Mayors Conference Notebook
FOR A TOPIC that is usually downright depressing, the city mayors and administrators who gathered over bagels and eggs to talk about vacant and abandoned properties sounded remarkably upbeat.
The battle to reclaim their neighborhoods is on. And they’re swinging hard.
Green Bay, Wis., tore down a “flophouse” so a nonprofit group could build an affordable single-family house. St. Louis forced the owners of 189 properties to comply with local building codes –– which include picking up garbage and cutting the grass.
Chicago has hired a “portfolio services” company to help put 2,500 vacant and foreclosed properties back to productive use over the next three to five years.
Green Bay Mayor James J. Schimitt said his city’s program to convert multifamily rentals back into owner-occupied single-family houses is so aggressive that he knows it will cost him votes. “Those landlords will not support me in the next election,” he said.
St. Louis Mayor Francis G. Slay said that his city’s program of fining owners who don’t keep up their properties is so successful –– the city has collected over $1 million since 2002 –– that it’s “funding itself.”
Meanwhile, the problems persist. A survey released by the U.S. Conference of Mayors found that 83 percent of the cities surveyed reported problems managing properties due to the mortgage crisis, up from just over 50 percent last year.
Of the 53 cities surveyed, 93 percent reported an increase during the last year in the number of vacant and abandoned properties. The numbers ranged from just over 8,300 in St. Louis and more than 15,000 in Las Vegas, according to the 2009 Vacant and Abandoned Properties Report. And 68 percent of the cities surveyed anticipate the problems will get worse over the next year.
How Providence stacks up is hard to know because the city did not participate in the survey.
But an analysis of foreclosures released this month by Rhode Island Legal Services showed that about 1,166 of the state’s 2,338 evictions filed by lenders in 2008 were in Providence. (The number of foreclosures is presumably higher, since people often move out prior to an eviction filing.)
RHODE ISLAND SCHOOL OF DESIGN President John Maeda, addressing mayors before lunch on Sunday, talked about the need to move away from traditional concepts of a leader towards a more creative, dynamic type of leadership.
In his half-hour speech, Maeda, who just finished his first full year at the helm RISD, kept things fast and loose, at times cracking up the crowd with a wide-ranging slide-show presentation, which covered everything from the basics of design theory, to musings on how technology can and should “bring people back to humanity,” and his work with Mayor David N. Cicilline to get more students to stay in Providence after graduation.
Maeda filled the speaking slot that had been reserved for Shaun Donovan, President Obama’s secretary of Housing and Urban Development, who was among a hundred White House officials who backed out of the conference after the White House became aware that city firefighters, in a contract deadlock with Cicilline’s administration, planned intensive picketing to highlight the local dispute.
He told the mayors that the old concept of leadership –– of an authoritarian, military-style hierarchy –– is outmoded. New leaders, Maeda said, should be more focused on being “real” than being “right” and being less risk-averse and more willing to make mistakes and learn from them.
SAN FRANCISCO MAYOR Gavin Newsom pulled out of the mayors meeting even as he was set to speak on Sunday about Bank on San Francisco, the city program to help low-income people open bank accounts, according to his spokesman.
Newsom, a Democrat, also chairs the U.S. Conference of Mayors’ task force on health-care reform, and he was supposed to talk on Monday about Healthy San Francisco, the city’s universal health-care program.
But Newsom, who has announced his candidacy for governor of California in 2010, has a strict policy of never crossing picket lines, said his press secretary, Nathan Ballard.
Besides Newsom, the only other mayor to have left the annual meeting because of concerns about union picketing was Burlington, Vt., Mayor Bob Kiss, according to organization officials.
Mayor Cicilline spoke at a forum on financial education Sunday morning. The mayor talked about Bank on Providence, which is a city program that will soon offer affordable financial services for low-wage residents.
It is modeled after the successful San Francisco program that Mayor Newsom was to speak about at the same forum.
Cicilline said that after some financial setbacks caused by the recession, the Providence program is still not quite off the ground. It just completed a survey of 370 city families that earned less than the median family income of $35,000 and found that 35 percent of the sample residents did not have a checking account.
The most common reasons given were that residents were not comfortable with banks (25 percent) or that fees were too high (20 percent), according to Cicilline. It also found that white residents were twice as likely to have a savings account than their black counterparts and about 20 percent more likely to have one than Latinos.
— Journal staff writers Lynn Arditi and Philip Marcelo
Tags: Mayors conference, Providence, Rhode Island, Rhode Island Legal Services, RHODE ISLAND SCHOOL OF DESIGN President John Maeda, RI