SYRACUSE — The City of Syracuse will use a $965,000 grant from the Cities for Responsible Investment and Strategic Enforcement (Cities RISE) program. The initiative provides municipalities the funding to launch programs related to housing and “strategic” code enforcement. Cities RISE seeks to “innovatively address and transform blighted, vacant, or poorly maintained” problem properties through […]
SYRACUSE — The City of Syracuse will use a $965,000 grant from the Cities for Responsible Investment and Strategic Enforcement (Cities RISE) program.
The initiative provides municipalities the funding to launch programs related to housing and “strategic” code enforcement.
Cities RISE seeks to “innovatively address and transform blighted, vacant, or poorly maintained” problem properties through the use of housing and community data from various state agencies, according to the office of New York State Attorney General Letitia (Tish) James. She announced the grant during a Feb. 20 appearance at City Hall Commons at 201 E. Washington St. in Syracuse.
The City of Syracuse will use the grant to establish a community-ambassador program that pays and trains residents to serve in a leadership capacity in their neighborhoods for code enforcement and housing-related issues. The city will also “pioneer” a student legal partnership with Syracuse University to “increase the capacity of code enforcement to more efficiently resolve cases.”
“This funding could not come at a better time to help us build our collective capacity to improve our neighborhoods and improve the lives of those that we serve,” Walsh said in his remarks. “I think what this funding and this third round of Cities RISE funding supports is really a creative and grassroots, bottoms-up approach to code enforcement,” Syracuse Mayor Ben Walsh said in his remarks at the Feb. 20 event.
James earlier in the day had announced more than $1.5 million in grants for the Cities of Elmira and Binghamton as part of the same program during a visit to Elmira.
“This program was conceived to provide local governments with innovative technology to address and transform problem properties, otherwise known as zombie properties that fall into despair during the foreclosure crisis,” James said in her remarks in announcing the grant. “Zombie properties dot the landscape all over the state of New York. They bring down property values. They attract a criminal element. And they decrease the … tax revenues, not only here in Syracuse but all across the state of New York.”
About Cities RISE
Launched in April 2017, Cities RISE “advances” the office of the attorney general’s strategy for helping New York families and communities rebuild from the housing crisis, James’ office said.
In the program’s first phase, 16 municipalities received a two-year subscription to a data platform designed to integrate and analyze data such as code-enforcement records, tax liens, and fire and police data to innovatively address and transform blighted, vacant, or poorly maintained problem properties.
Ten of the original 16 grantees were selected for phase two of the program, which began in November 2018.
Phase two of the program provided cities with technical assistance to analyze city data as well as assisted the cities with community engagement to develop program ideas for their grant application. Over the last year, these municipalities have worked with Cities RISE program partners to improve their code-enforcement strategies and develop new strategic programs.
The cities involved received expert support from the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, along with Boston, Massachusetts–based Tolemi, a social enterprise that created the BuildingBlocks platform used by all Cities RISE participants.
“The cities didn’t just ask for a million dollars. They thoughtfully and intentionally built innovation strategies to address distressed properties and abandonment in their communities with a deliberate attempt to insure efficient, effective, and equitable outcomes for residents so we really want to congratulate the City of Syracuse as well as our nine other cities throughout this process,” Lindsay Woodson, program manager for innovation field lab New York, at Harvard’s Ash Center, said in her remarks at City Hall Commons.
Harvard and Tolemi helped municipalities leverage data and evidence in operational work and policymaking. Additionally, last May, the mayors of the municipalities attended an executive education program at Harvard. They also worked with New York City–based Hester Street, an urban planning, design, and development nonprofit to develop and launch a community-engagement process.
In phase three of the program, 10 cities, including the City of Syracuse, were able to apply for a grant of up to $1 million to implement innovative and strategic programs related to code enforcement.
Enterprise Community Partners — a Maryland–based nonprofit that works as a community development intermediary specializing in affordable housing — is overseeing the initiative.