From the Cleveland Plain Dealer: Strategies For Rebuiding Cleveland: What can be learned from other cities.
Like a flower in the sand, a peach-colored house blooms from a bleak and battered street in the inner city of Schenectady, N.Y.
On a block of outdated and sometimes boarded-up double deckers, the slender home wears vacation clothes. Its siding gleams in cool Caribbean colors. A decorative black fence necklaces a front garden bursting with colors.
Strangers might suspect they had stumbled upon an artist’s enclave or a bed and breakfast in the urban blight, but anyone from around this upstate New York factory town knows better. They will assume another Guyanese immigrant family has moved in and that, chances are, the street is on the rise. For where one Guyanese buys and restores, others follow.
Facing the kinds of job losses and abandonment known to Cleveland, Schenectady pursued a creative solution. It introduced itself to an immigrant group in New York City, lured curious couples north to view its impossibly cheap homes, and let capitalism and immigrant dreams run their course.
In less than a decade, people who hail from the South American nation of Guyana have become about 10 percent of the city of 62,000, and streets once considered worthless now stir with fussy homeowners.
“They breathed new life into this town,” said Albert P. Jurczynski, the former mayor who marketed his city with bus tours and his mother-in-law’s homemade cookies. “They changed Schenectady. And they never asked for a dime from anyone.”
With the real-estate catastrophe having devalued, crippled and partially emptied whole neighborhoods of Northeast Ohio, it’s time to ask, “What next?”
I love what Schenectady did. I have commented on it before, in other forums, and have recommended this model to civic leaders in other cities. This effort, along with other examples provided in the article, show that rust-belt cities needn’t weep over abandoned factories and boarded-up homes. Energy, leadership, vision, and a quelling of unfounded fears can rebuild what was thought of as lost.
On a recent weekday, Desmond Ramsammy and his wife of one year, Panchawattie, stepped out of an immaculate, two-family house near downtown Schenectady and surveyed a world they were surprised to find.
Crack dealers and layabouts once dominated Hawk Street at the edge of the Hamilton Hill neighborhood. Today, the narrow block reflects fresh paint and new energy. About 80 percent of the houses are occupied by Guyanese. They mind each other’s children, walk to West Indian groceries on busy State Street, and cheer the cricket matches over at Central Park.
Desmond Ramsammy, a heating and cooling mechanic, discovered the scene when he drove up from Queens to visit his brother. He came back with his wife.
“It’s much more relaxed here,” he said. “The cost of living is much less. Even gas prices are lower.”
The couple paid $127,000 for a house that had sat vacant for six years before Mohabir Satram, a Guyanese home restorer, bought and rebuilt it from top to bottom. Now it holds new dreams.
The Ramsammys expect to sell their small house in Queens for about $650,000 and use the money to start a business in Schenectady.
Annunciating words that are music to the ears of civic leaders, Desmond Ramsammy said, “We plan to raise a family here.”
The opportunities are there: urban farming, economic changes that will reinvigorate cities (see this from the Telegraph), industrious immigrants… Simply a change in the paradigm which will mesh with a return to core values (if we’re lucky).
