Tag: New York

Buffalo’s Recent Economic Boom Leaves Longtime Residents Behind

Posted on by robbie

Ordering lobster from gourmet food trucks in Buffalo, New York, might’ve been ambitious a decade ago. Now, it happens weekly.
The food trucks that line Buffalo’s Larkin Square on Tuesdays during the warm summer months attract locals from all over the city, including its suburbs. But its lack of diversity is what shocks me most: Almost half of the city’s population are people of color, yet nearly everyone in the park is white.
Even the music reflects this fact, with a boomer-aged jam band rocking covers of Jethro Tull and Chicago.
I’m being shown around the square by Kayla Zemsky, a project manager with her family’s company, Larkin Development Group. Her family is responsible for some of Buffalo’s most well-known revitalization projects, including the newly built parklet that we’re wandering around that night. But the square, along with many other Zemsky family developments, are notorious among locals, who talk about how these kinds of developments have brought about gentrification in parts of this economically depressed city.
Zemsky tells me about the importance of revitalizing old neighborhoods, where abandoned and blighted homes litter residential streets (Buffalo has one of the largest shares of abandoned homes and properties in the state).
It’s all part of an idea to make Buffalo economically viable again, which appears to be working: A newly revitalized city is bringing back tourists through its architecture and history, and the city’s nightlife and cocktail culture has been drawing in travel and leisure writers en masse.
But the money flowing into the city seems to benefit only certain people — or at least that’s what longtime locals and activists tell me.  
“We cost the same as downtown Chicago right now,” says Sage Green, a community advocate at People United for Sustainable Housing, or PUSH Buffalo, a housing rights group.“That’s unreal; $1,500 a month in Buffalo blows my fucking mind.”
That should, indeed, blow everyone’s mind, if only for the fact that despite Buffalo’s current boom, it maintains its status as one of the nation’s poorest large cities.
The increase in the city’s property values and rents have made it one of the top 10 cities with the fastest-growing rents in the nation. Much of that bump has to do with the city’s real-estate boom: developers get close to 40 percent in tax breaks to build on Buffalo’s historic building stock — some of the most well-preserved architecture in the nation. And the state has coughed up $1 billion in a stimulus spending plan to help make Buffalo more attractive for tech manufacturers, including Tesla.
Despite an increase in popularity and interest in Buffalo, by and large the city’s residents haven’t seen the same benefits. Wages have only increased marginally, and employment in the city continues to be focused on retail and service work — much of which are by and large minimum wage jobs. As a result, people who could barely afford their mortgages or property taxes before are now in dire straits and at risk of losing their homes.
But Green’s group, PUSH, is working to keep residents in their homes by doing the most basic of renovations to the city’s old homes: insulating them.

Buffalo housing 2
PUSH at the 2018 Our City coalition public meeting.

***

October in Buffalo is a tense time for thousands of local homeowners. It’s the time of year when many find out if soon they will be homeless.
Every year, the city puts on an auction of homes whose homeowners have been in arrears with their property taxes or sewage fees. If you are behind any amount above $200, your home could be foreclosed on by the city.
“It used to be even lower than that,” says Gretchen Gonzalez, deputy director for the Volunteer Lawyers Project, a group that helps homeowners who have defaulted on their taxes work out payment plans to keep their homes. “A lot of our clients are economically disadvantaged people who live paycheck to paycheck. For those people, it just takes one tragedy or one lost job to end up behind. And these are people whose homes have been in their families for generations.”
Over a third of Buffalo’s residents are homeowners, with houses willed down or bought for cheap when the city’s economy was still spiraling downward.
And until recently, it was relatively cheap to be a Buffalo homeowner.
In 2013, most of Buffalo’s housing stock was priced between $30-60,000. Now, with Buffalo’s boom, more homes are now worth $70-90,000, according to recent ACS one-year survey numbers.
And with rising property values come a rise in property taxes, which are expected to dramatically increase with property reevaluations underway. The last time Buffalo did property reevaluations was in 2010, which has translated into less taxes — about 40 percent less than expected — coming into a city that has seen an exceptional boom in home values.
But increased property taxes is an issue for a city in which almost half of its residents live paycheck to paycheck and where 51 percent of its children live in poverty. As of now, between 2006 and 2018, an average of close to 3,000 homes every year are threatened on the auction block for failure to pay taxes.  
Housing advocates worry that the number is sure to rise after the city finishes its reevaluation next year.
“We’re certainly thrilled to see Buffalo’s economic turnaround, but it’s going to affect homeowners. And if people are having a hard time making ends meet right now, it’s only going to get worse,” says Kevin Quinn, an attorney with the Center for Law and Justice who has been representing dozens of homeowners in the past few months leading up to the city’s foreclosure auctions, which happen in mid-October.
But the cost of home ownership in Buffalo goes beyond property taxes. Before the recent housing developments in Buffalo overtook the market, residential areas were made up of homes that were built at the turn of the last century.
“All of these homes are old, old, old,” says Luana DeJesus, a program assistant at PUSH. “You better believe many of them don’t have proper insulation… A lot of people don’t even know what proper insulation is. And without that, you’re looking at bills costing into the hundreds when in reality it should be a quarter of that.”
And that’s where PUSH has found a niche as a unique problem solver to impending tax foreclosures: Keep people within their homes by insulating the homes.

***

The houses on Prospect Street, on Buffalo’s West Side, are quaint. Each of the colonial-style homes are two stories tall, with green lawns, flagpoles and raised patios. They’re also very old, sometimes well over 100 years — back when it was relatively cheap to heat a home.
But that’s not the case any longer.
On a Wednesday morning in September, I’m meeting with DeJesus outside of a home on Prospect. The home, owned by a local family that I was told had a hard time paying their utility bills, didn’t have any insulation. And that’s not an uncommon story in Buffalo.
“These are old homes — so many of them don’t have the proper insulation they need to keep warm during the winter here, so the costs are way more than what you’d normally expect than from newer homes,” DeJesus says.
According to National Fuel estimates, since 2015, gas prices to heat a home for five months has gone from $500 in 2015 to an estimated $560 this year. But that’s for energy-efficient homes.
In order to make homes energy-efficient — a process that can include an inspection and attic and wall insulation — it can easily range in the thousands of dollars. And for a number of families in Buffalo, that’s just not a viable option.
The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority offers free weatherizing for families who meet income guidelines that are 60 percent below the state’s median income, but there is little outreach from the state to get families to apply and weatherize their homes.
That’s where PUSH comes in. Once a week, members of PUSH go into poor neighborhoods and talk to residents about weatherizing their homes. For families that can afford weatherizing on their own, PUSH gets them set up for the process. For families that can’t afford the initial audit or the insulation, they partner with homeowners to get the free services through the state.
The result is thousands of dollars in savings each year for each home — more than enough to help families who struggle with their tax payments.
“PUSH [has] made a world of difference for people who didn’t even know what was going on with energy issues,” says Lucy Velez, a volunteer with PUSH. “My community doesn’t think about those things, we’re trying to keep our homes and pay our bills.”
Anecdotally, the process is working. Green, the community advocate, points out that families that were formerly on the auction block are now able to stay in their homes and finance their tax bills and city usage fees.
But she recognizes that lowering bills serves only as a band-aid for a much larger problem: a lack of affordable housing in the Buffalo area.
“These are band-aids, and band-aids are really important things. But they don’t address the problem. It’s easy to say something is bad and try and quickly fix it. It’s harder to ask why,” she says. “We’re in this space now, where we can’t just yell about public infrastructure. The middle ground is building infrastructural assets that can be controlled, designed and owned by the community so that we can build long-term neighborhoods.”
Just a few miles east, that’s exactly what’s happening.
The Fruit Belt section of Buffalo has been plagued with a declining population since the ’50s. The area — named for its flowering fruit trees — dropped from 11,000 in the ’70s to just over 2,000 people currently.
The decline in population has also translated to blocks of empty and vacant lots. Until now.
As of May this year, residents of the Fruit Belt neighborhood have successfully petitioned to create a land trust that would ensure people are not being priced out of their neighborhoods.
Residents who buy properties through a land trust split the equity of the home — most of it stays within the trust — which then keeps the price low for the next homebuyer.
Denice Barr, a resident of the Fruit Belt, is one of those residents who were instrumental in advocating for the land trust.
“People just moved into our neighborhoods without any thought about us, who’ve lived there for decades,” she says. “Now, we have the ability to take a stand against people moving in and selling off our community from under us.”
This solution isn’t unique to Buffalo. Community land trusts have been created in cities including Washington D.C., New York City and throughout Florida. But with a city that has seen a tremendous amount of growth in industry and city spending to make Buffalo more attractive, it could be a helpful tool for residents who have felt left behind in the city’s self-proclaimed renaissance.

***

This is part two in a two-part series on how solutions can both help — and hurt — communities. To read part one, on how the city of Buffalo is using architecture to help fuel a tourism-boom, click here.

Beyond Hot Wings: How Architecture Is Helping Buffalo Make Its Comeback

Posted on by robbie

I’m drinking in a brothel. Or, at least, what used to be a brothel, or so the bartender tells me. It’s now the Hydraulic Hearth, a pizza and cocktail joint on Larkin Square, in the east end of Buffalo, a neighborhood of warehouses and abandoned homes that have morphed into restaurants and distilleries.
I check my phone to see if I can confirm that the Hydraulic Hearth was indeed a brothel at one point in its history. But by 5 p.m. it ceases to matter: I’m drunk enough off of charanda and falernum to believe anything the bartender tells me.
I’ve been in Buffalo, New York, for only a few hours, and this is not the first time someone is acquainting me with the history of the exact place I happen to be standing, sitting or drinking. This might be common in Brooklyn or Silverlake, but in Buffalo, pride of place hasn’t been part of the cultural lexicon for generations — outside of it being the birthplace of Buffalo Wings.
So what’s happening here? Why is Buffalo suddenly…so cool?
For one, shifting demographics. Locals joke that Buffalo’s biggest export in the ’90s was 20-somethings. A stale local economy that hadn’t recovered since the decline of the Rust Belt in the ’50s drove the young and educated to live elsewhere.
But with substantial support from the state, the city has been able to reposition itself as an attractive option for developers and foreign buyers looking to invest in secondary and tertiary cities. Blue-collar workers employed by Buffalo’s myriad manufacturing outlets have been replaced, in part, by well-educated and ambitious millennials looking for more bang for their buck than they’d get in New York or San Francisco.
So over the past five years or so, establishments like the Hydraulic Hearth have been throwing open their doors in neighborhoods where, a decade ago, you’d have done best to lock them, especially at night.
Over the course of a single evening, young locals urged me to visit a variety of bars and restaurants throughout the city, and were eager to share stories about why they moved back to Buffalo.
“I couldn’t have been more excited to get the hell out of here after high school,” says Sarah Santiago, my bartender at the Indochine-esque Angelica Tearoom. She left Buffalo for college, but returned a few years ago, delightfully surprised by how cool the city had become in her absence.
And Santiago is hardly alone. Many millennials are forsaking the biggest metropolitan areas for small or mid-size cities like Buffalo.
Between 2010 and 2015, Buffalo experienced a six percent increase in millennial residents — a big deal for a city with a declining population. Likewise, the number of college graduates between 25 and 34 jumped 34 percent, a greater increase percentage-wise than in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.

Downtown Buffalo, as seen from Lake Erie.

And with those young urbanites came urban tastes: cafe culture, street art and fast-casual dining.
Case in point: Jon Karel and Harry Zemsky’s Angelica Tearoom. (Harry Zemsky is the son of Howard Zemsky, a local developer who is also the president and CEO of Empire State Development Corporation.)
“We’re not a place for a beer and a shot anymore,” Karel says, as the bartender pours me a mezcal-based drink that is described on the menu as “sexy, but boozy AF.” “People here have elevated tastes and have a refined culture, despite what you read.”
It’s this “elevation” of tastes that caught the attention of The New York Times back in June, a year after they deemed Buffalo 37th on its list of the best places to visit — in the world.
But it’s not just affordability that’s attracting millennials and helping to revive this city — it’s also the city’s architecture that was built by some of America’s most revered architects.

***

By the mid-1890s, Buffalo was being hailed as the most inventive city in the U.S.
The end of the industrial revolution had been good to the city, as the Erie Canal made Buffalo a major port to transport goods from the heartland. It was also during that period of time that Buffalo became known for its grain elevators — it boasted the first steam-powered one in the world, a major innovation in storing bulk produce. As America shifted from a nation of agriculture to one of automation and invention, Buffalo led the pack.
The Pan-American Exposition, which was held in Buffalo in 1901, created an electricity race, and Buffalo’s proximity to Niagara Falls made hydropower possible for the opening nights of the fair. It was the first time a city had been fully electrified in the U.S.
Buffalo’s impressive profile was noted by the nation’s most influential architects, such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Sullivan and Henry Hobson Richardson.
At the time, America was seeking a unique construction style that would separate it from European designers, and Buffalo became the testing ground for many of these architects.
It was in Buffalo where Wright’s prairie-house style was perfected, and where Sullivan used pillars — instead of walls — to test the stability of 20-plus-story buildings. It was also where America’s first urban park system was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, who went on to create Chicago’s Jackson Park and New York City’s Central Park.
But despite Buffalo’s newfound and expanding popularity, it soon suffered the same fate as other Rust Belt cities.
Automation and the push for work out west led to the city’s collapse. In 1900, Buffalo was the eighth-largest city in the nation, boasting a population of over 570,000. By 1960, it had dropped to the 20th largest in the country. In 1996, it was 54th. Now, it’s the 81st, behind Toledo, Ohio, and Laredo, Texas. In 2016, the census found that more than one third of Buffalo’s residents live at or below the federal poverty level, while more than 50 percent of Buffalo children currently live in poverty.
In an effort to improve the local economy, Gov. Andrew Cuomo pledged $1 billion in a program called Buffalo Billion, to help position the Buffalo-Niagara metropolitan area as a destination in its own right. As part of the program, Buffalo would house the region’s largest solar panel factory, SolarCity, owned in part by Tesla’s Elon Musk, and create an estimated 5,000 jobs for locals. But Buffalo Billion has been fraught with inefficiencies (SolarCity, for example, is far from hiring the 5,000 it anticipated) and lawsuits over corruption of the bidding process. Nonetheless, real-estate developers have invested heavily in Buffalo, in anticipation that the billion-dollar stimulus will bring more jobs and more people.
“Buffalo feels like a more dynamic city now than it was when I was growing up here,” says Kayla Zemsky, Harry Zemsky’s sister and a project manager at Larkin Development Group. “And it’s coming back in a real way.”

***

The Hotel at the Lafayette feels old, with its marbled mosaic tile floors and crystal chandeliers. It feels like stepping into history. 
The hotel, originally called the Hotel Lafayette, was built in 1902, and was designed by Louise Blanchard Bethune, the first American woman known to have worked as a professional architect. It was one of the first hotels in the region to have bathrooms en suite — a true luxury for the time.
But the hotel fell into ruin and, as the Toronto Star described it, “devolved into a fleabag hostelry, home to vagrants, crack addicts and assorted pigeons, its once grand public spaces and guest suites literally rotting.”
In 2013, the hotel was bought by Wyndham Group, which poured around $40 million into the property, turning it from fleabag to fabulous.
It’s there I met with Chris Hawley, a well-known local urbanist, who tells me that without places like the Lafayette, Buffalo wouldn’t be seeing such interest from developers.
“Buffalo, unlike many Sun Belt cities, possesses a huge landscape of historic buildings that are available for reuse,” Hawley says.
And that’s been a win for developers, who have the opportunity to receive 40 percent of their expenses back in tax credits if they remodel and renovate historic buildings — a result of a 1978 federal bill giving 20 percent of tax credits and a state bill matching them.
“We can keep building for a very long time, and developers can keep getting their money back, because we have so many buildings that can be used for those tax credits,” he says. “The historic tax credit program has been perhaps the most successful economic development program ever introduced in upstate New York. Without historic tax credits, it’s likely — in fact I can guarantee you — that Buffalo would not be witnessing this current renaissance.”
The Zemsky family has certainly capitalized on this, turning abandoned historic buildings into multi-use properties. All of Larkin Square is a Zemsky-run operation, with the original Larkin Soap Company Warehouse — built at the turn of the 20th century — at the center, retrofitted with new glass and interiors for office suites.
“People thought my father was crazy for taking a chance on this place and renovating it,” Kayla Zemsky tell me. “But there is a strong history in this neighborhood, and he wanted to maintain it and give it a more vibrant future.”
The Zemsky family has introduced a food truck night, with local artisanal food trucks parked alongside the square’s greenbelt, serving cupcakes, burritos and lobster.
“We’re keeping the history of this city alive and, as a result, we’re helping make Buffalo a place not just for tourists, but also for locals in the area,” she says.
This is one aspect of the city’s plans — alongside the Buffalo Billion deal — to remake Buffalo into a destination city through “archi-tourism.” The idea is to attract international visitors to Buffalo with historic architecture as its selling point.
And there’s good reason for that. Buffalo is the only city in America where the nation’s three greatest architects still have buildings standing: Sullivan’s Guaranty building (now a bank and office building), Richardson’s mental asylum (now a hotel and restaurant) and Wright’s Martin house (now a museum).
Though not rebuilt using the tax credits, the Frank Lloyd Wright Martin House — Wright’s largest home ever built and considered the opus for his famed prairie-style homes — was gutted and demolished in the ’50s, and has been rebuilt to academic standards within the past few years with $13 million in donations and grants.

The Darwin D. Martin House Complex, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.
The Darwin D. Martin House Complex, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

The house employs nearly 200 people and has an economic impact of $17 million annually, according to Mary Roberts, executive director of the Martin House. Almost $9 million of that, she says, comes from new visitors.
“I can absolutely say that the ‘archi-tourism’ model has been working to bring money into Buffalo,” Roberts says after one of their nighttime tours of the house, where virtually everyone in attendance was visiting from another state or country. “That’s a big deal, considering there were virtually no tourists visiting this house when we started the restoration effort. We are now welcoming approximately 40,000 guests annually, and the number is growing.”
Such development has helped push Buffalo’s property values higher and higher. In 2013, median home values were between $40,000 and $50,000. By 2016, it was $83,500.
But whereas the local economy has consistently grown year over year, to the benefit of developers and retailers, the median wage in Buffalo still hovers around $25,000 below the national average and is among the lowest in the region.
And for a city whose residents have seen their property taxes rise year after year without any extra income, tax foreclosures are now an imminent threat. This month, 3,000 homeowners are expecting to see their houses auctioned off for failure to pay tax bills owed to the city.
And though boozing in former brothels might be helping Buffalo reinvent itself as a tourist city with urban flair, the city’s economic plans appear to be leaving many of its residents — the ones who’ve stuck it out despite the city’s economic troubles — behind.
But there is hope for them, as well.

***

This is part one of a two-part series. Read part two, about how one group is casting light on the city’s housing problems and helping people stay in their homes, here.

A Prison With No Walls

Posted on by robbie

This isn’t Thomas DiSilvestre’s first stint in prison. At 23 years of age, he’s already been inside New York’s Rikers Island and the Ulster Correctional Facility for felony drug charges. His arms are scarred, and his almond-shaped eyes are downcast on the table in front of him.
“You have to always worry about people running around, cutting you,” he says, talking about his previous times in prison. “You don’t feel safe.”
DiSilvestre is incarcerated again. In May 2016, he was caught breaking into someone’s home stealing, according to the police report. Being his second offense, he took a plea deal with the Queens County, N.Y., district attorney for attempted burglary and received another three years in jail — a terrifying prospect.
But DiSilvestre didn’t end up in the same prison environment as before. He’s currently held about an hour south of the Canadian border near Lake Placid at the Moriah Shock Incarceration Facility.
To be clear, inmates at Moriah do not receive shock therapy, as its formal name seems to infer. Rather, non-violent felons, like DiSilvestre, are “shocked” by therapeutic social programs and military-style schedules designed to lower recidivism rates.
At their height, shock programs were in more than 50 prisons nationwide, but most have been shut down over the years due to inefficiencies and poor outcomes.
Still, there are two shock programs in New York that have proven effective and have drawn praise from state department heads, academics well-versed on military-style prisons and inmates. The prisons boast both lower recidivism rates and lower costs. Advocates say it’s because of their focus on social programs and therapy, rather than just military drills and discipline.
Luis Tena, a 43-year-old Bronx, N.Y., resident, was caught dealing drugs in 1994 and sent to Lakeview.
“I actually learned about the people I was hurting. The same people I was selling to, I was hurting, and I was victimizing my own people,” he says, adding that the boot camp training is what gave him the discipline to walk into a job interview post-incarceration.

NEW YORK’S UNIQUE SHOCK INCARCERATION PROGRAM

At a time when there’s bipartisan support for the overhaul of America’s prison system, alternatives to traditional incarceration are being examined — especially for low-level drug offenders. Last year, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo vowed to reform the state’s prisons by providing more education and keeping youth offenders out of jail. But little attention was given to New York’s shock program.
Two prisons in New York house shock programs: Moriah, in Mineville, and Lakeview, in Brocton. The facilities can serve more than 1,000 inmates combined, including women. During sentencing, judges give some felons a choice to go to Moriah or Lakeview in exchange for a shorter prison sentence.
“Before I went in, I couldn’t hold a job, I was an ignorant prick,” says Mike Semar, a former inmate at Lakeview’s shock program. “But when I got out, I wasn’t the old me I was before. That guy is dead and buried, he’s in the past.”
Cheryl Clark, a doctor in health and human services, developed the shock program in New York in 1987. By the early 1990s, its popularity increased as the crack epidemic (similar to today’s widespread addiction of opioids) swept through poor cities and neighborhoods across America.
NationSwell repeatedly asked to speak with Clark about shock incarceration and New York’s program, but she was unavailable for comment.
Interviews with current Moriah inmates, people formerly held at Lakeview and Moriah, and incarceration experts reveal that there are several factors that make New York’s program different. For one, the facilities themselves are unique. Unlike other prisons with towering three-story-high walls and guard posts with armed corrections officers, there’s very little of that at Lakeview — and none at Moriah.
“At other prisons, you’ll see a more physically hands-on policy with inmates when they act up or misbehave or throw them in a cell,” says Kim Schaefer, program administrator at Moriah. “We don’t even have cells here.”
Secondly, the New York prisons operate what are considered “second generation” shock programs, according to a report by the Department of Justice. New York shifted the focus from boot camp prisons, which were proven ineffective in the mid-1990s, to incarceration facilities that focus on therapy and education. Moriah and Lakeview’s success, even when others have failed, seems to be how they merge discipline with education and “self-based treatment,” which is different from typical prisons, which offer very few — if any — therapy programs.
According to shock’s prescriptive routine, a quarter of inmates’ time is spent in boot camp-style training and discipline. The remainder of their schedule is divided as follows: 25 percent on education, about 33 percent on therapy and group programs and the remainder on hard labor.
“When you teach people about self development, self knowledge and self awareness, you build those cognitive skills that are imperative to go back to employment and be part of their community,” says Katherine Vockins, founder and executive director of Rehabilitation Through the Arts, which uses art in prisons to teach felons how to make better decisions upon release.
Research shows that programs focusing on education are more effective in preventing felons from committing crimes in the future.
“It’s not a matter of contention among the department, this program works,” says Martin Horn, executive director of the New York State Sentencing Commission and a distinguished lecturer at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. “The program has proven its utility and is now integral to New York’s prison system.”

LIFE BEHIND (NONEXISTENT) BARS

When inmates look out their windows at Moriah, where the prison has taken occupancy of a 19th-century former iron mine, they see ponds filled with geese and mountains in the distance.
It feels more like a camp, says Boyce “Bud” D. Rawson II, who at 5:15 a.m. is barreling through Moriah’s front door gleefully.
“Hey boys!” he hollers to the staff. The man is enormous; he stands above six foot and has the build of a linebacker.
Rawson jaunts up the hill behind the administrative building passing by a flock of geese that he calls the prison’s “jailbirds.” He walks into one of the prison’s barracks where more than 40 felons are sleeping and picks up a touch dial phone.
“Ready,” he says, and within a minute, the speakers blast a crackled version of “Reverie.” The inmates jump out of their beds, count off and rush to the shower. They’re given 15 minutes to shave and get dressed before lining up outside for the morning drill, which is a grueling two hours of military exercises followed by a two-mile run.
The boot camp format isn’t for every inmate — even Rawson admits to that. “You have to really buy into this. You have to make that connection that what you learn here you can use outside this place.”
Schaefer, who was hesitant about working in corrections before seeing the atmosphere at Moriah, acknowledges that it’s unique. “It’s still a prison — we never forget that — but the goal here is different than other prisons. At other prisons upstate, they carry batons. Our officers carry whistles.”

A SUCCESSFUL MODEL

Other states have modeled the shock program, focusing heavily on the boot camp aspect, but prison advocates regard those as detrimental.
“Some of the people who are in prison have suffered a tremendous amount of abuse in their past, be it physical or mental,” says Vockins. “I can’t imagine these military programs could work for everyone because it could reacquaint them with that old trauma.”
Dave Allen, an officer at Moriah, says that the boot camp portion of shock is simply a way to get inmates focused. “The point isn’t to degrade them — that’s not why we’re here. But we need to make everyone understand that you can’t talk back, and you can’t be disrespectful, and if you do that, you can really do well in everything else we have here.”
Older studies conducted by the Department of Justice have also found that boot camp prisons aren’t effective in reducing recidivism rates. In June 2003, the department released a report that found boot camps — though effective in the short term — didn’t have positive effects in the long-term with inmates reoffending.
And recidivism rates are tricky to analyze, says Vockins, as there are a handful of ways to cherry pick data, which can produce different results. Agencies, for example, can track recidivism as re-entry into the prison system after three years due to a new crime, but could also not take into account parole violations that would put them back in the system after they are released.
Moriah and Lakeview stand apart from other programs that have seen cuts in funding or closures. The facilities cost less to operate than other New York state prisons — about $20,000 less per inmate per year. And they have some of the lowest recidivism rates in New York, according to data from the New York State Department of Corrections. Recidivism rates for New York prisons average around 65 percent after three years. For the shock program, they hover around 31 percent every year during the same time period.
But a change in New York’s harsh Rockefeller drug laws (which required mandatory minimum jail sentences) also means that fewer people are filling beds at Moriah.
“There really aren’t many low-level offenders in New York’s prisons anymore,” says Horn. “Because of [the changes in the law], those who are in prison are those with fairly serious crimes.
Currently, Moriah houses just under 200 inmates, but could accommodate around 100 more.
“If we ran at full capacity, we could save the state $90 million a year,” Rawson estimates.
The problem comes down to exposure to the shock program. Interviews with department officials say that many judges and district attorneys are unaware of Moriah.
“People say we’re the best kept secret,” says Schaefer. “Problem is, we don’t want to be a secret.”
Horn, for one, is skeptical of this and says that he goes to attorneys’ offices regularly to speak about the program.

LIFE AFTER SHOCK

It’s been almost 20 years since William Schoch was released from Lakeview, yet he still remembers the five steps to make better decisions that he learned while incarcerated.
“See your situation clearly, know what you want, expand your possibilities, evaluate and decide, and act,” he rattles off over the phone. “It’s become second nature to me.”
Two years ago, Semar, of Perry, N.Y., had a wife and child. On his 37th birthday, he was jailed for drug usage and ordered into Lakeview’s shock program.
“About three months in, I got served divorce papers. When those papers came in,” he says, “my [corrections officer] came over said, ‘Look, I’ve been there. A divorce isn’t something that you look forward to. But everything you’re doing right now will make you better, stronger. You’ll be able to deal with a lot more stuff,’ he told me. After that, I bought into the program.”
Rawson receives numerous letters and calls from former inmates and their parents with positive feedback about the shock program. He says that it’s those messages that convince him it’s working.
DiSilvestre, who was caught stealing, is less than a month away from graduating from Moriah. When that time comes, he and his platoon of inmates will dress in their best. Then, in front of their family and friends, they’ll walk in formation across the grounds to receive a diploma listing their achievements.
“There is a lot of pride from the guys that leave this place. They’re changed men,” Rawson says. “It’s a great feeling, knowing that these moms and dads have their kids back.”

5 Good Governing Mayors

Posted on by robbie

Focused on the issues most important to their constituents, mayors have to ensure public resources get used wisely and in a way that achieves results while respecting the law and democratic values.
As mayors from across the nation gather for The United States Conference of Mayors’ Annual Meeting this weekend, here are five that are practicing good governance in small and mid-sized cities.

Mayor Mick Cornett supported a one cent sales tax to fund projects that enhance the quality of life for Oklahoma City residents, such as the construction of RIVERSPORT Rapids.

Mick Cornett, Oklahoma City

Once dubbed one of the five most innovative mayors in the country by Newsweek, Cornett has been credited with helping his city shed a collective 1 million pounds through an ambitious health campaign. He’s also invested nearly $2 billion to improve schools and infrastructure and boosted civic engagement by including residents on various subcommittees. Cornett, who’s been mayor since 2004, is now the longest-serving leader among the 50 biggest cities in the U.S. and is hoping to take his changemaking ways statewide by running for governor.

Mayor Svante Myrick takes a selfie with the Child Development Council after his proclamation of Child Development Council Day in Ithaca, N.Y

Svante Myrick, Ithaca, N.Y.

First elected at age 24, Myrick – now 30 – is known for hanging an LED sign in his office that displays text messages from constituents. But more importantly, he’s tackled the heroin epidemic by proposing a detox center, methadone clinic and supervised safe injection site. “It’s a great example of good governance because although it’s experimental, there are early signs of success where it’s been done (like Vancouver, B.C.),” says Alex Torpey, former mayor of South Orange, N.J., and visiting professor of governance and technology at Seton Hall University. The idea may seem counterintuitive, but Torpey says Myrick’s team “brought in all possible stakeholders, did appropriate research and made a really brave decision to try something to help attack this problem.”

Local Louisville high school seniors discuss their post-graduation plans with Mayor Greg Fischer.

Greg Fischer, Louisville, Ky.

This Bluegrass State inventor turned businessman turned politician was elected mayor in 2010. Last year, he was voted the country’s “most innovative” mayor in a Politico survey and credited with driving the creation of a new economic development agency and an innovation office. One of his administration’s top goals includes making the city more compassionate, as well as improving education and creating “good-paying” jobs. “Throughout this tenure, the city of Louisville has moved from an old industrial town without a lot of industry to a modern creative class magnet in the Midwest,” says William Hatcher, associate professor of political science at Augusta University.

Mayor David Bieter congratulates new enlistees in the United States Navy at Boise City Hall.

David Bieter, Boise, Idaho

This fourth-term mayor – the longest in Boise’s history – has expanded access to childhood education programs and affordable housing while taking a bold stance to protect immigrants and refugees. His city does better than many others at ensuring the safety of residents and providing them access to hospital beds and certain health outcomes, helping Boise rank at the top of the America’s best-run cities study.

In Washington D.C., Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed participates in a panel discussion on the economy and job opportunities for Americans.

Kasim Reed, Atlanta

Under his leadership, the local government of this bigger city has strengthened its economy and developed urban amenities “in a manner that is effective, efficient and fair,” notes Hatcher. The second-term mayor established a bike share program to help with traffic congestion and pushed for new transit infrastructure. Recently, Reed pledged to uphold the Paris climate accord and joined the Global Parliament of Mayors, which is tackling local issues resulting from worldwide problems. “Mayors need to be at the forefront of global challenges like immigration, social mobility, climate change and resiliency,” Reed has said.
MORE: America’s Youngest Mayor

Fighting Poverty with Data

Posted on by robbie

For nearly 10 years, New York City’s Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity has been an incubator of ideas designed to solve the challenges of poverty. Using research, data integration and program evaluation, the office’s staff tests these concepts to see whether they will truly work and scales them when they do.
“Evidence matters because people matter,” says New York City Deputy Mayor Richard Buery. “Most government policies aren’t driven primarily by evidence of impact; they’re driven by everything from what is politically popular to what’s been around the longest.”
Buery continues, “Being able to demonstrate to the world a real commitment to results, a commitment to changing course when a certain course of action isn’t working, becomes critical to gaining the kind of public support and credibility that are important to make sure that people are willing to invest their tax dollars to drive quality government services.”
The office is continually expanding its expertise in research, service design, evaluation and data integration to support key mayoral initiatives including Pre-K for All, IDNYC and Community Schools. It has also launched over 70 of its own programs. One of its first initiatives is also one of its most successful: ASAP, an associate’s degree program offered to students at the City University of New York.  
Watch the video above to learn how ASAP is doubling community college graduation rates.

This Private Real Estate Developer Uncovers the Beauty of Aged Buildings

Posted on by robbie

The late 2000s was a dark period for homeownership in America. Viewing the real estate bust as an opportunity to rethink affordable housing, childhood friends Jason Bordainick and Andrew Cavaluzzi pooled their entrepreneurial backgrounds and real estate experience to create the Hudson Valley Property Group.
The New York-based business works with property owners to rehabilitate blighted developments to improve the lives of existing residents and the surrounding community. Avoiding the types of projects that other real estate developers rush towards, HVPG builds upon existing infrastructure, utilizing investors with long-term financial goals.
See this unique public-private funding model in action by watching the video above.
 

Artificial Intelligence Protects First Responders, How Birth Control Is Stopping the Spread of Disease and More

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This NASA-Developed A.I. Could Help Save Firefighters’ Lives, Smithsonian Magazine
Disorienting scenes where a single move can be deadly is a common experience for both space rovers and firefighters. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which built an artificial intelligence system for navigating unfamiliar landscapes, is sharing its technology with fire departments — warning first responders about hazards they might not notice in the smoke and flames.

Man v. Rat: Could the Long War Soon Be Over? The Guardian
A New York City subway rat carries a host of dangerous contagions, and its reproductive capacity — up to 15,000 offspring in a year — spread disease through city sewers and alleyways. A biotech startup in Flagstaff, Ariz., has developed a humane way to deal with Gotham’s infestation where rat poison has failed: birth control.
Generational Poverty: Trying to Solve Philly’s Most Enduring Problem, Philadelphia Magazine
Can Mattie McQueen, an unemployed 52-year-old raising three grandchildren in a largely unfurnished apartment, escape the destitution that’s dogged her ancestors since the postbellum years? One Philadelphia nonprofit is using what’s being called a “two- generation” model to assuage her financial stresses to make space for the children’s learning.
 

Can This Data-Driven Organization Help Those Most Desperate Escape Life on the Streets?

Posted on by robbie

Rosanne Haggerty grew up going to church in downtown Hartford, Conn. Her parents, both schoolteachers, never outright explained why they took their kids to church in a poor neighborhood full of single-room occupancy hotels and boarding houses. Haggerty, however, learned the lesson her folks were trying to instill. “My parents were both very devout Catholics in the social justice wing of the church,” Haggerty says, describing how the family visited fellow church members when they were sick and invited them over for holiday meals. Haggerty grew up with a sense that “we all can be doing more to provide that kind of support system for others.”
Today, Haggerty is a social change agent in her community, serving as the president of Community Solutions, a national organization that aims to end homelessness. Taking an entrepreneurial approach to address the problem, Community Solutions uses technology to capture data and tailor interventions to meet the needs of a region in the most effective way possible. At its heart, Community Solutions’s mission is the same as Haggerty’s parents’: helping people, one person at a time.
Community Solutions works in neighborhoods around the country to provide practical, data-driven solutions to the complicated problems involved in homelessness. The organization has already achieved great success: its 100,000 Homes campaign, which ran from 2010 to 2014, helped 186 participating communities house more than 105,000 homeless Americans across the country.” (Chronically homeless individuals make up 15 percent of the total homeless population, yet they utilize the majority of social services devoted towards helping them, including drop-in shelters.) To do this, it challenged the traditional approach of ending homelessness: requiring those living on the streets to demonstrate sobriety, steady income or mental health treatment, for example. Instead, it housed people first, an approach that has demonstrated overwhelming success: research finds that more than 85 percent of chronically homeless people housed through “Housing First” programs are still in homes two years later and unlikely to become homeless again.
“Technology played a critical role in the success of the 100,000 Homes campaign because it enabled multiple agencies to share and use the same data,” says Erin Connor, portfolio manager with the Cisco Foundation, which has supported Community Solutions’ technology-based initiatives. “By rigorously tracking, reporting and making decisions based on shared data, participating communities could track and monitor their progress against targets and contribute to achieving the collective goal.” As a result of this campaign, the estimated taxpayer savings was an astonishing $1.3 billion. Building on this achievement, its current Zero 2016 campaign works in 75 communities to sustainably end chronic and veteran homelessness altogether.
Technology and data gathering is critical for local and nationwide campaigns since homelessness is intimately connected to other social problems, like unemployment and poverty. One example of the local impact Community Solutions has had is in Brownsville (a neighborhood in Brooklyn, N.Y., that’s dominated by multiple public housing projects) via the Brownsville Partnership, which is demonstrating that these problems can be solved — to create “the endgame of homelessness,” as Haggerty puts it.
In Brownsville, the official unemployment rate is 16 percent, “about double that of Brooklyn” as a whole, Haggerty says, noting that the statistic excludes those not currently looking for work. In response, the organization works with existing job training programs, digging into their data and analyzing it to improve effectiveness and achieve success.
“Data is at the heart of everything we do, as far as understanding where to focus our efforts and how to improve our collective performance,” Haggerty explains. Analyzing usage data, Community Solutions works with health care providers, nonprofits, and city and state governments to figure out where the most vulnerable populations live, what systems they interact with and what help they need.
Because of this emphasis on data, Community Solutions increasingly thinks of itself as a tech company, Haggerty says. Since 2010, it’s partnered with Cisco to help bring practical, data-driven solutions to communities around the country, opening doors to innovation and progress. When the collaboration began, Community Solutions was a local New York City-based organization. Today, it works with communities throughout the United States. By looking at the problem more nationally and taking an entrepreneurial approach when it comes to applying technology, Community Solutions is now solving homelessness on a much larger scale and having greater impact — producing real social change.
One person benefitting from this tech-driven approach is Toni Diaz. In and out of homeless shelters since the age of 17, Diaz had three children and a fourth on the way by the time she was 23 years old. Escaping from an abusive partner, Diaz took her kids to a homeless shelter. “I didn’t have anywhere to go,” she says. Right when Diaz realized that she needed to make a change in her life, opportunity arrived in the form of a caseworker from the Brownsville Partnership.
Diaz’s journey out of homelessness took years, but Brownsville Partnership walked with her every step of the way. Today, she’s part of an innovative solution that helps people like her connect to the services and training programs that will help them break that same cycle. Stories like Diaz’s are one of the things Haggerty loves most about her work. “It’s especially satisfying when people we initially encountered in a time of crisis end up in a position where they are paying it forward,” she says. Diaz, Haggerty says, shows “what kind of resilience exists in people in this neighborhood” and communities like Brownsville around the country.
This was produced in partnership with Cisco, which believes everyone has the potential to become a global problem solver – to innovate as a technologist, think as an entrepreneur, and act as a social change agent.
Editors’ note: The original version of this story misspelled Rosanne Haggerty’s name. It also erroneously stated that Community Solutions’s 100,000 Homes campaign housed more than 105,000 chronically homeless people in 186 communities across the country. NationSwell apologizes for these errors.

Can New Tools End the AIDS Epidemic by 2020?

Posted on by robbie

In 1995, Perry Halkitis watched as New York City’s AIDS crisis unfolded around him and quit his job to focus full-time on the plague killing thousands of gay men. Professionally, it probably wasn’t an advantageous move, but he never doubted that it was the right thing to do. Halkitis, who, at age 18, came out to his Greek immigrant parents in 1981, is now a professor of public health, applied psychology and medicine at New York University. Two years ago, he completed a book about HIV+ gay men who survived that era, and he’s now working on a book about the experience of coming out across generations. Speaking to NationSwell in his Greenwich Village office, Halkitis recalled the experience of witnessing two devastating decades of the AIDS epidemic and his hope of finding a cure.

What innovations in your field are you most excited about right now?
I do work in gay men’s health, part of which is HIV. I emphasize that because too often people think about gay men’s health work as being synonymous with HIV. The thing that is most exciting me is that there are biomedical interventions that have been developed over the course of the last decade that provide another way to fight the epidemic. Now what do I mean that? We have something called PrEP now, which is administering an antiviral once a day to people who are HIV- that prevents them from becoming infected. It’s miraculous. We also know very clearly that HIV+ people — now living longer, fuller lives — who adhere to their treatment have viral suppression and are un-infectious. That is remarkable to me that these biomedical advances enable people to deter both acquiring and spreading the infection. We haven’t fully realized the power of these tools, and there are some challenges with them. But in the absence of a cure, it is the best thing we have.

Are these tools powerful enough that we can talk about ending the epidemic?
There are conversations about ending the epidemic. In New York, two years ago, Gov. Andrew Cuomo put forward a mandate to end AIDS by 2020. By that, he meant making infections go from 3,000 to 750 a year by use of these tools. So, do I think these tools are, in and of themselves, enough to bring an end to AIDS? They can get us near the end. We know perfectly well that people don’t finish their antibiotics and that people don’t exercise regularly. Being dependent completely on administering medicine on a regular basis is challenging reality. So I’m going to say that we’re going to do a really good job at deterring new infections.

What motivates you to do this work?
My decision, about 25 years ago, to enter this field was purely directed by the loss I experienced in my life. I was trained as an applied statistician working at a testing company, and at night, I was an activist. I was in New York City; AIDS was all around me. I witnessed friends dying. I decided to merge the two: to take my skills as a researcher and combine them with my passion as an activist. I find my motivation in the memory of the people who I’ve lost. I find my motivation in making sure that a new generation is free of this disease. And I find my motivation in training my students who are going to continue the good work once I’ve finished. I want gay men to be healthy, and I’m going to do everything in my power to see that.

What do you wish someone had told you when you started this job?
Don’t expect it to get easier over time. It’s going to get harder and more complicated. The more I learn and the more writing and research I do, the less I think I actually know. Which is good: it opens up more questions. I would have told myself in 1995 to be prepared for any possibility that might happen in this epidemic. I would tell myself to keep hope. I don’t think I had a lot of hope in 1995 that there was going to be an end to this epidemic. I was going to fight the battle for as long as I needed. And I would have told myself to be better about writing about my day-to-day life, which I haven’t done. It would have been an interesting story.

What’s your proudest accomplishment?
My book “The AIDS Generation,” where I documented the lives of 15 men who were long-term survivors. It could be the period at the end of the sentence of my career, if I did nothing else. (Surprise, I’m doing more.) I’m incredibly proud of that book, because it got a lot of attention in the popular press, and it inspired a conversation. Sean, one of the guys in the book, reminds me all of the time: “You started all of this.” I don’t really know if that’s true, but I like to think that I contributed to the beginning of the dialogue about long-term survivors.

To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Homepage photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images.

The Art of Using Film to Transform the Lives of Formerly-Incarcerated Youth

Posted on by robbie

Comics, with their rowdy action boxed within firm, familiar lines and violence reduced to harmless bams, thwacks and kapows, give Mario Rivera the ability to escape from reality. “When you’re reading the comic book, you’re no longer thinking about your problems,” says Rivera, a 24-year-old New Yorker who served time in prison for a violent crime he committed at age 15. The same goes for Rivera’s younger brother Shawn King, 21, who lived in 37 foster homes between the ages of 7 and 18 and was jailed for a few months earlier this year. Comics gave him a “way of keeping in touch with my brother and my dad…[a feeling] like they were there next to me,” he says.
The two brothers — lanky guys with the same curly, orangish hair and dozens of tattoos between them — barely saw each other during their formative years, but they recently reunited at the Community Producers program at New York City’s Maysles Documentary Center (MDC) and discovered their shared interest in not only comics, but filmmaking as well. At MDC, the siblings, along with two dozen court-involved youth, created documentary shorts about their lives. After six months of production (all at no cost to participants), the films capture day-to-day life of someone who came into contact with the law and compel audience members to change the way they view these adolescents: not as convicts, but as creatives.
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“If you hear from a young person who’s been incarcerated and listen to his story, you’ll leave different somehow, based on what you learned,” says Christine Peng, MDC’s education director who founded and oversees Community Producers. “Serving the communities and neighborhoods of the tri-state region is important to NBC 4 New York and Telemundo 47,” says John Durso, Jr., vice president of community and communications for NBC 4 New York and Telemundo 47.  “Maysles Documentary Center provides an important service to the community in which it’s located and through 21st Century Solutions, our stations work together to support new programs and initiatives, generating positive change within our region.
APPLY: Maysles Documentary Center is an NBCUniversal Foundation 21st Century Solutions grant winner. Apply to the 2016 program today.
MDC founder Albert Maysles and his brother, David, were revered documentarians known for “direct cinema,” an approach where the cameraman simply observes without intrusion and edits the clips together without narration. By letting characters in films such as “Grey Gardens” and “Salesman” speak for themselves, the brothers (now both deceased) believed, “you really get to know the world, not the philosophy or point-of-view of the narrator.” Albert’s creed was that “you can listen to someone else’s story and truly hear them out, without jumping to assumptions,” Peng explains.
Similarly, Community Producers gives participants (all racial minorities with a criminal history) the opportunity to share their real-life experiences of growing up — a chance many haven’t been afforded by the social service bureaucracy or criminal justice system. After just a few minutes onscreen, the filmmakers break through misconceptions and reveal their vulnerabilities to moviegoers. For instance, a viewer will discover that the roughly 46 tattoos crowding King and Rivera’s arms aren’t the typical jailhouse variety: they’re actually Pokémon and X-Men cartoons.
The process of breaking down stereotypes starts with the filmmakers themselves, as the adolescent New Yorkers, ever protective of their own turf and judgmental about other neighborhoods, had to learn to trust their peers at MDC. When the program first began in March, King was silent, and Rivera would only pipe up if spoken to one-on-one. They didn’t discuss life at home. “Is this a safe space for me? Are these people going to judge me?” Peng says the kids wondered. “Part of what eventually built that trust was either realizing you were totally wrong about somebody or realizing that you shared a lot in common, as people who lost parents or siblings or who had traumatic experiences growing up.”
Emulating the Maysles brothers by working in a pair, Rivera and King kept the cameras rolling nonstop, finding details from their lives that would resonate with an audience. As they debated artistic vision, their collaboration forced them to learn more about each other. While the brothers describe the experience as “fun,” Peng says she witnessed them learn “to be accountable to each other, emotionally and physically.” Often, the siblings pointed the lens toward their own family members, including a sister with whom they’d lost contact, and sometimes themselves. “The process of making the film gave them an excuse to be around people,” she noticed. “They could be involved and also be a little outside,” retreating behind the viewfinder. One afternoon, on MDC’s rooftop, Rivera and King asked each other about their relationship with their dad, the first time they’d ever discussed him together.
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When NationSwell visited MDC in late June, King had been temporarily kicked out of the MDC space. Despite his brother’s absence, Rivera said he planned to finish the film, even if he was doing it alone. “I’ve already started it, and I’m not the type who’s into starting something and not finishing it,” he told his peers after previewing a two-minute rough cut. King returned after a brief hiatus, and together, the siblings put together “Back to Reality,” a film that shows the their tangible love for each other and, as Rivera puts it, their “daily escapades.” The short movie also tackles weightier issues: learning how to parent while coping with their mother’s recent death and grappling with the lifelong appreciation of comic books their dad instilled in them even though they now hate the man for skipping out on their childhood.
Unlike most arts programs that tout the cathartic value of transforming one’s life into art, the Maysles Documentary Center Community Producers program impacts youth through alternative means. King and Rivera received something that had largely been missing from their childhood: a new way to connect with their family members and each other. With a camera in hand, they could rekindle any relationship and ask questions that previously might have been awkward. After filming her, King and Rivera’s sister arrived at the showcase to watch their finished movie. Sitting together in the back row of MDC’s theater, the siblings once again looked like a family. After years of separation, spent reading comic books alone, this reunion looked better than any caped crusader’s rescue.
Maysles Documentary Center is a recipient of last year’s 21st Century Solutions grant powered by the NBCUniversal Foundation, in partnership with the NBCUniversal Owned Television Stations. The grant celebrates nonprofits that are embracing innovative solutions to advance community-based programs in the areas of civic engagement, education, environment, jobs and economic empowerment, media, and technology for good. Apply here for a chance to be one of the 2016 winners!