In the 1950s, Debbie Montgomery, a former St. Paul City Council member and the first woman hired by the St. Paul Police Department, watched her parents thrive in the city's Rondo neighborhood. The flourishing Black family owned a multilevel home and a pair of lots, crucial acquisitions toward building generational wealth, before local planners used federal money to cut through one of the state's most prominent and affluent Black communities to create Interstate 94. "It decimated the village," Montgomery told me during our conversation last week. "We don't have a village anymore. We've got community but we don't have a village. We lost that."