Robert Golder, Graduate Research Asst., Urban Initiative

Last year I wrote about an innovative plan by Seth A. Piccirillo, community development director for the struggling City of Niagara Falls, to lure some of the best and brightest college graduates in the country by offering to pay their student loans if they became city residents and participated in the city’s revitalization for, at minimum, a period of two years. The highest priority was to be given to those who bought a home and actively engaged with the community. The hope was that these “urban pioneers” would start new businesses and provide the spark needed to get Niagara Falls growing again.

I was intrigued by this positive and unusual incentive project when I first heard about it, but its implementation has not measured up to expectations. The plan called for selection of an initial group of twenty candidates but, in April 2013, only the first five successful candidates were announced, including an artist from Buffalo which, if you drive south along Route 190, is less than twenty miles away from Niagara Falls. A second person will move to the city from Lockport, NY (where she grew up, only twenty miles to the east of Niagara Falls) to pursue a masters degree in Canadian studies in a program run jointly by the University of Buffalo and Brock University in Ontario, Canada. This is all well and good but, by dividing one’s time between Buffalo and Brock, how much time will be left for revitalizing Niagara Falls as an actively-engaged, job-creating urban pioneer? Neither candidate seems likely to bring a unique vision or a new sense of purpose to the city.

Niagara Falls, which boasted a New Bedford-size population of about 100,000 in 1950, is now officially the home of only 50,106 residents, and is desperate to stay above the 50,000 population mark – the cutoff point for community development block grant entitlement funding from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Even if twenty new residents are attracted by the student loan program, there are about 600 city-owned vacant lots in Niagara Falls. The city is currently trying to attract owner-neighbors to purchase them, with deals as low as $500.

The loss of HUD money would be devastating for Niagara Falls. Unfortunately, there are plenty of other ways for the city to lose access to its needed funds. The city budget relies on $7 million paid annually from the Seneca Nation’s casino gaming revenues. Currently the city is owed a total of $60 million, which has not been paid due to a dispute between the Seneca Nation and the state over the degree of exclusivity that Indian casinos should enjoy. The crisis has led to Moody’s dropping the city’s credit rating twice in the past five months, from A2 to Baa1, and then to Baa3. Borrowing to fund essential services (never mind innovative programs) will now cost much more.

We began posting in our blog a monthly project update in April to give readers a better sense of what we do on a daily basis. Here’s what May has us working on:

1) The SouthCoast Urban Indicators Project (SCUIP)

• Pages on Brownfields and walkability are now live.
• On May 9, we’ll announce winners of our photo contest at 6p at New Bedford’s Celtic Coffee House. After the event, you’ll see many of these great images bringing our topics to life.
• Stay tuned for new data on open space and recreation, the next page to be released.

2) Taunton HOPE VI evaluation

• Bob Golder is wrapping up interviews with English-speaking HOPE VI residents, and UMass Dartmouth Foreign Language Department faculty member Sandra Rivera is gearing up to begin conducting a handful of interviews in Spanish.
• We have two focus groups lined up for May: one on health and wellness needs, and the other on early childhood education and care.

3) Civic infrastructure survey project

• We’re in the process of penning a piece on civic infrastructure for the UMass Donahue Institute’s journal, Mass Benchmarks.
• The next brief to be released will be on nonprofits in Fall River and New Bedford.

4) Sustainable cities

• Our final event is on Thursday, May 9. It will feature keynote speaker Catherine Tumber (author of Small, Gritty, and Green.) She will be speaking at New Bedford’s Celtic Coffee House at 6p.

5) College access

• We’re in the midst of seeking funding to help offset the costs of conducting this project.
• We already have three high school students lined up as summer interns, and we may even host interns through UMass Dartmouth’s Upward Bound program!

6) LifeWork Project

• The Urban Initiative recently completed a logic model to reflect the theory of this program, which is that LifeWork will translate to improved education, employment, and financial outcomes for its participants.
• Selecting appropriate participants is critical to the success of this program, so the UI helped project partners develop a rubric with which to score applicants across measures like education, housing, transportation, and health to ensure that these factors won’t inhibit a woman’s ability to succeed.

7) Health planning dashboard

• The Urban Initiative and the Center for Policy Analysis have been asked by area health providers and advocacy groups to developed a web-based resource for sharing and accessing public health data for the SouthCoast. The site will likely borrow some features from SCUIP, and it will also offer an array of resources that will be aimed at helping build the capacity of SouthCoast organizations.

Working for the Urban Initiative is pretty fulfilling, and I think my colleagues would agree. We get to help organizations and community members do their job more effectively, which translates to meaningful impacts for cities and their residents. At the same time, our office is a place of constant learning, new ideas, and great conversations. But once in a while, the work of the Urban Initiative brings to mind the idiom, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.” While we can provide stakeholders with high-quality research, evaluations, data, and hands-on support, we can’t always ensure that our information and ideas will be used at all, never mind used to promote change.

Needless to say, this can be frustrating.

This makes encounters like I had a few weeks ago so very heartening. A transportation forum at the New Bedford Whaling Museum had just wrapped up, and I was approached by a woman I recognized from a series of community engagement sessions the Urban Initiative co-facilitated back in the fall of 2010 (when we were working on this project). She was a frequent bus rider, and I remembered her because she was particularly outspoken about the changes she wanted to see: like other bus riders, she sought things like evening, Sunday, and holiday service. Notably, none of these things existed in 2010, but the Southeastern Regional Transit Authority, or SRTA, has begun implementing those very things this year.

“You did that research project about SRTA, right?”, she asked. I responded in the affirmative. “You know, your research had a lot to do with these changes,” she said, in reference to expanded service days and hours.

I started to refute that, because credit is certainly due to SRTA’s new leadership, as well as the many partners who collaborated on that long-ago project. But I stopped myself. “Thank you. That means a lot to me,” I responded. And here’s what I should have added: people like her and expressions like that are the Urban Initiative’s reason for being.

While we usually post project updates in our monthly newsletter, we realized that we were taking up valuable real estate reporting on what’s currently underway, especially since many of our projects have long timelines. This month, we’re trying out the idea of posting this update on our blog, which could provide this information in a searchable, archive-able format. So without further ado, here’s what’s occupying the Urban Initiative staff this month:

1) The SouthCoast Urban Indicators Project (SCUIP)

• This month, we’re developing content on Brownfields, walkability, and civic infrastructure.
• If you haven’t seen it yet, check out our newest civic infrastructure pages on collaborative leadership in Fall River and New Bedford.

2) Taunton HOPE VI evaluation

• Bob Golder has been conducting interviews of 25 randomly selected heads of household from the former Fairfax Gardens housing development, a process that will qualitatively inform both the service delivery of the HOPE VI program as well as the Urban Initiative’s evaluation.
• We’ll be conducting focus groups in the upcoming months to learn about HOPE VI households’ experiences with and needs around supportive services in areas like childcare, health and wellness, and job training.

3) SouthCoast Healthy Housing and Workplace Initiative (SCHHWI)

• This week we got feedback from the CDC on our evaluation plan (very positive!).
• We just finished surveying New Bedford Housing Authority residents on smoking behavior and exposure and will do so in Wareham next.

4) Civic infrastructure survey project

• As noted, the first research brief and accompanying pages of SCUIP were just released.
• Upcoming topics will include nonprofits, philanthropy, and municipal government.

5) Sustainable cities

• Our next event is Thursday, April 11 at 6p right here on the UMass Dartmouth campus. We’ll be talking about developing indicators for SCUIP related to environmental sustainability.
• Mark your calendars for our final event, featuring keynote speaker Catherine Tumber (author of Small, Gritty, and Green.) We will host her at New Bedford’s Celtic Coffee House on Thursday, May 9 at 6p.

6) College access

• We have just finalized our research proposal for investigating college access issues in the SouthCoast starting this summer. Next step: identifying funding.
• UI intern Masi Faroqui is conducting some college access asset mapping in the region for a project in his MPP course, Applied Policy Research. We hope this will be a great way to generate some momentum for future research.

7) LifeWork for the WISE Woman

• The Urban Initiative has been engaged as the evaluator for an innovative project being developed by the Women’s Fund of Southeastern Massachusetts aimed at enhancing education and career outcomes for low-income mothers in New Bedford.
• Our first step has been working with the Women’s Fund and their many partners to develop a logic model demonstrating the program theory. We look forward to the kickoff of this very important initiative!

We have several other projects currently in development, so expect more in this space next month.

Robert Golder, Graduate Research Asst., Urban Initiative

The first computer that I ever owned was an Apple Macintosh SE/30. State-of-the-art when it was introduced in 1989, the SE/30 sported a 9-inch black-and-white screen composed of 512 by 342 pixels. But that postcard-sized screen displayed a world of wonder when I inserted a 1.44 MB floppy disk into the drive to load… Sim City.

Arriving on the scene in the same year as the SE/30, Sim City was the antithesis of the first-person shooter games that also arose in that exciting time. There were no points to score while playing the game. There was no real “winning” or “losing.” Sim City introduced a generation to the intricate pleasures and puzzles of urban planning: the player as mayor and urban designer, plotting out a city from its inception and then keeping its virtual inhabitants, the “Sims,” happy by adding amenities and addressing problems of zoning, traffic, police protection, and the occasional disaster, whether natural (tornado) or unnatural (the occasional appearance of Godzilla, crushing high-rises and starting devastating fires).

Fast forward nearly a quarter century (using the latest version’s “Cheetah Speed”), and you’re playing the fifth and latest version, now known as SimCity, available for the first time in an online-only configuration. Or, possibly, you’ve tried to play SimCity and gotten nowhere, since the rollout of the new game was disastrous. All players – even those active in single-player mode – must be connected to the Internet at all times, because the incredible complexity of accurately modeling a detailed urban environment in real-time demanded computing power located in the cloud, not just in your laptop’s chip. But server capacity arranged in advance by Electronic Arts was nowhere near sufficient to host the sudden influx of thousands of SimCity enthusiasts. Immediate fixes included disabling some of the game’s more popular features and temporarily halting new sales on Amazon.com, which infuriated still more players. Reportedly, those troubles have largely passed.

On the horizon, SimCityEDU is scheduled to be introduced later this year. The nonprofit GlassLab is working on this downloadable version of the game that is aimed at sixth graders and addresses their challenges in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math). Funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation, SimCityEDU measures children’s understanding at regular intervals along the learning path, rather than testing at the end of a unit. For example, the environmental choices students make as they engage in building a power plant (collecting documentation, interpreting information, graphing data, making a decision on what type of plant to build, etc.) may be continuously assessed, and teachers will have a tool to match these urban planning play sessions against Common Core standards.

Recent studies suggests that, due to climate change, opportunities for shipping vessels to cruise through the Arctic Ocean are becoming a real possibility.[1]  Once ice-covered and impassable for centuries, these waters are changing and changing fast.

From an economic development perspective, many argue that new shipping lanes through the North Pole will translate into big savings in time and money for the shipping industry, which could then lead to favorable outcomes for the global economy as a whole. But before we scratch our heads and think to ourselves, “Who said global warming was all bad?” let’s be sure we understand what tapping into this untouched resource really means.  Economic savings aside, there are a whole host of political, legal, and developmental considerations that opening up the arctic introduce.

First and foremost, it is unclear whether passage through the arctic (particularly the Northwest Strait as depicted below) is considered an international waterway or falls directly under Canada’s sovereignty.  Further, the United States has yet to ratify the United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), an international agreement that defines the rights and responsibilities of nations in their use of the world’s oceans.  Until the U.S. decides to ratify UNCLOS, they do not officially have a seat at the table for discussions about the newly opened shipping lanes.  There is also the issue of safety and navigation, as there is little to no infrastructure or technology in place that would help guide vessels and support search and rescue efforts through this dynamic environment.

Of course there is little doubt that the negative impacts of climate change will far exceed the positive.  It remains to be seen whether or not, or to what extent the impact of shipping lanes through the arctic will be positive. What is clear, however, is that we don’t have much time to address the major issues coming into the fore.  Most studies estimate that arctic ice will be thin enough for considerable travel by mid century at the latest.