Suggestions for saving and rebuilding Saginaw city neighborhoods abounded during a Feb. 25 forum conducted by C.A.P., Community Alliance for the People.
Some ideas were at odds with others:
- Spend funds to make rent more affordable.
- Spend funds to make home ownership more affordable so that fewer people will need to rent.
- Rescue and repair houses that are vacant, to restore their value.
- Tear down vacant houses, to remove the hazards.
More than 40 residents attended at the downtown SVRC Marketplace, including City Council members Bill Ostash and Monique Lamar Sylvia and County Commissioner Lisa Coney.
Chairman Jeffrey Bulls said, “We’ve gotta change the laws. We’ve gotta change some policies.” He proposed housing and transit efforts should contain closer links, to the point of locating any new housing near bus routes.
However, the group is not yet prepared to take proposals for housing policy change to the City Council. Pastor Hurley Coleman Jr. advised that C.A.P. should conclude every meeting with “one or two goals” for the group to pursue, but this did not occur.
Ostash also is the Council’s designee on the City Planning Commission, and he encouraged C.A.P. supporters to begin attending and advocating at meetings slated for the final Tuesday of each month, including Feb. 27, at 6 p.m. at City Hall. The sessions also are access-televised and replayed on SGTV, Cable 191, and saginaw-mi.com.
Near the close of the two-hour session, senior citizens Darlean Carpenter and Audy Beatty offered a pair of specifics:
- While advocating for change, more homeowners and tenants need to keep their own properties clean.
- A youth group could be formed to help seniors living alone with household chores, mainly shoveling snow and mowing lawns.
Community Alliance formed two years ago with the arrival of ARPA, the federal American Rescue Plan Act, intended to help local governments cope with the COVID pandemic and launch recovery efforts.
Of Saginaw’s $52 million, a 15-member ARPA advisory committee, including Bulls and Coleman, recommended $3.8 million for housing. The City Council has allocated the funds for specific repairs to low-income homeowners, beginning with furnaces this winter and roofs and windows this summer.
Meanwhile, the abandoned fairgrounds was a topic. An ARPA cleanup allotment of $1.3 million, and a pair of community groups are advocating for follow-up redevelopment so that similar desolation does not re-occur. Residents have spoken mainly, in general terms, of the most basic development, such as a grocery store and a drug store, with Kroger’s and Walgreen’s having recently fled. A park also is among the wishes.
Eric Eggleston, founding director of Youth Development Corp., said housing should be developed.
“If you’re coming up with plans that don’t have housing in them, you are off the track,” he advised, based on his experience in seeking funds for YDC, an agency somewhat similar to the old OIC in its work training/placement mission. One of the agency’s projects is building its first single-family home, at a site near Burt and South 14th.
