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Poor Springfield

by Bill Dusty

As the final act began to play out in a drama that has torn apart a community, George Pappas of the neighborhood group Springfield Forward stood before the members of the Springfield Finance Control Board this past Tuesday and directly addressed Mayor Domenic J. Sarno. In what may be his final words on the matter in a public meeting setting, Pappas ripped the mayor for his role in clearing the way for a low income housing project to be developed on the southern gateway to the city of Springfield.

George Pappas at a public meeting last year. Gilbert Winn, of WinnDevelopment, is seen in the background.

“You have now become a builder, Mayor Sarno,” said Pappas. “You have become the developer of Sarno’s Ghetto at Longhill Street. For the next 30 years, residents in Forest Park and Springfield will have a memorial to your disdain for the citizens of Springfield, your disregard for our community voice and it will be you who will be remembered as the Mayor who did not show courage, compassion or intelligence. You are the Mayor without clothes. Mayor Sarno, your decision not to build a school at Longhill Gardens but instead to build a 100% low income housing project is disgraceful.”

The Mayor was appalled at the tone and the measure of Pappas’s speech – repeatedly uttering “slanderous” as he coldly eyed his accuser. It was a scene that was caught live on television for all the world to see – or at least a few of the more interested residents of the city.

But Sarno, in truth, should not have been so surprised by the angry words of Pappas and Springfield Forward. The concerns they brought to light were both genuine and widely shared throughout the city – even as the group itself was ridiculed by the traditional powers-that-be in the community.

Springfield has been spiraling headlong into Third World status for over forty years, now. Its historically less-than courageous leaders – both at City Hall and in the city’s communities – have transformed Springfield into the epitome of a welfare state. It’s a place where many of the people who remain have little hope for the future. Pessimism in the city reigns supreme. In Springfield’s South End – a prime breeding ground for the kind of despair that grips much if the city – the neighborhood suffers under the burden of a 50% poverty rate. Things are about to get worse, too, as the former Longhill Gardens site will be bringing in over one hundred more low income families just up the road. (The Longhill Gardens complex is technically located in the Forest Park neighborhood, but in physical reality it is a mere football field away from the South End.)

Lawn signs protest the WinnDevelopment plan for Longhill Gardens.

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A 2006 study undertaken by the Brookings Institution on behalf of the Community Affairs Offices of the Federal Reserve showed that unemployment in Springfield’s inner-city neighborhoods stood at 14% compared to only 5% in the rest of the Springfield metropolitan area – and that was before the economic meltdown of 2008. For the Hispanic population that has surged into the city during the past twenty years, the numbers are even worse: 18% unemployment for Hispanic men, 24% for Hispanic women. Forty-two percent of the population over 25-years-old in the South End and Six Corners neighborhoods did not have a high school diploma, according to the study. Meanwhile, the median income in those neighborhoods checked in at $18,804 compared to $41,206 for the rest of the Springfield metropolitan area, the study reported.

Those income levels are reflected in the general employment market. The report noted that manufacturing jobs shrank by close to 30% in the greater Springfield metropolitan area from 1985 to 2000, with over 40% of such jobs being lost in the city itself. But while the metropolitan area largely recovered from those losses by making impressive gains in the retail/wholesale, telecommunications and utilities fields, the city of Springfield never saw similar success. Instead, typically low-paying services jobs filled in the vacuum. Springfield also lost jobs in retail/wholesale (about 25%), construction (over 20%), and finance (about 10%) during that same time period.

Clearly, there are few good job opportunities in the city to sustain families with low or no skills. Yet even so, the influx of the poverty-stricken has continued unabated for the past twenty years. But why do they come?

For most long-time residents of Springfield, the answer to that question is quite simple: Plentiful affordable housing (with more being built by the year), and easy access to cheap or free services. There is also a rather robust illegal drug trade going on in the city. (Cars with New York license plates routinely patrol the inner-city streets – with some even parked on street corners, drivers at the wheel, apparently just to relax and enjoy the view?)

The two primary industries in the city today appear to be infrastructure improvements via state and federal aid and the construction of affordable housing. Few private businesses come here. And when large companies like Baystate Health or MassMutual do invest in the city, the skilled jobs they create are mostly taken up by people who reside elsewhere. Or by people who want to reside elsewhere. One would be hard-pressed, indeed, to find a family hoping to someday move into the city of Springfield. And that is a shame.

Springfield still has much to offer. It is home to four local colleges, a fine complex of museums, and a sprawling riverfront just waiting for new redevelopment. Not to mention it is the birthplace of basketball (1891) and the site of the nation’s first armory (now the site of the Armory Museum and the campus of Springfield Technical Community College). On Florence and Spruce Streets, meanwhile, the nation’s first gasoline-powered automobile (Duryea) was test driven back in 1893.

Those were the days when innovation and ambition were traits to be encouraged and applauded. Back then, people not only admired personal achievement, they expected it.

Conversely, in Springfield today there is a phobia that cripples the city’s communities. It is the fear of criticizing mediocrity. These days, we are lectured by progressive leaders both in government and in our communities that underachievement is something to be “understood” and accommodated. To compound the problem, since most of the city’s poor happen to be minorities, anyone calling out members of those communities to be more responsible and proactive in bettering their lives risks being labeled a racist, a bigot or worse. According to the Brookings study, in a ten-year span between 1990 and 2000, while the city lost 25% of its white population, the Hispanic population grew by 56%. Yet the Hispanic leadership in the city’s poorest neighborhoods has been particularly abysmal. The closest thing the Latino community in the South End has to a local voice, for instance, belongs to State Representative Cheryl Coakley-Rivera – who lives in the North End of the city.

One Springfield resident, himself a minority, had his own thoughts on what most plagued his community: The city needs to attract more quality jobs, he said. People should not be coming here for cheap housing or services, they should be coming here to work.

Along that line, Springfield should also be looking at more creative ways to attract the kinds of industrious people that make cities work – the very kinds of people found coming out of the city’s four local colleges.

But the message is largely lost amid the finger-shaking and lecturing tones of the traditional power brokers in Springfield – a city where landlords call the shots in communities largely made up of apartment buildings and multi-family homes. In the Forest Park neighborhood, for example, where Springfield Forward fought its futile battle to preserve a middle-income environment, the neighborhood’s largest civic group, the Forest Park Civic Association (FPCA), is largely influenced by the Sears family, who make their living in real estate. (The Association’s current president is Brian Sears.) Meanwhile, the second-most influential civic group in Forest Park is called Concerned Citizens for Springfield, some of whose board members also preside on the board of the FPCA. Concerned Citizens specializes in buying up real estate for “redevelopment” – they purchased five units at Longhill Gardens at bargain rates back in 2005 and stand to reap a tidy profit when they sell them off to WinnDevelopment. (Some of Springfield Forward’s harshest critics on the Masslive.com Springfield forum are in fact board members of Concerned Citizens – in all likelihood including the anonymous user, “NoPol,” who many suspect to be Russell Seelig, currently listed as a clerk and director of that group, according to state records.)

Supporters of the WinnDevelopment plan to transform the former Longhill Gardens complex into an affordable housing project are adamant in their claim that no other option could be found for the site. Their assertion is punctuated by their claim that critics of the Winn plan have no other realistic alternatives themselves. But this argument is merely a self-serving ruse. In the commercial real estate world, nothing is impossible – as the Colvest Group, a small Connecticut-based commercial real estate developer, most recently demonstrated when it purchased the former St. Joseph’s Church in the city’s South End and promptly demolished it in order to build an office building. Also, it needs to be said that neighbors in opposition to the Winn plan shouldn’t have to come up with a specific alternative plan for the site. That’s what developers (like Winn) and RFPs (request for proposals) are for.

Meanwhile, the 2006 Brookings report cited the views of Springfield’s former chief development officer, David Panagore, regarding the futility of concentrated subsidized housing in a poor job market environment:

Revitalizing the housing market in the case study area will be difficult. David Panagore, chief development officer of the Springfield Finance Control Board, noted that the concentration of subsidized housing in the community had helped create “ghetto” conditions, which led to the subsequent loss of local retail and development. “It had the opposite effect it intended, by concentrating the families in these neighborhoods even after the jobs left,” he said. “It’s not that [affordable housing] policies per se are wrong, but you need to take into account local market conditions. If you have a thriving economy like Boston, your worry is ‘how can I get subsidized in there to keep some affordability?’ In Springfield [subsidized housing] becomes the only way you do development. There is no private market, so there’s little potential for private investment.

Ironically, just two years later, Panagore himself would support the development of just such a concentrated low income housing environment by backing WinnDevelopment’s Longhill Gardens plan. (Even after he had left for a job in Hartford, Connecticut, city leaders continued to consult with him as they sought to secure funding for the Winn project.) Meanwhile, his observation that subsidized housing would become the only way to do development has largely rang true, at least in the city’s poorer communities.

There are, to be fair, some bright prospects in the city’s future – as long as city leaders see such endeavors through. HAP Housing, Inc. and Habitat for Humanity, for example, have been working hard to build and redevelop homes in the city for lower income families and first-time home buyers. Unlike the low income housing projects that WinnDevelopment specializes in, these organizations offer actual homes for people to own and live in. Groups such as these are aided in their efforts by the Buy Springfield Now initiative, which assists potential homeowners in finding lenders, realtors and other resources. At the same time, business leaders and some city leaders are also working to transform the downtown into a more vibrant, arts-and-culture friendly environment in a bid to attract more visitors and downtown residents. It’s a hard sell, though, in a political and social climate where the decision makers never look too far beyond pleasing the voters with “here and now” freebies and other special interest goodies.

Back on the Longhill Gardens front, after all is said and done, there will still be one thing that Winn supporters and city officials cannot close their eyes to, nor shake their heads in denial of: No matter how well things turn out at the Winn-managed low income housing project, no matter how beautiful the property looks or how well-behaved its tenants are, the city will still be over one hundred families poorer as a result. And in a city whose schools are already struggling and whose inner-city streets and neighborhoods are steadily decaying from blight and neglect, this is not a pattern that many of the city’s remaining long-time, middle-income residents are likely to continue to endure for too much longer.

The leaders of Springfield should take some time out from politicking and ego-tripping and look hard at the choices they make for this city. With each decision they make, they need to ask themselves, “Will this make Springfield a more successful and productive city, or will it make Springfield more poor and dependent on state aid?”

How they are able to answer that question in the end will decide the fate of city they are charged with administering. And that alone will be their legacy.

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Posted by Bill Dusty on Jun 20th, 2009 and filed under Cities & Towns, City Hall, Latest Posts, Opinion, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.