City Wide Coalition of Urban Pastors Questions for Community Wide ForumHowie Hawkins, Green Party candidate for Mayor of Syracuse Monday, September 19, 2005 1. What new initiatives do you have for increasing affordable housing with the city? (1) Inclusionary zoning that requires new developments to include a minimum percentage of affordable housing, e.g., the Inner Harbor . New Paltz Greens, where Greens are the Mayor and Deputy Mayor, have drafted the first such legislation in New York State . Their legislation requires all development of 6 units or more to include at least 15% low-income housing, with low-income defined as below 60% of median income for rental housing and below 80% of median income for home ownership (2) Create more community land trusts that maintain the affordability of housing for people with low or fixed incomes when neighborhoods improve and property values increase, e.g. Time of Jubilee on the Southwest side. A Community Land Trust (CLT) is a not-for-profit landholding corporation that is democratically managed by residents on the land. A CLT issues land leases to homes and businesses in the CLT that secure tenure and use rights to a particular parcel of land. The lease specifies that homeowners may resell their homes, but at a price that equals the equity they have invested, but not a speculative windfall due to rising property values. Under a CLT lease, land maintains affordability because there is no capacity for land speculation or profiteering. (3) Replace the current property tax with land value taxation that taxes the market value of land sites but not the improvements to housing and businesses on land sites. Land value taxation shifts taxes off of labor and productive capital and onto land and resources, thus collecting ground rent for the benefit of all rather than the profit of a few. Land also maintains affordability when it is freed from speculation and private profiteering. Land value taxation restricts property taxes to the unearned income derived from appreciation of all land in the community, which reflects social investments in schools, parks, and other infrastructure and amenities, not the actions of the owner. It discourages speculators holding on to abandoned city lots and buildings. They have to make the land productive to pay the land value tax. That stimulates inner city redevelopment and discourages sprawl. Land value taxation also makes the property tax progressive because land ownership is far more concentrated than the ownership of home and business assets. (4) Replace absentee landlords with public or democratic non-profit housing , e.g., Kennedy Square, Sunset Terrace & Rolling Green. Take those Section 8 subsidies that now go as profit to outsiders and reinvest it in the community. (5) Establish a Municipal Bank to make home improvement and mortgage loans without redlining and discrimination Syracuse 's low-income and people of color neighborhoods have experienced. (6) Stop auctions HUD houses to absentee landlords. Sell them to city residents and provide grants from SNI, etc. and loans through municipal bank to finance their purchase.
2. What initiatives will you develop to beautify the city's southside? Rebuild Syracuse Green : Economic development funds should be spent on rebuilding Syracuse 's natural and built environment for economic and ecological sustainability, not on corporate welfare for private developers like Destiny USA . This would be done with p ublic works and contracts for community enterprises – with a Project Labor Agreement worked out with the building trades that would provide living-wage jobs for people in our communities through community hiring halls and training apprenticeships for at-risk youth and ex-offenders. Each contract would stipulate that the contractor has to take a certain percentage from the community hiring hall if the union hiring hall can't meet affirmative action goals for minority, women, and city-resident labor. Onondaga Creek Corridor Restoration would be the major public works project on the South Side. It would renaturalize the creek. It would create pedestrian and bike pathways along its length. It would be a 'civic and environmental highway,' a 'linear public plaza,' as Prof. Emanuel Carter, Landscape Architect at SUNY School of Environmental Science and Forestry, has called it in studies he has led for this project. It would create riverfront property that will revitalize the economy and environment of the Near West as well as South sides. It would be a public amenity for the whole region and bring customers in for neighborhood restaurants and shops. Green Projects : Clean green manufacturing enterprises in every neighborhood. Ecological housing projects along the creek. Biological sewage treatment "living machines." Replacing lead pipes. Renewable energy for the south side: insulation, efficient windows, fuel cells, wind generated hydrogen production for use in fuel cells, solar shingles. Biomass fuel and renewable natural gas from the living machines. Composting for community gardens and urban agriculture. A Greenway network of pedestrian and bike paths and light rails creating linear parks that link schools, parks, and shopping districts to residential streets. Reconnect the South Side to the University neighborhood by replacing Interstate 81 with a parklike Greenway for bike and pedestrian paths, a light rail line for commuters, and a North/South four-lane boulevard with street lights timed for 35 mile an hour travel. Instead of an ersatz Erie Canal inside the private Destiny USA dome, re-dig the original Erie Canal to transform the Erie Boulevard corridor from a mundane suburban sprawl style strip mall into a park-like corridor for shopping, green manufacturing, and recreation serviced by light rail and bike and pedestrian paths.
3. What plans do you have for job creation with the city – particularly where youth and young professionals (recent graduates) are concerned? Public Jobs in Public Works to Rebuild Syracuse Green: Private jobs are good, but public jobs are necessary for full employment. Public works for living-wage jobs, apprenticeships for youth, management roles for recent graduates. According to research done by the Apollo Alliance, NY State could see the creation of over 200,000 jobs in the next decade in renewable energy and retrofitting programs. Syracuse needs about 10,000 new jobs for its unemployed and underemployed in the inner city.
Private Jobs in Community-Owned Enterprises: Community-owned enterprises would include worker and consumer cooperatives, resident owner-operated small businesses, and stock corporations where voting shares are restricted to residents only, like the Green Bay Packers. The cooperatives are important for reasons that W.E.B. DuBois discussed in his book Dusk of Dawn. Dubois said the co-ops would develop the black community economically without recreating class divisions that white society had used to exploit black labor. He didn't want to reproduce that. In cooperatives, the managers and workers have an equal vote and the cooperative makes them all workers and managers at the same time. In other words, cooperatives develop the skills of the people as they develop the economy. That's what we need. We need to raise up the whole community together.
A Municipal Bank with a business development department that can plan, finance and advise community-owned enterprises. Succesful examples to learn from include Mondragon , Spain 's cooperative bank and the State Bank of North Dakota .
4. What ideas do you have for partnering with community and religious organizations around youth violence? What is your time frame for this initiative? Violence correlates with joblessness and low incomes. Most of the violence is gang related and the gangs are drug-selling businesses. So the centerpiece of an anti-violence program has to be a jobs and anti-poverty program. That is one of the purposes of the public works jobs in Rebuild Syracuse Green. The city needs to partner with the community and religious organizations that are in touch with the at-risk youth and ex-offenders and hook them up with the jobs and apprenticeships Rebuild Syracuse Green will provide. Those people will need mentoring and support and the city should help the community and religious organizations provide it.
5. The problems facing youth have existed for generations in this country. They are so deeply rooted and so complex that many cities prefer to ignore the problem. What plans do you have to help the youth of our city who have been locked out of their dream? The problem is not that complex. The data shows clearly that when young people can find living-wage jobs that can support a family, crime and violence go way down. When poverty is reduced to next to nothing, as the European countries have done, the crime rate is a small fraction of America 's. A serious anti-poverty program, based on providing decent jobs to everyone willing and able to work, will cut crime and violence down the very small levels.
Rebuild Syracuse Green. Public jobs through public works and a municipal bank to plan, finance, and advice community-owned businessesIf we provide better alternatives to the street hustles, young people will take them. I saw this with leaders of the Vice Lords of Chicago's West Side at Dartmouth College who I went to school with. They went from being high school dropout gangsters to Ivy League graduates when they were given the opportunity. Anti-poverty programs do work if they really provide training and jobs you can raise a family on. Living-Wage Minimum Wage: Make work pay to support a family. Labor productivity rose in the U.S. by 80 percent since 1968. If the real value of the national minimum wage had risen the minimum wage today would be about $15/hour. GDP has doubled since 1979, but almost all the growth of national income has gone to the top 10%. We have to make sure that every job in Syracuse pays a living wage. That means a citywide minimum wage law that is a living wage. 6. What possibilities do you see for collaborating between the city of Syracuse and the Syracuse School District for mentoring? The schools can help identify the kids heading for trouble and connect them with opportunities in the Rebuild Syracuse Green program. The city program can tell the schools the kinds of vocational programs needed to help youth prepare for job opportunities, from civil service exam preparation for youth interested in police and fire department jobs to training in the renewable energy and urban agriculture fields.
7. What direction do you feel Syracuse is headed and why? Syracuse is at a crossroads. If it continues with failed policies, it will continue to decline. Two polices stand out in this regard: corporate welfare and the war on drugs. Tax breaks and other incentives don't create jobs. Companies locate based on business basics: proximity to markets, suppliers, and material inputs like energy and water, and the quality of the workforce. Then they look at public services and amenities like schools, parks, and transportation. Do the managers want to live there. Then they make their decision where to locate. After that decision, they hire consultants to play cities and states off against each other to get corporate welfare and tax breaks. The war on drugs hasn't reduced drug use. It has only filled the prisons to overflowing, mostly with blacks, Latinos, and Indians. And it is a drain on the public treasury. On the other hand, Syracuse has lots of prime real estate in the poorest sections of the city like the south, lower east, and near west sides and along the Onondaga Creek and Erie Boulevard corridors. With energy prices rising and the peak of oil and gas production within site, the inner city becomes even more highly valued because dense, compact cities are more economical and energy efficient. If we can begin now to use public economic investments for neighborhood-directed development using green technologies and widespread community ownership, we can develop Syracuse as an ecologically and economically self-reliant and sustainable city that will boom. The trick will be to do this in a way that the low-skilled, and disabled, and elderly people can afford to live here as the property values rise as the city improves. That's where inclusionary zoning, community land trusts, and land value taxation I discussed earlier come in.
8. How would you increase the number of minority positions in the city? I would take the affirmative action goals of the city seriously and allocate the resources needed to achieve them. Those goals were established in the 1970s and the city's minority population has grown substantially since then. So the numerical goals need to be at least doubled from the 10% in contracting and 15% in employment to more than 20% in contracting and 30% in employment. The municipal bank, which would make loans without the discrimination the private banks have engaged in, could help create the minority businesses needed to meet the contracting goals. The community hiring hall would help meet the employment goals.
9. List and briefly discuss three of your ideas for improving the quality of life in the city? Public Power: We need to replace Niagara Mohawk/National Grid with city-owned power company like Solvay Electric whose customers pay one-quarter what Syracusans do to NiMo. We'll get better customer service for billing and service problems and be able to build local sources of clean, renewable energy
Progressive Tax Reform: The poorest 20% pay 14% of their income in sales and property taxes while the wealthiest 20% pay only 7%. It's time for a fair local tax structure, including: - Cuts in regressive sales and property taxes. - A city income tax, progressively graduated. - A commuter tax on the 40,000+ commuters, progressively graduated. - Eco-Taxes: Tax bads, not goods. Replace the across-the-board sales tax with selective eco-taxes on harmful products. - Property Tax Reform: Tax land values, not improvements to homes, businesses and farms. Decriminalize Drug Possession We know from the study by Ted Shepard at LeMoyne that more we spend on drug law enforcement, the more all violence and property crimes go up. It's time to start experimenting with harm reduction programs – pilot programs to see what works. For example, we could make drug possession a civil offense like a traffic ticket, instead of criminal offense and stop filling the jails with nonviolent drug offenders, most of them minority even though whites use and sell drugs at the same rates. Use the $5-8 million spent on drug enforcement by the Police Department, according to a report by former city auditor Minch Lewis, for youth job and recreation programs and drug treatment on demand for addicts. The city now spends half on parks, recreation, and youth programs that it did in the 1970s. It needs to provide recreation programs for all the youth who need them.
10. What relationships will you bring in the southern sector of our city that will enhance their lives? I live on the south side. Most of my relationships are here. The Green Party office is at 2617 South Salina St . Next door is the South Side Newsstand, which I have supported since we took over that store front eight years ago.
11. What is the city master plan? Sustainable Syracuse : Neighborhood-directed development using green technologies and widespread community ownership We should replace the 8 big, merely advisory TNT sectors with 25 or so Neighborhood Assemblies in the real neighborhoods of the city. They should be empowered to direct neighborhood development, put the neighborhood details into the city's Comprehensive Plan, review and amend the big urban design framework in the city's Comprehensive Plan, and elect neighborhood officers to guide the delivery of city services in their neighborhoods and compel the city to respond to neighborhood needs and problems We need a neighborhood-based city government, with each neighborhood electing a district councilor, a school board member, and members of other citywide commissions. Representatives will serve smaller constituencies and be forced to be more responsive and accountable to the neighborhoods that elected them. The city needs city planning and business development capacities. Right now the developers and absentee-owned corporations are calling the shots. With Destiny, we are creating a highly-subsidized competitor to all retail and entertainment businesses in the rest of the city. We are making a private developer the effective city planner. Instead we should create a city Planning Department that can help neighborhoods with community design and the city as a whole with its urban design. We need a Municipal Bank with business development capacity that can help plan, finance, and advise new community-owned enterprises that put our own people into business as worker-owners. Developers and corporations wanting to set up a branch here will then fit into our plans, instead of use continuing to adapt to their plans which have resulted in an eroded tax base, poor public services, and low-wage jobs. We can do better if we do our own planning for what we need. |