Swansea, and who are aware of their responsibilities under civil rights legislation.

Among the ideas considered was a suggestion that the viaduct be replaced with a tunnel. If I-70 could not be moved out of the neighborhood, at least it would not be seen, and the exhaust fumes and noise could be lessened. In 2014, CDOT announced a plan to remove the viaduct and route traffic 30-to-40 feet below street level in the Elyria-Swansea area. But only a portion of the route, about 1,000 feet, would be covered, in part because of concerns about ventilation.

CDOT spokeswoman Rebecca White said in an interview that she remembered the head of the Elyria Neighborhood Association, Tom Anthony, bringing homemade renderings of a tunnel to meetings. She calls the proposal “Tom Anthony light.”

Mr. Anthony, for his part, calls the proposal “dysfunctional.” He said the plan has merits, including reducing traffic exhaust near an elementary school. But it does not go far enough to address neighborhood concerns, in his view. 

Though the covered section will be topped with a 4-acre park, some fear that the lowered highway, which CdeBaca describes as a “gash,” will divide the neighborhood even more emphatically than the concrete columns that now support the viaduct.

In a city with an affordable housing problem, the plan also requires that 56 homes and 27 businesses be demolished.

Offers of help, viewed with skepticism

CDOT has promised money and help finding new places to live and work for the people who would be displaced, as well as $2 million to help develop affordable housing in Elyria and Swansea. The reconstruction plan also calls for CDOT to build two classrooms for Swansea Elementary.

CDOT also raised the possibility of easing proposed tolls’ impact on low-income drivers, perhaps by giving Globeville, Elyria, and Swansea residents pre-loaded payment devices. And it said a second cover could be added at some point in the future.

In July, CDOT launched a training center in the Elyria-Swansea area.

An agency more used to partnering with cement contractors is working with a technical college to help prepare neighborhood residents for jobs on the I-70 project and construction careers beyond that. A community development foundation was brought in to provide counselors who will work with trainees long-term to ensure that issues such as child care, housing, and transportation don’t derail them from a path to a better future.

“We haven’t really done this level of support or thoughtfulness about workforce development before,” says Ms. White, the CDOT spokeswoman. 

Ruben Sanchez, a 17-year-old aspiring engineer who has grown up in Swansea, is skeptical. When he was younger, he stayed at home with his two younger siblings while his mother attended meetings about plans for I-70. “They didn’t pay attention to the community’s desires,” he says. And efforts such as the job-training center strike Ruben as an attempt to buy support from some and thereby divide and weaken the neighborhood.

Kenneth Mondragon, whose family has lived in Globeville, looks back on the years of discussion. “They have these meetings,” he says. “There are so many meetings, you get burned out. You can voice your opinion. But they’re going to do what they’re going to do. You’re not going to get what you agreed on. It’s going to be less.”

But in what is called a record of decision, federal authorities say CDOT has provided “an unprecedented level of public involvement and tailored to the low-income minority populations of the project area to find ways to improve the project and lessen its impact.’’

Robert Steuteville, whose Congress for the New Urbanism campaigns to encourage better city planning, says conversation is key to bridging the disconnect between what officials hope they are accomplishing with community meetings and the reaction of people like Mr. Mondragon.

“People want assurances that the views of the residents are going to be taken into account,” says Mr. Steuteville, who edits the Congress for the New Urbanism’s journal. “You have to listen very carefully.”

In California, unintended consequences

Even when the community gets its say, the consequences can be unpredictable.

In 1989, an earthquake struck the Bay Area and brought down the Cypress Freeway. When it was built in the 1950s, the freeway isolated a 4-square-mile, largely African-American West Oakland neighborhood.

The California Transportation Department, Caltrans, originally proposed rebuilding the quake-toppled freeway where it stood. The community pushed back and was supported by city and county officials. Caltrans worked with them to devise a new route to the west that opened in 1998. Federal transportation officials point to the years-long project as proof of “the potential for a transportation agency to work together with citizens to accomplish an enormous task while helping to revitalize a community.”

Art Shanks remembers when the freeway made his Cypress neighborhood feel like “a prison without walls.” He took part in the conversations that led to the freeway being moved. Then he saw the gentrification sparked by revitalization. Now, few of the working-class African-American and Hispanic families who were once his neighbors can afford to live in Cypress.

As part of the Cypress project, Caltrans also funded a neighborhood job-training center that prepared local residents to work on the freeway reconstruction, much as Colorado highway officials are doing in Denver now. The Cypress center still operates today, with Mr. Shanks as its director. Over the past quarter century, Shanks says, it has trained more than 6,500 workers and also provided services such as drug rehabilitation and mental health counseling, as its scope expanded from people directly affected by the highway project to people in need across Alameda County.

Striking a balance

When the impact on the immediate community and larger transit needs need to be taken into account, “it’s challenging to strike the right balance,” says Ryan Gravel, an Atlanta-based designed and planner. “Especially when bad decisions have been made in the past and the options are expensive.”

Saying that “a new kind of city is emerging,” Mr. Gravel notes that the urban infrastructure projects of the 1950s and 1960s are nearing the end of their lifespan just as many Americans are reimagining what they want out of cities.

Gravel has seen his community embrace his idea for an Atlanta BeltLine, first sketched out in his master’s thesis. It would turn a railroad corridor that rings the heart of the city into a loop connecting dozens of neighborhoods with parks, foot and cycling paths, and streetcars.

For models elsewhere in the country, Gravel, author of “Where We Want to Live: Reclaiming Infrastructure for a New Generation of Cities,” points to New York’s High Line, a park in the sky built on old elevated railroad tracks, and Salt Lake City’s S-Line Greenway, which transformed an old freight line into a streetcar route, public plazas, art, walking paths, even a bocce court.

Planners acknowledge, though, that old infrastructure can’t just be abandoned. In Colorado, I-70 is a key route for east-west truck traffic and urbanite weekenders headed to ski in winters and hike in summers. CDOT said what it has learned working in Globeville, Elyria, and Swansea will inform future projects. White says community outreach efforts will continue, including events like one in which street artists – some from Globeville, Elyria, and Swansea – were commissioned to use the viaduct's underbelly as a canvas. The work will be demolished along with the viaduct.

The muralists said it’s normal for their work to be erased, that they have Instagram and their own websites to archive it. But the poignancy of creating something that will be torn down was not lost on them.

No longer towns, but still a community

Since the late 19^th century, an ethnic mosaic of laborers, factory workers, and families have made their homes in Globeville, Elyria, and Swansea. The neighborhoods were once independent towns: Globeville had the Globe Smelting and Refining Co. Elyria was a railroad and meatpacking hub. Swansea, known for its dairies, borrowed its name from a Welsh seaport where some of the first settlers started their voyage to America.

The dairy and groceries are gone, leaving a food desert. Globeville still has the National Western complex, home of an annual rodeo and cattle auction that has drawn visitors for more than a century. A Superfund site that resulted from the smelting was largely cleaned up by 2014. The neighborhoods are a mix of residential and industrial, with waste management and bottling businesses and, more recently, marijuana production houses scattered among the homes. An abandoned elementary school, once home to a community theater, is now being used as part of a housing and job-training complex to help military veterans who have been homeless.

For all the turmoil of the past and the uncertainty over the future, a community spirit endures.

Valdez, at 78 still running the liquor store her husband bought in the neighborhood decades ago, calls customers “sweetheart” and greets them with compliments about their hair. They call her Miss V. She is known for buying lunch for those she knows can’t make the necessary trip out of the neighborhood to shop for food.

Valdez says she will be retiring soon but plans to continue living nearby no matter what I-70 brings.

“I’m used to the neighborhood,” she says. “I’m used to the people. I take care of them and they take care of me.”

At the height of her career, Antonia Santiago Amador, or La Chana – a self-taught prodigy from an impoverished gitana (Gypsy) family – was the most acclaimed flamenco dancer of her day. She headlined every show in Spain; graced stages from London to Paris to Buenos Aires; and stole the heart of Peter Sellers, who promised to take her to Hollywood after featuring her in his 1967 film “The Bobo.”

“God wanted me to dance,” she says with the fervor of a Southern Baptist preacher and the confidence of an artist under no illusion of her talent.

But then, at just 33 years old, she disappeared from the spotlight. Her husband-cum-manager, jealous of her success and the attention that came with it, she says, forced her into early retirement before leaving her destitute.

It would take another four decades – and the painstaking efforts of a young filmmaker bent on bringing La Chana’s story to the big screen – for the once-fabled dancer to return to her beloved stage. As Lucija Stojevic’s film, “La Chana,” sweeps through Europe racking up awards, La Chana is getting a bittersweet taste of restored acclaim.

Amid an awards season all too conscious of female artists’ marginalization and abuse within the entertainment industry, La Chana’s story – both the movie’s making and its titular heroine’s – is an example of how women can find success in a male-dominated industry when it would otherwise silence them.

Reinventing herself

“[Dance] is something she has naturally inside her that people tried to shut out. And how many women are being shut out all over the world, constantly?” Ms. Stojevic asks, hunched over a tea in a Barcelona cafe on a cold and gray winter afternoon. She would know: When the film’s production began in 2012, the financial crisis was in full swing, and potential sponsors kept assuring Stojevic that the film’s unusual subject – a 71-year-old female dancer – would never garner any interest.

“I had things said, like, ‘Why would I want to watch a film about a fat old woman?’ ” she recalls. “It’s a male-dominated industry for sure. Even documentary, where there are lot more women, it’s mostly men in the decision-making positions.”

Noon Films

La Chana smiles in a scene from the film 'La Chana' by Croatian filmmaker Lucija Stojevic.

But she persisted, ultimately launching her own independent production company, Noon Films, and eventually landing a few life-saving donations from female supporters of the arts. Completed in 2016, “La Chana,” landed a nomination for best documentary at Europe’s equivalent of the Oscars, the European Film Awards, this past December. Its American debut is set for this spring.

The documentary is both an ode to La Chana’s unparalleled talent and how, in the twilight of her years, she’s reinventing herself to reclaim the stage decades after an abusive relationship put an end to her career.

“God is granting me a final five minutes for all the years that were taken away from me,” La Chana says.

Her memories from that lost era are intact. Tucked in a tiger-striped velour robe in her mountainside home outside Barcelona, La Chana remembers when, four decades ago, Salvador Dalí used to come watch her dance, his pet leopards in tow. “Madre mía, I was terrified of them,” she recalls, waving her second cigarette of the hour before her. “I never wanted him to come, but he always did.”

The film only ever alludes to the physical and emotional abuse La Chana suffered at her ex-husband’s hands. Stojevic grappled with a paradox all too familiar to women telling stories in the #MeToo age. At a time when the onus is on sharing narratives of mistreatment, she wondered how to tell a story of abuse without turning her subject into a victim.

“I had a lot of doubts about how to deal with the question of abuse,” she concedes. “And the film is not about that. It’s a turning point in the film, but it’s not about abuse. She’s not a victim.”

'A final five minutes'

The film cuts back and forth between interviews with La Chana today – typically chair-bound, due to her bad knees – and footage of her performances back in her heyday. Her dancing is arresting: Her heels pound against the ground in rapid-fire succession, the force of which make her lips tremble and teeth clatter as if she were whispering a prayer or spell; strands of her then full mane web across her forehead and temple, stuck there by sweat.

“Dancing has been the only place where I’ve had total freedom,” La Chana says.

If the film doesn’t focus on the details of La Chana’s former husband’s abuse, the way it presents the passage of time is the evidence of her robbed youth and all the years she could have been dancing.

Though proud of the film’s success, Stojevic is conscious of the limitations that come with an independent production. “At the end of the day, a film has to be seen,” she says. “You have to engage with the industry, because they’re the ones who are still monopolizing audiences.”

Reuters

A fixed odds betting terminal in London, Britain, offers some steps to gamblers to help them avoid excessive betting.

Nearly four months after the Las Vegas massacre, investigators have released a preliminary report about the shooter, Stephen Paddock. His motives remain unclear but officials can’t help but point to one possible factor: his extensive gambling in the days before the Oct. 1 killings and the loss of a significant amount of his wealth.

Investigating his motives remains important in order to prevent a similar mass shooting. With 58 people left dead, this massacre at a country music festival was the worst in modern American history. If problem gambling had something to do with it, then a big spotlight should shine on how to boost efforts to help problem gamblers. Last June, a gambling addict in the Philippines killed dozens by setting fire to a casino.

By his own admission in a 2013 deposition, Paddock was “the biggest video poker player in the world.” The retired accountant could wager thousands of dollars during overnight binges. Such behavior suggests it was not innocent pastime.  While the casino industry has ways to catch compulsive and addicted players, its record is mixed and its commercial interests can get in the way. Casinos are designed more to assist gambling than to curtail it.

If Paddock was overcome with rage over his gambling losses, were there people and services that should have offered a welcoming hand?

A surprising number of gamblers actually request help or offer to be blocked from a gaming site. In a large survey of gamblers by the British group Citizens Advice, more than 3 in 4 gamblers said they had tried self-exclusion.

“Whilst the majority of those who had tried it found it effective to some extent, 19 percent found it not at all effective,” states the group’s Jan. 23 report, titled “Out of Luck: An exploration of the causes and impacts of problem gambling.” In Britain, the online gambling industry plans to improve its procedures for self-exclusion this spring while the government pushes for protections on gaming machines.

Nearly half of the gamblers in the survey who had handed over control of their finances to other people found it to be an effective deterrent. Many others welcomed blocking software offered on online gambling sites and said it was useful.

“It is essential that gamblers and affected others are aware of the more in-depth help that is available to them and that they know how to access it,” the report recommends.

The reasons for offering more help were made clear by the survey.

For every problem gambler, between six and 10 additional people (such as friends, family or co-workers) are directly affected, the report states. Two-thirds of gamblers reported mental distress and high debts. A fifth of families with a problem gambler have been unable to afford food at times.

The top factor in problem gambling, according to the report, is “ease of access to and lack of restrictions on gambling.” Helping a gambler to self-exclude requires a number of actors to step up. The gambling industry can be better at using data and technology to identify and help problem gamblers. Creditors can spot rising debt and suggest counseling. Governments can be more aggressive in regulating the industry.

Problems gamblers are often seen as helpless in making a choice to curb or end their behavior. That is a questionable assumption. Self-control is possible for gamblers. The Las Vegas massacre might yet become a lesson in making that point more well known.