City Hall gathering aims for an equitable community
KINGSTON, N.Y. » Kingston needs the help of its community members to move forward on issues related to equitable development, the city’s grant manager told about two dozen people attending a workshop at City Hall.
“I want to emphasize that equitable development, or working on these issues, is not something that the city can do alone with our levels of capacity and just, also, the nature of the work,” Kristen Wilson said during the Equitable Development Community Workshop Thursday evening. “We need to work with community members. We need your participation. We need to all work on this together.”
The workshop was held to solicit feedback from the public on five specific equitable development goals. The goals, created during an equitable development workshop in May 2017, are strengthening existing neighborhoods and providing access to economic opportunity; maintaining neighborhood culture through economic change; completing a sidewalk network and making streets safe for all users; sustaining and creating affordable housing; and communicating effectively among the community.
Those attending the workshop split into groups, each to address a specific goal. The groups were tasked with further refining the goal and identifying steps that could be taken to achieve results.
“Our goal with equitable development is to be able to make sure that as our city develops, and as we work to build our city, and repair our city, and have more people moving to our city, we really want to make sure that nobody’s left behind,” Mayor Steve Noble said.
Noble said equitable development would make sure the city is building a community that is strong for everyone and provides opportunity for all.
The five goals were summarized as part of a memo created with assistance from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Wilson said. She said the memo was a “snapshot” of what a group of people talked about and would change based on the conversations at Thursday’s workshop.
“We’ll determine together what are the best next steps forward from the memo,” she said, adding that the city will hold periodic workshops to continue to discuss these goals and how to move forward.
The group discussing the goal of sustaining and creating affordable housing was led by Guy Kempe, vice president of community development for affordable housing agency RUPCO, and Michael Berg, executive director of Family of Woodstock.
Kempe said a lot of the discussion focused on coming up with a definition for affordable housing that would take into account a large swath of the community. He said what is affordable to one person might not be the same to another.
In the group discussing how to strengthen existing neighborhoods and provide access to economic opportunity, part of the discussion centered on the feeling that Midtown and Downtown Kingston are “food deserts,” according to Brenna Robinson, director of the city’s Office of Economic and Community Development. She said the discussion also turned to creating “worker co-ops” that could connect people to training and jobs.