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Easing of U.S.-Cuban diplomatic relations will create ‘influx of resources’, but not without concerns, UB expert says

July 22, 2015

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.

The Destruction of a Black Suburb

July 20, 2015

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.

An abandoned home in Lincoln Heights (Alana Semuels)

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.

Carl Westmoreland grew up in Lincoln Heights. (Alana Semuels)

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.

Charles Willis with his mother on the porch of her new home (Alana Semuels)

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.

Lincoln Heights Elementary (Alana Semuels)

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.

A shuttered store in Lincoln Heights (Alana Semuels)

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.

Poloncarz’s plan for tackling poverty in Erie County draws mixed reviews

July 13, 2015

Re-post from the Buffalo News

The success of Erie County’s anti-poverty plan, introduced in the spring, depends on helping people like Eman Jabbar, who struggled to find a job after emigrating from Iraq and moving to Riverside more than two years ago.

After completing a child care training program, she welcomed the first children into her home day care last month.

The plan also counts on working with nonprofit agencies, like those at the Erie County Health Mall on Broadway near Bailey Avenue, which opened a year ago, allowing patients to be examined and treated close to their neighborhoods.

“I can get there in 10 or 15 minutes,” said Christine Laird, 72, who lives on Seneca Street. “The facility is clean and the staff is wonderful. They have much more on hand, so if the doctor gives you a slip for bloodwork, you can get it done right there.”

Efforts like these can lift people out of poverty, or at least lower the costs of caring for them, said Erie County Executive Mark C. Poloncarz, who has made reducing poverty a focal point of his administration as he prepares to run for re-election.

“I had a few people say, ‘Mark, why are you doing this?’ People don’t vote based on health and human services,’ ” Poloncarz said.

“I’m not doing it for votes,” he said. “It will cost us less in the long run.”

Supporting services that lead to a healthier population – he counts respite care, mental health programs in schools and senior fitness programs among them – could save millions in Medicaid dollars alone, he said.

It’s no small matter. Erie County is the primary provider of health and human services in the community, and more than half of the county’s $1.45 billion budget goes toward it.

Poloncarz announced in March a 49-point agenda called “Initiatives for a Stronger Community.”

“By addressing the root causes, we create a stronger community and we reduce our costs,” he said. “We looked at areas where we could have an impact, and could strengthen families on the edge so they don’t fall over into poverty.”

Some anti-poverty advocates welcomed the plan. Others are not overly impressed.

“I’ve seen nothing here to suggest that what Mark is planning goes beyond repackaging and restructuring what is there,” said Henry Louis Taylor, a professor of urban and regional planning at the University at Buffalo.

Taylor, however, believes Poloncarz is on the right track in encouraging more cooperation among government and private agencies.

“It’s a fantastic idea to build more collaboration,” Taylor said. “Right now, these people and groups do not work together as teams.”

Marlies Wesolowski is on the front line of poverty initiatives, as executive director of the Lt. Col. Matt Urban Human Services Center. Located on Broadway, the agency provides housing services, senior services, homeless outreach, education and three food pantries.

She applauds the county executive for trying to solve what seem like intractable problems.

“People get very comfortable in their jobs, so telling them you want to change the way they do things can be unsettling,” Wesolowski said. “This policy is one that was long overdue. Time will tell if it makes a difference.”

No silver bullets

With the region’s economy improving, 2015 is a good year to try make Erie County prosperous for all residents, Poloncarz said.

“We need to build a foundation for the future so this great revival we are experiencing is not just for the lucky few,” Poloncarz said. “If we don’t do it now, we will never do it.”

Among the efforts:

• Subsidizing internships for adults interested in working in child care, so they can get training and be certified;

• Encouraging local employers to train former prisoners to work in manufacturing and construction and make them employable;

• Leveraging outside funds to rehabilitate rental housing and support nonprofit developers in building affordable family housing;

• Coordinating with Say Yes and Buffalo Public Schools, including creating mobile health centers for students in their schools for screenings, contraceptive counseling, immunizations and mental health care;

• Attaching Child Protective Services liaisons to homeless and women’s shelters, schools, hospitals and law enforcement to identify children at risk; and

• Expanding outreach in lead poisoning prevention programs.

Poloncarz called communication the key to making the initiatives work.

That will start within county government, Poloncarz said.

The plans were devised by officials in the county departments and agencies for health, social services, senior services, mental health, probation, veterans’ services, public advocacy and the disabled, all of which deal with many of the same people.

Despite the overlap, the services often were “siloed,” with those in some departments not knowing what those in other departments were doing.

‘Through the cracks’

From her perspective, Wesolowski of the Matt Urban Human Services Center said one of the greatest failings of the current system is that the people who need help – those who may be schizophrenic, have hearing or vision loss, suffer from depression or who are overwhelmed by problems – often don’t have any idea what services exist or how to access them.

All too often, people are ill-equipped to figure it out.

“Even though the general public will think there are a whole bunch of ‘savvy’ folks out there who ‘game’ the system,” Wesolowski said, “I will tell you that I see a lot of people who don’t know which end is up. They need help just getting help.

“Half of the battle is getting people to know what services are available, where the services are and to have access to the services,” she added. “I serve 21,000 clients every year, but we are doing things we shouldn’t be doing – some of these services, it’s not my strength, not my wheelhouse.”

If nothing else, she hopes the initiatives will lead those who provide health care, housing, food, shelter from violence, mental health treatment and assorted other services to join forces and become more effective.

“There’s some agencies, for reasons of turf or that people are too busy … well, you can take your eye off the ball, and people can fall through the cracks,” she said.

Wesolowski said Poloncarz’s initiative can help in another way, as well.

“I’m hopeful that this will get folks out of County Hall,” she said. “Checking out what’s going on in the community makes them more sensitive to the need that’s there.”

Taylor of UB said the focus needs to be more local.

“You can’t look at Erie County or the city as the target,” he said. “The changes have to be made in delivery of services at the neighborhood level.”

“The difficulties and hardship come when you don’t even have money to put food on the table and then you also have to find public transportation to get to the help you need,” Wesolowski said.

Finding what works

The partnership of government and nonprofit agencies worked for Jabbar, who opened a day care in her home. She graduated from the child care training at Journey’s End Resettlement Agency.

Jabbar earned a college degree in her native Iraq and taught elementary school before her family fled to the United States. Despite her education, she struggled to find a job.

“It is harder here than in Iraq, understanding the many regulations and rules,” she said through an interpreter. “Doing that in a different language is the hardest.”

But she found the Journey’s End classes in running a child care center enjoyable. The agency supplied teachers and interpreters and Erie County employees gave advice on how to meet the health and safety standards so they could be licensed.

The county also joined forces with private nonprofits to reopen the Erie County Health Mall on Broadway near Bailey. It began accepting patients in its newly renovated offices in May 2014. Patients can take care of all their health care in one place, sometimes in one visit, and many do.

Poloncarz directed his commissioners and department heads to look at other ways Erie County can do a better job serving its poorest residents.

“You shouldn’t decide not to do something because it’s hard,” Poloncarz said.

Taylor said he’s skeptical that a restructuring, no matter how broad, will make much of an improvement.

“When you say you want to get people out of poverty, you don’t tell us anything,” he said. “Moving people from ‘very low income’ to ‘low income’ is not going to change the challenges they are facing.”

Nevertheless, Poloncarz is serious about trying to make a dent.

Poloncarz points to the Health Mall, staffed by Catholic Health, UB Dental, and Mid-Erie and Lakeshore Mental Health.

“We changed the model and we have seen 10,000 visits since it reopened a year ago,” Poloncarz said.

CEL graduates emerging minority and women entrepreneurs

July 13, 2015

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

Plan to redirect services could ease poverty while saving the county money

July 13, 2015

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.

Making sure the Buffalo Billion reaches everyone

July 13, 2015

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.

Tackling the region’s racial divide

July 13, 2015

Read the full article from Buffalo News here.

“Henry Louis Taylor Jr., founding director of the University at Buffalo’s Center for Urban Studies, said he thinks the new federal desegregation effort ignores the economic realities of the housing market.

Most poor African-Americans live in cheap rental housing in neighborhoods such as Buffalo’s East Side because that’s all they can afford, Taylor said.

To combat that, the federal government should offer more subsidized housing vouchers and encourage housing development, both public and otherwise, in all sorts of neighborhoods, Taylor said.”

What Urban Renaissance? How Planning Can Bring Prosperity to Distressed Urban Neighborhoods

April 8, 2015

“Buffalo is experiencing an economic boom, but the explosion will not automatically spark the revitalization of precarious East Side neighborhoods, an area consisting of black neighborhoods lying east of Main Street and north of South Buffalo,” writes Henry Louis Taylor, Jr., PhD, professor of urban and regional planning, in a recent Buffalo News viewpoint piece (Sept. 7, 2014).

Taylor continues that residents of these neighborhoods bordering Buffalo’s booming medical campus, downtown and waterfront, are living urban life in reverse. Rather than moving toward economic opportunity, they are moving away from it. This “market-driven paradox” is the result of compounding factors including a lack of investment in existing housing stock and the spread of blight and joblessness, together fueling health challenges, inadequate schooling, crime and a lack of hope.

As director of the Center for Urban Studies, Taylor and a contingent of planning staff and students are extending economic opportunity to these communities through a soup-to-nuts neighborhood planning model rooted in research and aggressive resident and community outreach.

Most recently, the center completed the “Perry Choice Neighborhood Transformation Plan” for a post-industrial enclave just south of downtown and adjacent to the redeveloping Canalside area and Cobblestone District. The federally-funded comprehensive planning effort – led by the Buffalo Municipal Housing Authority (grantee) and the Center for Urban Studies (planning coordinator), along with the Philadelphia-based planning and design firm Wallace Roberts & Todd – links physical improvements, including a reimagined public housing complex, to improved access to quality education, job training, health services and transportation. A few miles north, in the Fruit

Belt neighborhood next to the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus, the center continues its years-long “community as classroom” program to engage middle-schoolers in neighborhood redevelopment.

The center is now replicating these planning models for other East Side communities. Taylor says the work also applies broadly to legacy cities across the country and even internationally as the center prepares to launch a planning initiative in Havana, Cuba.

Earlier this year, HUD highlighted the work of the Center for Urban Studies (as well as the UB Regional Institute) in its recognition of the University at Buffalo as a national best practice for community outreach and development efforts in downtown Buffalo and its surrounding neighborhoods.

We sat down with Taylor recently to refect on what goes into turning around a distressed urban neighborhood, and what steps government and business leaders can take to ensure the cit y of Buffalo’s economic renaissance benefts all.

What is the role of planners in this kind of work?

Let’s take Buffalo’s East Side as an example. This community has a tremendous wealth of human and organizational capital. How do you put these multiple population groups together? Do you let them continue to operate in silos or do you help them work together? This gets to the profound role of planners. We have to be designers of the entire community. Planners need to build both the physical environment as well as the social and institutional structure of neighborhoods, the interfaces and the connections. If we are to bring about real, meaningful change for distressed urban neighborhoods, you can’t just build a house or create a really nice park. The community needs to be a part of and own the plan.

Tell us a little bit about how CUS builds buy-in for this work?

In the case of the Perry neighborhood, South Park Avenue is a boundary line between the predominantly white and black neighborhoods. We knew we had to build a relationship across that line. Once we got moving, they were extremely supportive and helpful. We held dozens of focus groups, conducted structured surveys of almost 70 percent of residents in the Commodore Perry public housing complex and interviewed service providers. We sent a busload of our students into

the community to conduct surveys of residents. We set up a Planning & Information Center staffed by our students and residents to link the planning team and community members.

This became the material we used to drive the plan.

Perry youth take “preference surveys” to share their input on proposed streetscape and building designs for their neighborhood. Photo courtesy of Center for Urban Studies

One of the project’s most significant findings was that the supportive services organizations were not efficiently organized to effectively deliver services in the neighborhood. They made no distinction between neighborhood- and city-level services and lacked a place-based focus on service delivery. Also, many residents didn’t realize the types of services available. We had to rethink the system. But what I didn’t expect was the willingness of these organizations to attend meetings and commit staff and time to this process – from Catholic Charities of Buffalo, to the United Way of Buffalo and Erie County, to Say Yes to Education. We were able to literally reconceive and redesign the organizational framework of the neighborhood and community. The heads of these organizations are now important collaborators and leaders of this plan.

How does this translate into implementation? Who needs to play a role, and how?

We are in the midst of a neo-liberal economy that calls for smaller government and fewer taxes. Government doesn’t have the capacity it used to. It becomes partner and other organizations drive development. At the same time, you need a lead organization to pull together this network and provide staff to move collaboration forward. It’s the catalyst, the engine and conscience of the plan that keeps thing moving in the right direction. It’s also important that developers buy into the vision. If they do, then you’ll find they’re willing to do some things they wouldn’t be willing to do otherwise. In the Perry neighborhood, when the Seneca Buffalo Creek Casino was being developed, we worked with the developer to externalize retail. They also worked with us to target housing for casino employees. Developing a neighborhood is a lot like stitching a quilt. Everybody has a piece, but if we stitch together with a theme, then we can make a great quilt.

Behind Buffalo’s renaissance is a framework of plans, including Buffalo’s comprehensive plan, a new regional economic development plan for WNY and the Green Code, the city’s frst zoning code rewrite in 50 years. How does CUS’s work at the neighborhood level build off these efforts?

Our job as planners is to connect to these efforts. In the case of the Green Code, we went back and forth to make sure the strategies were consistent, compatible and reinforcing across both plans. The Perry Choice plan also integrates with One Region Forward, a regional plan for sustainable development, as well as plans for adjoining communities, including the Larkin District to the east, the Old First Ward to the South and Canalside to the west. It’s a system of plans and it’s everyone’s job to connect those efforts. This applies, too, to on-the-ground development and specific projects. In the absence of this, it can actually accelerate decline in distressed communities.

The Commodore Perry Homes public housing complex today. Photo courtesy of Center for Urban Studies

New public and assisted living units are designed to be street-facing, visitable and energy-efficient. Rendering by Wallace Roberts & Todd

What else can we be doing to address this “market-driven paradox” affecting distressed neighborhoods in Buffalo and beyond?

We studied the Perry neighborhood census tracks and found that 30-40 percent of the population was spending 50 percent or more on housing. That’s a significant proportion of the population at or above the cutoff for the recommended financial burden for housing. When old housing meets a low-income population, it’s toxic.

“City leadership can do two things. One is to have a strategy for upgrading existing housing units. Most housing dollars now go toward new builds. The second thing is to creatively utilize our existing resources. Public art and small design projects can change the image of a neighborhood.”

The plan for the Perry neighborhood calls for more than 800 new and renovated mixed-income housing units over 10 years; restored street grid connections to the waterfront, downtown and South Buffalo; walkable, tree-lined streetscapes; a new central park and pocket parks throughout the neighborhood, and a 105,000-square-foot multi-service community center.

What if we were to structure curriculum to allow young kids in art class to engage in this work? In our summer academic camp with the Futures Academy [in the Fruit Belt neighborhood], a student made a sculpture out of “junk,” and it cost $4 to produce. We mounted murals on vacant buildings. It just requires the organization of people and institutions that are already willing to do this work. I would also call upon the private sector and foundations to invest in socially responsible causes in these neighborhoods. Local government doesn’t have this capacity. It’s a matter of how we refocus the resources we have.

How is CUS working to transfer knowledge across the city and outside the region?

The plan itself provides a framework for neighborhood development. In Buffalo, we’re already working with the King Urban Life Center to implement a similar plan for Buffalo’s Martin Luther King Park neighborhood, which will be anchored in early childhood education. This, in turn, will allow us to implement our early childhood education program in the Perry neighborhood. We also recently conducted a health needs survey for the Greater Buffalo United Ministries. Their network of churches will serve as a portal to a recently formed coordinated care network for the city’s Medicaid beneficiaries. If we can link that work to the Perry neighborhood and Kensington Heights, we can create a city-wide coordinated care network.

“At the center, we have a marriage between our research and our practice- based work. We’re publishing peer-reviewed research informed by the realities here in Buffalo.”

Robert Mark Silverman, [associate professor of urban and regional planning and a faculty affiliate of the center], is leading a project to make recommendations about where the government should place affordable housing in 10 of the fastest-shrinking U.S. cities, including Buffalo and several other transitioning cities where gentrification threatens access to affordable housing.

We work across the city and world to replicate and share ideas. In Cuba, we’re in the process of building a program to explore neighborhood conditions as social contributors to health issues. We’ve gotten through the first tier of approval from the Cuban government. We’re also attempting to set up a study abroad program on health and housing in Havana in partnership with UB’s School of Public Health and Health Professions. All this is connected.

Our overarching belief is that across the Americas, the challenges of marginalized groups are similar enough that we can create solutions with impact across the board.

New Cuba policy spurs mixed feelings in Cuban-Americans

April 8, 2015

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.”

Talk of South Park stadium site stirs hornet’s nest for neighbors

April 8, 2015

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.

Yet it has stirred a hornet’s nest of potential opposition from two neighborhoods, one predominantly African-American, the other overwhelmingly white.

The South Park stadium site, identified in a state consultant’s report last month, would tuck a football palace in the vast triangle formed by the river, Louisiana Street and north of South Park Avenue.

But the larger development footprint surrounding the possible stadium site – defined by a zigzagging boundary line that looks like a gerrymandered congressional district – identifies the Commodore Perry Homes, as well as a prominent business strip along South Park Avenue as possible sites for redevelopment. And the stadium itself would swallow a popular waterfront park.

Not surprisingly, you’ll hear a lot of not-in-my-backyard, or NIMBY, sentiments from both public housing advocates and those who would like the Old First Ward to remain, well, old.

Even though the state stadium study does not include a call for demolition of any homes, residents fear that the ominous red “D” on the state’s stadium map – which stands for potential development sites – really spells death to their neighborhoods.

“When folks come to take your homes, whether you’re black or white, middle class or poor people, you’re all in the same boat,” said Sam Smith, chairman of a residents’ council representing city housing tenants. “They always choose the path of least resistance. We’re all looked at as something that’s in the way of so-called progress.”

Several sources said that opinion of the possible stadium site is much more mixed in the Old First Ward, with many thinking the facility would be a boon to the neighborhood.

But then there are loud voices such as that of Julie Cleary, who lives on Hamburg Street in the ward, a few blocks east and south of the proposed site.

‘A loss of our homes’

“It would mean a loss of our homes, our neighbors and our church, which is most important to all of us,” said Cleary, a key player in defeating the proposed move of the Buffalo Zoo to the riverfront many years ago.

“It would be the end of our way of life.”

Truth be told, though, that’s not what the stadium site map spells out.

The yellow border on the site map – which swallows up the Perry projects and the South Park Avenue home of prominent businesses such as Mazurek’s Bakery, Carbone’s Pizza & Subs and Adolf’s Old First Ward Tavern – merely indicates the areas that could be affected by the stadium, said a source who was involved in the development of the state stadium report. It does not mean that all, or even any, of the buildings within the yellow line would come down.

In fact, none of the three proposed downtown stadium sites requires the taking of any homes, said the source – who added that other potential sites were rejected precisely because they would require the demolition of housing.

Hearing that, Common Council Member David A. Franczyk of the Fillmore District advised caution.

“It doesn’t mean they’re going to have to go in there and plow it all out,” Franczyk said. “It doesn’t mean (that South Park business strip) is scheduled for removal, and it shouldn’t be.”

Still, advocates for the residents of the Perry Homes look at the stadium plan and see the end of a neighborhood that was the childhood home of many current city leaders.

“I don’t like the South Park site,” said former Council President George K. Arthur.

“People have been living there for years and years. The South Park District is an old established district with a lot of history, and all of it would be gone.”

Henry Louis Taylor Jr., founding director of the Center for Urban Studies at the University at Buffalo, predicted that the South Park site for a stadium would displace at least 1,000 to 1,500 residents, most of them in the Perry Homes.

“You’re not just displacing people,” Taylor said. “You’re destroying communities, including the social networks people make to help them survive in the city.”

Others, though, said the Perry housing – parts of which date from the 1930s – are doomed, regardless of whether the stadium is built in the neighborhood.

“Perry, as we see it, is not going to remain,” Franczyk said.

Franczyk noted that the projects’ towers, with their dimly lit hallways, are not an inviting living environment.

Interest in preserving park

Then again, the Perry Homes might actually make a good stadium site, said Laura Kelly, director of the Old 1st Ward Community Association.

“You look up at them, and a lot of them are boarded up and vacant,” she noted.

Kelly, like other First Ward community leaders, is strongly opposed to the South Park stadium proposal. But both she and Franczyk said opponents appear to be outnumbered in the neighborhood. Kelly said many neighborhood residents work at First Niagara Center and see a football stadium as bringing more employment to the neighborhood.

“I would say the neighborhood in general is very excited about the possibility of the stadium,” Kelly said.

But it shouldn’t be, she quickly added.

“This effectively would cut the neighborhood off from the waterfront again,” said Kelly, who also noted the possible impact of a stadium on a wide range of neighborhood businesses.

More than anything else, opposition in the Old First Ward appears likely to come from those who want to preserve Father Conway Park, a heavily used green space that falls within the footprint of the proposed stadium site. But the issue is larger than that, said Peg Overdorf, director of the Valley Community Center.

“I don’t want my neighborhood to be the backdoor of a stadium,” she said. “I don’t want to live in a sea of parking lots.”

But the source who was involved in drawing up the report said there may be ways to save parts of Father Conway Park, or move it.

And Franczyk – who fought for passage of a Council resolution calling for the stadium to be located in the city – stressed that a stadium consultant’s report doesn’t necessarily mean that a stadium, even if it’s built at the South Park site, would lead to the dire consequences that some are predicting.

If something concrete is proposed that concerns the neighborhood, Franczyk said, “let’s talk about it.”

Taylor, a longtime Bills season-ticket holder, believes that the Bills can copy what the Atlanta Falcons ownership is doing.

In Atlanta, the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, has committed $15 million toward developing the Westside neighborhood near the new stadium.

The UB professor would like to see Bills owners Terry and Kim Pegula make a similar commitment here.

“They should put aside a significant amount of resources to expressly address neighborhood development in and around the stadium,” he said.

Taylor, who has done research on distressed urban neighborhoods and the redevelopment of shrinking cities, is concerned about the current residents of the area if a stadium is built on the South Park site.

‘There can be synergy’

“Economic development doesn’t have to overwhelm and drown social development,” he said. “There can be synergy between the two.”

And the loss of green space such as the park also would hurt the community, Taylor said. There aren’t many green spaces for African-Americans to exercise and work out in that part of the city, and that’s crucial, in his view, because of the high levels of respiratory problems, including asthma, among blacks living there.

Cleary, from the Old First Ward, had the same reaction, about the possible loss of Father Conway Park at the South Park site.

“That’s out of the question,” she said. “That’s as sacred to us as our homes.”