“A Brand New Day” SUN’s Testimony at the 2010 CDBG Hearing

For the past 16 years, for the entirety of the last two mayoral administrations, our neighborhoods and its housing have been dying, little by little, house by house. The low income communities on the south and near west sides of the city, the neighborhoods where Syracuse United Neighbors members live, have felt more than our fair share of pain during this era.

Homeownership has fallen to 18% in our neighborhoods, while the number of vacant and abandoned homes have skyrocketed. Almost half of the city’s 1,500 vacant houses are located in our neighborhoods, despite the fact that we make up only 15% of the city’s households. Even before the current financial meltdown, mainstream banks did not make mortgage or home improvement loans in our neighborhoods.

The two prior administrations largely stood by and watched. The Community Development Block Grant is the only dedicated source of money available to the city and is required to be spent on the improvement of housing for low income families. Despite the several million dollars that annually comes to our city through this program, the money did not make it back out to the neighborhoods and was not used to redevelop our housing. The Bernardi administration wasted millions of dollars chasing foolish economic development projects and the Driscoll administration spent the ever-dwindling amounts of aid coming from the Bush White House on salaries for City Hall salaries. Last year, the City pocketed 46% of all the money that HUD sent to the city.

But it is a brand new day. Mayor Stephanie Miner came into office and proved that she had been listening to the calls of SUN for CDBG reform. Mayor Miner cut unnecessary staff positions in the old Community Development department, merged the separate Community and Economic Development departments and eliminated the slush funds for City Hall salaries known as Technical Services. In addition, the new Neighborhood Development department has committed itself to having a full-time code enforcement inspector for CDBG projects and work to develop an honest-to-goodness Housing Plan for the city, something missing in this town since Mayor Young created the Syracuse Housing Partnership back in the 1980’s. SUN looks forward to being a part of the planning process and having future CDBG housing money dedicated to neighborhood -wide projects, not just random new houses, planted in neighborhoods for no rhyme or reason.

Now that the city has bold and innovative leadership in the Mayor’s office, the new Division of Planning and the new Department of Neighborhood & Business Development, SUN is looking forward to a new set of discussions about CDBG:

1) Creating a pool of quality contractors for projects funded by CDBG, addressing the legitimate concerns of poor workmanship expressed by countless neighbors and the red tape and bureaucracy that have scared away too many good contractors from CDBG work.

2) A comprehensive plan to rehabilitate the huge pool of vacant and abandoned buildings, especially those at the epicenter of the problem–the neighborhoods of the south and near-west sides of the city.

3) How to use the annual pool of CDBG money to not only rebuild our housing but to train and provide jobs for people in our community. We need to build the capacity of companies in Syracuse to do green housing work, starting with the deconstruction, rather than the demolition, of houses.

4) Working to create a city/county Task Force on Housing Rehabilitation and New Construction–a parallel organization to the city/county Task Force on the Homeless and Housing Vulnerable–a group that does such a wonderful and comprehensive job on that issue.

SUN has only one specific request on the draft budget that has been presented. We believe that Home Headquarters’ SHARP program, the program that funds home handyman repairs of less than $1,000 should be increased from its current level of $100,000 to $200,000. Last year, the initial $100,000 was all appropriated during the first week Home Headquarters accepted applications. A second round of funding later in the year went equally quickly.