GRAND RAPIDS, MI – Driving west along 28th Street, Senita Lenear points out nearly a dozen closed businesses and undeveloped plots of land she deems ripe for investment on Grand Rapids’ Southeast Side.

Those shells of former businesses represent a loss of jobs and money flowing through the community.

At a time when Grand Rapids is regularly recognized as a city on the rise – ranked as one of the nation’s best places to live and one of the fastest-growing economies – a portion of the city is being left behind.

The ward with Grand Rapids’ highest concentration of black residents has the lowest amount of investment. City officials have done far more to improve the other two wards through tax breaks for developers and major infrastructure projects.

Lenear, a city commissioner representing the Third Ward, is frustrated by the disparity in the spending of city tax dollars and blames city leadership over the years for not having a plan to bring development to the Third Ward.

“We have not put our money where our mouth is consistently,” Lenear said. “Too frequently when it comes time to make a decision using an equity lens, we fall short at the commission.

“I’m not looking for a perfect plan, I’m looking for activity. Inactivity is no longer acceptable.”

The inequities show up in:

Private investment: Between 2012-17, private investors spent $1.29 billion on new developments and expansions of old ones citywide using government tax incentives like the Brownfield Redevelopment Program. Of that, only 1.5 percent – or $19.4 million – went toward projects in the Third Ward. That’s compared to $750 million and $516 million in the First and Second wards, respectively.

Public investment: The city often spends more on infrastructure in the First and Second wards than the Third Ward. Of the $68.5 million in “location-specific” capital investments in the Fiscal Year 2020 budget, about 12.6 percent went to the Third Ward.

Parks: The Third Ward has less than its share of public park spaces. Its total parks (17) is seven fewer than the First Ward and 17 fewer than in the Second Ward. The Third Ward also had the smallest share of funding for parks projects through four years of the seven-year parks millage.

Third Ward Equity fund: During the FY 2019 budget planning process, none of about a dozen proposed capital projects presented to the city commission were housed in the Third Ward. It sparked a boycott of the prioritization exercise by Lenear and then-commissioner David Allen. In response, a $750,000 Third Ward Equity Fund was created. The fund sat untouched for nearly a year before a plan was created to determine how it would be used.

Decades-old fight: In the 1990s, then-city commissioner Eric Williams said he had to fight for the Third Ward to get its share of city resources. His stories echo those of Lenear, who has on multiple occasions called out her colleagues on the commission for failing to make equitable decisions.

The talk of inequity and race go hand in hand. The lack of city investment in the Third Ward – its population is about 33.7 percent black – results in less economic development and fewer new jobs. Based on citywide data, black residents have the lowest median income of $25,458 and highest unemployment rate at 18.1 percent.

A 2015 Forbes article ranked Grand Rapids the second-worst metropolitan area in the United States for blacks to prosper. Then-Mayor George Heartwell validated that claim at the time and called it a problem the city could fix. When he left office in 2015 after 12 years as mayor, he called racial equity his most significant unfinished business.

A common response to the ward discrepancy is to point to the Third Ward being the only ward that doesn’t touch downtown. Some city leaders also say investing in the poorest neighborhoods – split between the First and Third wards – is more important than equal resource distribution by ward.

But Williams said ignoring the ward-aspect is a way of camouflaging the problem.

“We cannot not look at the Third Ward,” said the former commissioner. “We have to look at the wards but it’s a both/and. We still have to look at the plight of African Americans in this community and our Latino population.”

Lenear wants a city plan for redevelopment of parts of the Third Ward. She’s encouraged after hearing the new city manager, Mark Washington, call it a priority.

“City employees could scourer the Third Ward to see where investment is needed and create incentives around those spaces,” Lenear said. “Why not spend some time on 28th Street and reimagine what it could be in places where there are a lot of vacancies so developers can see the vision?

“We as a city haven’t done as good of a job selling the Third Ward to developers quite like we have for other parts of the city.”

Private investment

More than $1.2 billion was invested by private companies using city tax incentives from 2012-17. Less than 2 percent of that amount went into the Third Ward.

During the six-year window, the Third Ward received $19.4 Million – or 1.5 percent – of the $1.29 billion in such private investments in Grand Rapids, according to a study.

For the Third Ward, that meant fewer new jobs (7.6 percent of the total) and housing units (1.3 percent of the total) than its neighboring wards to the north and west. The Third Ward is home to the business district of Southtown, the neighborhoods of Alger Heights and Breton Village, and schools such as Ottawa Hills High School and Calvin University.

Lenear said the data was both “eye-opening” and a confirmation of what she already knew. Data for 2018 hasn’t been added to the online dashboard yet, but Lenear said she suspected it would be “awfully similar.”

In Southtown, featuring six business districts in Southeast Grand Rapids, about 21 percent of the 500,000 square feet of retail space sits vacant. About 15 percent of the 13,000 houses in that area also are vacant.

City leaders can’t force development in specific areas, but they can provide incentives for development. That’s what Lenear would like to see more of. More area-specific plans in the ward and more direction to developers on what residents want and where they want it.

Much of the development that has occurred in the Third Ward in recent memory has been by non-profit developers, which Lenear called a symptom of the concentration of poverty in specific ZIP codes. She’s appreciative of the investment but said mixing in more for-profit development helps to increase tax capture and the general appeal of the area.

“It allows for a place and a space where it’s attractive, it looks safe, it feels safe and people are going to come and partake because they feel it’s welcoming,” Lenear said. “Non-profits are less likely to be involved in business and primarily focus on housing. We appreciate the housing, but we also need for there to be a spark in the business side of things. That drives jobs and it drives economics.”

Third Ward Commissioner Nathaniel Moody, 63-year-old native of Grand Rapids, said he believes things like racial bias, ignorance and a misperception that there’s more crime in the area have contributed to developers looking away from the Third Ward.

Grand Rapids police don’t collect crime data by ward. However, violent crime maps from January-July 2019 showed one of the four most significant crime hotspots was located in the Third Ward (Franklin Street and Eastern Avenue), while the other three were in the southeastern chunk of the First Ward, on Commerce and Divisions avenues, south of Fulton.

When crime data was broken down by ward in 2009, the First Ward led the way with 130.6 crimes per 1,000 people, according to data collected by the Johnson Center at Grand Valley State University. The Third Ward reported 104.9 crimes per 1,000 people, and the Second Ward had 93.3 crimes per 1,000 people.

“Grand Rapids is not a hostile city, the Third Ward is not a danger zone,” Moody said. “You have more (crime) happening in the First Ward than in the Third Ward … But statistics show crime is high where there’s an impoverished area. If we improve the economy in the Third Ward, crime will drop.”

The Third Ward isn’t the poorest one-third of the city. It ranks between the First and Second wards in terms of average median household income ($43,887), average per capita income ($24,745) and average persons below the poverty line (19.7 percent), according to data from 2013-17.

It has the density and the opportunities for businesses to succeed there. And city leaders understand they have a role to play in guiding development and ensuring local infrastructure is appealing to investors.

“In many cases, the private investment follows public infrastructure,” said Washington, Grand Rapids’ first black city manager. “What we can do as a city is create a roadmap or vision of our future where we’d like to see investment occur. That is a responsibility of the city to comprehensively lead the way in all industries.”

However, public infrastructure spending, like city money spent enticing private development, hasn’t been equally split among the wards.

Infrastructure projects

About $100 million in capital improvement projects, those associated with public infrastructure such as roads, sewers and city facilities, are part of the city’s 2020 budget. Although the city disputes the perceived inequity in Third Ward projects for 2020, officials are planning to change the process next year to better balance the split of money spent among the wards.

The budget report calls for the city to refine the capital process in the future to use similar balance and distribution strategies to that of Vital Streets – the voter-approved 15-year streets tax from 2014.

In FY 2016, the Third Ward received 14.5 percent of the funding for road fixes, compared to 29 percent for the Second Ward and 55 percent for the First Ward. Over the next two years, though, the Third Ward led the other two wards in investment, resulting in a three-year total that provided almost 34 percent for the Third Ward, 36 percent for the First Ward, and almost 30 percent for the Second Ward.

Lenear points to the way Vital Streets funds have been spent as an example of how she’d like to see other funds equitably distributed.

“It was kind of the beginning of them hearing from me about inequities,” she said. “It really comes down to early conversations when it was established where we said, ‘This is what we’re going to do, let’s not play these games.’”

Reversing decades of inequitable investment is going to take intentional efforts, city leaders agreed.

Lenear wants the city to focus on necessities before those that improve the attractiveness of the city.

“If you really want to fix this, you can’t have capital projects to the tune of 100 million dollars in other places and these ZIP codes aren’t impacted,” Lenear said. “If you just take 10-20 percent of your little frilly stuff, putting bubbles in rivers and things of that nature, and plop it into ZIP codes with these disparities and then you convince the other players to join in with you, you can make an impact here.”

In defending the allocation of the $100-plus million for 2020 projects, city officials broke that total down into $29.4 million for “city-wide” investments, like work at the Water Resource Recovery Facility or system-wide sewer improvements, and about $68.5 million in “location-specific” projects that will “directly benefit a neighborhood.”

Of the $68.5 million total, about 13 percent ($8.7 million) will go toward projects in the Third Ward. Eighty-seven percent will be split between the other two wards.

City officials contest that some of the “location-specific” projects slated for this year should also be considered city-wide, like work on city facilities and the downtown Lyon Square park, reconstruction of stretches of certain streets, and parking infrastructure projects in the First and Second wards.

By their estimate, the Third Ward will get 28 percent of location-specific spending, versus 25 percent in the Second Ward and 47 percent in the First Ward.

“I don’t disagree that those could be classified as city-wide investments, but I still think this isn’t rocket science,” Lenear said. “If you exclude them, you still end up with inequity in how much was allocated per ward … That still doesn’t prove you’ve invested in the Third Ward.”

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Parks

The amount of parkland and money spent on improvements isn’t being equally distributed to the Third Ward. The discrepancy comes at a time when the city is asking voters for a tax increase and extension for parks this November.

The Third Ward doesn’t have as many public park spaces as other parts of the city. Despite being home to one-third of the population, the ward has 17 parks (201.6 acres), compared to the 24 parks (211.6 acres) in the First Ward and 34 parks (520.9 acres) in the Second Ward.

During the first year of the current parks and pools millage, eight parks were upgraded citywide. None were in the Third Ward. Through four years, the Third Ward parks received the least amount of money for improvements.

The Fiscal Year 2020 budget does include $300,000 to be used for park land acquisition for the Third Ward. A specific plan has yet to come before the city commission.

When it comes to prioritizing resources, Lenear said adding more parks isn’t at the top of her list. However, she’d like to see better maintenance of the parks in her ward.

When city leaders held a press conference at Joe Taylor Park following a rash of shootings this summer, Lenear said the lack of upkeep was “embarrassing.”

“It was horrible,” she said. “The hopes for many people as an outcome of the millage was that we were going to see funding that would have gone to renovations go toward maintenance for the parks, and we just didn’t see that. That’s an area they need to work on.”

Third Ward Equity Fund

Frustrations over inequity in city spending for capital improvement projects came to a head over the last year.

A $750,000 Third Ward Equity Fund, created in response to complaints by Lenear and Allen that none of the dozen or so city projects proposed for FY2019 involved the Third Ward, went unused for a year.

The fund has since been allocated to fund five proposals to repair homes, reduce exposure to lead, elevate business sustainability and growth, improve existing businesses and provide resources for survivors of trauma and violence.

Lenear is grateful for the dollars, but they don’t solve the equity problem.

“After we went through this exercise and the protest and after the promises of, ‘We’ll figure this out,’ this was what came before the commission,” Lenear said. “The commission that talks about equity and knew this wasn’t the solution, became skittish when it came time to invest in the Third Ward … I’m grateful they did something, but it wasn’t enough, and it still isn’t enough.”

The issue began in November 2017 when city leaders participated in an exercise to prioritize proposed capital improvement projects. Large sheets of paper, each with a project and its projected cost, covered the windows of the ninth-floor commission chamber.

As commissioners marked their favorites, Lenear and then-commissioner Dave Allen paused. Noting that none of the 12 or so projects involved the Third Ward, they boycotted the activity.

“We had a challenging conversation with staff and our colleagues about our reality,” Lenear said. “When you’ve heard us talk about equity, here it is. It’s the unintentional consequences to not using an equity lens when you’re making decisions.”

Those conversations didn’t do much to alter the budget proposal though, aside from the creation of the Third Ward Equity Fund.

Decades-old fight

The fight for equity in the Third Ward isn’t new.

Twenty years before Lenear took office, former commissioner Eric Williams found himself in a similar battle – one that left him cynical and believing the scales might never balance.

“Have I seen Grand Rapids make significant strides? No, I haven’t,” said Williams, now chief executive officer for United Methodist Community House. “There was always a fight to get resources in the Third Ward, and there are commissioners fighting that battle now.”

The former commissioner pointed to a 1995 municipal equity study that was commissioned by the city to analyze and evaluate the delivery of city services to neighborhoods. Completed by MSU professor Joe Darden, the study showed a perceived inequity in services provided by the police, public works, neighborhood services and the parks and recreation departments. Complaints involved response time for police, code enforcement, and the frequency and quality of trash and refuse collection, street sweeping and street lighting work.

To Williams, the data wasn’t a surprise. It depicted life in the ward he was elected to represent.

“Decisions made downtown did not clearly represent all populations equitably,” he said.

Williams also recalled taking a stand against his fellow commissioners in the mid-90s when the city sought a 15-year tax incentive known as a Renaissance Zone to encourage investment and create jobs by reutilizing vacant, contaminated and underutilized properties in blighted neighborhoods and industrial zones.

Williams said early talk aimed at creating a zone in a warehouse district north of downtown.

“I said I’d fight it tooth and nail, that you will not take this money and give it to rich white men who are already rich, and you neglect the people here,” Williams said. “Once again, the department didn’t have equitable eyes to look at how we ensure that different neighborhoods could benefit.

“The intent of the empowerment zones was to help the city. That wouldn’t help the city, it would help a few people in the city in a few square blocks and that wasn’t in the Third Ward.”

The city eventually settled on six areas of the city to be Renaissance Zones. Two of those – Madison Square and the Wealthy-Eastern-Franklin area – were created in the Third Ward.

Looking forward

Grand Rapids isn’t alone in this plight. Other urban areas in the country are similarly seeking solutions to counter decades of institutional discrimination and systemic racism.

Washington and Assistant City Manager Doug Matthews saw it in Austin, Texas, as well.

Washington’s experience considering equity in municipal decisions made him a strong candidate for city manager last summer in the eyes of most of the Grand Rapids City Commission. His experience had Lenear optimistic that considerable change can be done under his leadership, and even has Williams and those around him buying in.

“There’s this thinking if you create equity, there are winners and losers and that’s not true,” Williams said. “I think having an African American city manager has renewed some hope and people are watching him carefully.

“Mark has a very good message … He has talked about equity, about fairness, about opportunities for all. If he can bring reality to that vision for the city, I think everyone will win.”

If equitable investment in the Third Ward is made a priority, Lenear said it won’t take much time to see the impact citywide either. But this isn’t the first time leaders have said they wanted to address inequities.

“I truly believe addressing racial equity in our city will take us to a place none of us can even dream of,” she said. “But you have to prioritize it. When we don’t, I think we’re blowing smoke.”