Blog Archives

Latest Census stats show minorities now Buffalo’s majority

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/ 

 

Erie County Executive forms Poverty Committee

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.”

Reducing poverty in Erie County is focus of new community advisory panel

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

Buffalo-area homeowners love their homes, and they’re not going anywhere

Read the full article from Buffalo News here.

“[T]here is another factor also at work in these neighborhoods where people stay – and stay, Taylor said. ‘You have folks there, who are determined to build a strong neighborhood,’ he said. ‘They’re operating under a different set of notions…They stay – not because they are stuck, but they stay because of a commitment to the African-American community, and a determination to keep that part of the city vibrant,’ he said.”

NPR Interviews Center for Urban Studies’ Director Henry Louis Taylor Jr.

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.”

 

 

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

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

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

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.

Tackling the region’s racial divide

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.”

New Cuba policy spurs mixed feelings in Cuban-Americans

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.”