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POLITICS
More Than Arson: A Two-Part Report on Saginaw Blight Part Two: Pros and Cons of Focusing on a Target Area By Mike Thompson With urban aid that started during the 1960s, Saginaw city leaders for the first time are concentrating on a single neighborhood for isolated effort.
Pro: Maybe we will see better
results in a smaller zone, instead of spreading the resources all across
town. Con: But what if the target neighborhood isn't my own
neighborhood?
The area surrounding St. Mary's of
Michigan hospital, known as the Cathedral District, quietly
emerged early this year as the singular "revitalization area" for the
immediate future.
City Council members, based highly on prodding from newly hired staff, established the new policy with such little fanfare that not a single soul from outside the target area protested publicly.
But this is a vital change of strategy as
Saginaw looks beyond last fall's three-week criminal spat of arson, in
order to cope with the larger long-term question of how to improve
conditions.
Development Director Odail Thorns Jr. came on board 16 months ago. He inherited an office map with color-coded pins that represent hundreds of demolitions and rehab jobs through the years.
"We have fewer resources and we need to
spend them more wisely. We decided we need to go into smaller areas one
at a time, clean them out, and really make an impact," Thorns says.
City Manager Darnell Earley, hired permanently this year, is on the same page. He says a "more focused" effort will lead to "tangible and visible accomplishments."
Amos O'Neal is the City Council's
delegate to Cities of Promise, a new state initiative that first
will focus on the Cathedral District. "For years, we've been using this
scattered approach to dealing with blight all over the place," O'Neal
says. "We need to take a different approach."
Many different targets The lion's share of aid through the years has gone to the East Side, but most of the near West Side also has qualified at one time or another.
Besides the Cathedral District, other
target areas have included:
* The sprawling northeast zone on both
sides of Interstate 675, up to about Fourteenth Street.
* A far-smaller south end neighborhood
sandwiched between Wickes Park and the abandoned South Side Business
District along M-13.
* A southwest section that surrounds the
commercial strip where South Michigan bends into West Michigan.
* The central West Side zone from
Mason/Woodbridge to the river, which could become the "Covenant District" if Covenant Health Care one day gets
as involved as St. Mary's.
* A small northwest pocket north of
Davenport, and north of Stone School.
If you live in these neighborhoods, you
won't get completely erased from the city's aid map but you'll get far
less attention, at least for the next year or two. The next 110
abandoned houses on the removal schedule; for example, all are in the
Cathedral District. Most are behind the hospital along streets such as
Warren, Weadock and Park. City Hall won't make demolitions elsewhere
unless a severe fire causes an emergency safety condition.
Longtime neighborhood activist
Christina Jones lives in East Side territory near Janes and South
12th, a few blocks from Houghton School. Her neighborhood south of I-675
remained fairly solid into the early 1990s, but since then it has became
as blighted as any in the city. As many as eight vacant structures are
on single blocks, but Jones is about a mile from the outer edge of the
Cathedral District, and so now the prospects of immediate help are less
than ever.
"We can't give up, just because the city
chooses to focus on another target area," Jones says. "We have to
concentrate for now on other concerns like after school programs for the
children, support groups, prayer groups."
Elizabeth Hansen resides near the
Courthouse in the West Side's Heritage Square area, which contains a few too many upper
incomes to even qualify for federal aid. She also chairs the Human
Planning Commission, which advises the City Council.
"It's nice to have a target area, but
when it isn't your own neighborhood, you feel left out," Hansen says.
She has crossed the river to aid Global
ReLeaf with a block-by-block environmental survey of tree conditions in
the St. Mary's area, so she has seen the Cathedral District first-hand
and she fears a turnaround will require more than two years.
"It makes sense if you can go in and get
something done and then move on, but it's disappointing when it looks
like some neighborhoods never get targeted," Hansen says.
More like running a business Thorns came to City Hall from an uncommon background for a municipal administrator. He was a top Delphi Steering executive. If you're UAW, don't blame him; he wasn't on the Steve Miller level. But he was up high, retiring in 2001 as global director of half shafts and aftermarket. He has won praise in many quarters for bringing a business sensibility to a key City Hall position.
"There was a big gap in our operation in
terms of revitalizing the neighborhoods," Thorns says.
For example, inspectors three years ago barely had time to conduct a "windshield survey" of blight. They drove the city's 300 miles of streets and recorded 507 abandoned houses. Thorns ordered a more comprehensive study with help from college interns and came up with more than 700 vacant homes, along with hundreds more eyesores (and potential arson targets) such as garages and sheds.
"We may have been underestimating the
problem," he says.
City Council nominees on the November 2005 One Saginaw reform slate, Bill Federspiel, Amanda Kitterman, Andrew Wendt and Greg Branch joined Larry Coulouris as newcomers. The approach under Earley and new Mayor Carol Cottrell has been to drastically shorten the council meetings, and to settle top issues in more of a behind-the-scenes style.
A typical meeting now is 90 minutes.
When the controversial Roma Thurin
and Dan Soza were on the council, the typical standard was closer
to 5 or 6 hours. "This is not because of any clandestine effort to get
things passed," Earley says. "This is more due to a businesslike
approach to getting things done."
And so when O'Neal last December spoke of
a need for a tighter target area and proposed the Cathedral District,
the conversation was brief. Thurin and Soza no longer were around to
pose multiple questions, such as, "Why exactly should we pick the St.
Mary's area?"
Nobody else asked.
O'Neal said the East Holland and
Remington one ways, with large amounts of both motor traffic and blight,
should be included in an effort to improve the city's image. He received
his wish, with Holland and Remington as the Cathedral District's south
boundary. Other borders are East Genesee Avenue to the east, Janes
Avenue (and the edge of downtown) to the north, and the river to the
west.
In the middle of the zone, St. Mary's of
Michigan has made major contributions in the Cathedral District.
Neighborhood Renewal Services has organized a public-private home
lending pool to serve the area, and Habitat for Humanity for two
recent summers has built there. The first-year Saginaw County Land
Bank Authority will focus in the Cathedral zone, aiming to keep
abandoned houses and lots out of the hands of slum land speculators.
"We started with this area because there
is a lot of activity going on already," O'Neal says. "Holland and
Remington are main arteries that are highly visible to the public, and
St. Mary's is a key stakeholder."
Suddenly a major player Many residents recall when the St. Mary's entrance was along South Jefferson rather than South Washington. Visitors would have to dodge speeding traffic after they parked. Then, in the hospital rooms of loved ones or friends, they would peer out the windows and see widespread nearby blight. Past civic leaders such as Henry Nickleberry say the hospital came close to moving out of town.
Hospital officials decided to stay and
started making investments, but mostly within the campus. Some neighbors
remained suspicious. The main turnaround came during the middle 1990s
with the arrival of Sister Dinah White as director of mission
services.
Sister Dinah persuaded the St. Mary's
board and administration to invest more than $2 million of the
hospital's own money in the surrounding area between 1997 and 2004. A
good chunk was to raze or repair nearby houses in need, creating a sort
of buffer to surround the campus. But the hospital went beyond with
services such as the GreenHouse Gathering Place family support center, a youth
community center, mobile medical clinics at sites such as the East Side
Soup Kitchen, and neighborhood health outreach workers.
This was a precursor to investments of
the Shaheen family and others across from the new front entrance, aided
with tax breaks and brownfields.
When St. Mary's local cash started to run
dry a year ago, Sister Dinah helped land $318,300 in grants from
the regional Daughters of Charity headquarters. She has relocated
to a new assignment out of state but her successor, Paul Bauschatz,
is carrying on with a followup $900,000 grant request. He leads a
coalition that hopes to raise a matching $5 million from government,
business and foundation sources.
"We do projects as simple as cleanups and
flower plantings," Bauschatz says. "We need to concentrate on what we
must do to reverse the downward trend, and to change the image people
will see when they drive in. It's a continuation of our corporate social
responsibility."
A consultant is helping neighbors and
civic leaders come up with plans for such basics as housing and business
development, education and recreation. One idea is to create model
"legacy blocks," which in other words are target blocks in a larger
target area.
For instance, Patrick and Azalee
Williams have acquired and maintained a stunning total of 11 vacant
lots surrounding their historic home in the 900 block of Emerson near
Central Middle School's football field.
"We have nearly 4 acres right here in the
middle of the city," Patrick Williams says. "Rather than have blight
around us, we purchased it and revitalized it. This is a family
neighborhood. We could live anywhere we like, and we choose to live
here.
His wife makes another point." It's a
good, sturdy home. You couldn't build this kind of house nowadays,"
Azalee Williams says.
Federal aid shrinks City Hall receives about $3 million annually in federal block grants; a sum slashed slightly more than 50 percent from the peak years of the mid to late 1990s. About one-third goes for housing. Other sums are for an array of projects that range from parking ramp upgrades to small business loans. The annual topic of community policing versus youth social programs has stirred debate for nearly a decade, but this category is restricted to 15 percent of the total.
Thorns says few of the abandoned
properties in the Cathedral District or elsewhere are in good enough
shape to be saved. He estimates the city would need $8 million to
remove all the vacant structures, and that doesn't even start to count
slum rentals that become abandoned almost day by day.
But city leaders say they no longer can
afford to use local funds for demolitions, so they have switched in
recent years to federal block grants. The sum has averaged about
$400,000 during the past four years, a far cry from that $8 million in need.
Cash-strapped state government, which
can't run deficits like the feds, kicks in smaller sums such as a recent
Cities of Promise $225,000 allotment to tear down abandoned
eyesores. City leaders are sending the cash straight to the Cathedral
area. They also are seeking more state dollars for home-fixup aid, and
for sidewalk repairs near schools. They are aiming for a project to
catch neighbors who dump trash and garbage on vacant lots, or who strip
medal siding from properties. At the same time, they are crossing their
fingers with hopes that a new Democratic Congress in Washington might
help send a little more gravy toward Saginaw.
"It's a pleasant surprise to see people
rallying," Thorns says.
Mark Neumeier has served since 1988 as director of Neighborhood Renewal Services, a federal project based on an early 1970s Pittsburgh model that merges residents with bankers and local government. First-time owners have purchased hundreds of houses. Success has come not just in the Cathedral area but across the West Side through the Home Ownership Program (H.O.P.), which has featured familiar yellow and black for-sale signs. Funds are shrinking but the effort continues.
Neumeier looks beyond the target
neighborhood strategy, dreaming that Saginaw somehow could become a
federal target city for the whole nation.
"We have all the problems of a big city,
but we�re small enough to be a place where the feds could adopt us as a
model with some pilot projects. We could get the Saginaw Community Foundation involved and maybe the big
ones � Kresge, Kellogg, Ford," he suggests.
"All I know is, we need to do something.
The arsons were so bad that my brother-in-law in Louisiana read about
them. Saginaw made the news wire services, but not in the way we want.
The housing conditions have become so bad that despite all of our work,
I'd have to say at NRS that we're back where we started 18 years ago."
Choices aren't easy Questions loom. Can targeting really make a Cathedral District difference within a year or two? If so, what would be the next target area? And then the one after that?
To some extent, many city leaders in all
sincerity seem to wish to keep their cake and also eat it. They
repeatedly say that while focusing on the St. Mary's area, they don't
wish to disregard others. That's a tough balancing act.
"We're not going to say that all work
goes into this one area and nothing else happens anywhere else," O'Neal
explains. "We can't just put ourselves in a box like that. We can still
address emergencies elsewhere, but we need to maximize our resources in
one area."
Thorns and O'Neal see future West Side
hope near Covenant Health Care. The hospital's community commitments of
$100,000 for Bliss Park and a "Walk to Work" home sale promotion for
employees are more modest so far than those by St. Mary's. But more
potential exists.
"When we move to Phase 2 and Phase 3 with new target neighborhoods, we'll be looking for other key stakeholders," O'Neal says.
This leads to a deeper dilemma. What will
become the fate of those areas that no longer have strong stakeholders
or anchors, devastated areas where homeowners who maintain pride often
are surrounded by blight on all sides? They pay taxes too. Should they
face less hope that City Hall someday will finally remove the eyesores?
O'Neal makes an apple tree metaphor. He
says an area with strong partners, such as the Cathedral District, is
akin to a lower hanging apple that's the most fundamental to pick first.
An area such as Covenant is like the tree's middle part. A heavily
blighted zone such as Christina Jones� territory near I-675 is among the
high branches where apples are most difficult to reach.
"No neighborhood is too far gone. The
high apples may just take longer," O'Neal insists, but some officials
say with regret that they aren't so sure.
County Treasurer Marv Hare, leader
of the land bank, says he wonders whether his childhood northeast area
near Johnson and North 13th - a mile east of The Dow Event Center -
still has a future.
"When there are so many abandoned houses
and lots, it really can get expensive for a land bank," Hare says. "The
area where I grew up, I don't know whether that's still savable. If we
don't target neighborhoods that are still viable, then we won't get very
far."
Chief Inspector Jim Hodges says
some areas are so beat up that City Hall on occasion has spent federal
grants twice at the same houses.
"We gave them rehab grants 15 or 20 years
ago (for about $20,000), but they still deteriorated so badly that now
they're on the demolition list (for about another $8,000)," Hodges says.
Thorns maintains that Saginaw has no "dead" neighborhoods.
"But there are some," Thorns adds, "where
I am sure we would have a lot of questions before we went into them with
major resources."
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