The Big Questions

Conversation on taxes and vacancy

In case you don't read the comments devotedly (I mean, I know you do, but...), I point you to some interesting discussion that has been happening on a previous post.

Constructive Suggestions

After two weeks, some ideas, including a proposal for the comp plan process, have settled out of some of my thoughts on the SDAT process. I talk about it in my current column.

"There’s a tricky balancing act called for between those who will want the process to be a free-wheeling forum to say whatever’s on their minds and feel heard, and those who want to roll up their sleeves and work together on just what exactly our goals are for the city and its key assets, what we’re going to do about some of the tricky problems, and how we want to handle the hard trade-offs."

SDAT final presentation, in the flesh, er, in the electrons

The presentation given by the SDAT team is now accessible online, here.

It's clearly intended to go with a soundtrack/presentation as it were, so some of it is a bit out of context. It may not be immediately clear at first, for example, that the slides saying "location," "urban fabric," etc. are describing some of Albany's assets.

I especially point you to the questions for the future on page 65 and the principles on page 69 (expanded upon in the following pages).

About that Comp Plan Board

Here's an update, from the horse's mouth, about how the Comp Plan Board selection process will proceed. Reading between the lines, it sounds like if you represent, ahem, a group/location/constituency that is likely to be under-represented among the applicants, it's definitely still worth getting a letter of intent and a resume in.

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August 20, 2007

To:    Council Colleagues

Fr:    Richard Conti,    President Pro Tem

Re:    Comprehensive Plan Board selection process

Earlier this year the Council adopted Resolution 23.31.07R establishing a Comprehensive Plan Board and charging it with the responsibility of developing a comprehensive plan for the City of Albany.

In response to our “Call for Nominations” over 70 individuals have expressed interest in appointment to one of the 20 available seats on the Board.  Ten of these appointments are by the Council upon recommendation of the Mayor.

The interview and selection process for appointment to the Board will be lengthy.  The process needs to be co-ordinated with the executive branch and we need to select and recommend the appointment of a Board which is balanced in several ways.  In order to accomplish this, candidates will be interviewed by a joint Council-Executive committee comprised of the following individuals (listed alphabetically):

Council
Richard Conti, President Pro Tem
Dan Herring, Chair Planning Committee
Carolyn McLaughlin, Majority Leader
Shawn Morris, President   

Executive
Phil Calderone, Deputy Mayor
Joe Cavazos, Commissioner of Admin. Services
Megan Daley, Deputy Commissioner of Planning
Mike Yevoli, Commissioner of Planning

The interview committee will review the pool of applicants who have submitted their resumes and seek to develop consensus-based recommendations.  As we move forward through this process we may need to do additional outreach to assure we have a representative pool of applicants, therefore the opportunity to submit additional names remains open.  This process will be a joint process (not separate ones) which hopefully can be completed by the Fall with formal Council appointment of the remaining members of the Board.

I appreciate your patience during this process, if you have any questions please feel free to contact me.

Step Two: Upping those Vacant Building Fees

Turns out that in July, Councilman Richard Conti (Ward 6) introduced an ordinance that would fulfill one of the recommendations made at the presentation on Wednesday: increase the annual fee to owners of vacant buildings over the course of the first five years they stand vacant, from $250 the first year to $2,000 in the fifth and thereafter. (I'd question why we let it go flat at that point, frankly. Wilmington, DE, often cited as a model, jumps the fee up again at 10 years and then ever year after that. It is, after, the really long term vacancies that are the worst problems.)

Still, it's a good idea, used to good effect in other cities, and Albany should definitely move in that direction. The ordinance (after the jump), which needs a little rewording to be fully clear, is with the Law Committee, and Conti seems optimistic about its passage.

However, it won't do much good until the data collection and enforcement sides catch up with it. The building department is a year behind on its quarterly reports, and no one really knows what buildings are in the registry, should be in the registry, etc. Everyone in this field agrees: good information is step one. But while we've got step two proposed, it won't hurt to get it passed.

Original documents after the jump.

One of them there big questions

One of the biggest questions floating around Albany these days is how to actually create a truly inclusive planning process--not just in theory, but in results. The SDAT process did not succeed in this, as I've noted before. Participants were maybe 5 percent people of color at best, in a city that is over 1/3 people of color.

Nonetheless, I believe that the evidence is that the planning department wants to make it work and is receptive to suggestions: They did try to reach out to churches, as people often suggest; perhaps not in the right way or with enough time to build relationships and bring church leaders on board, but they did hear that suggestion. They chose a location that was accessible by bus, and listened when people said they should offer snacks at meetings. They employed several different methods of trying to get the information out.

So what I want to do in this space over the coming months, while the comp plan board is being selected and the SDAT report finalized, is try to generate a super-specific agenda/checklist for an inclusive Albany planning process. And, not to put too fine a point on it, I don't think what we need is to hear from more people like me on this. I want to hear from people of color and residents of the underrepresented neighborhoods:

Where should meetings be held? How should they be publicized? How should they be framed and carried out to make participants feel like they were worthwhile and talk up the others through word of mouth?  What language should or shouldn't be used to describe them? What amenities would make them accessible (like child care)? What evidence of good will could convince the disengaged to engage? What am I not even thinking of?

The Heart of It All

So, of course, beyond the specifics of vacant property, the big money questions are what insight did the SDAT team give us into how to make Albany a healthier, more sustainable city, and how likely is it that their recommendations will bear fruit?

As I said before, the quality of the presentation was uneven. While some bits homed in on some fairly concrete strategies or needs in terms of vacant properties, downtown residential, and building better relationships between the city and its institutions, others wandered quickly through outlines of broad or boilerplate concepts ("stormwater management," "energy efficiency") that the city "should address." They weren't wrong, but I hope there's more detail in the final report.

I would have loved to have a much shorter list in most sections and then hear some specifics spelled out. For example I would have loved to hear much more about the following things that were mentioned in a breath or two:

• connecting our various parks through greenways
• connecting better with our waterfront (Grace Perdomo: "Everyone would obviously like to see I-787 removed. And it would be unprofessional for me to hope that it would happen by flooding.")
• putting in a skate park
• needing more streetscape on East-West routes
• a citywide bike/pedestrian safety plan
• multi-modal transportation corridors and the trade-offs that need to be made to set them up
• focusing neighborhood development around assets like new libraries or bus-rapid-transit stops and matching zoning to that
• having the citizens involvement in developing the RFP for the planning consultants for the comp plan so that we're sure we get someone who knows how to do public outreach and will follow our various specific directives.

Again, I hope that will be there in the final report.

I think for the SDAT process to have been successful and worthwhile, a few things will have to happen:

1. The city and residents need to prioritize from the report a handful of the top recommendations, both on process and on programs, and turn them into an agenda that can be rallied around and used to draw more interest. (Said agenda should not, however, be fixed or exclusive until participation broadens.)
2. The city should move on the vacant properties suggestions immediately. That doesn't need to wait  for the comp plan: no one is going to come to the comp plan and say "Please leave the vacant rotting building on my corner." Implementation of something, a proof of not "sitting on the shelf," and a systemic change that will have such a major impact will do tons to lift cynicism and engage further residents. It will also provide a good and ongoing media hook. One of the more disappointing parts of the presentation last night was the absence of any media beyond myself and the TU. (That I noticed. Apologies to the Gazette if you were somewhere in a corner that I didn't see.) There were certainly no TV cameras.
3. The SDAT process and any coverage generated by it need to be learned from and capitalized upon to craft a comp plan process that is actually representative of the city's diversity. (More on this later.)
4. Some of the more open-ended questions and topics presented by the SDAT team could form the structure for comp plan meetings so that citizens are still coming on the ground floor, before a plan has been drafted, but the meetings none the less have some focus and can inspire creativity in participants beyond the usual litany of issues. (It should be noted for balance that at least one person I talked to was thrilled by the charettes and their breadth and could have "kept going all week.")

When the presentation and then the report are posted, I will propose examples of what #1 and #4 might look like.

Operation Vacant Properties

Perhaps the most compelling portion of the presentation was Alan Mallach on vacant properties. Looking at the number of Albany's vacant properties in private hands, and their conditions, Mallach said "Your ordinances are not working. . . Owners have to bear the costs and the city has to be aggressive about
making them."

He suggested several very concrete steps:

• A detailed and constantly updated real property information system, accessible by the public.
• A land bank, which is a mechanism for taking control of abandoned properties, maintaining them, and finding good, non-speculative owners for them.
• A chance in the relationship between the city and county on foreclosures, in which the county pays some taxes to the city, takes ownership of properties and sells them off at auction to speculators. This is short-term cash boost to the city that is a long-term drain on the city in lost property taxes and all the other costs associated with these properties. The land bank should take all foreclosed properties.
• Revise and enforce our vacant property ordinances so that "owners of vacant property are responsible for absolutely everything their buildings cause."  Mallach recommended graduated fees (in Wilmington DE they double every year) and billing owners for code inspections, police calls, fire calls, etc. and then going after the liens.
• Putting out a bond for forgivable loans (i.e. if you meet certain criteria, like living in the house for X years you don't have to pay it back) for owner-occupants to rehab abandoned properties. This would be gap financing, just covering the difference between rehab costs and market value. It would easily pay for itself in increased property taxes.

As wonkish as this sounds, it wasn't just me who was following closely. A set of concrete, possible, not costing millions of dollars we don't have steps to take toward what is one of the more intractable problems in our most distressed neighborhoods? Well, that's exciting. And, might I had, reducing abandoned buildings is a major crime-fighting strategy.

OK, I'm exhausted. There's more to say, but it's not going to be tonight.

Touché

There were several points made throughout the evening about basic underlying matters of practice that Albany will need to achieve in order to move forward with some of its needed systemic changes. They almost seem too obvious to recount, and were presented as very basic, but a couple of them, shall we say, touched a nerve with the audience, and for the same reason that they did so, they are worth belaboring over and over until they come to pass:

The city needs better record keeping and databases about things like vacant properties, and all of that information needs to be open, transparent, and easily accessible to the public, as in online. Mallach made this point several times, and it generated spontaneous applause the first time. "Information is best when it's shared," he noted. [Ed note: anything involving a FOIL request or people having to show up at the Common Council to demand access so doesn't count.]

Inclusive partnerships need to be the foundation of future planning. "This is not easy because power is not evenly distributed, and people who have more are reluctant to share," said Mallach. They need to.

Outside Looking In

One of the things I think the SDAT team did really will is help those of us at the presentation take a fresh look at our city. Whether they extracted it from our ramblings or from their whirlwind research or the material the city provided, they got a number of distinctive things about Albany and made the audience chuckle in recognition or burst out into applause on several occasions. They were also incredibly upbeat about the city, in a believable way. "Thank you for getting us excited about our city again," said Bill Newman in the comment period.

A very random collection of interesting points that were made, some which were new to me, most of which it was just nice to hear confirmation of:

Albany's strengths include its location, its urban fabric, its distinctive neighborhoods, its historic buildings, its institutions, and its neighborhood associations. It's unusual for a city as small as Albany to have the kind of cultural richness that it has.

Though there are neighborhoods where this is not true, overall the city has the lowest unemployment rate in the state, and its employment base has been growing, albeit modestly. (So why do students still think they need to go elsewhere to find a job?)

There's very little "transportation constraints on suburban commuters" (i.e. traffic) into Albany. Low commute times compared to the rest of the state or country, and housing prices in the city that aren't much lower than in the suburbs means that the city will be more successful marketing itself to "lifestyle" residents: people who want to be in an urban area, live in cool old buildings, enjoy culture and walkable neighborhoods, and live sustainably.

We have one of the best housing authorities around. (Some of us knew that, but it was nice to see it identified so strongly. In very few cities can the housing authority be a point of pride.)

To quote Alan Mallach, "Albany is a funny place." In particular he meant that the concentration and size of our major institutions—state government, the universities, and the hospitals—is very large for the size city we are. This means that what they do and how they grow is makes "an enormous difference to the city." And though the rest of the state likes to bash Albany in the abstract, Mallach specifically and directly exhorted state government to take an interest: "The future of Albany is important to the entire state. It should be right in the center of the state's agenda."

Pedestrian and bicycle safety and accommodation are huge issues in the city.

We actually have a pretty good transit system, but no one knows how to use it. It's unclear, not well advertised or marked. We have a guaranteed ride home program for swiper users but no one knows about it. The system is also short on crosstown routes.

Albany is doing just well enough that it could probably coast, noted Mallach in conclusion, but that's not what people want. Albany has the potential to become the kind of sustainable community that "others could only dream of."