Watch the YouTube video, here.

A formal connection between the Center for Urban Studies and the Community Health Equity Research Institute at UB is sharpening the focus on Buffalo’s built environment and its impact on the city’s social determinants of health.

Read the full article from University at Buffalo, here.

BUFFALO, N.Y. – To more powerfully address and reverse Buffalo’s entrenched health disparities, a University at Buffalo center dedicated to regenerating underdeveloped neighborhoods is joining the Community Health Equity Research Institute at UB.

In case you missed the panel discussion for the Center’s most recent report, “The Harder We Run”, here is a zoom recording of the panel discussion: https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/0ZTy_hrHh_hqxZVMIgkWB4uNQ_l8ui_1B_l8cLEebdag-hszVI4a_4gvWQH8l-w0.HAXa-XGMiYa3CkDX

Reporter Mark Scheer interviews Henry-Louis Taylor, director of the Center for Urban Studies, on “The Harder We Run: The State of Black Buffalo in 1990 and the Present,” a 2021 report to the Buffalo Center for Health Equity.

By Henry-Louis Taylor, Jr., Jin-Kyu Jung, and Evan Dash

The U.B. Center for Urban Studies is releasing its study, The Harder We Run: The State of Black Buffalo in 1990 and the Present, by Henry-Louis Taylor, Jr., Jin-Kyu Jung, and Evan Dash. Thirty-one years ago, in 1990, the U.B. Center released its study, African Americans and the Rise of Buffalo’s Post-Industrial City, 1940 to Present. This investigation was the most comprehensive study ever conducted on Black Buffalo. This past summer, the Buffalo Health Equity Center asked the U.B. Center to use the 1990 Black Buffalo Study and answer the question, “Has Black Buffalo progressed since 1990?” The U.B. Center took on the project but did not request any funding. The report, The Harder We Run, answers the question, “Has Black Buffalo progressed since 1990?” The report tells us what happened to Black Buffalo over the past thirty-one years, why it happened, and what we can do about it.

Read the full article from Buffalo News here.

Read the full article from Buffalo News here.

Read the full article from Buffalo News here.

How have case numbers changed over time? How many people have been vaccinated? Find out with these charts and maps, updated weekly.

Read the full article from Buffalo News here.

See how unemployment has changed over time, plus how small businesses are doing in our community, and more economic indicators with these regularly updated charts and graphs.

Read the full article from Buffalo News here.

UB President Satish K. Tripathi on Friday announced that the university will host in-person commencement exercises for members of the Class of 2020 in the fall, nearly a year and a half after they were supposed to be feted.

Read the full article from Buffalo News here.

Read the full article from Buffalo News here.

Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz plans to spend $300,000 in federal stimulus money to attack the racial disparity in health outcomes. It’s a good start. The challenge for Poloncarz: Ensure the spending actually narrows the gap.

In Erie County, African American children are more than twice as likely to die within a year after birth, according to the County Health Rankings report, and twice as likely to die before they turn 18. African American girls are 2 1/2 times more likely than whites to give birth in their late teens.

Underlying all of that is poverty. Nearly half of African American children in Erie County are living in poverty – five times the rate among white children.

Read the full article from Buffalo News here.

“That’s a joke: $500 for 1,600 families that are probably making about $15,000 or $16,000 dollars a year?” Taylor said.

Read the full article from Buffalo News here.

The 25-point proposal, to be released today, revolves around “helping senior citizens, small businesses, and taxpayers,” her campaign said. Her “signature item,” she added, is allowing senior citizens on a fixed income and small business owners to pay property taxes monthly, instead of annually.

Read the full article from Buffalo News here.

The Buffalo Police Department held a community outreach called Taking It to the Streets at New Hope Baptist Church,  across from Schiller Park, Tuesday, July 20, 2021. It provided a chance for the police to interact with the public. Police officials and various officers were on hand as well as  community groups and services. They plan on doing similar events around the city throughout the rest of the summer.

Read the full article from WKBW Buffalo here.

Thousands took the streets in Cuba last week to protest against the government. In Buffalo on Sunday around 50 residents took to the streets to march in solidarity.

Read the full article from Buffalo News here.

While Covid-19 drew renewed attention to the local health disparities issue, the nature of the disparity has been known for a long time. Erie County fares worse on many state and national averages when it comes to premature deaths, lack of preventative care and childhood poverty among African American residents.

Read the full article from Buffalo News here.

Read the full article from Buffalo News here.

Read the full article from Buffalo News here.

Read the full article from Buffalo News here.

Noting a series of alarming incidents around the country, members of a citizens police oversight panel that reports to the Buffalo Common Council on Wednesday questioned Police Commissioner Byron C. Lockwood on the steps being taken to prevent a white supremacist from infiltrating the department’s ranks.

Read the full article from Buffalo News here.

Buffalo is slated to receive $331 million in federal stimulus funding. Half of the windfall arrived last month. The second payment is expected to come next year. All of the funds must be spent within the next four years. The Common Council will hold a public meeting for the community to weigh in on the spending.

Read the full article from Buffalo News here.

The vaccination campaign is running up against the independence prized in rural areas, vaccine hesitancy, lingering animosity over the governor’s public health restrictions and the continuing spread of misinformation about Covid-19. Those and other factors have contributed to the low vaccination rate in Allegany and elsewhere, experts say.

Read the full article from Buffalo News here.

Walton grew up poor in one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, but she beat Buffalo’s four-term mayor, Byron W. Brown, with votes – and a lot of campaign help – from professionals in the city’s wealthier enclaves. And now Walton and her supporters are working to defeat Brown’s write-in bid in November and create a progressive city administration led by a self-proclaimed democratic socialist.

Read the full article from Jacobin here.

As clichéd as it sounds, Buffalo’s historic June 2021 primary, in which democratic socialist India Walton won a major upset over four-term incumbent Byron Brown, is something of a tale of two cities. And it’s the same tale that Buffalonians have discussed for generations: the “East-West divide” carved by Main Street through the heart of the city.

Read the full article from Buffalo News here.

The expanded museum, at a cost of $168 million, is expected to reopen in fall 2022, three years since the museum closed in November 2019. When it reopens, the museum will become known as the Buffalo AKG Art Museum. AKG stands for the museum’s major contributors: John J. Albright, Seymour H. Knox Jr. and Jeffrey E. Gundlach.

Read the full article from Buffalo News here.

Read the full article from Buffalo News here.

Walton cruised to victory last month by emphasizing new ways to solve old problems, especially in policing. She reiterated on Wednesday her plan to reallocate $7.5 million of the Police Department budget to programs that link usual subjects of police attention to mental health services. Her Wednesday event also marked the first of many in which she is expected to highlight her proposals, backed by high-profile figures like Williams. Others with similar socialist philosophies – such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of the Bronx and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont – are mentioned as other potential campaign allies.

Read the full article from Buffalo News here.

Read the full article from WKBW Buffalo here.

The City of Buffalo and the Buffalo Sewer Authority are providing relief to the more than 30,000 households that fell behind on water and sewer bills during the past 16 months. Of the $361 million the city received through the American Rescue Plan, $13 million of it will be used to wash away debt for low-income families who faced financial hardships as a result of the pandemic.

Read the full article from Buffalo News here.

Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz first announced on May 11 that the county had contracted with Buffalo Homecare and the Visiting Nursing Association of Western New York to deliver and administer the vaccine to the homes of eligible residents who request it, regardless of whether they are homebound.

Read the full article from Buffalo News here.

At least 20% of federal American Rescue Plan money must be used in the next three years to deal with learning loss by students due to the Covid-19 pandemic. That amounts to $63 million in Erie and Niagara counties, and for many school districts, summer school will be one of their tools.

Read the full article from Buffalo News here.

A self-proclaimed democratic socialist who vows to “put people first,” she said her life – growing up poor on the East Side, being a single mother of four boys, being a nurse and a community organizer and having firsthand experience being arrested by Buffalo police – has prepared her for this moment as she faces a write-in campaign from an emboldened Brown in the general election on Nov. 2.

Read the full article from Investigate Post here.

Ken Kruly is a political analyst for WGRZ-TV, publisher of Politics and Other Stuff and author of Money In Politics for Investigative Post. In an analysis for Investigative Post, Kruly compared Brown’s performance this year to the results of his previous four mayoral campaigns. He found Brown’s share of the vote dropped in six of the nine Common Council districts compared to four years ago.

Read the full article from Buffalo News here.

“She will prioritize addressing the root causes of crime such as concentrated poverty and lack of living-wage jobs,” according to her platform on her campaign website, and she would emphasize “harm reduction and restorative justice programs rather than punitive measures.”

Read the full article from The New York Times here.

That danger is real. Polls reveal that both Black and white voters reject the slogan “Defund the police.” Yet Walton has shown that even in a city where shootings have surged a staggering 116 percent so far this year, a socialist promising police reform can win.

Read the full article here.

Gone was the aloof incumbent seemingly self-assured of an unprecedented fifth term leading Buffalo. Instead, Brown launched a “do over” candidacy, passionately announcing in the Statler Terrace Room a write-in campaign for the Nov. 2 general election to reclaim the office he preliminarily lost to newcomer India B. Walton on June 22.

Read the full aricle here.

She’d beaten Brown by 1,507 votes, according to the unofficial tally by the Erie County Board of Elections. That’s more than the absentee ballots left to be counted. She won almost 52 percent of the vote to Brown’s 45 percent. Le’Candice Durham, a City Hall employee whose campaign seemed designed to siphon votes from Walton to benefit Brown, got 650 votes, or just over 3 percent.

Read the full article from Buffalo News, here.

Buffalo Mayor Byron W. Brown has said he will not sign expedited legislation approved by the Common Council to eliminate school zone speed cameras because council members did not follow the proper process.

Read the full article from The Buffalo News here.

Read the full article from UBNow here.

“This victory reflected the people’s power. It was made possible by the millions who drew a line in the sand and said ‘enough.’ But history teaches us, the retrogressive forces in this country will resist. Even as they say, ‘justice was served, and this is the beginning of a new beginning,’ they will block efforts to defund the police and recreate policing as we know it. These same forces will fight reforms to improve the quality of neighborhood life among Blacks, Indigenous and people of color. They will work tirelessly to maintain the status quo. And the fightback will continue. The people will build on this ‘shining moment.’ The people will continue to the quest for that day when BIPOC will cry ‘free at last, free at last.’ This victory will cause them to keep the faith and raise the battle cry, ‘Remember George Floyd. Power to the People.’”

Read the full article from The Buffalo News here.

Read the full article from The Buffalo News here.

“Six out of nine city lawmakers voted Tuesday to get rid of Buffalo’s school zone speed cameras by September, but it is not a done deal. Their patience is running out.…According to the City Charter, Mayor Byron W. Brown has 10 days to sign the legislation or veto it. If he vetoes it, the legislation goes back to the Council, which then has 30 days to vote to override the veto. If Brown does not act then, the legislation becomes law.”

Read the full article from UBNow here.

“‘The partnership between the task force and the Community Health Equity Research Institute was instrumental in partially mitigating the deadly impact of the pandemic in communities of color in Buffalo,’ Murphy says. The vision of the website was guided chiefly by contributions from three members of the institute’s Steering Committee: Henry Louis Taylor Jr., professor of urban and regional planning, School of Architecture and Planning, and associate director of the institute; Kelly Wofford, community engagement coordinator in UB’s Center for Nursing Research in the School of Nursing; and Christopher St. Vil, assistant professor in the School of Social Work.”

Read the full article from Democrat and Chronicle here.

“Henry Louis Taylor Jr., director of the University at Buffalo Center for Urban Studies,said expungement ‘begins to close the road from the neighborhood to the jail.’ But to create substantive change, he said, the funding set aside in the legislation must include connecting people who were incarcerated to job opportunities and other resources, as well as repairing harms done to communities by marijuana prohibition.The changes, he said, that need to come from funding have to be transformative and may include items such as housing subsidies for communities and cooperatives.Importantly,he said, the community should have a say in how the money is spent.”

Read the full story from WIVB here.

“Experts say the racial slur is meant to describe people who are mixed race and it dates back to slavery and the practice of raping female slaves. ‘Rape was institutionalized, and it meant that women were the plaything of the plantation owner to be taken whenever he chose to. As I always say, when I look in the mirror I see the color of rape,’ said Henry Louis Taylor Jr., UB director of the university’s Center for urban studies. ‘It’s a reminder of a time when African American women had no control over their bodies.'”

Read the full article from The Buffalo News here.

“The report calls for the city’s Commission on Citizens’ Rights and Community Relations to undergo a community planning process with residents from all neighborhoods to improve interactions with the police. The plan also calls on the commission to provide a survey on its website for residents to complete any time they interact with police officers.”

Read the full article from The Buffalo News here.

“Buffalo kicked off a pilot program Tuesday with the demolition of a dilapidated house in the Hamlin Park neighborhood to make way for a new house to be built within 12 months…The program seeks to replace vacant, blighted structures with affordable houses for new homeowners. The city’s Division of Real Estate identifies a community housing partner for construction of a new home within 12 months from the date of demolition.”

Read the full story from The Buffalo News here.

“‘The Erie County Sheriff’s Office has an abysmal track record of complying with the requirement to notify the commission of incidents that jeopardize the safety and well-being of individuals in custody, facility staff and the community,’ Commission of Correction Chairman Allen Riley said in the written statement.

Read the full article from NBCBLK here.

“An investigation into the official response to Daniel Prude’s police suffocation death last year in Rochester, New York, is faulting the city’s mayor and former police chief for keeping critical details of the case secret for months and lying to the public about what they knew. The report, commissioned by Rochester’s city council and made public Friday, said Mayor Lovely Warren lied at a September press conference when she said it wasn’t until August that she learned officers had physically restrained Prude during the March 23, 2020, arrest that led to his death.”

Read the full article from AP News here.

“‘Black workers have historically been the backbone of this country, its institutions, and innovations,’ said Patrisse Cullors, the executive director of Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, in a statement. ‘Therefore, it is fully within our rights and dignity that we be treated and compensated fairly. Just as we have the right to live, we also have the right to work.'”

Read the full article from The Buffalo News here.

Read the full article from The Buffalo News here.

“In New York, white residents have received a disproportionate share of vaccines in each of the state’s 10 regions and in all five counties of Western New York. That disparity is especially dramatic in Erie County: While white residents make up just over 81% of the population, they account for almost 91% of the newly vaccinated. Black residents, on the other hand, represent 5.7% of all vaccinated people (compared to 13.1% of the population), while Asian residents make up 2.5% of those vaccinated (3.6% of the population) and Hispanic residents make up 2.2% (4.5% of the population).”

Read the full article from The Buffalo News here.

“The nonprofit developers proposing 50 units of affordable housing in Buffalo’s Fruit Belt neighborhood asked the Buffalo Planning Board to delay consideration of the project for another month, as they reach out to the community to resolve concerns and resistance. Dunkirk-based Southern Tier Environments for Living and the Fruit Belt Community Land Trust want to construct a 33-unit apartment building at 326 High St., at the corner of Peach Street, along with five three-bedroom duplexes, one two-bedroom duplex and five single-family homes on scattered sites.”

Read the full article from Diverse Issues in Education here.

“Every sphere — academe, government, business, sports, religion, legal, etcetera — ‘must commit to changing the way they look and function,’ Dr. Lori Martin, interim director of Louisiana State University’s African and African American Studies Program, told Diverse via email. ‘They must be prepared to disrupt and dismantle the policies and practices that perpetuate anti-Black sentiments and demonstrate a commitment that is lifelong.'”

Read the full article on the UB School of Architecture and Planning website here.

“As an advocate for centering the work of black heterogeneous communities, [Taylor] urges planners to delve into the mundane, the day-to-day realities of a single mother raising two children, and the varying challenges of multi-generational Black households. In the context of the pandemic and the fight against health disparities he plays a pivotal role as associate director of The Community Health Equity Research Institute, which brings UB faculty members and community leaders in Buffalo to address the disproportionate impacts of COVID-19 on communities of color.​”

Read the full article from The New York Times  here.

“‘The criminal justice system has demonstrated an unwillingness to hold law enforcement officers accountable in the unjustified killing of unarmed African-Americans,’ [Attorney General] James said, her voice growing emotional at a news conference at Aenon Missionary Baptist Church in Rochester. ‘What binds these cases is the tragic loss of life in circumstances in which the death could be avoided.'”

Read the full article from Parade here.

Being aware that implicit racism exists is crucial, Dr. Taylor says. But, he adds, it’s also important for people to “engage in a lot of self-education.” “I think every white person should have a book on Blacks and Latinx that they read,” Dr. Taylor says. He specifically cites the book, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation, as a good option. Dr. Taylor also urges businesses and schools to host workshops on the issues of racism and bias. “The level of awareness about these kinds of issues is terrible,” he says.

Read the full article from Buffalo News here.

“‘We can find no evidence that these speed zone cameras are saving people’s lives, making life safer and making the world better for the children anywhere, not just here in Buffalo. There’s no data to support that. But what there is data to support … revenue generation,’ Taylor said. ‘It’s nothing more than a revenue grabbing scheme … designed to bilk the African American community from resources.'”

Read the full article from UBNow here.

“Cornel West, Harvard University professor, bestselling author, political activist and public intellectual, will speak via Zoom at “Beyond the Knife,” the initiative’s first public event, from 4-5 p.m. on Feb. 18. This event is free and open to the public. Register and submit questions for the question-and-answer session online.”

Read the full article from Buffalo News here.

“University at Buffalo professor Henry Louis Taylor Jr., who narrates the film, contributes considerably to the documentary. Taylor rivetingly condemns Americans’ fateful choice after the Civil War to support ex-Confederates’ interests rather than build up Black Americans’ opportunities, and provides a poignant concluding call to pursue social justice.”

Read the full article from The Guardian here.

“The Black Lives Matter movement has been nominated for the 2021 Nobel peace prize for the way its call for systemic change has spread around the world. In his nomination papers, the Norwegian MP Petter Eide said the movement had forced countries outside the US to grapple with racism within their own societies. ‘I find that one of the key challenges we have seen in America, but also in Europe and Asia, is the kind of increasing conflict based on inequality,’ Eide said. ‘Black Lives Matter has become a very important worldwide movement to fight racial injustice.’”

Read the full article from Pittsburgh-Post Gazette here.

“‘In this case, I would argue that the city is a slumlord that is consciously participating in the underdevelopment of the community,’ said Henry Louis Taylor Jr., a professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning and associate director of the Community Health Equity Research Institute at the University of Buffalo.”

Read the full article from MGIC Connects here.

“‘Looking back, who served as role models to you, and what did you learn from them?‘ ‘One of my role models is Dr. Henry Taylor, director of the UB Center of Urban Studies, because of his strong commitment to urban policy and his advocacy for building civic capacity to effect community change. Another is R. Donahue Peebles, who inspires me because of his success in real estate and his understanding of the role of politics in development and building wealth.'”

Read the full article from Pittsburgh Post-Gazette here.

“Henry Louis Taylor, Jr., whose research at the University of Buffalo focuses on distressed urban neighborhoods and the health of those who live there, said the trajectory of Homewood follows a familiar pattern. ‘In American cities and suburbs, the way you increase residential land value under the current system in the country [is] as whiteness and social-class exclusivity increases, values go up. As Blackness and people of color increase and social inclusivity increases, values go down,’ he said.”

Read the full article from Buffalo News here.

“The governor said there’s ‘understandable’ cynicism and distrust of the health care system in the Black community because of previous injustices. But the governor said such distrust isn’t justified when it comes to the Covid-19 vaccine. He said he has been calling pastors and other leaders in African American communities around the state about it, and the state plans to roll out an advertising campaign aimed at building trust in the vaccine among Black New Yorkers.”

Read the full article from The New York Times here.

“The police department in Rochester, N.Y., released body-camera footage on Sunday that showed a 9-year-old girl being handcuffed and pepper-sprayed by police officers who had responded to a family disturbance call. During the incident, which occurred Friday afternoon, officers restrained the girl, pushing her into the snow in order to handcuff her, while she screamed repeatedly for her father, the footage showed. At one point, an officer said, ‘You’re acting like a child.’ She responded, ‘I am a child.'”

Read the full article from WBEN here.

BUFFALO (WBEN) – “The one thing we can say for sure in this is that the big loser last night was the pollsters,” said Professor Jim Campbell, as a group of University at Buffalo experts held a virtual meeting to discuss Election Night and the election process as a whole.

“This was not supposed to be as close as it turned out to be in many states,” he continued.

Wisconsin turned out to be a very thin margin, as election officials continues to tally votes in a state where Democratic Nominee Joe Biden holds a lead. Prior to Tuesday night, it was anticipated that Biden would run away with Wisconsin, holding nearly a double-digit lead in some polls.

Watch the video and read the full article from Spectrum News here.

“This is a deeply, deeply divided country along ideological lines,” said Henry Louis Taylor, professor of urban planning.

“This was in some ways a referendum on President Trump and indicates how sharply polarized we are as a nation,” said James Campbell, professor of political science.

President Trump has threatened lawsuits to come over the voting process and collecting and counting of ballots in some states.

Election law expert James Gardner expects to see recounts and court cases to resolve this, but also wondered about the how the federal courts, including the United States Supreme Court, would handle the situation with objectivity.

Watch the video and read the full article from WKBW here.

“Call it a ‘post game breakdown’ of the 2020 election in Western New York by professors at the University at Buffalo.
The question – is traditionally blue Erie County becoming republican country?…
Professor Taylor says the Trump administration has caused a deep divide and that reveals far reaching racism.
‘This is Donald Trump’s America,’ Taylor stated.
Taylor also stated that he believes democrats have ‘no vision that excites people.'”

Read the full article from Housing Matters here.

“Evidence shows that government housing policies and individual practices created and sustain segregation between white and Black people and that segregation exacerbates racial wealth inequality, racial achievement gaps, and racial profiling. This 2017 study applies a “white racial frame” to explain the persistence of residential and school segregation, synthesizing more than 60 articles from the fields of sociology, economics, critical theory, and law. The authors’ frame reflects the theory that white people who hold power in the US purposefully maintain their dominance and perpetuate socioeconomic inequities based on race and ethnicity. By applying this frame, the authors shift focus from disparate outcomes by race and ethnicity to the (often white) lenders, police, educators, and politicians who shape structures of opportunity.”

Read the full article from WGRZ, here.

“The fact that this community-university partnership was able to mitigate the high mortality among African Americans in the first wave puts us in a position to build on that achievement during this coming flu season and a possible second wave,” said Tim Murphy, MD, SUNY Distinguished Professor in the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at UB and director of the Community Health Equity Research Institute and UB’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute “And it’s something that can be replicated in other communities.”

Read the full article from The New York Times, here.

“A Black man died of suffocation in Rochester, N.Y., after police officers who were taking him into custody put a hood over his head and then pressed his face into the pavement for two minutes, according to video and records released by his family and local activists on Wednesday. The man, Daniel Prude, 41, died on March 30, seven days after his encounter with the police, after being removed from life support, his family said.”

Read the full article from Salon, here.

“‘Without rent forgiveness, tenants will ultimately have to pay back rent along with any late-fees and penalties, or face eviction when the moratorium is lifted,’ Silverman explained. ‘It is ultimately up to landlords to decide if they are going to pursue eviction, but at some point in the future, we can anticipate that there will be a spike in evictions across the country. It could be very destabilizing to the economy at the very time that the COVID crisis ends. For renters, it will also have ripple effects on their credit history and ability to find replacement housing.'”

Read the full article from PolitiFact, here.

“A Republican National Convention speaker falsely claimed that the Democratic Party under Joe Biden would ‘abolish the suburbs altogether by ending single-family zoning.’ That’s not true. The claim came from Patricia McCloskey, a St. Louis lawyer who, along with her husband, Mark, is facing felony charges for pointing guns at protesters marching outside their home…’This is a red herring, pure and simple,’ said Robert Silverman, a professor or urban and regional planning at the University of Buffalo. ‘Zoning is a local function in the United States, and the suggestions made in the McCloskeys’ speech are patently false.'”

Read the full article from International Business Times, here.

“Black Americans are denied access to credit far more than their white counterparts, according to a recent report from LendingTree (TREE), the online lending marketplace. Specifically, regardless of income levels, in 2019, Black adults were denied credit – including credit cards, higher credit card limits, mortgages, refinancing, student loans, personal loans – 44% of the time (versus 19% for whites). Put another way, Blacks were denied or approved for less than the amount requested 57% of the time versus 24% for whites.”

Read the full article from Wall Street Journal, here.

“The coronavirus pandemic risks widening the financial gap in Buffalo, N.Y., between white and Black workers, who entered this year’s economic downturn with less financial security and are disproportionately employed in sectors more vulnerable to layoffs and exposure to Covid-19. Over the last half-century, Black people in Buffalo were more likely to trade relatively stable manufacturing jobs for lower-wage work in the service sector, live in poorer neighborhoods and face higher levels of unemployment, according to researchers…”

Read the full article from Politico, here.

President Donald Trump is pining for support in the suburbs, and pushing out low-income housing is playing a part in his bid to get it.

Read the full article from The Conversation, here.

The legacy of structural racism in Minneapolis was laid bare to the world at the intersection of Chicago Avenue and East 38th Street, the location where George Floyd’s neck was pinned to the ground by a police officer’s knee. But it is also imprinted in streets, parks and neighborhoods across the city – the result of urban planning that utilized segregation as a tool of white supremacy.

Today, Minneapolis is seen to be one of the most liberal cities in the U.S. But if you scratch away the progressive veneer of the U.S.‘s most cyclable city, the city with the best park system and sixth-highest quality of life, you find what Kirsten Delegard, a Minneapolis historian, describes as “darker truths about the city.”

Read the full article from Buffalo News, here.

Millard Fillmore gets little love from presidential historians, but he’s enjoyed favorite son status in Buffalo for more than 150 years.

That’s beginning to change.

The 13th president lived here for years before and after his term in the White House. His fingerprints are on many educational and cultural institutions, from the University at Buffalo to Buffalo General Medical Center, and his name and image are sprinkled throughout greater Buffalo.

Now, Fillmore’s signing of the Compromise of 1850 – which included the loathsome Fugitive Slave Act – and his unsuccessful presidential run as a member of the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic Know Nothing Party are raising questions about his lofty local status.

Read the full article from Buffalo News, here.

A few years ago, University at Buffalo President Satish Tripathi used his annual address to trumpet the UB 2020 strategic plan as laying the groundwork for propelling Buffalo Niagara in everything from health care and the arts to business and industry.

But with that target year now here and bringing a whole new set of issues – or, rather, an acknowledgement of issues that Blacks have long tried to raise – UB’s faculty is pushing one of the region’s major institutions to take on something else: systemic racism.

In an overwhelming vote a couple of weeks ago, United University Professions – which represents most faculty – passed a resolution condemning “police violence against African American, Indigenous and Latino/Latina residents,” opposing “the militarization of police and its impact on communities of color and on peaceful protests,” and supporting “reallocation of Buffalo resources from policing toward investment in Buffalo’s low-income communities of color.”

Read the full article Marketplace, here.

Traditional measures of risk like debt-to-income ratios disproportionately hurt Black borrowers, said Henry Louis Taylor Jr., a professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Buffalo.

“They’re not going to do well on that because of the low incomes that they have traditionally and because of the debts that they acquire just trying to make ends meet,” he said.

Read the full article from The Spectrum, here.

UB Professor Henry Louis Taylor, Jr., who has spent decades studying and writing about inequality, called the UB responses “just short of pathetic.”

Taylor, a professor in the department of Urban and Regional Planning, believes Foster’s letter was “right on target.” He and Foster are both executive members of the SUNY Black faculty group.

“I think it shows absolutely no understanding of the challenges that we face at this moment in time and they just oughta stop and give this to somebody that knows what they’re doing or talk to somebody that knows what they’re doing because it’s been pathetic,” Taylor said. “You know, this university has been backsliding in a lot of areas as it relates to race and class.”

Read the full article from The Nation, here.

According to activists circulating a petition demanding his immediate resignation, [Mayor] Brown has never demonstrated an inclination to change the way police operate.

In fact, those activists say, the opposite is true. Under three police commissioners named by Brown in his 14 years as mayor, the department has instituted policies embodying the specific brand of racism that fuels protests across the country.

Some examples:

§ Setting up police checkpoints in poor, mostly black and Latino neighborhoods, which were discontinued after their constitutionality was challenged in a lawsuit.

§ Raising revenue for Brown’s cash-strapped administration by targeting motorists in those same neighborhoods for minor infractions—busted headlights, expired registrations or insurance cards, rolling stops.

§ Creating special units with a reputation for brutality and disregard for the Fourth Amendment.

Read the full article from Buffalo News, here.

“Taylor, of the Center for Urban Studies, said he does see hope for structural change this time, of the type that Buffalo’s black community didn’t get in 1967. A broad, diverse coalition of activists has mobilized around Buffalo’s inequities, he said: not only in the criminal justice system, but in neighborhood development, housing and education.”

Read the full article from Open Society Foundations, here.

India Walton signed the lease: $1,200 a month for a modest, gut-renovated one-bedroom, $200 less than the listed price because she had her own appliances. Still, says Walton, “in this neighborhood? $1,200 was unheard of.”

At least it used to be. After decades of disinvestment and neglect, the Fruit Belt was beginning to boom.

The catalyst was right next door: a rapidly expanding medical complex, staffed by a growing number of doctors, nurses, and technicians looking for a nearby place to live.

In many ways, it was a familiar story: an African American neighborhood, long neglected by the city, suddenly deemed “desirable” and, in turn, overrun by new, more expensive development. But the story of the Fruit Belt, so named for the orchards planted there in the 1800s [PDF], went in an unexpected direction. As the medical campus grew, the small, sloping neighborhood sitting in its shadow—whose black population boomed following World War II—decided that its fate had not yet been sealed.

Read the full article from Planetizen, here.

Henry Louis Taylor, Jr., a professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Buffalo, is featured in an ABC News article about the ongoing risk of mass evictions as the country’s millions of renters collides with tens of millions of new unemployment claims across the country.

Taylor said that “federal and statewide eviction moratoriums are based on COVID-19 timetables that are ‘too short’ and don’t consider predictions from medical experts that the pandemic could persist into the fall and beyond, as public health officials have suggested,” according to the article, written by Deena Zaru.

Read the full article from ABC News, here.

The first of the month is daunting for many low and middle-income Americans who will be struggling to pay their rent for the second time since the coronavirus pandemic essentially shut down the U.S. economy.

More than 30 million Americans have filed for unemployment insurance since the COVID-19 crisis hit the U.S. in March, and despite a range of temporary federal and state eviction moratoriums, some Americans are still being served eviction notices amid a public health crisis that requires many people to stay at home.

Henry Louis Taylor, Jr., a professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Buffalo, said that federal and statewide eviction moratoriums are based on COVID-19 timetables that are “too short” and don’t consider predictions from medical experts that the pandemic could persist into the fall and beyond, as public health officials have suggested.

Read the full article from Smartcities Drive, here.

Dive Brief:

• New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced the city’s budget for fiscal year 2021 (FY21), which previewed “cautious planning” and deep cuts across multiple sectors to address constraints amid the novel coronavirus pandemic. At $89.3 billion, the budget is $3.4 billion smaller than the one for fiscal year 2020 (FY20) to account for a potential $7.4 billion tax revenue loss across both years.
• The sanitation department, for instance, saw its e-waste and community composting subsidy programs temporarily disappear, amounting to cost savings of $3.4 million and $3.5 million, respectively in FY21 and beyond. The city also curtailed funding for its Summer Youth Employment Program; Vision Zero program; tree pruning and tree stump removal efforts; and educational district-charter partnerships program, among other adjustments.
• The budget aims to keep safety, health, shelter and access to food top of mind, but “Washington must also step up” to get New Yorkers through the pandemic, De Blasio said. ​

Read the full article from Buffalo News, here.

The plan comes after weeks of growing evidence that coronavirus has hit communities of color particularly hard, as well as vocal calls for governments and health care systems to step up more targeted interventions. Five of the seven Erie County ZIP codes with the highest concentration of Covid-19 are predominantly African American, according to an analysis by Alan Lesse, an associate dean at the University at Buffalo Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences.

Health department data also show black patients account for a disproportionate share of Erie County’s Covid-19 deaths.

“Black and brown people are scared. They’re staying home,” said Dr. Raul Vazquez, a physician and health care executive whose affiliated organizations serve thousands of low-income patients in Buffalo. “But the community will benefit from this. That’s very important.”

Read the full article from NBC News, here.

For Dr. Henry Louis Taylor, Jr., a University of Buffalo professor and researcher, there isn’t much of a controversy. The surgeon general missed the mark. And it’s not what he said, but what he did not say.

“It is irresponsible to talk about the elimination of drugs and alcohol without talking about eliminating the neighborhood-based social determinants that produce drug and alcohol abuse,” Taylor told NBC News.

The ‘step-up’ question does not reflect the realities of black America. It suggests that African Americans themselves are responsible for their plight.

“The Adams statement is, at best, irresponsible and, at worst, reflective of systemic structural racism,” Taylor added. “Black people live under enormous stress in places that are service deserts that lack gyms and are not suitable for jogging or even walking. At the same time, alcohol and tobacco companies target these communities. The ‘step-up’ question does not reflect the realities of black America. It suggests that African Americans themselves are responsible for their plight.”

Read the full article from CityLab, here.

Social distancing is not new to black communities. “Social distancing” in the form of anti-black segregation and discrimination was U.S. law throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. This created racial wealth disparities that have lingered, negatively impacting black people’s capacity to start and maintain businesses. The remnants of federally backed redlining practices, which financially isolated black people throughout the 20th century, throttled the amount of wealth black people could create from homeownership. Most entrepreneurs start businesses with the equity they’ve accrued in their homes. Consequently, black people, who’ve been over-burdened by American economic policies, require a different kind of stimulus in this coronavirus scourge era.

The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (Cares) package is an attempt to offset an impending recession caused by mandated and voluntary social distancing, which will last until at least April 30. Congress should also pass a relief package for people who’ve suffered from the de jure and de facto social distancing of racial segregation, which still sets African Americans apart from white people today on both a spatial and economic basis.

Read the full article from CityLab, here.

If we’re going to recover from the coronavirus pandemic, then let’s do it in a way that shakes up the status quo. This is the message that a group of U.S. economists, professors, and veterans of the last financial crisis sent in a letter to Congress yesterday asking for “green stimulus” legislation to jump-start the economy in a way that controls for climate change and poverty.

They are asking for a $2 trillion commitment for programs that will create living-wage jobs, amped-up public health and housing sectors, and a pivot away from a fossil-fuels-based energy frame. Under their plan, the stimulus would automatically renew every year at 4 percent of GDP, or $850 billion annually, as well as give the public more of a voice in whether — and how — large-scale corporations would get bailouts. For now, the coalition recognizes that the focus should be on stopping the spread of coronavirus and mitigating all related health risks.

Read the full article from Newsone, here.

The president of Color Of Change, Rashad Robinson, explained:

“This pandemic reveals a terrifying reality — many Americans don’t even know if they are infected with COVID-19 because they are scared to go to the hospital and receive free tests and treatment that may saddle them with debt that could take years to pay off. After years of Republicans, big pharma and major corporations fighting against paid sick leave legislation and medicare for all we are left with a crisis where disproportionately Black low wage workers are continuing to support the public without the health insurance or paid time off that would make us all safer.”

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), about 29 percent of the workforce was able to work from home. Ninety percent of higher-wage workers received paid sick leave compared to lower-income workers, according to BLS. Just 31 percent of workers with salaries in the bottom 10% were allowed paid sick leave.

Among the working poor, Black workers will witness an even greater impact.

Read the full article from The New Republic, here.

Providing both Democratic and Republican talking points—about government waste and excess, for instance—Data for Progress found at least 60 percent of respondents supported the idea of green industrial policy to boost a number of concrete technologies: smart grids, electric buses, renewable energy, battery technology, and building retrofits with a focus on low-income housing. Investments toward underground high-voltage transmission lines and electric minivans and pickup trucks also polled well. The only technology for which poll respondents seemed to dislike the idea of federal backing was meat alternatives like Beyond Meat. Report authors Daniel Aldana Cohen, Thea Riofrancos, Billy Fleming, and Jason Ganz also found strong support for federal funding of graduate programs in fields linked to green technology, such as engineering.

“Americans seem fine with a mixed economy. If anything, they’re excited about it,” said brief co-author Aldana Cohen, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania. “The Republican Party and the mainstream media will tell you that Americans want markets to be the leaders. Respondents were excited for the government to support things that feel even minimally like a public good, even when they’re told the private sector would do a better job.” Riofrancos, a Providence College political scientist, argued that the results show an appetite for the state to be something more than a “handmaiden to capital.”

Read the full article from Buffalo News, here.

Like hundreds of other low- and fixed-income homeowners in fast-appreciating neighborhoods, the Howells fear they can’t keep pace with the speed or the scale of the reassessment. The project, which concluded in September and will hit city tax bills next July, logged steady growth in most neighborhoods, though some parts of the city saw no real appreciation, and others experienced staggering spikes.

Average assessments spiked most dramatically on the West Side, a Buffalo News analysis of more than 60,000 preliminary assessment records shows. They increased by as much as 272% on the blocks south and west of Symphony Circle, raising property tax bills by hundreds and even thousands of dollars.

Residents of a number of traditionally working-class and mixed-income neighborhoods, including Allentown, the Fruit Belt and Elmwood-Bryant, also saw assessments jump far above the citywide norm, hiking tax bills, escrowed mortgages and rents. Citywide real estate values grew at four times the rate officials predicted in 2015, according to The News’ analysis.

Read the full article from The Next System Project, here.

California’s Bay Area is home to one of the country’s worst housing crises, where despite soaring rents there are still far more empty homes than unhoused people. In late January 2020, a group of unhoused mothers—organizing under the name “Moms 4 Housing”—took matters into their own hands, occupying a home in West Oakland that had been vacant for two years. Despite their violent police eviction, the moms had overwhelming community support and media attention. Their occupation and organizing resulted in a historic win not only for the right to housing but also for a burgeoning strategy that communities are using to combat decades of racist housing policies, displacement, and gentrification.

The property’s absentee landowners, Wedgewood Properties, agreed to sell the home to the Oakland Community Land Trust, a nonprofit that buys land to maintain permanent affordable housing for low-income communities.

Though there is sometimes disagreement about how to define and measure displacement and gentrification (with some pompous claims that it’s not even a bad thing), the public and private strategies of disinvestment—which have long incubated the concentrated poverty experienced by communities of color—are undeniable: redlining, exploitative financial practices, white flight, tenant harassment, and predatory housing courts have resulted in the structural racism that undergirds our nation’s housing crisis.

Read the full post from Buffalo News, here.

It was a secret to all but a few people with long memories in the Town of Amherst.

In 1964, crews working to build a new roadway on the University at Buffalo’s Main Street campus dug up several graves. What was all but forgotten was where the remains were unceremoniously reburied.

In two locations on and near Amherst’s Audubon Golf Course.

Now, the town is figuring out what to do to give the dead a proper final resting place.

“This is what it is. We have what we have. Now, what do we do, and how do we do it in the right way?” Amherst Supervisor Brian J. Kulpa said.

Read the full article from Buffalo News, here.

“It’s a battle over symbolic messages,” said Henry Louis Taylor Jr., a University at Buffalo professor who studies race and class issues and urban affairs. “The holiday is a symbol and a message that is connected to it. Resistance to that holiday is opposition to that message and everything that it is about.”

The effort to make King’s birthday a national holiday began days after the iconic African American civil rights leader was assassinated in 1968, according to an account from the History channel.

Read the full article from CityLab, here.

Read the full article from Buffalo News, here.

On Nov. 5, in a shameful move, voters in Kansas City chose to remove Martin Luther King Jr.’s name from one of its main thoroughfares. I found this disheartening. What were they thinking? Voters in Buffalo wouldn’t do something like this. Then, I realized that Buffalo is one of the only major cities in the country without a thoroughfare named Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. There are more than 900 streets named after MLK in the country, but there is no major street honoring MLK in Western New York.

Granted, in many places MLK Boulevard is found in the poorest section of a city. This is one instance where Buffalo’s late arrival to the party can be informed by mistakes made in other places and turned into an opportunity to do better.

Main Street in Buffalo is known as the dividing line between the predominantly white West Side of the city and the predominantly black East Side. It is time to change this image, erase this dividing line, and transform it into a symbol of unity. Buffalo can do better than places like Kansas City. Buffalo can send a message to the rest of the county that its central corridor is no longer a dividing line, but a place where the entire city comes together.

It is time for the Mayor’s Office and Common Council to come together and formally put a referendum on the 2020 ballot to change the name of Main Street to Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. Why not?

Read the full article from UBNow, here.

Read the full article from the Buffalo News, here.

The Great Moments histories are the creation of Buffalo-based artist Caitlin Cass, whose work also has appeared in The New Yorker, The Lily and The Nib. For this exhibition, Cass has added original art and, with handwritten sidebars, says, “I will analyze my own canon in all of its messy, brazen eagerness.”

In a press release, Cass explains that she created the Great Moments comics in an effort “to make a history that prioritized failure instead of victory … the anticlimactic fizzling out instead of the path to progress.”

…

In describing the images, Henry Louis Taylor Jr. of UB’s Center for Urban Studies said, “These portrait are about hope; they show a dreamscape of social change. They are about the possibility of building a future city where well-being and wholeness reign.”

Read the full article from The New York Times, here.

Read the full article from Buffalo Rising, here.

Just when you think that gardens couldn’t be any greater in Buffalo, comes along The Futures Garden. This Grassroots Garden is located directly across from the Marva J Daniel Futures Preparatory School #37 (Futures Phoenix), which is just down Carlton Street from The Medical Campus. On my way to visit a friend who lives a few doors away from the garden, I made a pitstop to inspect the sustainable grounds in all of their glory.

This garden has it all – giant rain barrels, composting, raised beds, beautiful signage, places to sit and ponder, solar power, hand painted garbage cans, flowers, veggies, and even a mini library. To me, this garden is about as inspirational as it gets.

Read the full article from The Houghton College Blog, here.

Houghton’s extension programs are intended to serve students who would not otherwise be able to access a Christian liberal arts education, and who would be highly unlikely to come to Houghton’s residential campus. The focus on tutoring, language development, mentoring, community support and accountability has resulted in impressively high completion rates (over 80% in both Symphony Circle and Houghton College Utica).

Pierre Michel, a member of the Class of 2011, recently assumed the leadership of the oldest of Houghton’s extension sites—Houghton College Buffalo: Symphony Circle. The son of Haitian immigrants, Pierre brings his own life experience to the Symphony Circle site, along with his previous work in leadership roles at two other educational institutions. Thus far, the program has primarily served refugees on the west side of Buffalo.

Read the full article from WBFO, here.

The Erie County Legislature held a public hearing Thursday evening, but not a single speaker showed up. That was unexpected, because the hearing revolved around the plan for a Corrections Advisory Board, which has been controversial.

Earlier in the day, Erie County Sheriff Tim Howard told the Legislature’s Public Safety Committee he would go along with the creation. That was unexpected as well, as he has been unhappy about recreating a board that fell out of existence six years ago.

The sheriff told the committee he wanted “an open-minded, honorable advisory board,” not one “to advance a political agenda,” and that its work might benefit his department. That was such a breakthrough that hours later, no one showed for the evening hearing.

Read the full article from Challenger Community News, here.

Prisoners Are People Too is hosting a Regional Conference in collaboration with the Alliance of Families for Justice on Friday, May 3, from 5:30-8 p.m. and Saturday, May 4 from 8:30a.m.-3:30p.m. at Mt. Olive Baptist Church, 701 East Delavan Avenue . The conference, whose theme is “Changing Criminal Injustice,” will highlight the strategies that we can use to improve the lives of the incarcerated, the formerly incarcerated, and the victims.

Activist-scholar Dr. Henry Louis Taylor, Jr. will be the keynote speaker on Saturday, May 4. Dr. Taylor is the Founding Director of the Center for Urban Studies at the University at Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning. His research, focusing on issues of race and class has made him an expert in assessing systemic factors, fueled by racism, that frequently lead to criminal convictions.

Read the full article from Investigative Post, here.

The laws are making criminals out of tens of thousands of residents and straining court systems; yet in the case of debt-related suspensions, several experts said they provide little to no public safety benefit.

“We are taking people who are already on the economic edge, we are criminalizing them and increasing the burdens and hardships on their lives,” said Henry Louis Taylor Jr., a professor who studies race and class issues at the University at Buffalo.

Each year, a torrent of people with suspended license charges wind up in Buffalo City Court, clogging up judges’ dockets and bogging down public defenders.

Read the full article from Buffalo News, here.

A 2017 housing opportunity strategy study commissioned by the city found that most East Side housing units are moderately to severely distressed and located in underdeveloped neighborhoods with low market demand.

HouHou should be punished for his racketeering, but more important, Buffalo’s prime blighters should be exposed. The real predatory profiteers are the rental property owners who make hyper-profits by charging high rents for poorly maintained and distressed rental housing units, and the land speculators who purchase properties and hold onto them without making any improvements until more profitable opportunities can be found.

The City of Buffalo is also complicit in the East Side neighborhood blight. The city poorly maintains sidewalks, streets and vacant lots in those neighborhoods. And, their shamefully weak rental registration process makes possible the existence of a prosperous low-income rental market that exploits the poor and those on the economic margin.

Henry Louis Taylor Jr., Ph.D., is director of the UB Center for Urban Studies.

Read the full article from Buffalo News, here.

Twenty-five years ago I got the opportunity of a lifetime: a chance to go to medical school and become a doctor. I have been fortunate enough to serve the Buffalo community I grew up in ever since.

Like many young African-American men back then, I lacked the resources, the guidance and the preparation it took to get into medical school.

Today there are as few African-American men in medical schools across the country as there were 25 – and even 50 – years ago. We need to do more to help more young black men and women fulfill that dream.

Dr. Jonathan Daniels is a pediatrician at Main Pediatrics and associate director of admissions, Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at UB.

Read the full article from The Buffalo News, here.

It seems a small thing, at first: a few words on a map. But Veronica Hemphill-Nichols still remembers the day in 2008 when she bought her first smartphone, opened Google Maps, and saw that her neighborhood, the Fruit Belt, was labeled “Medical Park” instead.

First, Hemphill-Nichols convened a meeting with city planners, who said they hadn’t requested the change. Then she complained to Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus officials, who said they hadn’t done it either. In the 11 years since, Fruit Belt residents and activists have waged a battle against a mysterious digital renaming they see as a potent symbol of gentrification.

Read the full article from Buffalo News, here.

Zandra Cunningham graduated from the University at Buffalo’s Minority and Women’s Emerging Entrepreneur program in the School of Management. The Center for Urban Studies was founded in partnership with the Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership.

The story goes like this: Zandra Cunningham was obsessed with lip balm. When her dad stopped bankrolling her habit, the 9-year-old had to learn to make her own.

Nine years later, that’s turned into a $500,000 skin care company with products sold nationwide in such stores as Costco and Target.

Read the full article from UBNow, here.

Photographer: Meredith Forrest Kulwicki

Henry Louis Taylor Jr. won the student vote and shows off his prize: a rowing oar. Taylor’s name will be added to the oar, joining those of the previous winners of the Life Raft Debate.

Imagine a worst-case parallel universe where climate change has taken an irreversible toll on the Earth. Instead of the typical weather that Buffalo has to offer, the city now suffers from 200-degree swings in temperature, forcing a small group of surviving UB students and faculty to start a new society elsewhere.

…

Taylor, a professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning, said he could help in the creation of an all-inclusive and perfect society, especially after learning from what had derailed the old one. He acknowledged that it could be a pipe dream, but said humans should strive for that, regardless.

“The survivors can and must do better, but this will require imagining a different, but possible world: a society that is more just, equitable and inclusive than the old one. It will require having the capacity and the tools to design, plan and build that ultimate world,” he said.

“Urban planning is not only essential; it is indispensable” he added. “My discipline is pre-eminently positioned to play a leading role in building such a just society.”

On Tuesday May 23 Dr. Henry Louis Taylor Jr. visited the TR Site to continue our lecture series with his talk “The Evolution of U.S. Cuban Relations”. His discussion of Cuba is particularly relevant to the Site as, for better or worse, Theodore Roosevelt was as significant in the history of Cuba as Cuba was in the rise of Theodore Roosevelt.

Dr. Taylor began his talk by setting the stage for the audience. He said that much of the U.S relationship with Cuba was complicated by the Cold War narrative. He defined this as the perspective, even to this day, of Cuba as opposed to the United States in the battle between “good capitalist, and evil socialist.” He went on to say that, despite the policies of detente, the U.S. still views the Cuban government as one “that needs to be toppled, because it oppresses its own people.”

This was an important point, as he claimed that the Cold War narrative would continue to muddle any dealings we had with Cuba. It also helped to create the context for the question he spent a great deal of time on: “What is Cuba?”  Dr. Taylor answered this in part by discussing Lenin and Trotsky’s thoughts on how a socialist country would fare in a world dominated by capitalism.

One very important point, was that, despite any success, Cuba would always be threatened by capitalist restoration for three reasons: (1) necessary market reforms, (2) the threat that those market reforms would generate internally, and (3) intrigue from capitalist countries. According to Dr. Taylor,  Cuba is defined by this struggle as well as its multi-ethnic nature.

Dr. Taylor also explained the evolving relationship between these two neighbors including the recent “thaw”. From his perspective, the easing of tensions is a noticeable improvement, but Dr. Taylor cautioned the audience to “have absolutely no illusions as to what this detente means for the United States and Cuba.” He asserts that tensions will continue “as long as the United States continues to use a Cold War lens” to view Cuba and their relationship between the two nations.

**Follow this link to watch Dr. Taylor’s presentation on YouTube.**

Read the full article from WBFO, here.

“It’s definitely a sign of progress, when you talk about even, a few blocks away from the proposed Tim Hortons supposed to be a grocery store in downtown Buffalo, close to the east side,” Pridgen said. “So we are seeing some businesses come to the east side that would not have even looked our way in the past.”

University at Buffalo professor and department of Urban and Regional Planning Founding Director, Center for Urban Studies, Henry Louis Taylor Jr. disagrees. He says, more commercial development on the east side, might not be such a good idea.

“The Tim Hortons is anchoring that change process, and it’s located there because of its proximity to downtown as well as its proximity, to rising neighborhood that’s becoming home to an increasing number of whites.”

Listen to the full story from Marketplace, here.

New York City has the largest public housing system in the country. A lot of that housing is decades old and not in good condition, to put it mildly. New York has a vast backlog of repairs it needs to make to its public housing, but the cost to get all its buildings up to snuff is steep — almost $32 billion over the next five years, according to a recent report from the city’s housing authority.

Angel King knows about that backlog first hand. She has lived in a sprawling housing development in Canarsie, Brooklyn, since she was a little girl. It’s called the Breukelen Houses, and it was completed in 1952. King still remembers how the complex felt when she and her family moved in in the ’80s.

“To us, it was like, ‘Wow!’ Everything was so shiny, it was so new,” she said. “The hallways were always clean.”

Re-Post From Progressive City

Introductory remarks by contributing editorial board member Jeffrey Lowe: 

On Friday, April 6th, Henry Louis Taylor, Jr., received the Urban Affairs Association’s (UAA’s) 2018 Marilyn J. Gittell Activist Scholar Award.  Gittell spent her entire 50-year career with the City University of New York, and focused her scholarship and community activism on concerns about racial, gender, and educational justice and on citizen participation and community control.  She passed away in 2010. As the receiver of the award named in her honor, Taylor is recognized with high esteem by his UAA colleagues for achievement in research exemplifying a direct relationship between activism, scholarship, and community engagement.

Planners Network applauds UAA for choosing Henry Taylor, a faculty member for nearly four decades in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Buffalo, as the recipient of the 2018 Marilyn J. Gittell Activist Scholar Award.  We find his scholarly activism unswerving and in adherence with our principals for planning to be a tool for eliminating inequalities and changing the fundamental political and economic structures of society. And Progressive City is proud to be publishing the speech that Henry Taylor gave when accepting the award.  What follows next is Taylor’s reflection upon his career, as well as his understanding (based on his experiences) of the risks and rewards for using scholarship as a force for social change.

Re-post from Wbfo News

The Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences on Main Street will host the Igniting Hope conference.

Some of the largest disparities in health in Erie County are happening in the City of Buffalo. A public conference this weekend aims to start trying to fix them.

14204, 14206, 14211, 14212, and 14215 are the five zip codes that suffer from the some of the worst disparities in health in all of Erie County. They cover most of Buffalo’s East Side and a portion of its First Ward – neighborhoods heavily populated by African Americans.

Zip codes experiencing the worst health outcomes in Erie County.

CREDIT: GIS MAPPING ERIE COUNTY/TASK FORCE ON HEALTH CARE DISPARITY IN THE AFRICAN AMERICAN COMMUNITY, JUNE 2015

Health disparities in the African American community are what the Igniting Hope conference aims to take on.

Pastor George Nicholas of Lincoln Memorial United Methodist Church, the conference’s convener, said it will be a first step towards changing the “traditional” narrative around health disparities and race.

“The immediate response has been focusing on the behavior – you know, eating of fried foods, lack of exercise, and all those things,” said Nicholas. “And while those are factors, the data shows us that there’s other factors – social determinants – that actually play a greater impact on the health of African Americans.”

Economy, environment, health services, education, and social support networks will be among the topics discussed. The goal is to help members of the public, the medical field, and thought leaders in the community understand what’s driving health disparities.

Nicholas hopes those who turn out for the event will answer a call to action.

“Can we truly say that this region is in a renaissance or in a revival when we have this entire community here that is suffering from some major health problems, and we’re not responding properly to them,” asked Nicholas.

The conference is a joint effort between Millennium Collaborative Care and the University at Buffalo. For the school, it’s a chance to show what its researchers can do, and the precursor to sending them out into the community to do it.

Timothy Murphy, Director of the Clinical and Translational Science Institute at the school, said they aim to bridge the gap between minorities and research which stems from a historic lack of trust.

“If you look at all of the people nationally who participate in clinical studies, less than ten percent are under-represented minorities,” said Murphy.

“People who participate in clinical research, they have better health outcomes, they have more cost-efficient care, and surveys show they are more satisfied with their care.”

The conference is free and runs from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Saturday inside the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at 955 Main Street. More information is on the Millennium Collaborative Care website.

Re-post from Wbfo News

Issues surrounding housing inequities in Buffalo were brought to light during a panel discussion at the WNED|WBFO Studios Wednesday night, as part of WBFO’s Racial Equity Project.

University at Buffalo Urban Planning professor Henry Louis Taylor Jr. was one of the panelists. He says changing the way the city makes investments is key when solving the problem of housing inequities in Buffalo.

“The pattern that we see across Buffalo’s history, where ever whites are concentrated, investments follow at the public level and at the private level,” he said.

Other panelists included Dr. Melinda Cameron from University at Buffalo Pediatrics, Sarah Wooton from the Partnership for the Public Good and John Washington from PUSH Buffalo.

For more watch the full replay of FB live event online at wbfo.org.

Re-Post From Social Science Space

There is a term, structural racism, which centers on the idea that discrimination is built into institutions and culture. Henry Louis Taylor, Jr., a professor of urban and regional planning at the University at Buffalo and the founding director of the Center for Urban Studies there, has taken that idea of built-in racism a step farther. He argues that racism in the metropolitan U.S. is physically part of the landscape, both in the built environment and the market-centric economic network.

Such insights, and his work to redress and reverse them, saw the Urban Affairs Association present Taylor with the UAA-SAGE Marilyn J. Gittell Activist Scholar Award for 2018. The award highlights field-based urban scholarship and promotes the dissemination of work by activist urban scholars. “Taylor’s research explores the nexus between city building and racial and social class injustice,” the UAA explained in a release. “ … His contributions to scholar-activism have been long-standing and deep, delving into both international and local urban issues with a mastery of critical scholarship and a love of community.” This is actually Taylor’s second activist scholar award: in 2012 he received the Lee Benson Activist Scholar Award from the University of Pennsylvania.

Social Science Space took the opportunity of this latest award to discuss Taylor’s role as an activist, as a scholar (“I am an activist turned scholar, not a scholar turned activist”), an urban planner and an historian. We’ve split the interview into two parts, and the second installment, focused on Taylor’s almost two decades of work in Cuba, will appear here next week.

Taylor’s earliest academic work, as an undergrad, was in speech pathology and audiology before he took a second master’s and later a doctorate in urban history at the University at Buffalo. Since then he’s worked diligently on issues of racial justice, especially through the prism of urban planning and the historical experience of African Americans in U.S. cities. This includes academic work, as a professor at Buffalo, sitting on the editorial board of the Journal of Urban Affairs, and writing or co-authoring six books, including the Historical Roots of the Urban Crisis: African Americans in the Industrial City, 1900-1950. Taylor writes and appears often on urban issues for the mainstream press and online media.

Between academia and activism, he’s served on a number of practical projects, writing technical reports for redevelopment projects in his hometown and is currently, alongside Robert M. Silverman and Li Yin, studying gentrification and its impacts in Buffalo through the Urban Institute’s National Neighborhood Indicator Partnership.

As the UAA said in its citation, “Dr. Taylor fully embodies the connection between good scholarship and good activism and stands as a model for young academics.”

What excites you about my work on and off-campus? Do you feel that you are making a difference? Are you pessimistic or optimistic?

I am driven by the quest to end black oppression and build a world based on racial, economic, political, social and cultural justice. This is my life’s mission, and it is what excites me about my work at the university. Of course, the complicated issues facing blacks and other oppressed nationalities will not be solved in my lifetime; so my intent is to develop knowledge, insights and lessons that the next generation can build on. I am energized by a belief that the struggle of blacks and other oppressed groups will ultimately triumph; and that they will succeed in their quest to build a better, more racially and socioeconomically just and humane world.

I came to the University at Buffalo in 1987 with two interactive goals. The first was to build a research center that aligned knowledge production and implementation with the down-on-the-ground struggles of blacks, Latinx and the low-wage white precariat. The second goal was to popularize civic engagement on U.B.’s campus and to build community-university partnerships. This undertaking made it possible for me to connect easily my activism to scholarship.

The intent of the activist-scholar is to produce and implement knowledge for social change, so that we can understand the world in order to change it. Blacks, Latinx and other oppressed people are beset with oppressive core problems that (1) circumscribe their life chances; (2) produce undesirable economic, social, political and cultural outcomes; and (3) reproduce their positionality at the bottom of the economic order. These oppressive core problems consist of inferior education; inadequate housing; poor health care services; food insecurity, joblessness, low-wages, underdeveloped neighborhoods and powerlessness.

These issues are entangled with systemic structural racism, the market-centric approach to city-building, and the functioning of knowledge capitalism and operation of the neoliberal state. Such complicated issues cannot be resolved without the production and implementation of a knowledge base with the capacity to understand wicked problems and to construct a framework to guide the struggle to eliminate them. The intent of the UB Center for Urban Studies, which I founded, was to engage in the production and implementation of a social change knowledge base. The aim was to conduct studies ranging from historical analysis to theoretical studies to community-based participatory research, as well as neighborhood planning and community development. The intent was to understand core problems and unite with residents in down-on-the-ground struggles to solve them. Problems can never be fully understood and resolved in the absence of struggle. So, the goal was to battle against oppressive neighborhood and workplace conditions, as well as to engage in struggles to transform the entire metropolitan region.

Our work has made a difference. Over the years, we have engaged in many projects. I will highlight one. My first big project was a comprehensive study of the conditions facing Black Buffalo. We put together an interdisciplinary team consisting of 12 junior and senior scholars, along with dozens of graduate students to place Black Buffalo in a historic context and to study challenges facing the black community, including economic issues, inadequate education, work and joblessness, along with crime and victimization. The goal was to understand why neighborhood conditions were worsening and an underclass was growing.

Based on the study’s finding, we constructed a policy framework in partnership with a group of more than 20 practitioners and community residents, and then formed a community economic development organization, the Office of Urban Initiative, Inc., to implement the study’s findings. Over the ensuring years, dozens of organizations and groups used the state of Black Buffalo knowledge base and policy framework to guide their practical work.

The Black Buffalo study became a model of how I carried out my work in the city. Over the years, the UB Center has partnered with dozens of organizations and groups and have produced numerous technical reports and projects, including housing and commercial development initiatives. During this period, I have also learned that power concedes nothing without a demand. Knowledge production must always be connected to struggle.

Our work has made a difference, but we have not changed the trajectory of black neighborhoods, nor have we altered Buffalo’s market-centric approach to city building. Successful projects, including brick and mortar initiatives, and changes a neighborhood’s developmental trajectory are two different things.

Thus, in many respects, while everything has changed in Buffalo, everything has remained the same. Yet, I remain optimistic. The struggle of Black America and oppressed groups is a long movement; it is a protracted movement punctuated with ebbs and flows. My primary task is to produce knowledge, gain insights and learn lessons from participating in struggle, so that I improve the current situation and lay a foundation for future generations to build on. My optimism is fueled by an understanding that blacks and their allies have won many battles over time, and they will keep marching on until victory is won.

What is the state of urban America?

U.S. cities are in trouble. On the surface, many urban centers appear to be thriving; but looks are deceiving. Still, happy talk abounds. Even in my town, the theme song is “Buffalo Rising” as the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus, downtown investments, and a resurgent housing market fuel hope and optimism. In Cleveland, friends are quick to tell me about the success of “downtown as a neighborhood” and many other exciting things happening there; but looks can be deceiving. Beneath the calm and seemingly flourishing urban skyline, trouble is brewing in superstar cities and peripheral cities alike.

In time, I predict that the urban precariat and the increasingly marginalized and oppressed national minorities, including blacks, Latinx, immigrants, and refugees will be ignited by Henri Lefebvre’s Right to the City manifesto. The right to the city is a clarion call for the production of urban space to be wrested away from neoliberal private and government interests, and restructured in the interest of blacks, Latinx, and the working-class precariat and other groups marginalized by the market-centric creative city building method. We have seen right to the city flashpoints in Ferguson, Baltimore, rise of BlackLivesMatter, and in the growing resistance to police violence in underdevelopment urban communities across the country. These are trailers to a drama that will be increasingly played out on the streets and in the rise of a new political movement sometime in the indeterminant future.

---

Honoring Another Activist-Scholar

The Urban Affairs Association honored Temple University’s Elizabeth L. Sweet, whose work “focuses on feminist and anti-racist approaches to safe cities and sustainable community development in Latina/o and Latin American communities,” as its 2018 Marilyn J. Gittell Activist Scholar Award-Honorable Mention.

Sweet teaches in the Department of Geography and Urban Studies at Temple, and is an expert in planning theory and qualitative research methodologies (she uses a mixed-methods and place-based approach in her own research). In recent publications she has proposed using body map storytelling and community mapping as innovative ways to co-create data with communities on a wide range of issues and solutions to urban problems.

In its citation, the UAA noted that Sweet “is committed to collaborating with communities in order to influence policy, and she has worked with groups in the U.S., Mexico, and Columbia.. Among her many projects are a chapter on migrant women’s safety and an article on methodologies for making communities safer through reconceptualizing bodies and space.” Off-campus, she works with Women for Economic Justice in Chicago and Coalición Fortaleza Latina in Norristown, Pennsylvania to help create inclusive and equitable cities.

---

What’s happening? In a recent book, Ricard Florida, the economist and urban studies theorist, argued that U.S. cities were facing a new urban crisis consisting of a failing middle-class, increasing inequality, deepening segregation, and I might add housing affordability, evictions, low-wages, poverty and joblessness, along with the exacerbation of conditions in underdeveloped neighborhoods. According to Florida, superstar cities, such as San Francisco, L.A., Boston, Washington, D.C., and New York City are in crisis, as well as peripheral cities such as Buffalo, Cleveland, and Milwaukee.

The plight of U.S. cities, I argue, is not the result of a crisis situationcaused by some anomaly, or by misguided or insensitive urban policies. No. We are not facing a crisis, but are witnessing the increasingly visible chronic socioeconomic outcomes produced by a neoliberal market-centric approach to building cities and their metropolitan regions. The culprit is this neoliberal market-centricmethod of city-building. Cities are not unplanned and unintentional urban places that grow wild, unbridled and randomly. City-building is intentional, and the resultant economic and spatial inequality is inevitable and deliberate. The new urban crisis conceptual framework, then, hides the structural inequality and racism inherent in the neoliberal market-centric approach to city building.

This unique market-centric approach to building cities deliberately steered city building toward the twin goals of refashioning cities to accommodate emergent knowledge capitalism and to attract the nascent knowledge workers, high-techies and cultural workers, as well as students and others Richard Florida dubbed the creative class. This approach to city building was ignited by the rise of a service, finance, real estate, high-technology and tourism economy, which demanded a new built environment to house it and a new residential environment to house the creative class.

Robert Moses and the Rockefellers forged the creative city building template, although Austrian David Yencken is credited with coining the term in 1988. However, in the 1950s and 1960s, Moses and the Rockefellers intentionally recreated Manhattan as a place that would attract the city’s nascent knowledge workers, high techies, and cultural workers with chic restaurants, coffee houses, elegant co-ops and high culture in a distinctively urban setting where elite and upwardly mobile white residents could live, work, play and shop in cosmopolitan space where they felt safe, secure, comfortable and happy. With impunity, using urban renewal and slum clearance, Moses and the Rockefellers, in their quest to transform the Big Apple into a superstar city, destroyed working class neighborhoods, displaced thousands, gentrified Manhattan and intensified socioeconomic inequality in New York City.

Richard Florida and others embraced and popularized this approach to city-building in the current period. While Florida believed the creative city methodology was most appropriate for big cities with superstar potential, over time, cities regardless of their positionality within the urban hierarchy double-downed on the market-centric creative city approach to city building. Urban leaders everywhere believed the secret to urban prosperity was building a city that attracted and retained the creative class. Such a place would attract knowledge, high-tech and cultural workers and the big companies, investors and prosperity would follow.

This storyline had an ugly side. The creative city strategy combined with the neoliberalization of government to hit with sledgehammer force blacks, Latinx, immigrants and refugees, and the white working class precariat. The creative city approach expropriated urban land with high-value potential and used it for high value creative city commercial and residential development. Gentrification, displacement, relocation to the urban periphery or inner-suburbs and an exacerbation of living standard and quality of the life became the flipside chic creative class neighborhoods.

The Ferguson explosion first revealed the ugly side of the creative city paradigm, especially in limited resource peripheral cities. The big problem is that trickle-down neighborhood development does not work, especially in peripheral cities where government invest most public dollars in vibrant creative class neighborhoods, with the unfounded expectation that concentrated development will spark market-centric activities in areas of concentrated underdevelopment.

The neighborhood-effects literature, and the work of scholars like Robert Sampson in the Great American City and Patrick Sharkey in Stuck in Place indicate the fallacy of such thinking. Sampson and Sharkey argue that neighborhoods are prime determinants of a person’s life chances and socioeconomic outcomes and that underdeveloped neighborhoods are oppressive sites of social reproduction that chronically produce undesirable socioeconomic outcomes among blacks and other people of color. The market-centric neoliberal creative city approach to development will continually produce marginalized underdeveloped neighborhoods, unless there is a radical intervention.

Florida and other urbanist understand the ugly side of creative city development, but think they can solve the problem simply by tinkering with the market. I call this type of thinking urban fantasy theory, where truth and reality is replaced with myths. Michael Oluf Emerson and Kevin T. Smiley makes this point in a brilliant new book, Market Cities, People Cities.They demonstrate that a powerful connection exist between the type of city-building paradigm used and socioeconomic outcomes. They show that market-centric and people-centric approaches to building cities yield fundamentally different outcomes. Thus, socioeconomic and neighborhood outcomes in market-centric places like Houston are fundamentally different from those found in people-centric places like Copenhagen.

The lesson is simple. The city-building paradigm matters. Thus, change the market-centric creative city building paradigm and we bolster the possibility of building a just city based on racial, economic, social, political and cultural justice. Meanwhile, without changing city-building approaches, tensions between concentrated development and concentrated underdevelopment in U.S. will continue to grow until the time comes when the disenfranchised and oppressed raises the Right to the City banner.

How do you overcome injustice fatigue from those who see the same or similar problems echoing throughout the decades?

I am a historian, as well as an urban planner. I understand the connections between the past, present and uncreated future. The black freedom struggle is a long movement—a protracted struggle that extends across time and space. In each epoch, blacks are faced with a challenge they must overcome to move the freedom struggle to the next stage. For example, stage one in the long movement was the battle against slavery. This fight lasted more than 200 years, but in the end blacks and their allies triumphed. Slavery was vanquished. Then it was replaced by an oppressive peonage system that tied blacks to agricultural capitalism as sharecropper, small farmers, and convict laborer. Racial segregation, hostile discrimination, along with legal and extralegal violence reinforced this system and kept blacks fastened to the land, disenfranchised, and powerless.

This was the age of Jim Crow racism. Blacks and their allies fought back. Jim Crow racism was defeated. The struggle took over a hundred years, but in the end the citadel of overt, hostile racism was torn down. During this era, blacks were proletariatinized and became an urban people trapped in underdeveloped urban neighborhoods. In this setting, they entered the third stage in the long freedom movement—the war for power, economic, political, social and cultural freedom. In this period, blacks will join with other oppressed people, including the white precariat, to proclaim their Right to the City and to end the hegemonic domination of market capitalism. This will be their most complex and difficult struggle, but in the end blacks and their allies will win. Justice always triumphs over injustice. Thus, when viewed against the long black freedom movement backdrop, I see blacks confronting challenges, battling against them, ultimately winning, and then moving on to the next challenge. So, I am not fatigued. On the contrary, I am energized, optimistic and excited.

Would you describe the interplay between academia and activism/advocacy in your work? Not every scholar is comfortable bridging the two.

I am an activist turned scholar, not a scholar turned activist. During my tenure in the left movement, I viewed a schism between knowledge production and implementation and the black struggle that frustrated our work down-on-the-ground in neighborhoods, the workplace, and cities. The reason is the socioeconomic, political, and cultural challenges facing blacks are too complex to understand without being unraveled by research and study. To transform freedom dreams into reality, not only do we need to understand the educational, housing, employment, health and underdeveloped neighborhood problem, but also we must know how to solve them in the real world. Moreover, we need to understand the history of the long movement, along with knowledge of its strengths and weakness, as well as successes and failures.

This task of understanding and solving the core problems facing blacks requires both the production and implementation of knowledge. For example, you cannot find a cure to lung cancer by engaging in research without practice. The theories of causality must be tested and verified in practical situations. The same is true in social struggles. Urgent social problems cannot be solved simply by producing knowledge. Knowledge must be tested and verified in the crucible of battle. This interplay between theory and praxis makes it possible to learn from our errors, miscalculations and flaws in thinking, thereby refining and improving knowledge.

I love bridging the space between activism and scholarship, but the production of knowledge for social change does not require that every scholar play this bridging role. What it does require is that the scholar is consciously and intentionally producing knowledge to bring about social change. Within this context, some scholars might produce knowledge, while others take the lead in implementing it, and still others, like myself, will produce and implement it. A scholar, then, can be a very progressive participant in the movement just by producing knowledge. However, to be considered an activist-scholar, one must be involved in connecting their scholarship to struggles down-on-the-ground.

On this point, I think that multiple forms of research can contribute to the production and implementation of knowledge for social change. In some instances, I engage in theoretical studies. Then in other situations, I am involved in action-oriented research to shed light on specific urban or neighborhood problems, while on other occasions, I am working with communities to develop transformative neighborhood plans. The larger point is the production of knowledge for social change must be intention, and the scholar must be deliberately seeking to create a knowledge base that contributes to the building of a better, more just and humane world.

What advice do you have for a young scholar-activist who wants to follow in your steps, or those of Marilyn Gittell or Lee Benson?

Activism and good scholarship are intertwined. The premise that activism distracts from scholarship is based on myth not truth and reality. The struggle to transform the conditions of life among oppressed people and build a better, more just, equitable and humane world is an extraordinarily complex task, which requires the highest level of scholarship combined with struggles down-on-the-ground. The great scholar-activists, such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Oliver Cox, Cedric Robinson, Cornel West, Mary Berry, Angela Davis, Marilyn Gittell, Ira Harkavy and Lee Benson understood this. They understood that connecting activism to scholarship was out best hope for solving the core problems facing blacks and other oppressed people, as well as transforming the United States into a people-centric society based on racial, social, economic, political, and cultural justice.

These activist-scholars also understood that knowledge, alone, is not enough. As Frederick Douglass said, “Without struggle, there is no progress. There never has and there never will be.” And this is exactly why scholarship must be linked to activism. So, my advice to the young scholar-activist is to become the best scholar you can be and find creative and innovative ways to link that scholarship to the quest to bring about social change. Thus, the young scholar-activist must embrace the Douglass credo, “Without struggle, there is no progress.”

Re-Post From Non-Profit Quarterly

It is the product of more than a decade of community organizing, but residents in east Buffalo’s historic Fruit Belt neighborhood cheered when Common Council President Darius Pridgen announced on his radio program last Friday that the “City administration [will start] setting aside land…for the first land trust in the Fruit Belt.”

Pridgen elaborated that the “land trust means those lots would stay in the hands of working class and low-income people. So, whatever the community land trust builds there, as far as housing, for 99 years it cannot be transferred to wealthy people. It cannot be sold to wealthy people.”

As WGRZ reports, “The folks who live in the Fruit Belt neighborhood, east of the thriving Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus, worry that soaring property values are forcing people out who can’t afford to pay increased rent or property taxes.” The land trust provides an avenue to protect residents by creating a nonprofit, governed by a community board, that holds title to the land and provides affordable housing to residents.

A 2016 policy brief from the nonprofit Partnership for the Public Good made the business case for the community land trust, which helped spur city action. The study estimates that “53 percent of residents spent over 30 percent of their income on housing” in a neighborhood where, as of 2014, poverty remains a high 42 percent. The city holds title to more than 200 vacant lots in the neighborhood—vacant lots that, if transferred to the community land trust, could help existing residents remain in the community and reduce their housing cost burdens. Pridgen’s announcement means that at least some of these 200 lots will be transferred to the trust.

“I’m terribly excited,” says Annette Lott, treasurer of the nonprofit Fruit Belt Community Land Trust. The land trust ensures long-term affordability; in exchange for signing a purchase agreement at a below-market price, the buyer agrees to accept a lower price at sale, thereby ensuring that the housing remains available at below-market prices for future generations.

Effectively, the land trust provides housing that serves as an intermediate rung between renting and owning. The stewardship of the community-based nonprofit also allows for residents to guide long-term planning. Another benefit of this structure is that the below-market prices help ensure that the land trust homebuyer does not get overextended, which is one reason why foreclosure rates on land trust homes are dramatically lower—about one eighth as high—than market-rate homes.

As we have covered in NPQ, the idea of a community land trust—first used in the US as a mechanism to protect rural lands for Black farmers in the late 1960s in Albany, Georgia—has gained ground as a tool for cities seeking to preserve housing affordability for low-income residents as wealthier, often whiter, residents move in, frequently pushing residents of color out into suburban areas—reversing what had been the opposite pattern of previous decades.

Buffalo joins a growing number of cities that are pursuing land trust solutions. Others acting in the past year include Washington, D.C., New York City, Pittsburgh, and Baltimore.

The Fruit Belt itself provides “a classic tale of how urban policies have destabilized the African American community and robbed low to moderate‐income blacks of the wealth producing power of homeownership,” notes Henry Louis Taylor, Jr., an urban studies professor and director of the Center for Urban Studies of the University at Buffalo. The Fruit Belt was originally German, but, starting in the 1950s, white flight and Black in-migration changed that dramatically.

Taylor explains that,

Two interactive factors triggered black migration to the Fruit Belt…. First, the building of the Kensington Expressway in 1960 split the Fruit Belt and separated most of it from the lower East Side and devalued property.… Second, during the 1950s, a massive urban renewal project on the lower East Side destroyed about 30 city blocks and decimated the historic center of Black Buffalo. Many of those displaced…settled in the Fruit Belt.

The number of Blacks peaked at 9,125 in 1970, but neighborhood population would fall by more than two thirds by 2000. (As of 2013, the neighborhood had 2,670 residents, 83 percent of whom are Black). As Taylor details, “Between 1970 and 2000, the proportion of Fruit Belt residents living in poverty increased from 28 percent to 45 percent.” A key factor behind neighborhood decline, Taylor adds, was city-backed housing demolition that pushed residents out to facilitate the expansion of the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus (BNMC).

Ironically, now BMNC is driving a revival that threatens to displace residents again, only this time through rising prices. Lott notes that current “rents in the Fruit Belt are $1,400 in some places…much too high for individuals for low income and poor people to be able to afford.”

The community land trust that Lott participates in is part of a broader effort to make sure that as the Fruit Belt neighborhood rebounds, a new wave of resident displacement is prevented. Involving a dozen local neighborhood groups and known as the Community First Alliance, the land trust is part of a broader strategy that includes support for local business development and the development of work pipelines to help residents obtain jobs at BMNC.—Steve Dubb

Re-post from The Spectrum

Omar David has never had a black professor.

Most UB students haven’t.

UB’s Equity, Diversity and Inclusion website says the university prides itself on the diversity of its community. But black students and black faculty feel left out of the diversity conversation.

For years, UB has struggled to bring in minority faculty. That is partially because black professors are demanding higher salaries because there are so few. UB does not have the money to compete with larger universities and offer higher pay.

UB also struggles to bring in black faculty because the few who are here feel undervalued.

And many who start here, leave, because they felt isolated. Often they were the only black people working in their departments. Or they felt the university didn’t put enough money, time or resources into black studies.

And students – many of whom come to UB for its diverse student population – feel discouraged because almost none of their professors look like them.

In a city as diverse as Buffalo and at a time when racial tensions are exploding across the nation, students say they expect more racial equality from UB. Black people make up 38.6 percent of the Buffalo population, according to the U.S. Census. Yet as of fall 2015, out of 2,513 faculty at UB, only 98 were black, according to UB Spokesperson John Della Contrada. That’s 3.8 percent. Out of those 98, only 41 were tenure track, which brings the total down to 1.6 percent.

David, a senior biological sciences major, feels having a black professor would have been inspirational. He thinks he would have aspired for greater leadership roles at UB if he had seen someone who looked like him and shared the same struggles achieve success.

But David never got his wish.

In the past 10 years, black faculty have continued to leave the university. Data from Teresa Miller, vice provost for Equity and Inclusion shows black faculty continued to decline from 2005 to 2015.

Miller has spent the last three years trying to recruit faculty of color. Faculty acknowledge Miller has worked hard, but say the university as a whole needs to take more responsibility in hiring black faculty.

Della Contrada said the university employs 202 state-supported staff “the second-largest race/ethnicity group, after whites for staff.”

“So that’s basically janitors and Campus Dining food workers…” David said. “That doesn’t make the lack of black faculty any better, if anything that makes it worse because it’s just placing more black people in more marginalized menial work.”

Addressing black issues

The number of black faculty at UB is “beyond disgraceful,” said urban and regional planning professor Henry Taylor.

Taylor said the university’s failure to do something about the lack of black faculty is a form of systemic racism. Such failure, he said “under develops” the black community by not allowing the African American studies program to evolve.

“The African American people were people that this country had a special responsibility to in the sense that they had been brought here as slaves, stolen from their country, imprisoned on their homeland and brought here to work,” Taylor said. “The university has a huge responsibility to [us] and I think the university has failed in a very miserable way.”

Taylor said black people get nothing, “absolutely zero” for suffering as a result of slavery.

When Taylor first came to UB in 1987, one of the university’s priorities was addressing issues black people faced, he said.

He was hired at the university specifically to help design a public service infrastructure that would connect the university to a larger urban community. He addressed these issues with then-UB President William Greiner and visited his house so often people thought he was Greiner’s relative.

Taylor also helped redevelop the University Plaza area, located across from South Campus.

He said administrators slowly began to feel race was too divisive of an issue and thought it needed to be minimized. Taylor said he was among the minority who felt race needed to be grappled with, talked about and placed at the forefront of university discussions.

Taylor said the university often boasts about its diversity by placing minority groups like Asians in the forefront so the campus looks diverse.

“There is no diversity because the university no longer has the commitment to dealing with the exploitation and oppression of black people,” Taylor said. “In the old days, we used to call that window dressing, when you get enough black people around just to say ‘there they are,’ but that’s not authentic and that’s not legitimate.”

Lack of blacks vs Buffalo demographics.

Blacks are the second-largest ethnic group in Buffalo, second only to whites, who hold a 50.4 percent majority.

“We live in a city that’s close to 50 percent black and Latinx, and yet we have not a single major initiative that’s focused on that,” Taylor said. “We have a Global Health Equity Institute that doesn’t even have a focus on the African American population.”

Taylor said despite the high concentration of blacks, the university continues to prioritize addressing refugee and immigrant issues over black issues.

“And my response is ‘seriously?’ Why don’t you try moving the health equity needle in Buffalo? And why would you ever focus on the refugee population and not have a focus on the African American population whose health indicators are horrendous? Who face an enormous level of inequities in comparison to whites and they don’t even make your cut? Seriously people?” he said.

Taylor said there has been a dramatic decline in tenure-track black faculty in the past 25-30 years and the university continues to lose the small number of tenure-track faculty embedded on the campus.

“When you talk about faculty… the only thing that counts in a really meaningful way – and I don’t wanna disparage anyone – are those individuals who are full time and on tenure track because unless you’re full time and on tenure-track lines, you’re not providing instructional activities that are leading to degrees,” he said.

Taylor said the U.S. has a responsibility to create opportunities for black people to achieve their larger freedoms.

These larger freedoms, he said, aren’t the same as small freedoms like the right to vote, the right to speak or the right of social mobility.

“The larger freedoms are our human rights. The right to a high-quality education. The right to an employment that allows us to earn a livable wage. The right to live in safe and wholesome neighborhoods. The right to have high quality health care. The right to have nutritious food. These are our human rights. And education is an anchor human right. So that is the right that we have not yet been given or granted,” he said.

Faculty members who are not of color like transnational studies Professor Carl Nightingale agree that the lack of black faculty is a problem.

Nightingale said the university hasn’t done an adequate job of retaining faculty of color and the transnational studies department continues to lose more minority faculty. He said retaining more faculty of color should be a “major institutional priority.”

Recruitment of black faculty

The desperate need for the university to find a solution that brings in more faculty of color is an issue that keeps Teresa Miller up at night.

She has a daughter who’s a freshman in college and she evaluates diversity through her eyes. She worries that UB students of color don’t have enough professors who look like them.

As a black woman, in her role, she says people expect her to have a certain level of insight on issues facing people of color. They expect her to bring her own racial experiences to the table to help increase the university’s diversity.

She doesn’t think the resolve to hire black faculty has wavered, but UB’s strategy to hire them has changed in the last 30 years in light of widespread criticisms of initiatives like affirmative action.

Because of this, she says the university can’t use race as the sole criteria of hiring.

“The legal definition of affirmative action changed in the last 30 years, so there’s been an attack on the way race gets used in the hiring process so we’ve had to change the hiring process of people of color,” she said.

The university responded by changing its strategies for minority faculty recruitment.

Miller carved out a 10-step “strategic plan” to hire more culturally diverse staff.

The plan encourages the university to advertise for positions in areas with more people of color to gain more diverse applicant pools and take part in minority cluster hiring. It advises to reduce hiring barriers against people of color by training faculty to eliminate implicit biases.

Miller also regularly goes to conferences and sees how other universities hire faculty of color, and she carves out a plan based on her discoveries.

But many faculty of color drop out of these searches early, Miller said.

Other black faculty don’t want to come to the university because they don’t see people who look like them on campus.

Miller said colleges like Columbia University, Yale University or University of Michigan invest $30 to $50 million in recruiting faculty of color.

UB doesn’t have that money.

“Underrepresented minority faculty are demanding much higher starting salaries because there are fewer of them so it’s scarce and we often compete with schools that can pay a lot more,” Miller said.

While the university struggles to recruit blacks, Miller said the university continues to draw international, non-black faculty from across the globe in management, engineering and the sciences.

“I think the demographics of the nation and the state have changed over the last 30 years so the diversity of the non-white population has become greater in New York State than the rest of the nation,” said Craig Abbey, associate vice president and director of Institutional Analysis.

Miller doesn’t agree that the university’s commitment to hiring diverse faculty has shifted; she says the commitment has only gotten stronger.

“I don’t agree that our commitment is much less today, I think our commitment has grown. This office being created and being staffed and built out. That’s a commitment, it’s a commitment of resources to really make a difference,” she said.

How lack of black faculty affects students

The lack of diversity isn’t just limited to faculty; it also extends to the student body. Out of 28,444 UB students, only 1,881 students are black.

Students of color yearn to see people who look like them teaching in the classroom. Many students said they grew used to being the only black people in their classes, but they found it puzzling that many African American studies professors at UB were white.

Miller went to college at Duke University in North Carolina and said she only had one black professor.

“I say to people all the time, students are our clients and they want to see people who can relate to their experiences who are role models and mentors and it’s absolutely important,” Miller said.

While Taylor agrees a black professor could bring a unique perspective that a white professor couldn’t, he says the color of people’s skin doesn’t qualify them to teach black studies.

“I’m a firm believer based on my experiences that black faces in high places don’t mean a thing unless their ideologies and viewpoints are emphasizing change,” he said.

Taylor said there are some black people he wouldn’t want anywhere near UB students and within the black community there can be an ideological divide.

“There are some black people that I know through these buildings that I wouldn’t want anywhere near our black students and I certainly wouldn’t want them trying to teach them anything about the black experience,” he said.

He’s come across white scholars who have deep understandings of that experience and he says he would be happy to call them colleagues.

Taylor feels the university is responsible for finding and attracting “outstanding black scholars” but feels UB has never done that for its black studies program. He feels UB’s black studies program is one of the weakest in the country.

Black faculty departures

Lakisha Simmons, a former global gender studies professor, left UB to teach at the University of Michigan earlier this year. She found it difficult to teach in a department where she was the only black woman.

When she first came to UB, she loved that there was a core group of young faculty of color and she became very close with them and built “a strong community.”

That strong community of faculty of color dwindled over the six years she taught at the university.

“Things got really difficult for me a couple of years ago when the fate of global gender studies and African American studies seemed uncertain and I feel like at that time, there were messages that those studies were not valued,” Simmons said. “I feel like things changed with the current dean and Provost Miller but at that point, it was already almost too late. And if you feel that what you do is unimportant to the university for a certain number of years… it hurts your morale.”

At University of Michigan, she says black faculty are more valued because more money is invested in programs like black studies and global gender studies.

Another reason Simmons left UB was because black studies, global gender studies and African studies didn’t have their own department and were under the transnational studies department.

“It’s never perfect because there’s bias against people of color and women in the workplace… it’s not limited to the university. In the current political climate, where you go to school does make a difference but it’s difficult wherever you are,” she said. “It’s difficult to be a black person working wherever you are.”

Finding solutions

Simmons believes the university has to make a “huge push” for cluster hires in order to rectify the issue of lack of black faculty.

Miller said she is currently working with College of Arts and Sciences Dean Robin Schulze to cluster hire faculty of color.

The Spectrum reached out to Schulze three weeks ago, but her chief of staff said she could not fit an interview into her busy schedule.

Simmons said she sees Miller and many deans support recruiting black faculty, but she still doesn’t know if there’s urgency across the university, particularly from President Satish Tripathi and Provost Charles Zukoski.

“I think it’s getting to a point that it’s going to take drastic action just to get back to where UB was five years ago so there has to be some kind of targeted hire,” Simmons said. “Either you’re a school that’s recruiting faculty or you’re one that’s losing them because there are only so many professors of color.”

Taylor said he gets offers to teach at different universities often, but chooses to stay at UB.

“I’m not trying to run away from problems, I’m trying to solve them,” Taylor said.

Ashley Inkumsah is the co-senior news editor and can be reached at ashley.inkumsah@ubspectrum.com

john a. powell spoke at UB as part of his weeklong residency as the 2016-17 Clarkson Chair in Urban and Regional Planning. Photos: Douglas Levere

john a. powell (right) talks with Will and Nan Clarkson, who support the Clarkson Chair program that brings distinguished scholars and professionals to UB for lectures and seminars.

Re-post from The City Lab

Buffalo Becomes First City to Bid Minimum Parking Goodbye

The city is overhauling its archaic zoning regulations, but does the move help its citizens as much as it helps developers?

Linda Poon

In overhauling its zoning code for the first time since 1953, Buffalo, New York, has become the first major city to completely remove outdated minimum parking requirements. (Other cities have done so, too, but only in certain districts or neighborhoods.) That means developers there will no longer be required to build a certain number of parking spaces for commercial and residential projects, regardless of whether there are mass transit options nearby or if the tenants even need them.

Now, according to The Buffalo News, projects above 5,000 square feet will require parking analysis that factors in alternative transportation options in the area. It’s all part of a six-year-long initiative called the Buffalo Green Code, or the the Unified Development Ordinance, which the city council unanimously passed last week and Mayor Byron W. Brown signed into law Wednesday. It rewrote the zoning and land-use regulations to make them simpler and easier to understand. The new code also follows a relatively new concept called form-based zoning, which emphasizes the relationship between public space and buildings.

“Conventional zoning doesn’t begin with what we want this city to look like in terms of the ‘public realm,’“ says Robert Steuteville, editor of the Places Journal at the Congress for the New Urbanism. “What is it like for a human to walk around in a public space, and what kind of buildings do you want around you that would then define that space?”

Buffalo, like many U.S. cities, historically followed those conventional zoning codes from as early as the 1920s, which put heavy emphasis on making room for cars—hence the minimum parking requirements. “The automobile population really soared in the 1920s and early ‘30s, and curb parking was free. Very quickly all the on-street parking became very scarce, so you can see that any picture of an old city taken in the 1930s shows all the sidewalks completely lined with cars,” says Donald Shoup, an urban planning professor at UCLA and the author of the 2005 book The High Cost of Free Parking. “Planners thought the solution would be to require new buildings to have ‘enough’ to satisfy the demand. It seemed like quite a miracle; it didn’t cost the city anything and it hid the cost of parking.”

Once considered one of the largest metropolises in the U.S., with some 573,000 residents at its peak in the 1950s, Buffalo’s population headed toward a dramatic downward spiral (the latest count by the Census Bureau puts the current population at a little under 259,000.)  By the 1950s, when Buffalo implemented zoning codes that included minimum parking requirements, the city was undergoing major urban revitalization efforts that emphasized easy car access for suburbanites.

“It was fascinating to look at maps that they showed how much of downtown Buffalo was devoted to parking,” says Shoup, who was a visiting professor at the University of Buffalo in 2010. “People have done this for a number of cities, coloring in all the parking lots red and it turns out most of [downtown] Buffalo was red.”

But as the years passed, the codes would prove to hurt more than it helped. Following a suburban model of development, the city allowed stores to be built on huge lots without pedestrian access, rather of promoting walkable neighborhoods. And sidewalk dining at neighborhood restaurants, for example, was technically illegal without a zoning variance. And with the parking requirement, Shoup argues, everyone—including those who can’t afford a car—end up paying for parking.

It also didn’t help that parking requirements many cities across the U.S. were rarely grounded in factual research, says Steuteville. In fact, Shoup’s book notes they amounted to little more than a “collective hunch” of how many spots a building needs, and often these numbers are exaggerated. Local officials often copied what other cities were doing without understanding the reasoning first.

Then there was the issue of historical preservation. “The parking requirement prevented the preservation of some wonderful buildings that were just left to decay and even torn down,” Shoup says. “In more neighborhood commercial areas, if anybody wanted to convert an old building into a restaurant, which has a high parking requirement, the only way they could do it would be by tearing down one of the buildings on either side to provide the parking.”

While Buffalo may be the first to implement a citywide removal, both Shoup and Steuteville say the move is only part of a larger, national movement that’s already ongoing. It would be hard-pressed to find an urban planner who would argue that parking hasn’t done harm to a city, according to Shoup. A 2015 crowdsourced map by the nonprofit Strong Towns shows that dozens of cities—mostly small ones—across the U.S. have either removed parking requirements in certain areas (green pins), lowered them for certain building uses (blue pins), or are currently discussing the move (orange pins).

When asked about the potential of removing parking minimums, Shoup points to a particular case in 1999 Los Angeles. The financial district of L.A. is filled with 19^th century offices that, at the time, were mostly vacant above the ground floor. They couldn’t be restored as housing because the rule then was that each unit needed at least two parking spaces. “A planner in 1999 came up with the Adaptive Reuse Ordinance saying that any historical buildings can be converted into housing without requiring any new parking. People thought this would be a disaster,” he says. “But the ordinance was passed, and within eight years, 57 historical office buildings were fully restored into housing and they created a terrific buzz downtown.”

Yet despite the success of the L.A.’s Adaptive Reuse Ordinance, some critics say it didn’t benefit the poor. Instead, they argue, it helped spur gentrification and homelessness in the city’s downtown area, turning it into what Los Angeles Magazine editor Ed Leibowitz called a “hipster paradise.” Developers built artsy lofts to attract the wealthy while providing very little—if any—affordable housing units for low-income families.

Now critics of the Green Code worry the same could happen to Buffalo as the city’s push for urban revival increases rent prices. While form-based zoning promotes density and development, which are economical for cities like Buffalo, “it doesn’t necessarily guarantee that the types of development taking place are going to allow for either the retention or increase in affordable units,” says Robert Silverman, a urban planning professor who studies inequality in inner-city housing markets at the University of Buffalo.

He predicts that Buffalo may end up following the path of Miami and Denver—the only two other cities to adopt form-based code, and are facing affordable housing crises. “Even though Buffalo is losing population, its Green Code really focuses on dense development in a much smaller footprint, and having less density in older neighborhood outside of it,” Silverman says. “So it essentially creates more demand in a smaller area for development to take place, which has an upward pressure on the cost of commercial and retail property and also on housing.”

The intention for fair housing may be there, but until it’s spelled out in Buffalo’s code, it hinges on political support.

Prior to one of the last public meetings to pass the new ordinance in December (the city’s had some 230), residents held a rally urging the council to write inclusionary zoning into the code. That would require that a percentage of units in new market-rate residential developments be affordable for low- and moderate-income residents. In the end, though, the Green Code passed without such a provision. Although, the city has said that it’s in the midst of conducting a roughly year-long affordable housing study that started in May, and plans to pass an ordinance some time this year.

The council also assures that the Green Code allows for more public input for new development, though Silverman warns that could also give NIMBY and historic preservation activists more opportunities to publicly resist proposals to, say, increase building heights in historic areas—to the detriment of fair housing advocates. Plus, the intention for fair housing may be there, but until it’s spelled out in Buffalo’s code, it hinges on political support. “If a new mayor came into the power who is less amenable to those types of policy,” Silverman says, “without the mandate written into the code, all those kind of goals can go away very quickly.”

Overall, Silverman agrees with Shoup and Steuteville that the Green Code, with its removal of minimum parking requirements, is a step in the right direction. Steuteville even thinks Buffalo’s move, if successful, can embolden other cities to push for form-based codes. “As the city turns itself around with the help of this code,” he says, “it could be a model for cities from Cleveland, Toledo, Detroit to Milwaukee, Erie, or Rochester—all these cities that have been declining.”

Yet, Silverman says, “there is still work to be done.”

Re-post from Wbfo News

Listen.

Cuban exiles now living in Miami are cheering news of the death of Fidel Castro at the age of 90. But a University at Buffalo professor who spent significant time in Cuba doing research says there is likely a much different reaction to Castro’s death inside Cuba.

Dr. Henry Louis Taylor released a book in 2009 that explored Cuban neighborhoods. Taylor says Castro was held in high regard.

Taylor said Castro allowed neighborhoods to shape everyday life and culture, despite scarce resources, and that helped sustain his power at a time when other communist regimes collapsed.

His book, “Inside El Barrio: A Bottom-Up View of Neighborhood Life in Castro’s Cuba” (Kumarian Press, 2009), charted the legacy of the last 15 years of Fidel Castro’s rule through the lens of Cuban household life.

WBFO’s Mark Scott reached Taylor Saturday to learn more about his research, Castro’s legacy and the future of Cuba.

When political candidates speak, they are often addressing several audiences at once, and their words can have different meanings for each. When Hillary Clinton talked about race during her debate Monday night against Donald J. Trump, she delivered a subtle and powerful message to black voters, speaking to them not only in the substance of what she said, but in her carefully chosen language.

Mrs. Clinton has been viewed with skepticism by some black activists since the 1990s, when she called for harsh penalties for teenage gang members, whom she termed “super-predators.” But throughout the 90-minute forum Monday night, she showed her determination to persuade large numbers of black voters to support her in November by adopting the lexicon that has been embraced by a new generation of young black activists and liberal whites.

Mrs. Clinton’s expressions set off a range of reactions, from relief to delight, to accusations of cynical political maneuvering. But there was near universal agreement that her use of the language of the racial justice movement signaled a significant moment for both the candidate and the cause. Here is a look at what Mrs. Clinton said and what it meant to certain viewers.

Watch.

Despite the often-negative images, rhetoric and scholarship that often characterize urban communities of color as chaotic or dangerous, these communities are in fact reflections of histories of survival and adaptation that benefited not only the people within them but also cities and metropolitan areas at large. North American cities and the urban life that fuels them would be far different without the presence of such communities, which have influenced music, food, sports, political leadership, and urban scholarship. Communities of color and their struggles for equality have profoundly affected the field of urban planning and its scholars, particularly in encouraging movement toward social equity and justice, and this has been true since the early twentieth century but most certainly since the 1960s.

Panelists: William Goldsmith, Sigmund Shipp, Conan Smith, and Henry Louis Taylor, Jr.
Moderator: June Manning Thomas

Re-Post From WIVB

Watch.

BUFFALO, N.Y. (WIVB) – Kids from around Buffalo are at a University at Buffalo summer camp where they’re learning about the problems different neighborhoods continue facing.

“We’re learning about neighborhood development,” said Ayana Thomson, a 12-year-old camper. “Like how to improve a neighbor and make it more appealing to everyone else.”

The neighborhoods they’ve selected to look at are on the East Side near Genessee Street, an area not too far from where Thompson lives.

“When I look at my neighborhood, I realize it could be much worse like the other neighborhoods,” said Thompson. “They don’t have a lot of resources or many things to do.”

The campers like the different hands-on activities they do. They’re creating mock-murals and mosaics as well as learning to use photoshop, creating before and after photos showing how they’d like to spruce up streets.

“When I see the other neighborhoods, I see the potential that their neighborhood has,” said Nadia Loggans, another camper.

UB’s Urban Planning Department hosts the camp where teachers and leaders say it is about more than the kids seeing the problems happening around them but also understand why they’re happening.

“They see the issues, they walk by them every day,” says Camden Miller, one of the camp’s teachers. “Getting them to be aware of them is easy. It’s getting them to understand why they’re happening is tougher. Having them go out into the neighborhood and explain what they see and why they feel it is occurring and apply it really gives them some perspective.”

The kids say they’re learning they can change their city and make a difference.

“It takes everybody to improve the neighborhood.”

Re-post from Democracy Now

Watch:

To discuss Hillary Clinton’s historic nomination and how the Black Lives Matter movement is reflected in the Democratic platform, we are joined by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of “From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation” and an assistant professor of African-American studies at Princeton University, and Janaye Ingram, the former executive director of the National Action Network and a member of the 20/20 Leaders of America.

Guests:

Full Transcript:

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. This is “Breaking with Convention: War, Peace and the Presidency,” our two-hour daily two-week special from the Republican and, this week, the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.

To talk more about the historic nomination of Hillary Clinton and how the Black Lives Matter movement is reflected in the Democratic platform, we’re joined now by two guests. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is the author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation. She’s an assistant professor of African-American studies at Princeton University. And Janaye Ingram is with us, former executive director of the National Action Network and a member of the 20/20 Leaders of America.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Let’s begin with Janaye Ingram. Your response to the nomination of Hillary Clinton last night, the formal acceptance speech that she gave on the floor of the Democratic National Convention, the first woman nominated by a major party to be president of the United States?

JANAYE INGRAM: Well, obviously, I think it’s a proud moment for this country that this has happened, notwithstanding all that has surrounded her nomination. I still believe that her nomination, the first female, is a moment that we need to pay attention to and we need to acknowledge as a history-making moment. I was happy about her speech last night. I think she could have done a little bit more with giving us personal—a personal story. I think, leading up to her speech, you had a lot of the speakers—and the video—you had her daughter talking about her as a person. The speeches in the nights prior, you had people sort of humanizing her and bringing that human touch. I was looking to hear a little bit more from that perspective.

But I was also happy to hear her talk about the Black Lives Matter movement, even though she didn’t specifically call it out. She did mention the fact that black and brown people are being sort of brutalized—that’s my word—brutalized by police. And I will say that was something. That was a recognition to have on a national stage by this candidate, was important to the movement. You had Reverend Barber earlier talk about Black Lives Matter. And so, having that repeated by Hillary Clinton, at least in her way of saying it, was an important moment, that shows, I think, a lot of the pressure that has been placed on her. She is feeling that pressure, and she is responding to it, at least now, with words.

AMY GOODMAN: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor?

KEEANGA–YAMAHTTA TAYLOR: So, I guess I was thinking that the speech, along with the convention as a whole, in many ways has demonstrated this gap between the kind of symbolism and the reality that exists on the streets of Philadelphia and around the country. And so, I think that Hillary Clinton gave a speech that was full of platitudes and that, in some ways, I guess, was of symbolic value, but that really lacked any kind of specificity in terms of how we are going to address very serious crises in this country. And so, I think that, to me, that’s part of the problem I kind of walk away with the convention with, is there’s all the talk about how great and wonderful the United States is, and in many ways, obviously, the convention reflected more of the ethnic and gender and sexual orientation diversity in the United States certainly than the Republican hate show last week, but I think that what we’ve learned from the Obama presidency is that we have to move from symbolism into actual policies and programs that are going to improve the lives of everyday, ordinary people. And in the speeches throughout the week and Clinton’s speech last night, I think we’re still waiting for that specificity in how we go from a kind of symbolic representation of people to the actual representation and improvement in the quality of people’s lives on an everyday basis.

AMY GOODMAN: What would you have liked Hillary Clinton to say last night?

KEEANGA–YAMAHTTA TAYLOR: Well, I think the two things that I’m most concerned with have to do with Black Lives Matter and specific policies that are going to be advanced to stop police abuse and violence in black communities. And also, Hillary Clinton gave a very heralded speech in Harlem in February, where she talked about the reinvestment in distressed communities, and that seemed to be something that was completely missing from the speech. So, in a city like Philadelphia, where the Democratic Party has been having this party all week, there’s 28 percent poverty, and half of those people are living in what is defined as extreme poverty. And so, what are the actual policies and practices that are going to be put into place to address that? That’s the concrete details that I wanted to hear about.

AMY GOODMAN: Janaye, why do you think Hillary Clinton is the best person to address the criminal justice system?

JANAYE INGRAM: I don’t know that I would say that she’s the best person. I think she definitely has a—having had the experience that she’s had, she does bring to the table certain criteria that I think would be helpful, as opposed to the person that she’s running against. To say that she’s the best person is not something that I would be comfortable saying. I think, given the two choices—you have Donald Trump, who has talked about essentially creating a law and order state, which when you’re talking about a fractured relationship between police and specifically the black community, that is very troubling and disturbing to hear. So, given the two choices, I think having someone who at least is willing to have the conversation and to recognize that, even if it is platitudes, that it’s important that she says it. I was really waiting to see if it was going to be said by her, to be honest, because, you know, I wasn’t completely sure. But the fact that she actually acknowledged it means that there’s an opportunity there for us to go further and hold her accountable to the things that she’s saying.

AMY GOODMAN: And you had this unusual moment on the stage of the convention where the mothers of those who had been killed, two of them by police, one by a vigilante—Sandra Bland’s mother, Trayvon Martin’s mother and Jordan Davis’s mother. What did you make of that, Keeanga?

KEEANGA–YAMAHTTA TAYLOR: Well, one thing that I want to say, though, is that Donald Trump may, in fact, talk about law and order and building a law and order—building further on a law and order society, but we have to remember that Bill and Hillary Clinton, in fact, did build a law and order society with the passage of the crime bill in 1994, passage of the Effective Death Penalty Act in 1996. And so, in many ways, we are recovering from the policies that were championed and doggedly pursued by the Clinton, the original Clinton, administration in the 1990s. So I think it’s important to say that.

In terms of the appearance of the Mothers of the Movement, I know that if my child were killed unjustly by the police or by a racist vigilante, that I would want to do everything in my power to bring the perpetrator to justice. So I don’t question the motives of the mothers who participated in the DNC program.

AMY GOODMAN: The fact that they were there.

KEEANGA–YAMAHTTA TAYLOR: Absolutely. I do question, however, the motives of political operatives who I think would use the suffering of black parents for votes. And so, there’s nothing that I have seen yet in Clinton’s policy platform that, to me, takes seriously addressing the issues of police violence. There’s been talk about money on police training, that sort of thing. But what about police accountability? What is actually being talked about in terms of holding the police accountable for the deaths of black people? We’ve just seen this week, Freddie Gray—apparently, no one killed Freddie Gray. Freddie Gray’s death was declared a homicide, and no one will be held to account. And so, that—I’m interested in what Hillary Clinton has to say about that. And that’s what I mean that we have to move beyond promises during election time and platitudes into concrete specifics of what elected officials are going to do to defend black people from violence and abuse at the hands of the police.

JANAYE INGRAM: You know, going back to the earlier point about the—

AMY GOODMAN: Janaye Ingram.

JANAYE INGRAM: Yes—the crime bill, while I agree, you know, that was not the right legislation that we needed to have—and clearly, we are seeing the effects of that daily. The Clintons championed that, and so, by doing that, they are the face of that. I will say there were other people who championed that and who supported that bill, who looked like us, like the two of us. And so, you know, at that time, I want to put the context behind that bill. At that time, there was a lot of crime, and there were a lot of people of all races—it wasn’t just the Clintons who were saying this is the bill. And so, there is a responsibility that we have as a community, and I think that’s the part that I think is really important. Yes, we’re talking about—we need to talk about policy solutions, but offering policy, in and of itself, does not guarantee that that policy will even be implemented. Power concedes nothing without a demand. So, yes, we have to make sure that the power structure is meeting our demands and is essentially responding to the things that they said that they were going to do.

There’s a certain level of accountability that I don’t know has been achieved yet. And that’s not just by the black community. I think that’s by the American society as a whole. I think that’s part of the frustration that you’re seeing coming out with the Bernie movement. People don’t feel like politicians have been held accountable. But what they fail to realize is that we are the ones that are supposed to keep politicians accountable. And so, with that, I think, you know, we’re talking about policy solutions. I think Hillary Clinton needs to have someone in her ear talking about what types of solutions need to be had. I don’t know that, given the ’94 crime bill, that I would fully say, you know, “Have at it. You create the policies, and we’ll be behind it.” It needs to be a conversation.

AMY GOODMAN: Keeanga?

KEEANGA–YAMAHTTA TAYLOR: Yeah, I would just say that, first, talking about the 1990s, I think it’s one thing if you’re in a black community that is absolutely having issues with crime and poverty because of decades-long disinvestment in jobs and infrastructure in black communities, and you’re left with no other viable alternative. So, the alternative wasn’t either support the crime bill or support this host of public policies that are aimed at rebuilding the public infrastructure, rebuilding public programs that are intended to mitigate the worst aspects of poverty. People weren’t given that option. In fact, Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton helped to usher in a period where they declared the era of big government, i.e. government programs, is over. And so, the only alternative that people were given was more police and more prisons.

And that’s the very important context, because the thing I think that we miss that was most pernicious about Clinton policies in the 1990s—the crime bill, the Effective Death Penalty Act, welfare reform—was not just that people ended up in prison, was not just that poor people lost access to important government benefits, but most importantly is the damage that was done to the idea that government has a role in the life of everyday people, that government has a responsibility to poor and working-class people. And, in fact, they helped to disconnect the idea that government has any role. They helped to disconnect the idea that poverty, that economic inequality is responsible for the issues of crime, that those things were responsible for people’s reliance or need for welfare. And these are ideas that we are still contending with today, the idea that government somehow is a bad thing.

AMY GOODMAN: And what is your assessment of Donald Trump, where he fits into this? Let’s begin with Janaye.

JANAYE INGRAM: My assessment of Donald Trump is obviously that he is using fear as a tactic to sort of gain him some votes, popularity. Even seeing his most recent comments talking about hitting some of the speakers, I mean, it’s—

AMY GOODMAN: He was in Iowa—

JANAYE INGRAM: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: —and he said that he wanted to attack some of the DNC speakers.

JANAYE INGRAM: He wanted to attack—he said—I believe he said “hit.”

AMY GOODMAN: “Hit,” you’re right.

JANAYE INGRAM: He wanted to hit some of the speakers. It is appalling to me that this man is a nominee to be president. I can’t even fathom that this is the person that some people in this country want to lead this country. What he’s doing is not leadership. What he is doing, I don’t even know the word for it, but it’s disgusting. Whatever it is, it’s disgusting.

And ultimately, you know, I think, at the end of the day, I noticed in the package that—one of the packages you showed, someone was talking about how there was this sense of nationalism at the DNC. And I noticed it, too. I noticed the signs and the chants. What I attributed that to was when you have a person who is talking about making America great again, as if America hasn’t made strides, and talking about taking America back to a period when I don’t think it was great at all—let me not say “at all,” but I don’t think it was as great as it could have been. It did not live up to the ideals and the tenets that we want to hold America to. I think that was the reason behind all of that sort of sense of nationalism, to basically say this is still a nation to be proud of.

AMY GOODMAN: Keeanga, I’m going to end with the question about movements and where they fit into this whole electoral process into November.

KEEANGA–YAMAHTTA TAYLOR: Well, I think the movements are quite critical in terms of keeping alive the issues that are most important to us, because, to be honest, there would be no discussion about police violence and police brutality, there would be no discussion about black lives mattering, without there having been, since August 9th of 2014, a movement highlighting and exposing that police violence is not just a case of bad apples or rogue cops, but that it’s absolutely systemic. And so, I actually think that in order to keep these issues alive, in order to keep whomever is elected in November, to keep their feet to the fire, that the movement can’t collapse into just blind support for Hillary Clinton because we know that Donald Trump is not on the agenda, and that the movement needs to remain politically independent, with its own set of independent objectives and goals that are not tied to whomever becomes president.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we will certainly continue this discussion in these months to come, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, and Janaye Ingram, former executive director of the National Action Network.

This is Democracy Now! When we come back, we take a look at the vice-presidential nominee, Tim Kaine, the senator from Virginia, and his time in Honduras. This is Democracy Now! Back in a minute.

UB Center for Urban Studies is hosting its 4th annual Summer Academic Camp. The camp is designed for middle school students.  WBFO’s Eileen Buckley reports the theme is neighborhood development.

More than ten students are gathering in a classroom on the University at Buffalo’s South campus at the Hayes Hall Annex through mid-August for this Academic Camp. They’re learning about ”Transformation of the Visual Landscape’.

“In many of the east side neighborhoods, the visual landscape is harmful in the sense that it depicts an image of decay, deterioration, neglect and a sense of hopelessness — that is — that you can do nothing about it,” said Dr. Henry Louis Taylor, Jr., Director of UB’s Urban Studies program.

Re-Post From WIVB

BUFFALO, N.Y. (WIVB) – Leaders in Buffalo love talking about the city’s renaissance. Progress is on display in certain places but the fact is, Buffalo is still the 3rd poorest city in the country, with 30.1% of the population struggling to make ends meet.

News 4’s Nalina Shapiro wanted to help us understand how some neighborhoods, like the east side, ended up the way it did. This story fill books. It’s a complex issue and it’s not easy getting answers from leaders but two two professors and one young man helped us understand Buffalo’s history and what changes still need to be made.

We met 14 year old Razhon Harris while he was doing yard work near the Broadway Market. He told us he wants to make an impact.

“Right now I’m helping my grandma with some grass, planting some grass for her,” said Harris.

A few feet of new grass might not mean much to you but it represents something much bigger for Harris. He lives in one of Buffalo’s poorest neighborhoods on the east side.

“Well it adds property value to the houses and it attracts some people over here,” Harris told us while he was planting the seeds.

Not nearly enough people are investing in the east side. One problem has to do with home values, which are low. The average price of a home sold on the east side went for $37,426, according to data sent to us by Emily Cornwell, a licensed real estate agent with Nothnagle Realtors. If you take a quick ten minute drive to North Buffalo, the Elmwood, Allentown and downtown areas home prices range from $128,000 to more than $500,000. The west side is also making a comeback with home prices valued on average at around $123,546. South Buffalo home prices are also lower, on average between $68,000 and around $85,000.

Still, the east side has the lowest home prices and some of the most empty structures. The area by the Broadway market has the highest rate of vacant houses in the city, 1,704 vacancies among 6,471 units according to Buffalo Business First.

“See my family, our house used to be abandoned but then we fixed it up and now it looks beautiful,” said Harris.

That’s just one family. Not everyone can afford to do that or wants to do that since home values are so low. Harris said the community needs more help.

“It’s like a war zone over here, when they’re spending money, our taxpayer dollars on certain stuff that doesn’t help everybody it’s only helping certain people,” said Harris.

If a 14 year old can tell you that, you would think leaders in Buffalo know investing in home ownership is one key to turning a poor neighborhood around.

“So they know they know they chose to do something differently,” said U.B. Professor Henry Louis Taylor.

Professor Taylor says choices city leaders made created the current state on the east side.

“It’s pure racism, systemic structural racism,” said Professor Taylor.

The pictures tell the story. If you drive by the waterfront and the medical campus it’s a completely different story than what’s being told on the east side, a predominantly black community.

“Buffalo rising and African Americans falling,” said Professor Taylor. “And people will say well how could that happen in a city managed by blacks and controlled by blacks and our answer is simple, black faces in high places don’t mean a thing if they have the same agenda as white faces in high places,” said Professor Taylor.

Building new, forgetting about the old and pushing people out into the suburbs is what Professor Taylor thinks will continue to happen unless more private sector money is invested into areas like the east side.

We asked Harris what his message is to the Mayor of Buffalo and other city leaders, to which he replied, “spend some more money over here, you only did a couple streets and these pots holes over here is crazy,” said Harris.

Historians will tell you east side roads started crumbling when new roads like the 33 and Scajaquada were built, to draw people to the newly developed suburbs in the 1950’s. That created a huge housing vacuum. People moved to the suburbs and left the east side homes empty.
“So, lots of absentee landlords and it led to a rent problem for homeowners and they couldn’t find renters so it led to high arson rates in communities like this,” said Buffalo State Sociology Professor Eric Krieg.

We spoke with him on a deserted Broadway looking in the distance at a blossoming downtown Buffalo.

“It’s an interesting place because there is hardly any traffic on Broadway and a lot of empty lots and buildings that need a lot of repair,” said Professor Krieg.

“I would like some more parks that are child friendly, because there have been a lot of shootings over here and it would be safer if there was more child friendly places over here,” said Harris.

While Harris said the city needs to help more he also added more young people like him need to step up.

“Some of the non lazy ones need to come outside and do some work instead of hanging around doing stuff that don’t matter,” said Harris.

Children can’t control where they’re born, but Professor Taylor says leaders can either continue to build what he calls a “latte city”  to attract only a certain type of business professional, or create a city that works to understand everyone’s diversity.

“What if happy talk was all over Buffalo not just in a few places, imagine what an awesome city that would be,” said Professor Taylor.

We reached out to the City of Buffalo June 6th when we began working on the story. The mayor just responded on July 11th.

“The city has spent significantly more on the east side of Buffalo than it has spent in Canalside. In fact the spending in Canalside is largely private sector spending and that is what is driving the spending we see at Canalside,” said Mayor Byron brown. “Figure in a 10-year period of time those numbers are well in excess of $300 million dollars on the east side of Buffalo.”

Mayor Brown says just recently Sinatra Development agreed to invest $20 million dollars at 1160 Jefferson street on the east side to create a mixed income mixed use space with apartments, retail space and a health center.

Re-post from the Boston Review

A protester demonstrates at a rally against police violence in Minneapolis. / Fibonacci Blue

In spite of Bernie Sanders’s primary win in Indiana and favored status in West Virginia, recent voting in Pennsylvania, Maryland, New York, and a handful of other states appears to confirm what has long been anticipated: after a spirited campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, the Vermont senator is falling to earth. One would not want to write off a campaign prematurely—after all, dismissal of Donald Trump by the press and his fellow Republicans paved his road to the GOP nomination—but Sanders himself is retrenching. Staff cuts and campaign statements suggest he is now focused less on the presidency than on dents he can make in the Democratic Party platform at July’s convention.

Thus it is fair, at this stage, to ask what will become of the political fervor Sanders has unleashed. Supporters of his opponent, Hillary Clinton, hope some of that excitement can be funneled toward her general election run, securing a decisive victory and the legislative mandate believed to result. Especially if Trump is on the general election ballot, as seems all but certain, there is no doubt that a significant portion of Sanders backers will vote for Clinton in November.

Yet this lesser-of-many-evils approach only emphasizes the cynical calculus that Sanders’s supporters yearned to escape: the Democrats promise as little as they can get away with and hope the troglodytes parading in the Republican Party are enough to get the base out to the polls.

Bernie Sanders advocates redistributive government, which puts him at odds with the last twenty-five years of Democratic common sense.

But now some activists wonder whether the class anger orbiting Sanders’s campaign can transform the Democratic Party into a tool for movements against economic and racial inequality. An older generation remembers when the Democratic Party brandished its liberal credentials instead of being terrified by them. For these activists, Sanders’s surprising run yields nostalgic visions of “taking back” the party, reviving what they believe was a grassroots politics representing ordinary people.

Like much nostalgia, however, this is naïve. One need look no further than Clinton’s candidacy to appreciate the Democratic top-brass’s aversion to policies and politics centered on social justice. Instead of thanking Sanders for activating new voters and reinvigorating those still sleepy from the underwhelming presidency of Barack Obama, former President Bill Clinton accused him of wanting to “shoot” people on Wall Street. Last December, instead of accepting responsibility for the security of its own data, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) smeared Sanders and falsely accused him of breaking into Hillary Clinton’s campaign secrets. Clinton has reluctantly appealed to Sanders’s supporters by referring to herself as progressive and declaring that the middle class needs a raise. But mostly she and the Democratic hierarchy have mocked Sanders for supposedly promising “free this and free that and everything”—a criticism she rejected when it came from Jeb Bush’s lips. Clinton has campaigned relentlessly on the improbability of universal health care and criticized Sanders for suggesting that there be free tuition at public universities and colleges.

This is not just a case of Clinton failing to detect which way the wind is blowing in American politics. As a steward of American capital, it is her responsibility to attack the idea of social entitlement. It was her husband and campaign surrogate who clearly articulated the politics of the “new Democrats,” when he declared that the “era of big government is over.” Sanders advocates redistributive government, which puts him at odds with the last twenty-five years of Democratic common sense. Hillary Clinton is not fundamentally opposed to the use of the government treasury for any and all social entitlements, but her refusal to embrace serious redistributive policies for the benefit of poor people shows that she sees her future job as her husband saw his in the ’90s: to crush, or at least ignore, the proposition that the public should provide for people’s needs.

This does not make Clinton a conservative Democrat; it just makes her a Democrat. Since her husband’s first term, the Democratic Party has successfully molded itself into a small-government, pro-privatization, law-and-order party. As then-Senator Joe Biden put it while celebrating the 1994 Crime Bill:

Let me define the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is now for 60 new death penalties. That is what is in this bill. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party has 70 enhanced penalties. . . . The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is for 100,000 cops. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party is for 125,000 new state prison cells.

Today the Black Lives Matter movement has compelled the party to walk back some of that rhetoric. But there is little reason to believe this is a genuine retreat rather than an exercise in political expediency. Biden was speaking to a deeper truth about how the party wanted to be known: as tough as the GOP, not socially liberal or especially concerned with the interests of minorities.

This is not just old news. Decmocratic veterans nationwide continue to push a regressive agenda. Consider Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel, once a party kingmaker and now one of the most reviled public officials in his city. He earned his ignominy by covering for police criminality and attempting to dismantle public education, a process that included thelargest mass school closure in American history, in 2013. Mayor Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles has cracked down on the homeless, confiscating their property, including the “tiny homes” that were doing what the city wouldn’t—house homeless people. In New York City, mayor Bill De Blasio betrayed his supporters in the criminal justice reform movement bypledging to hire 1,300 more police even as crime continued its historic downward trend. In San Franciso, Mayor Ed Lee promoted a “Twitter tax break”—a payroll tax exemption lasting six years and intended to keep tech companies in San Francisco—which cost the city $34 million in 2015 alone. Meanwhile, San Francisco faces a $100 million budget shortfall, and Mayor Lee is calling for across-the-board spending cuts from city agencies. With Democrats scaling back services—excepting, of course, law enforcement—and pushing trickle-down economics, who needs Republicans?

One might protest that Democratic officials have generally been more critical of the latest excesses of campaign finance law than have been their GOP competitors. But these words don’t reflect principle. When it comes to absorbing corporate money and accompanying influence, the Democratic Party takes a back seat to no one. The party’s largest corporate donors embody the greed that courses through the financial and industrial economy: Goldman Sachs, AT&T, Bank of America, JP Morgan, and General Electric hedge their bets by giving almost equally to both parties. Lockheed Martin and Walmart veer toward Republicans but still give millions to Democrats, just in case. In the midst of the primary season, the DNC changed the party’s rules to allow presidential candidates to accept more money from lobbyists and political action committees.

The corrosive influence of money in politics is hardly a revelation, but it is sobering to observe it at work in an organization that claims to champion the welfare of the downtrodden. Take the Congressional Black Caucus, which used to refer to itself as the “conscience of the Congress.” The CBC PAC and its politicians politicians have received some of their largest donations from Walmart, General Motors, and Coca-Cola. Is it any wonder that the caucus has been almost absent in the fight for a higher minimum wage, even as more than half of black workers make less than $15 an hour?

Citizens angered by inequality and injustice should not be stifled by the pressure to organize through the Democratic Party.

Indeed, this campaign season has been a lesson in just how conservative the Democratic Party actually is. Hence Clinton’s unofficial campaign slogan of “no we can’t” and DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s calm admission that unpledged superdelegates “exist really to make sure that party leaders and elected officials don’t have to be in a position where they are running against grassroots activists.”

The two-party system itself preserves the Democrats’ conservatism, which suggests that the party is not likely to change before there is a legitimate challenge from its left. Until then, the Democratic leadership can remain confident that its base has nowhere else to go. Thus, even when Democrats push policies that harm their constituents, they can expect little protest from the major liberal organizations. For example, when the Democratic Party promotes so-called education reform policies that are hostile to teachers unions andnegatively affect black students, officials themselves receive almost no resistance from teachers unions or the NAACP.

In fact, the opposite occurrs. While rank-and-file teachers oppose significant aspects of the reform movement, including the Common Core standards and the intensifying regime of standardized testing, their union leadership dutifully lines up to back the Democratic Party. The American Federation of Teachers endorsed Clinton as early as July 2015; the National Education Association followed suit in October, with no debate or discussion among its members. The civil rights establishment is largely silent on education policy, but, when it does get vocal, it tends to support reformers. This is not surprising considering that theNAACP and Urban League have received millions of dollars from the Gates Foundation, which champions charter schools, standardized testing, and privatization. Notably, education reform was the key agenda item of former Obama administration Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. The party’s conservatism radiates outward, as its constituency learns to fall in behind its positions.

This makes the party difficult to capture, as the Tea Party had captured the GOP at one point. Yet the appeal of such a strategy is longstanding. The same question returns eternally: How to transform protest rabble into respectable politics? In the late 1960s and early ’70s, the move to integrate the New Left into the Democratic Party was heralded as a sign of maturation for the counterculture. But as the movements in the streets subsided and activists entered the electoral arena, they imbibed party norms and became less militant. In 1984 and ’88, the Rainbow Coalition led by Reverend Jesse Jackson was supposed to get tough with the Democratic Party and demand a seat at the table for black voters. Instead, the party got tough with black and other progressive voters by insisting that they take a back seat to the paty’s conservative wing, represented by Bill Clinton. And let us not forget that it was Al Gore, running against Michael Dukakis for the Democratic Party nomination in 1988, who introduced Willie Horton into the post–Civil Rights lexicon of racial symbolism, helping to derail Dukakis’s campaign and reinforce the era’s demand for crime-control politics and policies.

Given the resilience of party conservatives, their history of both rebuffing challenges from the left and absorbing the challengers themselves, it is hard to imagine a takeover strategy bearing fruit. This brings us back to Sanders and the most unfortunate aspect of his campaign: he is running as a Democrat. As a consequence he will, at some point, be asked to throw his support to Clinton. (Already he has agreed to back her in the likely event that she is nominated.) For Sanders, who has spent his entire political life working with and on behalf of Democrats, this is perhaps no great sacrifice.

However, the intractability of the Democratic Party is not the only argument against moving from protest to polite politics. The assumption that doing so is preferable or important underestimates the critical role protest plays in generating progressive change. When activists recall a Democratic Party that cared about ordinary people, what they really have in mind are the social movements and revolts that forced the party to respond to the needs and demands of those on the streets. There would have been no New Deal without the Hoovervilles, rent riots, sit-down strikes, and Communist Party activism of the 1930s. There would have been no Great Society without Civil Rights protests in the South and rebellions in more than two hundred cities across the country during the 1960s. Even Richard Nixon, who won office appealing to a racist “silent majority,” waited out his first term before he began dismantling Lyndon Johnson’s welfare state, lest he provoke protests.

As the great activist and historian Howard Zinn put it, “What matters most is not who is sitting in the White House, but ‘who is sitting in’—and who is marching outside the White House, pushing for change.” He didn’t mean that elections are irrelevant, but he emphasized what citizens do to shape their world. The anger about inequality and injustice in the United States, which has been given some voice by the Sanders campaign and most certainly by the Black Lives Matter movement, should not be stifled by the pressure to organize through the Democratic Party. It can’t be done. The movement for equality and justice should continue to organize independently and fight for its agenda regardless of what party sits in office.

Re-Post From New York Times

GARDEN CITY, N.Y. — Mary Crosson, a housing activist, remembers moving to Long Island from Bayside, Queens, in the 1990s and being struck by the sharp divisions that seemed to keep blacks and whites apart.

“I come from South Carolina, so I understand discrimination,” said Mrs. Crosson, 68, who is black and lives in the village of Hempstead, where nearly half the residents are African-American. “In Queens, it was more of a mixed neighborhood. I came out here and I felt like I went back to the South all over again.”

A federal appeals court found last month that such segregation was not an accident. The court ruled that Hempstead’s next-door neighbor, Garden City, a wealthy village where 1.2 percent of the residents were black in 2010, had violated federal antidiscrimination law by rezoning land specifically to block multifamily housing — and the potential for minorities to move in.

“Something was amiss here,” a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit wrote in its decision. “Garden City’s abrupt shift in zoning in the face of vocal opposition to changing the character of Garden City represented acquiescence to race-based animus.”

The ruling, which affirmed a 2013 decision by a Federal District Court judge, is a pivotal development in the long struggle to dismantle housing segregation as the federal government, courts and advocacy groups shift the battle beyond cities to white suburban enclaves that have deliberately erected barriers to integration.

The more aggressive posture reflects a growing impatience with the persistence of segregation a half-century after the passage of the federal Fair Housing Act, and an effort to apply more pressure on communities to finally open themselves up to black and Latino residents.

“It’s another signal that the tide is turning in terms of fair housing,” said Prof. Robert M. Silverman, of the School of Architecture and Planning at the State University of New York at Buffalo, who has written extensively on the subject of housing segregation. “There’s a historic pattern of segregation that those places have experienced.”
Continue reading the main story

In the case of Garden City, however, the legal victory may have come too late. The litigation dragged on for so long that a courthouse is now planned for the land at the center of the case, and local officials, advocates said, claim there are few other parcels on which to build.

From left, Mary Crosson, Diane Goins and Atlanta Georgia Cockrell at the headquarters of the Long Island chapter of New York Communities for Change. CreditVictor J. Blue for The New York Times

The judges who ruled in the Garden City case raised the possibility that discrimination went beyond one community, directing the district court to determine whether officials in Nassau County, which includes Garden City and Hempstead, had deliberately steered affordable housing to low-income areas with largely minority populations.

Experts on fair housing say discrimination cases are flaring where the need for more affordable housing is greatest: cities where housing costs are high and their suburbs. In recent years, legal challenges have been raised inWestchester County, N.Y.; Marin County, Calif.; and the city of Dallas, among other places.

The litigation in Nassau County is entering its next phase as a new rule issued by the Obama administration takes effect, requiring communities that receive federal housing aid to detail how they plan to reduce racial inequality in housing. The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development has given local governments data and mapping tools to help them address segregation.

Bryan Greene, the agency’s general deputy assistant secretary for fair housing and equal opportunity, said the requirement would help prevent what happened in Westchester, where some of the country’s most affluent communities sit next to hardscrabble towns and where, a judge found, officials had failed to consider race when they certified that the county had taken steps to promote fair housing.

Westchester, which entered a sweeping desegregation agreement with the federal government in 2009, helped “illustrate to many people nationwide that communities were getting millions and millions of dollars in block grant funding” without evaluating the problem of racial segregation, Mr. Greene said.

In the case of Garden City, local officials had not received federal housing money, but the Fair Housing Act applies to all housing transactions and policies, even when federal money is not involved.

The lawsuit that led to the appeals court ruling last month was filed against the village and Nassau County in 2005. It accused the village of discrimination by catering to residents who had protested the board of trustees’ initial embrace of a zoning classification that would have allowed multifamily housing on a 25-acre parcel that the county owned and planned to sell to a private developer.

While the classification did not specifically refer to affordable housing, the appeals court said, residents who opposed the move raised the specter of such housing being built and urged the trustees to “play it safe” by allowing only townhouses or single-family homes on the property. The trustees did just that.

Using what the appeals court called code words, residents said that multifamily housing would change the “flavor” and “character” of the village and would lead to “four or 10 people in an apartment,” and demanded a guarantee that the housing be “upscale.”

“The tenor of the discussion at public hearings,” the judges wrote, and a flier that circulated in the village, “shows that citizen opposition, though not overtly race-based, was directed at a potential influx of poor, minority residents.”

Garden City officials have yet to decide whether to appeal. The trustees said in a statement that the village had already begun to apply remedies ordered by the district court judge, Arthur D. Spatt, adopting a fair-housing resolution and appointing a fair-housing compliance officer.

Judge Spatt also ordered Garden City to require that 10 percent of new residential developments with five units or more be set aside for residents with household incomes of 80 percent or less of Long Island’s median income.

Advocates doubt the village will create such housing anytime soon. “They’ve been saying to us the whole time that they don’t have enough land to build anything,” said Diane Goins, chairwoman of the Long Island chapter of New York Communities for Change, a plaintiff in the case.

Nonetheless, Ms. Goins, who lives in Hempstead, called the ruling historic. “Having grown up in African-American communities on Long Island, I always knew that we were locked into certain places,” she explained. “You could visit Garden City, but you could not stay.”

The lawyers for the plaintiffs said Garden City and Nassau County were not unusual. “There are many violations going on all across the country, but unless someone catches them, it’s of no moment,” one of the lawyers, Frederick K. Brewington, said.

The broader implications of the case, and the appeals court’s question about whether Nassau had engaged in racial steering, could be far-reaching. Nassau “is one of the most segregated counties in the country,” said Stanley J. Brown, another lawyer for the plaintiffs.

In Westchester, the events that eventually produced a desegregation agreement started with a challenge by an advocacy group, the Anti-Discrimination Center, which accused the county of lying when it claimed to have followed fair-housing requirements while applying for federal housing money.

A federal judge agreed, ruling that the county had “utterly failed” to meet its obligations. The county said it would build 750 units of affordable housing in 31 overwhelmingly white communities. The units — intended for working, middle-class families — were to be aggressively marketed to nonwhite residents.

At the end of 2015, according to county officials, financing was in place for 649 units, 588 of which had building permits or certificates of occupancy.

But a thornier element of the Westchester settlement required the county to “use all available means as appropriate” to promote nondiscriminatory housing. That included pressing local governments to change zoning rules that discouraged the construction of apartments.

The federal housing agency has repeatedly accused Rob Astorino, the Westchester County executive, of moving too slowly on the issue. He, in turn, has accused the agency of trying to expand the agreement’s scope.

In a recent opinion article in a local newspaper, Mr. Astorino, a Republican, said the housing agency was trying to “assault local zoning.”

The Nassau and Westchester cases have their roots in a much older housing-discrimination battle near New York: a seminal case in Mount Laurel, N.J.

The Mount Laurel case began in the 1960s when a group of African-Americans found themselves priced out of the township, a Philadelphia suburb. They sued in 1971, after local officials blocked an affordable-housing project.

The case reached New Jersey’s highest court, which in two key rulings limited the use of exclusionary zoning to prevent the construction of affordable housing.

More important, the ruling, known as the Mount Laurel doctrine, asserted that all municipalities had an obligation to provide a “fair share” of affordable housing. Since the mid-1980s, a total of more than 65,000 units have been built across New Jersey’s 21 counties.

Professor Silverman of SUNY Buffalo said continued litigation of fair-housing cases highlighted both the intractable nature of the problem and the robust enforcement now unfolding nationally.

“The fact that discrimination has been sustained over time, despite a series of different court challenges, has kept the issue salient,” he said. “People see the inequalities.”

2. Some advocates have conflated affordable and workforce housing — that is combining homelessness, low-income and middle class needs together. Does such an approach sufficiently address the complexities of the debate or are cities more successful when they address these issues separately?

In a place that is growing rapidly, there is a need for a multifaceted approach, since different groups in the population face affordable housing barriers for different reasons. Strategies like workforce housing usually focus on specific groups that fall through the cracks in tight housing markets — teachers, police officers, firefighters, etc. — who can’t afford to live in the place they work due to their salaries being too low.

So, affordable housing, down payment assistance, mortgage interest write downs or other policies are put in place to help them find housing. But, those types of programs don’t address the needs of other groups struggling to find affordable housing, like the elderly, students or the poor in general. They need a variety of other fair and affordable housing options. Even if things get conflated in the short term, the long-term needs of all constituencies will eventually surface and have to be addressed.

3. Are there cities that have best practices on managing housing needs for changing and growing populations?

People point to places like New Jersey as a model for regional affordable housing development. A lot has been written about the Mount Laurel case where affordable housing was part of the state’s regional fair share approach. Illinois, particularly in the Greater Chicago area, is also cited a lot for its use of inclusionary zoning and mixed-income development.

4. Can government be effective when a booming market is bringing together willing buyers and sellers even at the expense of existing residents, i.e., because they live in public housing that will be torn down, because renters will be charged more every year, and because property value increases will lead to an increase in taxes?

Local government can do some of the things I mention above to protect long-term residents from speculation and housing inflation. The most direct ways to protect existing residents are tools like rent control and various forms of property tax and assessment relief. But, local government can also be more aggressive about building more affordable housing.

Today a lot of that activity takes place with nonprofit developers using tools like the low-income housing tax credit (LIHTC) and by creating low-income housing trust funds. Trust funds are typically funded with fees applied to market-rate developments, payments for increased density that are part of incentive-based inclusionary zoning, and fees for deed transfers, etc.

5. Are there other factors I’m not taking into consideration that I should be on this issue?

Another tool that is being used more to provide for affordable housing are community benefits agreements (CBAs), which are negotiated with developers of large projects like hospital and university expansions, stadium development, etc. Part of those agreements can include set-asides for affordable housing development that are linked to larger projects receiving public subsidies.

David Plazas is the opinion engagement editor of The Tennessean. Call him at 615-259-8063, email him at dplazas@tennessean.com or tweet to him @davidplazas.

Re-post from The Blade

Michigan National Guard member Zach Burrell helps distribute water to residents in their cars in Flint, Michigan, on January 21. The EPA didn’t act as urgently and as transparently as it could have to help the people of Flint – something it has acknowledged only grudgingly.

“The people weren’t put first, the health of the people was not put before profit and money”, Flint Mayor Karen Weaver says in an interview with Ari Shapiro on All Things Considered.

Walters says her 5-year-old son has developed speech issues and a compromised immune system since the water crisis began.

Taylor compares what is going on in Flint to New Orleans with Hurricane Katrina and Ferguson, Missouri, after the death of Michael Brown.

There are now lawsuits and federal investigations pending to find out exactly who knew what about the water’s toxicity and when they knew it, with much of the blame being directed at Gov. Snyder.

The agency also sent a letter to Snyder telling him the city is violating federal drinking water rules and must work quickly to fix them.

Water from the river, known locally as a dumping ground, was more corrosive, causing more lead to leach from Flint’s aging water pipes than the Detroit water the city previously used.

Snyder, a Republican in his second term, was blasted by Hillary Clinton in her remarks after the recent Democratic presidential debate.

“I’ll tell you what, if the kids in a rich suburb of Detroit had been drinking contaminated water and been in it, there would’ve been action”, she said. It was a city, not a state, problem, they said.

Research shows the presence of lead in the blood of children, even at low levels, can stunt their development seriously and irreversibly – in particular, the development of their brain.

“We’re talking birth rates defects, we’re talking sterility stuff like that, and that’s what really bothers me”, he said. Snyder has also “focused on improving education in all our cities, knowing that students need to not just graduate, but graduate with in-demand skills as they compete in a global economy”. Healthy Michigan was a whole Medicaid expansion.

Until Flint’s infrastructure is renovated and all of the corroded pipes are replaced, the water crisis will not end. He said he was releasing them “so that you have answers to your questions about what we’ve done and what we’re doing to make this right for the families of Flint”.

Many have argued that the public health crisis in the poor, majority-Black city points to issues of structural inequality and racism. In the early 1970s, the automaker employed 80,000 blue- and white-collar workers in the area. Fewer than 8,000 GM jobs remain.

In the wake of the financial crisis MI was hit harder than most.

“The real responsibility rests with the county, city and KWA”, he wrote, referring to the Karegnondi Water Authority.

The information comes from The Guardian, which says it received documents showing that city water tests are “systematically distorting” the amount of lead present. They would never do this to Ann Arbor.

13 in Flint, Michigan. He called for Snyder’s ouster and arrest.

Snyder made the emails public on Wednesday following widespread criticism.

“Let’s call this what it is”, Moore said. And the water crisis there is no coincidence, says Henry Louis Taylor Jr., University at Buffalo professor of urban and regional planning and director of the Center for Urban Studies.

Roger Schneider reported from Detroit. He’s known best for launching and contributing to the newsletterInside Michigan Politics.

– See more at: http://www.buffalo.edu/news/releases/2016/01/032.html#sthash.M5r19Vw4.dpuf

Re-Post From the Marc Steiner Show

We discuss our cities from Flint to Baltimore, looking at clean water, environmental racism & infrastructure. With: Dr. Lawrence Brown, public health consultant and Assistant Professor of Public Health in the School of Community Health and Policy at Morgan State University; Mijin Cha, consultant and fellow at Cornell University’s Worker Institute and adjunct professor at Fordham Law School; Henry Louis Taylor, Jr., professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Buffalo and Director of the University of Buffalo Center for Urban Studies; and Jacqui Patterson, Director of the Environmental and Climate Justice Program at the NAACP.

Click here to listen to Podcast

Re-Post From The Washington Post

Flint, Ferguson, New Orleans and Baltimore — cities now inseparable from the national news stories centered there — became calamities for separate reasons. One was a natural disaster (made worse by human error), another awholly man-made crisis. The two others began with police violence, but in disparate settings: the newly impoverished suburbs and the long-distraught inner city. Flint and New Orleans were failures of infrastructure, Baltimore and Ferguson a collapse of human relationships.

“On one level,” says Henry Louis Taylor, “they all look and appear to be very, very different.” But, argues the professor of urban and regional planning at the University at Buffalo, it’s about time we begin to talk about them in the same breath. “These are places that are left behind, forgotten,” he says. “They’re places we’ve gotten very good at shielding from view.”

Together, he argues that these cities — and recent events there — point to the endurance in the United States of structural racism, of minorities disproportionately left vulnerable to the economy or the environment, of communities abandoned by taxpayer dollars, public interest and government oversight.

[Flint’s water crisis reveals government failures at every level]

“Flint is what I call ‘a throwaway city,’ ” Taylor says, to take one example. “It was left by the big industries. It was left on its own, by the state, by taxpayers, by the county.”

And then such places must strike terrible financial bargains — ticketing residents in Ferguson to generate money, downgrading the water supply in Flint to cut costs. The same shortage of funding also affects schools. The quality of schools alters children’s futures. Those children remain in poverty as adults. And their own families live with the environmental costs of decades-old decisions on where to put highways, factories and power plants.

These kinds of places are frequently home to minorities. And they often exist, too, within larger regions that do have resources — but where the neighborshave been quite ingenious in making sure they don’t have to share them.

“Across the board, when we start to probe deep into these forgotten places, we start to see a trend emerge,” Taylor says. “We start to see the different ways in which racism impacts African Americans, and we also see the different ways where it impacts the places where they live.”

[What your first-grade life says about the rest of it]

In the heat of an unfolding news event, it appears as if we’re looking at something else, or something smaller — a problem of EPA leadership, or aging pipes, or bad apples among police officers.

“We’ll see police brutality in Ferguson, and we’ll see police brutality in Baltimore, or Cleveland, but we’re confused about the places,” Taylor says. “Well in Ferguson, you had whites in control. But in Baltimore, you had blacks in control, so maybe that’s not racism, maybe that’s something else. We’re not sure exactly what we’re seeing. Or you see Flint, and people are really confused, because we don’t know what’s going on. Maybe those were just a bunch of bad decisions people made, and it doesn’t have anything to do with race.”

What we should be seeing, he suggests, are links between all of these events and the larger structures that contributed to them.

Re-Post From Investigative Post

Has Buffalo really gotten its mojo back?

That was the question posed by Investigative Post Editor Jim Heaney during a panel discussion Tuesday at Allen Street Hardware attended by an overflow crowd of 80 people.

The panelists were Newell Nussbaumer, editorial director of Buffalo Rising, Rocco Termini, president of Signature Development, and Henry Taylor, professor and founding director of the Center for Urban Studies at the University at Buffalo.

They did agree that the Queen City has made strides, but most of its work still lies ahead, and not everybody is sharing in the recovery. Much of the night’s discussion centered around Buffalo’s struggling East Side and what can be done to ensure it isn’t left behind in the rebound.

Termini said that Buffalo is still in the infancy of regaining its mojo. He said real progress happens when a city is economically sustainable and doesn’t rely on subsidies to incentivize developers.

“Whether it is historic tax credits, whether it is brownfield tax credits, or it’s direct infusion of cash from the state of New York or some other governmental body, I think you get your mojo when you don’t need any of those subsidies,” said Termini.

Termini said Buffalo’s biggest challenge is boosting its low median annual income, pointing out that it is $14,000 less than Rochester’s.

“You really need to have more income in this city to get rents up so that you can start doing things without government subsidies. And I think when you start seeing that happen in Buffalo, then you really have your mojo back,” said Termini.

Nussbaumer has been covering Buffalo’s growth since Buffalo Rising’s launch in 2004. He said Buffalo is seeing more new businesses sprout up than he can cover.

“I gauge how we’re doing, a lot of times, based on how I can keep up with what’s going on. And for the first time ever, I have a really hard time keeping up with what’s going on,” said Nussbaumer. “I can’t cover the stories fast enough.”

Taylor rejected the premise of Buffalo getting its mojo “back,” arguing that Buffalo’s task is to identify the kind of city we want to build and create a new mojo from that vision.

“The template we should be aiming for is a just city. A city anchored around social, racial and economic justice. A city in which we are looking at prosperity and growth not as ends within themselves, but as a means of creating and building a new way of life,” said Taylor.

All three panelists agreed that one of the city’s greatest assets is the number of young people choosing to stay or move back to Buffalo.

“Think about five years ago. It was like, ‘Everybody’s leaving Buffalo, you can’t get any young kids to stay in Buffalo.’ Now, you go to Connecticut Street, you go to 15th Street, you go to Rhode Island, you go to Vermont, you see young kids buying houses,” said Termini.

“They were buying them five years ago for $15,000, $20,000. Now those same houses are $150,000. They’re putting their sweat equity into these houses and they’re building a community of young people.”

The panel also agreed that the East Side is being left out of Buffalo’s resurgence. Taylor said more needs to be done to renovate the East Side without displacing residents.

“In 1970, 9,000 African Americans lived in the Fruit Belt. Today, less than 2,000 live in the Fruit Belt,” he said.

“Since 2000, when the Medical Campus was launched, the population in the Fruit Belt has dropped more than 45 percent. In that same period of time, since 2000, the number of vacancies has increased by 42 percent. I mean, how can the number of vacancies increase in the hottest neighborhood within the framework of the city?”

He said that 88 percent of those vacancies today are not for sale or rent, instead being held for development.

“That’s not your granddaddy’s gentrification. Your granddaddy’s gentrification is where one high-income group comes in and replaces another group. Some of that is starting to occur. But most of that is just erasing the people to make way for other forms of development,” said Taylor.

Nussbaumer said he understands why residents of the East Side would be wary of outside groups developing in their area. He thinks that if the right conversation is struck “sensitively,” they could see the same kind of rehabilitation movement that is occurring on the West Side.

“The East Side is filled with opportunities. If you look at the East Side of Buffalo, it is mind-blowing. You have beautiful buildings and a lot of them are in jeopardy right now, which is so sad,” he said.

“And you’ve got beautiful neighborhoods, beautiful people who are trying to make a go of it, and they want to be welcoming, but they’re afraid that certain areas and certain properties are going to be bought up for the wrong reason.”

Taylor said a movement that works in favor of the East Side must grow organically from within the community.

“You do not want a West Side organization developing the East Side,” said Taylor. “You’ve got to build the capacity on the East Side in order to do that.”

Buffalo’s failing educational system was also seen by the panel as one of the city’s plights.

Termini said that until something can be done to improve the educational system, Buffalo will have no mojo. He said the failing system affects everybody, especially the poor. He called for radical change to Buffalo Public Schools, suggesting to throw away the current system and “start from zero.”

“These kids are not dumb kids, it’s just that they’re kids who have been educated by the Buffalo Public Schools that don’t prepare them for anything except McDonald’s,” Termini said.

“And that’s the big problem in Buffalo, and that’s one of the reasons why our median income is so low. We don’t prepare people for life after school.”

Termini wants to decentralize the schools, assigning four or five schools to each college in Western New York and having those colleges run the schools.

“Then you have an opportunity for all the students in these colleges to be mentors to these kids,” he said.

“And some of these kids really need mentors because there’s really a lack of guidance at home. Until we re-imagine our whole school system, we’re going nowhere, and I think that’s probably our biggest problem right now.”

The panel discussion was part of Investigative Post’s “At Issue” series sponsored by William C. Bernhardi Law Offices, the M&T Bank Foundation, Talking Leaves Books, WGRZ and The Public.

Upcoming events include a luncheon Jan. 13 that will consider conditions on the city’s East Side, a trivia night Jan. 27 featuring Kevin O’Connell of WGRZ, and another happy hour discussion Feb. 10 on a topic yet to be determined. Tickets will go on sale soon.

Re-Post from WBFO

A writer, a professor, and a developer walk into a bar. There’s no punch line to follow because that’s actually what happened during a panel discussion on Tuesday night at Allentown Hardware. The main question – is Buffalo getting its mojo back?

Investigative Post editor Jim Heaney moderated the conversation between Buffalo Rising Editor Newell Nussbaumer, University at Buffalo Urban Studies Professor Henry Taylor, and developer Rocco Termini.

Nussbaumer said the city has come a long way from where it was, but hasn’t made a full rebound yet. He said he often gauges how Buffalo is doing on how well he can keep up with what’s going on in town.

“For the first time ever I have a really hard time keeping up with what’s going on,” said Nussbaumer.

Nussbaumer fields constant emails and conversations with people moving back to Buffalo and engaging in new activity.

Termini said the city is in its mojo infancy. He pointed out that every project in Buffalo has a subsidy associated with it, from tax credits for historic properties and brownfields to cash injections from state or local government.

“I think you get your mojo when you don’t need any of those subsidies,” Termini said.

Termini said the real problem is that residents can’t afford to pay market-rate rent with Buffalo’s low median income.

As for Taylor, he took issue with the concept of getting mojo back. He said the mojo of the past should not be a present concern. Instead, Taylor believes residents should focus on the task of creating a new mojo.

“A part of that task is to identify the kind of city that we want to build,” said Taylor. “We don’t know what kind of city we want to build.”

Taylor said the city template should be anchored around social, racial and economic justice. He said prosperity and growth should be looked at as a means of creating a new way of life.

In regards to the best thing Buffalo has going for its resurgence and areas in which it can stand for improvement, all three agreed that the most positive asset is a new wealth of young residents.

“Young people are reenergizing this city,” explained Termini. “They’re coming back. They’re not leaving. And they’re not leaving because they see the possibility of opportunities here, which five years ago, people didn’t see those opportunities.”

Among the items thought to be negative were an underperforming education system, failure to develop the city’s east side, and a lack of vision for accommodating minority and low income residents.

The conversation quickly turned to the question of how to revive Buffalo’s East Side neighborhoods and a key issue.

“Who on the East Side will be the catalyst?” asked Nussbaumer. “Will it be the reverends? Will it be the community? Will it be the block clubs? Will it be the commercial businesses that are over there? Who is going to lead that conversation?”

All three panelists generally agreed that the conversation needs to come from within the east side community, but debated over whether outside help would be appropriate. Taylor said the person or entity hasn’t yet emerged who can take charge of the issue.

Re-post from Orchard Park Bee

Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz recently announced the appointees of the re-established Welfare Advisory Board, which will function as a Poverty Committee to advise Erie County on how to reduce poverty, according to a release.

Poloncarz called for the establishment of the committee earlier this year as part of his health and human services plan, Initiatives for a Stronger Community.

“Although numerous indicators show that the County as a whole is better off than it was a few short years ago, our community cannot truly be prosperous if a significant portion of our community is unable to take advantage of these opportunities,” Poloncarz said in the release.

Although the poverty committee will be staffed and supported by the Department of Social Services, it will be engaged with all county departments that work with individuals in or at-risk of poverty.

The poverty committee will advise county government on measures to reduce poverty and its causes, including access to employment opportunities, the high cost of safe and secure housing, substance abuse, mental illness, discrimination and disability.

The Erie County Charter directs that the board, which had been inactive for many years, be made up of seven members. Poloncarz introduced the members along with the chairperson of the board, the Rev. Kinzer Pointer.

“Re-establishing this important committee to ask and seek answers to reducing poverty is our responsibility to our fellow citizens,” Rev. Pointer said. “This is vital work in returning the entire region to better days, and I am pleased to join this effort.”

Rev. Pointer, of Buffalo, and a graduate of Canisius College, is the pastor of Agape Fellowship Baptist Church.

The other new appointees are:

Dr. Henry Louis Taylor, the founding director of the Center for Urban Studies at the University at Buffalo. His research focuses on understanding distressed urban neighborhoods, the redevelopment of shrinking cities, and issues of social isolation, racial justice and class facing people of color.

Anna Falicov, who has focused her law practice and activism on representing and advocating for working people. She is the chairwoman of the Coalition for Economic Justice, an organization that works on issues of equitable economic development and workers’ rights.

Dr. Myron Glick, the chief medical officer of Jericho Road Community Health Center. The center provides a culturally sensitive medical home, especially for refugee and low-income community members, facilitating wellness and self-sufficiency by addressing health, education, economic and spiritual barriers.

Rev. Frank Cerny, board chairman of the Rural Outreach Center in East Aurora, which provides a centralized facility where those in need in rural areas of Erie County can receive acute assistance when dealing with sudden traumatic events, along with empowerment and training programs to elevate their status.

Dr. Yvonne Minor-Ragan, president of Buffalo Promise Neighborhood. The organization is a public/ private partnership seeking to improve academic performance at the neighborhood’s three schools while revitalizing the surrounding community.

Marlies Wesolowski, executive director of the Lt. Col. Matt Urban Human Services Center, a multifaceted human service organization, since 2001. She previously served as Buffalo School Board president.

Re-Post From WIVB

BUFFALO, N.Y. (WIVB) —  For the first time in its history, those who make up Buffalo’s minority population have become the majority. And while the result is a more racially or ethically diverse population, some officials say it also signals something else.

“We have worked to be more inviting of all people,” said Mayor Byron Brown at City Hall Tuesday. “People of all backgrounds, of all races, of all faiths, we are working together collectively in this community to build a city of opportunity for all people.

“We are very pleased that people are embracing the diversity of this community,” he said. “We are celebrating our diversity. We are learning about the different cultures that exist in our community.”

Brown exemplified that mentality Tuesday while welcoming members of a business contingency from China that operates a company at the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus. They’re considering an expansion.

“Communities that support and respect their diversity are more vibrant, they’re more progressive, and they see more economic development and job growth, and that’s what we’re seeing in the city of Buffalo,” Brown said.

Resident Gina Davis, who lives near Martin Luther King Jr., Park, agreed.

“I look it as a positive thing because at one time, Buffalo looked like it was a forgotten city,” Davis said. “And now with such diversity, it’s beautiful.

“There has been a lot of racism in the city of Buffalo, and I think with them moving back into the city, I think it’s a good thing. I think it’s a good start for unity,” she said.

While celebrating diversity is an important step toward equality, such population shifts also signal inequality, when it comes to resources, says Dr. Henry Louis Taylor, Jr., professor of Urban Planning and History, and the director of the Center for Urban Studies at UB.

“We should celebrate the upward trajectory of this place,” he said. “But at the same time, we should condemn metropolitan inequality. We should condemn the fact that people can escape their responsibilities as citizens of Erie County simply by changing their addresses.

“Whites are continuing to move out into the suburban region,” Taylor said. “It means its overall tax base is still declining, while the challenges it faces are continuing to increase. Which means less money that will be available for struggling suburbs like Lackawanna, or even places like Cheektowaga, where problems are much greater, and the inner cities.

Whether it’s white flight or a chance to celebrate diversity, experts believe the trend will continue. And only time will tell whether it’s in the best interests of the city of good neighbors.

Link to full article: http://wivb.com/2015/09/22/latest-census-stats-show-minorities-now-buffalos-majority/ 

Read the full article from WBFO here.

“While we hear time and time again about Buffalo’s economic renaissance, there remains many living in poverty, not just in the city but throughout Erie County. A new panel of volunteers is being formed by the Erie County Executive to help address the problem.

County Executive Mark Poloncarz’s panel, named the Poverty Committee, is a re-establishment of what used to be the Welfare Advisory Board. Members of the panel, whose backgrounds include academia, clergy and not-for-profit human service providers, will voluntarily explore ways the county can take on the issue.”

Re-Post From The Buffalo News

One is a University at Buffalo professor with expertise on distressed urban neighborhoods and the redevelopment of shrinking cities. Another runs a West Side health center whose main clients are refugees and others of low income. A third is chairman of an agency dedicated to meeting the needs of the rural poor.

The three are among seven appointed Thursday to a new committee tasked with advising Erie County on ways to combat poverty countywide.

According to County Executive Mark C. Poloncarz, reducing poverty will be accomplished, in part, by keeping a sustained focus on the problem, even as the county’s overall economic fortunes begin to look up after decades on a downward spiral.

“Although numerous indicators show that the county as a whole is better off than it was a few short years ago, our community cannot truly be prosperous if a significant portion of our community is unable to take advantage of these opportunities,” Poloncarz said.

The announcement came a day after new U.S. Census Bureau data showed a slight decrease in the percentage of Buffalo children living in poverty to 47.3 percent last year, down from 50.6 percent in 2013.

The overall poverty rate of 15.2 percent in Erie County was unchanged between 2013 and 2014, while for senior citizens countywide, the poverty rate had a slight uptick to 17.3 percent last year, from 16.2 in 2013.

The new figures show that Buffalo’s children, as a whole, remain the third-poorest among kids in the nation’s large cities.

“Right now, to be poor in Buffalo means to live in a dilapidated and rundown neighborhood or … living in poor housing. It means having limited access to health care services and very often dying prematurely. It means not getting an adequate education,” said Henry L. Taylor Jr., founding director of UB’s Center for Urban Studies and one of those appointed to the committee.

“We may not be able to eliminate poverty, but we can eliminate what poverty means in a place like Buffalo.”

The new committee is, in essence, the re-establishment of the long-defunct Welfare Advisory Board, which is required under the County Charter. Poloncarz called for the establishment of the committee as part of his Initiatives for a Stronger Community plan that was released in March.

“The Welfare Advisory Board operated more as an entity that looked at how we can better provide in the context of the one program related to welfare, and how we could get information out to more people about what they may qualify for,” he said.

The new committee, on the other hand, will meet quarterly with officials from the county’s Departments of Social Services, Health, Mental Health and Senior Services to see how each can more effectively combat poverty using the resources they already have.

“Each has a niche area that they work in,” Poloncarz said of the seven appointees.

“What we want them to do is to come together to not only make suggestions how we can do things better, but also let us know when we’re doing things right and where we have shortfalls in areas that we haven’t even focused on before.”

Poloncarz added, “I think the key is to bring in individuals who are not beholden to any elected official or, for that matter, commissioner, and really tell us what we need to hear, even though it may be something we don’t want to hear.”

One of the appointees is the Rev. Kinzer M. Pointer, pastor of Agape Fellowship Baptist Church, who lauded the effort and noted that there was little will to reconstitute the old Welfare Advisory Board under previous administrations.

“There has been some thoughtful consideration on the part of the county executive, which entails a level of courage, because no one really wanted to talk about it,” Pointer said.

Other appointees are: Anna Falicov, chairwoman of the Coalition for Economic Justice, which focuses on creating good jobs and equitable development and advocating workers’ rights; Dr. Myron Glick, chief medical officer of Jericho Road Community Health Center, which provides culturally sensitive medical treatment targeted to refugees and low-income residents; and the Rev. Frank Cerny, chairman of Rural Outreach Center board in East Aurora, which focuses on poor people in the county’s rural areas.

Also appointed to the poverty committee are:

Dr. Yvonne S. Minor-Ragan, president of Buffalo Promise Neighborhood, a public-private partnership aimed at improving economic conditions and schools in a 97-block area around Bailey Avenue just south of UB’s South Campus in Buffalo; and Marlies A. Wesolowski, executive director of the Lt. Col. Matt Urban Human Services Center, which provides a range of human services in the Broadway Market area.

“This is not just going to be focused on the East Side or the West Side of Buffalo, but the entire county,” Poloncarz emphasized.

Erie County Legislature Chairman John J. Mills, R-Orchard Park, said he had not been apprised of the new committee but agreed that poverty in Erie County needs to be addressed aggressively.

“I hope it isn’t just window dressing for the sake of forming a committee,” Mills said.

email: hmcneil@buffnews.com

Listen to the full interview from Here and Now here.

“However, these potential improvements are not without risk. Here & Now‘s Meghna Chakrabarti speaks with Henry Louis Taylor Jr., a professor and director of the Center for Urban Studies at SUNY Buffalo in New York, who has visited Cuba every year since 1999 to interview Cuban citizens about life in the country.

He warns that while there are major positives to the deal, it has its negatives as well.”

Re-Post From UB – News Releases

BUFFALO, N.Y. – Henry Louis Taylor Jr. has visited Cuba at least once a year since 1999.  The University at Buffalo professor of urban and regional planning and director of the Center for Urban Studies has studied what life is like in the neighborhoods of Cuba. And one thing he has learned is that life is tough there. “So much of Cuban life has been made difficult because of the wall the United States has built up around them,” Taylor said. “The U.S. essentially tried to choke the island to death and everything has been hard – purchasing goods at reasonable prices, trading.” But Taylor believes it is now the U.S. that may actually make things better for Cuba and its people. On Monday, after more than half a century, the U.S. officially reopened its embassy in Havana. Taylor says this will immediately be of great benefit to Cuba in terms of increasing tourism, remittances and trade. “I have been bombarded by people asking about how to go and the best way to travel there and rules and regulations,” he says. “There are a lot more study programs going there now and that gets translated into dollars. I am already seeing bed and breakfasts sprouting up all over the place.” Taylor said he does have some concerns, though. He worries that racial divides inside of Cuba will intensify because the people with the most money and resources are white Cubans, and the increase in remittances will just increase that racial divide, he said.

Re-post from The Atlantic

LINCOLN HEIGHTS, Ohio—African Americans started coming to Cincinnati more than a century ago, fleeing the violence and economic constraints of the South for jobs and homes.

But redlining and other restrictive zoning laws prohibited black families from buying homes in many of the city’s neighborhoods. So when developers started selling off lots of unincorporated land north of Cincinnati to black buyers, it seemed like a good opportunity, one of the few paths to homeownership in the segregated North.

The land had no paved roads and no streetlights. Few homes had running water and there was no police or fire protection. Carl Westmoreland, who grew up in this village in the 1940s, remembers watching black men rush over a hill toward a burning home with a small fire cart they’d bought. They didn’t save it in time, but the neighborhood banded together and rebuilt the house together. He refers to the community at the time as “America’s Soweto” for the primitive living conditions there.

When it incorporated in 1947, this village, called Lincoln Heights, was the first primarily black self-governing community north of the Mason-Dixon line. (Today, the city has one of the highest concentrations of African American residents in the state of Ohio—according to the Census, 95.5 percent.) Lincoln Heights thrived for a while, producing poet Nikki Giovanni, songwriters the Isley Brothers (who wrote “Twist and Shout”), and scholar Carl Westmoreland, who now helps run the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. Hundreds of residents worked at the nearby Wright Aeronautical Plant, manufacturing the B-29 bomber, and at a chemical plant a few blocks away, putting away money to improve their homes and secure their places in the black middle class. So successful was Lincoln Heights in its early days that New York’s governor, Thomas E. Dewey, invited prominent officials to New York City for a ticker-tape parade to honor the village as one of the only self-governing African American communities in the nation, according to Lincoln Heights, by Carolyn F. Smith.

“It really was a situation where people made something out of nothing,” Westmoreland said about the suburb.

But today, Lincoln Heights is struggling. Its median household income of $25,568 is less than half that of Blue Ash, a nearby majority-white suburb. About 16 percent of residents are unemployed, and one-third of families earn below the poverty level. The schools are bad—parents of about 40 percent of students send them to other schools in the area. The town’s police and fire departments shut down in October 2014 after an insurance company pulled the village’s insurance after balking at the number of lawsuits filed over civil-rights violations, wrongful terminations, and wage disputes. The fire department reopened, but the county sheriff took over for the police department earlier this year. The sense of community and pride that governed the town’s early days have all but disappeared.

How one of the first black suburbs in the country fell so far from its halcyon early days exemplifies how systemic racism hampered the goals of those who were trying to build a community there. The people of Lincoln Heights might have had their own suburb, but the world made sure they had little else. From the beginning, historians say, the town was doomed to fail.

“The notion of suburbanization, of neighborhood opportunities, all of that is embedded in that fantasy that black people can move to freedom, and we can’t,” said Henry Louis Taylor, a professor of urban and regional planning at the University at Buffalo, who wrote his dissertation on Lincoln Heights.

​* * *

Residents of Lincoln Heights first tried to incorporate in 1939. Men were sick of working two jobs and then coming home to the chaos of open sewers and burning buildings and dark streets. Someone needed to put in paved roads and electricity and inspect buildings to make sure they were up to code, and the county government nearby had no interest in doing any of that. If the residents of Lincoln Heights incorporated and provided city services themselves, the thinking went, they wouldn’t have to wait around for white officials to cooperate.

They decided to form “their own city, a city, a village, a place where black men and women could respond to the civic needs of their neighbors, a place where black children could grow up to become the mayor, the chief of police, the safety director,” Westmoreland wrote, in a piece for the now-defunct Nip Magazine.

Local residents filed the proper papers with Hamilton County, but just a few minutes before the filing deadline, white residents from the nearby city of Lockland filed an objection. Lockland residents were worried that should Lincoln Heights be improved, its business district would rival Lockland’s, according to Westmoreland.

War began in Europe and more delays ensued. The Wright Aeronautical Plant was located on the land Lincoln Heights wanted to incorporate, but the plant manager, wary of being located in a black area, asked the county to delay the application further.

Then, as Lincoln Heights residents waited to incorporate, the county allowed white landowners in nearby Woodlawn to incorporate, giving much of the western part of what would have been Lincoln Heights to the white town. Then the county gave much of the eastern part of what would have been Lincoln Heights to another new white town, Evendale, including the land where the Wright plant was located. The residents of Lincoln Heights challenged this move in court but lost.

Westmoreland remembers Lincoln Heights residents slowly realizing that they were going to have to fight for land that had widely been considered theirs, and that, as African Americans in the 1940s and 1950s, they were probably going to lose.

“I remember them saying that those white folks are not going to let this place succeed,” he told me, sitting outside the house where he grew up in Lincoln Heights.

When the county finally allowed the city to incorporate, in 1946, the boundaries were radically different than black residents had once hoped, encircling about 10 percent—one square mile—of the original proposal. The village now included no major factories or plants and no industrial tax base.

“They ended up in a situation like many of these smaller suburban communities, without the type of economic framework and base that’s going to be required to sustain itself for a period of time,” said Taylor, the University of Buffalo professor. “Without that type of revenue base, these little small places would eventually get into trouble.”

In much the same way that large municipalities such as Detroit and Cleveland started to suffer when white residents fled to the suburbs, taking with them prospective tax revenue, black suburbs such as Lincoln Heights struggled without the resources of better-paid white residents and thriving businesses. The difference is that Lincoln Heights had those resources until the residents of nearby suburbs usurped them. Lincoln Heights didn’t have to lose population to fail, its failure was written in the way the county shaped its boundaries from the beginning.

It’s an example of the type of structural impediments that have hampered black suburbs like Lincoln Heights and Ferguson all across the country.

“The metropolitics of U.S. urban regions make it possible for high-income groups to develop their own suburbs and hoard their resources within their municipalities,” Taylor said.  “The absence of revenue sharing and the equitable distribution of resources in Hamilton County and elsewhere mean that Lincoln Heights will struggle to provide its residents with the high quality of services they need.”

Some municipalities, such as Minneapolis-St. Paul, established revenue sharingso that poor and rich towns in the same region could all prosper. But the majority of areas kept their finances separate, and their boundary lines drawn.

* * *

When Charles Willis grew up in Lincoln Heights in the 1960s, there was still a sense that this radical idea of a black self-governing suburb could work. Emboldened by the gains of the civil-rights era, community members worked together to provide support and services for one another and to create a sense of a community that would equip them for the outside world.

When he was growing up, people took pride in the fact that Lincoln Heights was the largest predominantly black city in America. Parents sent their kids to schools and expected them to succeed, even if they themselves couldn’t read. Carl Westmoreland remembers standing up in front of his church along with the rest of his class and having to give a five-minute speech on what he wanted to be when he grew up. He remembers bricklayers and day laborers working together to build houses for neighbors, and he remembers helping friends carry buckets of water from the fire hydrant every Sunday because they didn’t have any running water.

As recently as 2001, the Cincinnati Enquirer wrote a piece about a black family that had moved to a white neighborhood, been harassed, and decided to move back to Lincoln Heights. “Lincoln Heights provides the Hills and other African Americans a sense of home, history and pride that they don’t experience elsewhere,” the story said.

But over time, Lincoln Heights residents found it more difficult to maintain that sense of community. For one thing, the jobs in nearby towns in factories and chemical plants started to disappear as American manufacturing began to shrink in the 1970s and 1980s. As unemployment rose, Lincoln Heights lacked a tax base deep enough to underwrite community development and other social-welfare programs. Soon, it became obvious to anyone who grew up in Lincoln Heights that if you wanted to make something of yourself, you had to get out. People who grew up in Lincoln Heights and were lucky enough to go away to college didn’t come back. Those who stayed largely were the ones who couldn’t get out.

“People who left to go get educated, they never came back,” Willis told me. “They either stayed in their university cities or moved to Florida or California or what have you.”

The population of Lincoln Heights fell 45 percent between 1970 and 2013—from 6,099 in 1970s to 4,805 in 1990 to 3,367 in 2013. The population of the nearby village of Blue Ash grew 46 percent over the same period.

For Willis, it was a lesson in advocacy for African Americans: Black residents should have been focusing on creating local businesses and a thriving economy, rather than going elsewhere to succeed, he says.

“Dr. King was right to say we should be able have a cup of coffee. But, guess what, Malcolm X was right too. We should’ve been building our own,” he told me.

​* * *

The future does not look bright for Lincoln Heights. Home values fell 76.4 percent between 2007 and 2013, while home values in tiny Indian Hill, a nearby suburb, rose 27.7 percent. The elementary school is abandoned, and when the district put it up for auction earlier this year, with a minimum bid of $69,900, no one came forward to buy it.

When I drove around town with Westmoreland, we passed crumbling homes and boarded-up stores. There was one convenience store that seemed busy—men congregated in its backyard, smoking cigarettes. But when I went back alone and tried to talk to the men in the yard, the owner, incensed, yelled at me as soon as I identified myself as a reporter.

“Move on out of here,” he said. I left and later learned from residents that the store is an open-air drug market, completely ignored by police. It sits on the same street where Carl Westmoreland grew up.

Last year, two nonprofit groups, the Cincinnatus Association and Citizens for Civic Renewal, put out a study that concluded that Cincinnati and its suburbs needed to cooperate—consolidate local governments and share services—to thrive. The idea was supported by an editorial in the Cincinnati Enquirer, which argued that cooperation could reduce inequality.

“Politically fractured regions can contribute to social separation and inequality, as residents perceive they can ‘move away’ from problems rather than contributing to their solution,” the editorial said.

Albert Kanter, the former executive director of the Lincoln Heights Community Improvement District, wrote a letter to the newspaper in support of the plan, arguing that it would help communities like Lincoln Heights.

But nearby wealthy towns seem to have little inclination to share services or revenues with Lincoln Heights. They were built, after all, not by sharing but by taking away. And they have little motivation to change that now.

Re-Post From UB – News Releases

BUFFALO, N.Y. — Megan McNally, executive director of The Foundry, has been named Protégé of the Year by the Allstate Minority and Women Emerging Entrepreneurs (MWEE) program, a joint venture by the University at Buffalo School of Management’s Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership (CEL) and the UB Center for Urban Studies.

McNally earned a $1,500 prize for the honor. She says the MWEE program taught her important lessons that will guide her work at the Foundry, a business incubator and community space on Buffalo’s East Side.

“When running a startup of any kind, it is hard to prioritize competing needs, so learning to rank needs and tackle the most pressing first has been extremely helpful,” McNally says.

Levino Johnson, founder and owner of Executive Investigation & Security, was awarded second place and a $1,000 prize. Catrice Huff, founder and director of Up, Up, and Away Child Care Center, took third place and a $500 prize.

The awards were handed out at a graduation ceremony for five CEL programs on June 3 at UB’s Center for the Arts.

Sponsored by The Allstate Foundation, the MWEE program helps minority and women entrepreneurs take their companies to the next stage of development with business development seminars twice a month, networking events and one-on-one mentoring.

After entering as protégés last year, 25 participants graduated, bringing the total number of local entrepreneurs who have completed the MWEE program to 205 since it launched in 2004.

In addition to the award winners, the graduates were:

Natalie Apparicio-Farrell, Healthcare Hub LLC; Howard and Sonya Brackett, Preventive Health Care; Milly Castro, Buffalo Key Properties; Esteban Guerrero, In His Hands Electric; Audrey Hall, Eco Serve Pest Services; Laura Haykel, iFlourish Consulting; Tara Jabbaar-Gyambrah, TMJ Consulting; Antoine Jackson, Jani-King and Jackson Development; Danielle Jackson, I Love Catering Buffalo; Melonya Johnson, BSMART Coaching.

Also, Janet Marcel, Paper Trail of WNY; Tirone Mosely, Creative Arizona LLC; Novi Paluch, Sasmita Batik Indonesia; Anna Povetska, Brr-ffalo Clothing & Novelty Co.; James Ray, Celebrities Executive Services Inc.; Jayme Smith, Studio J; Corina Stammworthy, The Laundromutt; Laurie Thomas, Thomas & Sons Janitorial Services; Andrea Veres, The Waxing Studio; Avon White, Eagles Best LLC; and Marcus Wise, 464 Gallery.

Each participant was assigned a mentor from the local business community to help devise realistic business goals and develop timetables and strategies for achieving them. Mentors met regularly with participants, providing advice in strategic and tactical thinking, marketing, long-range financial planning and more.

McNally’s mentor, Lynn Oswald, director of the Niagara County Small Business Development Center, was honored as Mentor of the Year.

“Lynn was an amazing resource who helped me cut through the distractions to create a prioritized plan for moving toward the bigger vision of our organization,” says McNally. “Working with other businesses from the MWEE program and supporting their growth has helped us grow our own capacity at The Foundry.”

The CEL is accepting applications for the 2016 MWEE program. To be eligible, an entrepreneur must be a woman or member of a recognized minority group and own a business in the Buffalo Niagara region.

Individuals interested in the program can learn more about the curriculum and speak candidly with MWEE alumni at an open house from 5:30-7:30 p.m. July 28 at the UB Downtown Gateway, located at 77 Goodell St., Buffalo. To register for the open house or apply, contact the CEL at 716-885-5715 or mgt-cel@buffalo.edu.

The Allstate Foundation, a charitable organization funded by subsidiaries of Allstate Insurance Corp., provides philanthropic grants to nonprofit organizations. With a focus on teen safe driving and building financial independence for domestic violence survivors, The Allstate Foundation also promotes safe and vital communities; tolerance, inclusion, and diversity; and economic empowerment. For more information, visit allstatefoundation.org.

Established in 1987, the CEL provides participants with individualized and interactive education in entrepreneurship. More than 1,200 CEL alumni employ more than 22,000 Western New Yorkers, and their businesses are worth more than $2 billion to the local economy. For more information, visit mgt.buffalo.edu/cel.

The UB School of Management is recognized for its emphasis on real-world learning, community and economic impact, and the global perspective of its faculty, students and alumni. The school also has been ranked by Bloomberg Businessweek, the Financial Times, Forbes and U.S. News & World Report for the quality of its programs and the return on investment it provides its graduates. For more information about the UB School of Management, visit mgt.buffalo.edu.

– See more at: http://www.buffalo.edu/news/releases/2015/06/037.html#sthash.cQ0XWuUs.dpuf

Re-post from The Buffalo News

Poverty is a condition that affects more than just the poor. Paying for anti-poverty programs impacts nearly everybody in Erie County. More than half of the county’s $1.45 billion budget goes toward providing health and human services in the community.

Erie County Executive Mark C. Poloncarz is the latest high-ranking official to take a stab at finding solutions to poverty.

While Poloncarz is running for re-election, there probably aren’t many votes in tackling poverty. Success will be incremental, and many parts of the community have little sympathy for the poor. The onetime county comptroller broke it down by the numbers: “It will cost us less in the long run.” Simply improving health in the community will save the county millions of Medicaid dollars.

Poloncarz announced his 49-point agenda in March, called “Initiatives for a Stronger Community.” The plan would improve jobs skills and housing opportunities and coordinate services for the poor. So far, the attempt has failed to impress some anti-poverty advocates. Henry Louis Taylor, a professor of urban and regional planning at the University at Buffalo, suggested it hardly goes “beyond repackaging and restructuring what is there.”

Point taken, but, as Taylor went on to say, the county executive is on the right track when it comes to encouraging cooperation among government and private agencies. Something as simple as breaking down the walls separating county departments and nonprofit agencies has the potential to improve the lives of clients.

A great example is the county collaboration with private nonprofits to reopen the Erie County Health Mall on Broadway near Bailey Avenue, where better communication and smarter concentration of resources allow patients to access health care specialities in one spot.

It is no surprise that governmental agencies don’t communicate well with each other, whether they’re trying to protect their own piece of turf or just never had to collaborate. Poloncarz’s anti-poverty plan is aimed at unblocking bureaucratic logjams and allowing much-needed services to reach their intended targets more readily.

Buffalo Mayor Byron W. Brown announced his anti-poverty plan early in his first term. The “Roadmap for Reducing Poverty” drew plenty of criticism for identifying the problems without offering much in the way of solutions. Since then the city has worked on anti-poverty programs.

Tackling poverty is a monumental task. The county’s plan to repackage and redirect existing programs is a good place to start.

Re-Post From The Buffalo News

When Grace Tate thinks about the Buffalo Billion, she worries that something as basic as a bus route could keep poorer residents from sharing in the spoils.

As the state’s keystone economic development initiative unfolds – training workers in new skills and bringing thousands of promised new jobs to the Buffalo Niagara region – Tate, a vice president at the Buffalo Urban League, fears that low-income workers who don’t have cars might be shut out of some of these new jobs if they are created far from the urban core, in locations not served by public transportation.

That’s been happening for decades, as factory and service jobs have shifted to the suburbs, where having a car is a requirement for having a job.

If it keeps happening with the Buffalo Billion – and state officials have been promising that making the new jobs accessible is one of their priorities – then Tate fears the benefits of the state’s largess will largely pass by the region’s poorest neighborhoods, where many workers depend on buses and their feet to get to work.

“Once we get individuals qualified for jobs, we can’t get the candidates there,” Tate said.

To be sure, the SolarCity plant on South Park Avenue – and its 1,460 promised jobs – will be accessible. So are IBM’s software development jobs in the Key Center and those at other Buffalo Billion initiatives such as the Buffalo Manufacturing Works testing and research facility and the Albany Molecular Research drug development site on the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus. But SolarCity’s suppliers, which could provide another pledged 1,440 jobs, could be scattered throughout the region, as could other spin-off jobs.

“Transportation is a big issue,” Tate said.

And it’s the poorest neighborhoods that need the jobs the most. About one of every five African-Americans who wants a job can’t find one, said Henry Louis Taylor, a University at Buffalo professor and the founding director of its Center for Urban Studies.

“We’re not really talking about pockets of unemployment,” he said. “We’re talking about huge holes where there is unemployment.”

The biggest hole is among workers who never finished high school. Unemployment among Buffalo residents between the ages of 25 and 64 who lack a high school diploma is 22 percent – four times the 5.3 percent jobless rate across the entire Buffalo Niagara region, said Gary Keith, the regional economist for M&T Bank in Buffalo. In contrast, city residents with a four-year college degree have an unemployment rate of just 4.6 percent.

Because jobs for workers without a high school diploma or its equivalent are so much harder to find these days, many of those residents have simply given up the job hunt. Only four of every nine city residents without a high school diploma are participating in the local work force, Keith said. In contrast, better than four of every five city residents with a four-year degree is part of the workforce.

“You can’t have an opportunity if you do not participate,” Keith said. “If you don’t have that entry-level skill set, you’re going to be pretty much doomed to not participate.”

That’s because many of today’s jobs, especially in manufacturing, are more sophisticated and demanding than the factory jobs of our fathers.

“The nature of work is going through an enormous shift,” said Richard Deitz, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in Buffalo.

“The skill requirements of jobs are increasing,” especially as mid-skill jobs have shifted to cheaper overseas markets during the past two decades. “Workers can either move up the ladder … or they can fall down into lower-skill jobs.”

Area officials are moving to revamp the region’s training programs, hoping to focus on teaching workers the skills that actually are in demand by employers – a step that requires closer communications between businesses and local colleges and training centers.

“In the future, it’s about knowing how to learn and your ability to learn new tasks,” said Taylor, who thinks existing training programs have lost touch with what employers need.

“They don’t produce folks for specific jobs that are available, so that when they’re finished there’s a job waiting for them,” he said.

Instead, workers who have completed training programs often wind up frustrated because they find they aren’t much more employable than they were before, Taylor said.

And when they do land an entry-level job, it too often proves to be a dead end, with little room for advancement.

“In the African-American and Latino community, people realize that getting into a place doesn’t mean you’re going to be able to move up,” said Taylor, who urged employers to create “internal ladders” to help minority workers advance beyond entry-level jobs.

“I want to measure the Buffalo Billion based on the impact it is having on the neighborhoods right here,” said Assemblyman Sean Ryan, D-Buffalo, who late last month organized a forum on the potential impact of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s economic development program.

“When we look back on the Buffalo Billion 10 years from now, we should measure it by its impact on poverty and unemployment in Buffalo,” he said.

Read the full article from Buffalo News here.

The Buffalo News

By Melinda Miller

December 19, 2015

Surprised. Thrilled. Skeptical.

When President Obama said, “There’s a complicated history between the United States and Cuba,” he also was acknowledging the range of emotions that would greet the news this week that the U.S. is reopening diplomatic relations with the island – and with the Castros.

“My dad was a revolutionary against (Fidel) Castro and he is against anything that might benefit that government,” said Alberto Rey, a Cuban-born SUNY Fredonia distinguished professor.

Rey is visiting his parents in Miami for the holidays. Describing the mood of that heavily Cuban-American city, Rey said, “It depends who you ask.”

“There are others who will bite the bullet and say ‘OK, if it will help the people,’ and a lot of the younger people here are all for it,” Rey said.

“The reactions are the same here as in Miami,” said Rene De La Pedraja, a professor of history at Canisius College. Born in Cuba, he left as a young man in 1960.

“Younger people are excited, and a lot of the older ones – not including myself – are bitterly opposed to it,” he said.

De La Pedraja’s approval of the president’s action goes beyond mere acceptance.

“In my whole career and my whole life, I have been hoping for this to happen,” De la Pedraja said. “My family lost everything in Cuba. We have many reasons to be against the regime. But that is water under the bridge. It is time to end the suffering of the Cuban people. It is good for Cubans. It is good for business in the United States.”

For his part, Rey takes a wait-and-see-view of the development, tempering any enthusiasm with a hearty distrust of the communist government.

“A lot of people don’t understand that Cuba has traded with everybody else in the world, just not the United States. The government has remained in power because they know exactly how much business needs to occur to keep their people oppressed,” Rey said. “The United States isn’t going to just go in there. I think the (Cuban) government will be very careful about how much trade they allow.”

Eunice Lewin, who left Cuba at age 17, declares herself “thrilled, very thrilled” about the new policy, but she agrees with Rey that a diplomatic and trade freeze that lasted 54 years will not thaw easily.

“It’s not going to happen overnight,” said Lewin, a former Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority commissioner and member of Roswell Park Alliance, Buffalo Urban League and Hispanics United of Buffalo, among other groups. “Some of us are thinking things will go very fast, but it’s not going to happen that way.”

She has followed the news this week in Hispanic media, where she said the conversations have been “intense.”

“I do understand the reaction of those who are opposed to it,” she said. “You could never minimize the suffering the Cuban people have gone through. But it is 2014 and (the embargo) hasn’t helped them.”

Lewin’s father was born in Jamaica and her mother was Cuban. She grew up in Guantanamo. Now she is a trustee with the State University of New York, and she hopes education is among the initial areas of cooperation.

“I would love to see more (student) exchanges with the University at Buffalo. I would like to see that move very quickly,” Lewin said. “UB has the international infrastructure in place to build on with its China program, and I think through education you can accomplish quite a bit. Think about it. It would just be unbelievable!”

Lewin has had siblings return to Cuba to visit, but she said the closest she has come is looking across the sea toward her native country 90 miles away. That could change soon.

“I definitely will take the trip,” she said. “Consider what Cuba has to offer educationally, socially, economically, culturally. In these areas, they are holding their own. Now with the U.S. back in, imagine what could be accomplished. We have to move forward.”

Henry Louis Taylor Jr., professor of urban and regional planning in UB’s School of Architecture and Planning, already has taken the trip many times, researching life among ordinary Cubans and writing a book about it, “Inside El Barrio: A Bottom-Up View of Neighborhood Life in Castro’s Cuba.”

He is cautiously optimistic about Obama’s action.

“In my opinion, this is long overdue. I think it has the potential to be very, very positive,” Taylor said, with just a few reservations. “Lifting the embargo would have a good effect on Cuba economically, to be able to trade with a natural trading partner and conduct joint ventures. That could create job opportunities for the low-income residents who have borne the largest impact of the embargo.”

A possible down side for that same population could be a greater imbalance of wealth between the country’s citizens and a weakening of the current social support system, “and that could increase the tension between the white Cubans and the Afro-Cubans,” he said.

Taylor also sees Cuba as a place ripe for tourism, noting that for travelers who are allowed to go there, it is one of the most beautiful and affordable destinations in the Caribbean.

“One of my greatest fears is that Cuba will become like the Bahamas, with high costs and very expensive for its own people,” Taylor said.

De La Pedraja mentioned the tourist aspect, also, but he has yet to return.

“My son is dying to go,” he said.

“I’ve always been hesitant to return,” he said, mentioning a Cuba trip sponsored by Canisius. “I encourage my students to go, and I have had opportunities, but there is something that holds me back.”

He has traveled throughout Latin America and written extensively about the region’s history, but for him, Cuba is different.

“For me, it is opening up a box of memories,” he said. “So much of the island, particularly Havana, where I am from, is pretty much intact from when I was there. It is almost frozen in time. It would be like going through a time warp.”

Rey, who also is an artist and has created many works inspired by Cubans who fled their country, understands that feeling. He has gone back.

“The reports of how good the country is running have been overstated,” Rey said. “Thirty years after I left, I went back and it was exhilarating, beautiful, many places hadn’t changed, and even the derelict ones were beautiful, but a couple of days later it gets depressing, because you see how oppressed the people are.”

De La Pedraja pointed out that Fidel Castro, the retired revolutionary founder of today’s Cuba, had said at one time that restoring relations with the United States would complete his mission.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if he dies in the next few weeks or months,” he said.

Rey said that would be the kind of news that Cuban-Americans like his father, who saw people he knew shot and imprisoned by the communists, would welcome.

“A lot of people would rest in peace if they could see that,” he said. “A part of them would be much happier if that chapter could be closed.”

Re-post from The Buffalo News

It’s the biggest possible city site for a new Bills stadium, just to the east of the Buffalo River, with a north end zone aimed at the downtown skyline.

Henry Louis Taylor, Jr., PhD, professor of urban and regional planning, is among a distinguished group of individuals being inducted into the Service Honor Roll of the Urban Affairs Association, an international professional organization for urban scholars, researchers, and public service professionals.

The honor roll recognizes individuals for their commitment, intellect and energy in service to the organization, which is dedicated to creating interdisciplinary spaces for intellectual and practical discussions about urban life.

Taylor, who is also founding director of the Center for Urban Studies, served on the board of UAA from 1995 to 2001, three years of which he served as chairman of the Membership Committee. In 2000, he conceived and developed TheCyberhood.net as a virtual commons for students, scholars, practitioners and activists concerned about cities and their metropolitan regions. The site, co-sponsored by the Urban Affairs Association and the Center for Urban Studies, has emerged as one of the top academic websites in the nation and attracts visitors from around the world.

“It is a humbling experience to be honored by the Urban Affairs Association, the nation’s premiere urban studies organization,” says Taylor. “As a historian and urban planner, you engage in activities designed to improve the plight of marginalized groups, especially blacks and people of color, including the building of organizations and institutions that are devoted to producing knowledge and solving the wicked problems confronting society. You do what you do without thinking about rewards or awards.  So, when they happen, you are surprised and humbled.”

Taylor was selected along with 12 other Honor Roll inductees by a unanimous vote of the association’s Governing Board. Other honorees include urban affairs scholars from disciplines as diverse as urban and regional planning, geography and political science, as well as a civil rights activist and economist being recognized posthumously.

Taylor was inducted into the Honor Roll at the UAA’s annual conference in March 2014 in San Antonio.

Children gathered on the front steps of their Buffalo school Thursday afternoon for a ribbon-cutting ceremony to re-name the school.

Futures School #37 on Carlton Street in Buffalo’s Fruit Belt neighborhood will now be called the Marva J. Daniel Futures Preparatory School #37. The school is named for Marva Daniel, who spent almost 20 years as principal there. The school district credits Daniel with leading the school’s renaissance.

According to a statement from the Buffalo Public Schools, School #37 currently exceeds the state average in testing. It features single gender classrooms, mentoring opportunities, and a partnership with the University at Buffalo in Architecture and Planning.

Following the ribbon cutting on Thursday, children unveiled the large mural they painted with their UB partners in the Art and Urban Studies Departments.