Cities Decline When Voters Disengage
Reflecting on a risky Facebook Live session over politics and community
I had enough.
It was 2017 and I was ready to leave Syracuse. After relocating there for school and recovering from a series of unheralded events, I had finally found stability. It was fresh, innocent, fragile, and in the cross-hairs of an even more fragile political system. Yet, I was making that stanky face and it came from my soul.
I had enough.
The Back Story
To understand my righteous riot, you need context on the series of unheralded events that unhinged my middle-class 20s:
- relocating my job during the housing market crash and having the job close its doors within 60 days of my arriving
- surrendering my car in a city with a struggling bus system
- renting a home and having it condemned while I was on winter break
- living in a homeless shelter while trying to recover items from my condemned home when the Haitian earthquake rocked my family to its core
- withdrawing from school due to a chronic health condition while uninsured
- losing my hair and racking up weight and nearly $12k in medical debt while working 2 jobs in nonprofit youth development with “at-risk” teens and freelancing in marketing
- ending a 5 year supportive relationship that withstood military stoploss but not a new socio-economic class while rebuilding
- moving out and ending a friendship with a 5-year roomate over growing differences
By the grace of God, I made it through all that with my sanity. By 2015 I had affordable rent, health insurance with an HSA, healthy anchoring friendships, enjoyed being single, and a second chance to complete my education. By 2017 it all was still there and with it came a beautiful cat, a resilient fish (RIP Tigger), medical debt consolidation, student loan consolidation, new leadership opportunities, and a great work environment in marketing.
What was there to be fed up about?
The Storm
Syracuse is a rust belt city. It at one point had the population of Buffalo, New York but its people and population (nor their quality of life) withstood Urban Renewal, white flight, redlining, and the end of manufacturing jobs in American cities.
To put it frankly, what I had been experiencing in my first 5 to 7 years living in Syracuse, its people had been experiencing over the past decades. Once I understood that, the city made more sense to me — its grittiness, its get-to-the-point people, and its spirit when found in people who would not give up on it. Here, a city of innovators experienced a fall and systems kept swirling the debris of that fall around them.
It reminded me of Haiti.
I didn’t know if I was ready to call Syracuse home, but I was ready to stop moving every 24–36 months and begin roots. It was 4.5 hours from NYC, D.C., Toronto, Montreal, and Philly. I could perform and get wherever I needed to in those cities and still have a home in an affordable community. I saw a percentage of people fighting for their city here. And though upward mobility as a transplant was tough, connecting with other peers was finally happening. I could see the future of the city and its challenges required more coordination than it did money — that’s a leadership challenge. The city’s unseen had started to connect and were gathering their bricks, not behind candidates but each other. I thought “God, you placed me here. So let me contribute to the brick-building of this city.” And I did.
I didn’t leap all the way and drown (at least not at that point yet) but I enjoyed engaging, helping to connect dots in leadership programs, and connected a PACT group who I saw as peer advisors who shared a vision of putting effort around upward mobility together.
You would think that the election of Donald Trump and growing racial violence towards Blacks and immigrants would be a blow to these efforts, but it wasn’t. It was a reminder that as the rest of the country fought bigger battles, we had more reason to build a community that could withstand the national political climate that was coming. We were in the early stages when I began to hear the murmurs of a scattering movement. Their source was a body of people who were not hustling to float, were not next to us laying bricks, and were dismissive of our vision. My concern deepened when I saw the very scrappy, big-hearted city I was serving back-down from calling it out.
They sit on my board.
They’re an elder at my church.
They chair an important committee.
They control grant dollars.
They, they, they….
The Privilege to Speak
The reality was that the “we’s” alongside me had a lot to lose in their organizing. Syracuse was blasted for being number one in the country for concentrated poverty of Blacks and Latinos. Its high school graduation rates were illustrating the effects of poverty on children’s homes. Stability looked like not disrupting what families still had to hold onto.
Working for a large private sector contractor and developer, I understood the fragility of not putting yourself out there and disrupting your own security. As an immigrant, I assimilating without drawing fire had become a way of life and a martial art. But I had something to lose that Haiti had buried so deep into my DNA that I couldn’t remove it: accepting silence. Haitians are incapable of living on our knees.
Haitians are incapable of living on our knees.
That’s what was happening here. Families living on less than $36,000 a year in a volatile economy is not living on your feet. And the inability to speak on the challenges freely without fear of consequence was a shadow that people of color who makeup 51% of this city and were working-class communicated in other ways. Residents spoke frustratingly of their city, saw it through a lens of doubt, negativity, and disbelief. They disengaged in the civic processes that not only disappointed and disenfranchised them, but rewarded their silence with nothing.
I could choose to join them in that silence and never realize my prayer for a home and chosen community; or I could choose to use my privilege of “less to lose” and speak up. If it backfired, at best I accomplished blowing up my stability on my feet. The alternative was not living and I couldn’t sustain that.
So, we’re full circle. I spoke up…and unknowingly enlisted myself in rebuilding not just a community, but a city.
New Medium Series: How to Rebuild a City
I never intended to gain attention with a 10 minute live about how Millennials will leave Syracuse. My intent was to ring an alarm that there are consequences to ostracizing a class of investors — your residents. We are your taxpayers, renters, small business owners, sales-tax generating consumers and, in every year, we are your voters.
What the video did was affirm friends who were holding their breaths banking on a strategy of hope instead of truth.
Seven years later, Syracuse has come a long, long, way in a short amount of time. The past few years of sheer work is noticeable when former residents revisit Downtown and don’t recognize its revival. The work has taken the wind out of some while invoking fire in others committed to anchor that growth in equity and opportunity. The city I fell in love with is fighting for itself. Amen. That fight will write this series.
This series has been brewing, in part, because we don’t rebuild cities alone. We rebuild them at the pre-electoral process by ripping the band-aid off and engage in the trenches. We rebuild them by acknowledging the truth of where we screwed up (or were screwed) while simultaneously taking risks and throwing ideas at the wall. Strategy happens along the way. It must. But the fight moves from guerrilla to strategic to defensive in order to protect what we have built.
So, let us begin: How to Rebuild a City.
