“Pathways to Equity” Event Recap

A resilient city is a just city.

Part 2 of our Recovery and Resilience Series on January 26 featured four dynamic community leaders from across New York State, all of whom are tackling systemic inequities from a variety of angles. Such work is more important now than ever as the trio of crises brought on by this pandemic—health, educational, economic—have underscored the many inequity gaps in our society. Those who lacked a support system or access to affordable healthcare or lived in overcrowded conditions are also those who have suffered the most. Black Americans are dying from Covid-19 at twice the rate as White Americans. A new study showed that 2020 brought the sharpest rise in the poverty rate since the 1960s.

Yet there is also reason to be hopeful. This past summer we saw the largest civil rights protests in U.S. history. New York State recently passed the landmark Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, which requires that 40% of the overall benefits of spending on clean energy be directed towards disadvantaged communities. This is an incredible development, and one fueled directly from grassroots environmental justice organizations like PUSH Buffalo.

And one of the many reassuring shifts which the new Biden administration brings is an early and extraordinary emphasis on equity in their overall agenda. In a recent NY Times cover article about these new equity measures, Cecilia Rouse, the nominee to lead the Council of Economic Advisors said, “Racial equity is not a silo in and of itself. It is woven into all of these policy efforts.” Indeed, this is the challenge of all conversations about inclusion and equity—not to simply have them as one offs, to check a box, but to be ongoing, embedded, and critical to the very foundation of all of our work.

Our panelists represented each of the four upstate metro areas along the Erie Canal corridor. One of the tenets of our work at The Future of Small Cities Institute is a belief that creating a network of knowledge-sharing across cities is critical to establishing long term, resilient communities Together, we are more than the sum of our parts. Good work is being done everywhere—we just need to link up the stars into a constellation.

Scenes from PUSH Buffalo’s Green Development Zone

RAHWA GHIRMATZION, Executive Director of PUSH Buffalo, described the incredible work her organization has done over the last fifteen years around improving affordable housing, expanding local hiring opportunities, and actualizing racial and environmental justice in Buffalo's West Side. PUSH Buffalo is built around the Just Transition framework, which envisions a transition away from an extractive, exploitative economy to a regenerative, localized economy of co-creation. This transition is reflected in the organizational strategies of PUSH, with a "bottom up" approach, informed by the wisdom of the local residents. "We ask them what it is they want, where they live," said Ms. Ghirmatzion.

She showed us the PUSH's Green Development Zone, a nation leading environmental justice project founded in 2008, which combines green affordable home construction, community-based renewable energy, housing weatherization, green jobs training, and vacant land restoration.

"In this work we're thinking in an intersectional way," said Ms. Ghirmatzion. "We're thinking about resiliency, the jobs of the future, the ways we can work with natural systems and green infrastructure in legacy cities."

School 77

PUSH Buffalo's flagship housing project is School 77, a repurposing and transformation of a vacant 1927 public school. After engaging with over 1000 community members about what the building should become, PUSH turned the school into 30 energy efficient affordable senior housing units along with room for multiple businesses including a theater company, youth programing, and the new headquarters for PUSH Buffalo. The roof features NYS's first 100% affordable community solar project. Much of the buildings design was co-created by residents and community members.

"It’s not just about what's happening right now, it’s about what is the world we’d like to build using strategies of engaging communities like ours. We may be poor, but we’re resilient. We have local knowledge and local expertise. When you think about the term equity… these communities are underestimated and underinvested in… but when you invest in us, you get what’s happening on the West Side of Buffalo."

WADE NORWOOD, CEO of Common Ground Health in Rochester, narrated a complex pattern of socioeconomic disenfranchisement in the Finger Lakes Region that included plenty of both rural and urban poverty that crossed color lines. In many cases, such poverty translates to dramatic reduction in life expectancy. Common Ground Health has a long history of unpacking the intersecting factors that contribute to heath and wellness outcomes and then organizing innovative and collaborative community solutions.

"We see that the nature of poverty in Upstate New York and its effect on people's mental and emotional health is not due to one thing," said Mr. Norwood. "It's really this essence of one thing on top of another."

Community health educators in salons and barbershops.

In order to engage black and minority communities, Common Ground Health has tapped into the existing social infrastructure, including salons and barbershops, as venues for delivering important health information. Their efforts have had many positive, measurable effects, including a 43% drop in dangerously high blood pressure, and in some parts of the region they've eliminated the racial disparity in such health metrics. Said Mr. Norwood: "Oppressed people, whatever their level of formal education, as Ella Baker said, have the ability to understand and interpret the world around them, to see the world for what it is and to move to transform it."

Their health interventions also include city design as well, including a Complete Streets Makeover, successfully slowing traffic and creating expanded public space, much of the design guided by the vision of local residents.

"People are the pathway," said Mr. Norwood. "We believe data and opportunity are the light that can be brought into community conversations. If you give people light, people will find the way."

Common Ground Health’s Complete Streets Makeover in Rochester, NY.

Dr. JUHANNA ROGERS, VP of Racial Equity and Social Impact at Centerstate CEO in Syracuse, has in the past worked to transform communities through street-level, door-by-door engagement, trying to shift the perception in minority communities that the chamber of commerce can both be an asset and an ally in their everyday lives. Her role at Centerstate now is "working to challenge our business leadership within Central New York to think about the intentional ways to disrupt systemic injustice and racial inequities. How to dismantle the existing systems and recreate them."

Dr. Rogers is also a entrepreneur and critical race scholar. "I bring all of these lenses with me," she said. Much of her work is guided by the Sankofa Principle, arising from Ghanian history: "As we think about where we are heading, we have to look back."

She uses the complex history of oppression in the United States, like the Tuskegee Experiments or the Tulsa Race Massacre, to help explicate and unpack the enduring inequities in our communities as well as our workforce and business leadership, where minorities are often underrepresented or don't survive the promotion ladder.

"If we don't address the fundamental inequities in our workforce, we will continue to have growing repercussions on our economy," said Dr. Rogers.

Dr. Rogers and Centerstate CEO are rolling out a host of tools to help businesses make the transition to embracing racial and social equity, including guided dialogue sessions, leadership training for companies eager to transform their practice and combat systemic racism, and a CEO's Equity Toolkit that contains an equity pledge that Centerstate is hoping to nationalize. Such resources have the capacity to transform the business landscape of a small city like Syracuse and beyond.

Unpacking the lessons of the past to explain enduring, systemic racial injustice.

"If we don't address the fundamental inequities in our workforce, we will continue to see growing repercussions on our economy," said Dr. Rogers.

Dr. Rogers and Centerstate CEO are rolling out a host of tools to help businesses make the transition to embracing racial and social equity, including guided dialogue sessions, leadership training for companies eager to transform their practice and combat systemic racism, and a CEO's Equity Toolkit that contains an equity pledge that Centerstate is hoping to nationalize. Such resources have the capacity to transform the business landscape of a small city like Syracuse and beyond.

ADAM ZARAKO, Executive Director of the Albany County Land Bank, presented the unique toolkit that a Land Bank offers to addressing vacant and abandoned properties and both the direct and indirect costs on a community's wellbeing. These negative externalities can run deep. "There are correlations between the prevalence of vacant properties and mental health, chronic illness, and even childhood literacy rates," said Mr. Zaranko.

How did we get here? Mr. Zaranko traced the history of Redlining in our cities in the 1930s, which designated certain neighborhoods "hazardous" and others "desirable." Many minorities could only secure loans or buy properties in hazardous areas, thus codifying segregational practices that would be further exacerbated by a migration out of cities to the suburbs by affluent home buyers from 1950-2010. In many cases, the properties that the Land Bank acquires corresponds block-for-block with the nearly 100 year old redlining maps. In Albany, NY systemic discrimatory practices like these has contributed to a nearly 50% homeownership gap between White and Blank communities, among the worst in the nation.

Redlining map of Albany (1938)

One way to improve neighborhood stability is to foster intergenerational wealth by providing more opportunities for affordable homeownership," said Mr. Zaranko.

The Land Bank model can help disrupt these cycles. Unlike a governmental or private model of property sale and acquisition guided by maximum revenue, the Land Bank can straddle that middle ground and overcome various barriers to homeownership through inclusive neighborhood programs, education, flexible financing, and utilizing local contractors, including through their newly launched Equitable Ownership Program.

Mr. Zaranko also touched upon the shift that the Covid -19 pandemic will bring to the Land Bank. "Unlike in 2008, in which we saw almost entirely residential real estate," said Mr. Zaranko. "We'll be seeing unprecedented foreclosed commercial and industrial properties coming out of the Covid-19 shutdown. A lot of small businesses." This shift will create plenty of challenges but it could also present opportunities in how small cities might reimagine and repurpose commercial space as community anchors.

In closing, Mr. Zaranko challenged us to reimagine the paradigm of vacant properties as a barrier:

Overall, there are 26 Land Banks (and growing) in New York State. They are a key art of the puzzle in fostering equitable and sustainable small legacy cities in the future.

—

The question and answer session following the presentations was particularly lively, with a capping moment that gave me chills. (Always nice to have a preacher as one of your panelists!)

Here is the full video of the event: