Announcer: The views and opinions expressed in to the point are those of the hosted, the program and its guests.

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Doni: Policymakers have been struggling for decades with how to interrupt the impact of poverty on neighborhoods and their residents.

The approach recommended by many urban planners seems simple.

You change neighborhoods.

You change the way they look.

The way they feel, and their response to the needs of the people who live in them.

Well, Toledo's Department of Neighborhoods is doing just that, with plans to develop some of the city's most challenging areas.

They are also changing lives.

Rosalyn Clemons, director of the city's Department of Neighborhoods, is with us to talk about this important issue.

I'm Doni Miller.

And this is... To The Point.

Connect with us on our social media pages.

You know that you can email me at doni _miller@wgte.org and for this episode and other additional extras, don't hesitate to go to wgte.org/to the point.

I am so excited that this young woman has taken time from her extraordinarily busy schedule to come and talk to us about this very, very important issue.

On talking about Miss Rosalyn Clemons, who is the director of the city's Department of Neighborhoods, someone who has an extraordinary background in the development of neighborhoods, long history in focusing on core cities and the problems that those cities represent for people living in poverty.

You have taken on the development of some of our toughest neighborhoods with an aggression that we've not seen in this city in a very long time.

And for that, I personally thank you.

But I want to know why you've decided that this is important work.

Rosalyn: Well, first of all, Doni, thank you for having me here.

My pleasure.

On your show.

I took this job.

I think October of this year would be five years.

And when I was first interviewed for the position, I said, Well, let me come up and see this city and spend a couple of weeks up here before I make my decision.

I, I worked all my life in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area for several counties.

And as you know, it's a very high income, very vibrant region.

So I came up to Toledo and I believe it was in July of 2009.

I came up to the city and I drove the neighborhoods and I was I was challenged by what I saw the, the blight, the condition of the homes, the homelessness, the poverty.

But yet I was I was I saw the opportunity in this city, the mommy river, the beautiful old houses, the parks, and having worked 30 some years in housing and community development, I said to myself, you know, if you can make something happen in the Washington, D.C. region where it's easy, relatively easy, that's okay.

But if you can change neighborhoods in a in a in a condition like that, I I'm seeing in Toledo, then you know what you're doing.

That's right.

Then you really know what you're doing.

So I retired from Prince George's County Redevelopment Authority one week and two weeks later I was in the city of Toledo right before COVID, bro, right before COVID broke out.

I can say it's been probably the toughest job that I've had.

Doni: What makes it so difficult?

Rosalyn: The needs are just so great.

You can see when you hear about the impact of economic decline in the Rust Belt, you hear about it.

But until you come to Toledo and you see what these neighborhoods look like today and you imagine what they must have looked like 40 years ago, what the city must have looked like 40 years ago with department stores and people shopping and, and people taking care of their homes in these neighborhoods.

You see you you you you see the decline in the city.

And it and for me, it was a it was a challenge.

It was a challenge to do this work and to, to make a difference here.

Toledo neighborhoods have suffered from extreme disinvestment.

People have left the city.

People have lost jobs.

People their homes have declined, not because they want them to decline.

They seem a lot because of the poverty.

People just don't have the money to keep up their homes.

So we're, we're doing this work.

And I always tell the council that if you my budget in 2023, my expenditures were around $50 million.

Most of that came from federal from the federal government.

Our annual CDBG and home entitlement dollars that we get a big infusion of COVID rental assistance dollars.

So our work, for the most part, is funded by the federal government.

Sure.

The general funds funds about 5% of our budget.

So the work is tough because I tell people that apply for money every year.

If I had all the money I needed, I would fund your project, but I don't.

So there are some hard choices that we have to make in terms of in terms of what we fund.

Our priorities are really housing preservation, improving rooftops so the houses don't continue to deteriorate.

We do a lot of whole house renovations.

We do a lot of LED abatement work.

As you know, lead poisoning is big in the city because our housing stock is old, built over almost 85% of our housing was built prior to 1978.

So that means a lot of it is susceptible to lead poisoning hazards.

So we do an awful lot of work on housing preservation, housing preservation.

We also are trying to focus on what I call neighborhood sustainability efforts in addition to housing, the parks at the pocket parks that are in our neighborhoods, buying playground equipment, upgrading the signs, upgrading sidewalks, lighting those kinds of things that that make the neighborhood more inviting.

Doni: And let me let me interrupt and ask you this, because everything that you're saying right now is is so on point to what needs to happen to change neighborhoods and when you change neighborhoods, I think you change the perception of people who live in the neighborhood.

Do you give them hope?

Rosalyn: You give them hope.

You you, you, you, you you give them hope.

And one of the things that I find here in the city, there's a there's a lack this investment causes a lack of trust.

Yes.

People feel that somehow everyone has turned their backs on the neighborhoods.

No, absolutely.

I'm not going to apply for this funding because I'm not going to get it anyway.

That was a big one I took over.

That was a big perception that we had to overcome people.

People had for years for the pots of money that we did have.

We were not using them as or spending down as efficiently and as quickly as we needed to spend down because people simply just didn't bother to apply.

Right.

Because they felt that they would not receive this funding.

And of course, there are there were a lot of things that we were doing internally that were deterrents so that, for example, one of the low hanging fruit that I got rid of was this requirement that in order to get housing preservation assistance, you had to have homeowner's insurance.

Well, the homeowner insurance company were not and are not going to insure you if your roof is falling down or if the house next door to you has a has a roof that's falling down.

So it was a chicken and egg thing.

So we we and it wasn't a requirement of the funding that we got.

It was it was wasn't in the Toledo Municipal Code.

It was just something that the staff was doing.

Even if you had a child living in the home that had been laid poisoned, if you didn't have property insurance, we were not funding the repairs.

So when asked, why are we doing this, this was simply because we've always done it this way.

So we work to really remove that requirement while at the same time encouraging insurance providers to step in and ensure the property after we had done the repair.

Doni: So these would be funds that are available to homeowners to help repair their to.

Rosalyn: Help repair their homes.

Doni: That's amazing.

Rosalyn: So that was that's just an example of low hanging fruit that we that we did to try to encourage folks that were eligible, income eligible and lived in their homes to come and access this funding.

We have a menu of programs that we that we operate on, Doni, to preserve housing.

As I said, we have the light abatement program.

We have the rooftops program, we have the home rescue program, which is the whole house renovation.

We also have a very robust homeownership assistance program where we provide funding down payment, closing calls, assistance for people to buy homes in our inner core.

Yes.

If you if you are buying if you want to buy a house in our inner neighborhoods like Junction or Inglewood or Old South, in these are three neighborhoods where we're focusing our work.

We're layering funding with the goal of everything that we do.

We are sort of prioritizing these three neighborhoods so that in a five year period, we can look back and see some measurable change.

Doni: And that's homeownership and that's homeownership.

Rosalyn: Yeah.

And one of the opportunities that I saw in Toledo was just the the affordability of housing, the affordability of housing, the the beautiful old houses that have been rundown where anywhere else in the country people would be snatching them up and buying them up and rehab.

I mean, homes that are within walking distance of your downtown.

Right.

That whole Inglewood neighborhood is a is a is a neighborhood that we we are we have designated as a strategic area.

We're promoting acquisition of those old homes.

We're partnering with the land bank for folks to buy those old homes and fix them up.

Doni: I want you to hold that thought.

We're going to go away for just a second.

Okay.

When we come back, I want to talk about your focus in the Inglewood neighborhood and that whole Detroit Monroe corridor.

Rosalyn: Well, Inglewood is one of our nurses, which is a neighborhood revitalization strategy area.

It is a a a tool that HUD promotes that says, okay, if you if you have an area that is predominantly low moderate income, that has potential in terms of lots, in terms of housing, in terms of economic development, you can designate this area as a whole application protocol that you put together with the residents.

You, you define the boundaries.

You put together an application and you submit it to HUD.

We've done that right there.

Doni: I'm going to go away for just a second, but we will be right back.

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Doni: As always, you can connect with us on our social media pages.

You can also email me at doni _miller@wgte.org and for this episode and other additional extras please as always go to wgteorg/to the point if you were with us in our first segment, and I really hope that you were you know that we are talking to Miss Roslyn Clemons.

She is the director of the city's Department of Neighborhoods and has shared with us some of the reasons why developing neighborhoods are is such important work, the impact that it has on the lives of folks in in those neighborhoods.

And a bonus I wasn't expecting was the description of some of the programs available to help residents in the community take ownership of their own homes and empower themselves through being responsible for fixing up their their properties with the help of the city.

Rosalyn: Yeah, we we, we as I said, we have a menu of things that we operate on our own and also in partnership with some of our nonprofits.

The Home Rescue Program is whole house renovation that's targeted to some of these neighborhoods.

We're spending on the average about 60 or 70,000 per home.

These are these are.

Doni: Are these repayable?

Rosalyn: These are soft.

These are loans that are put on these properties.

And then if you remain in the house for ten or more years, the loan burns off.

So that's one program that we're doing because we're spending so much in that program, we decided to really pivot and start investing in rooftops because if your roof goes, the rest of your.

Doni: House is going.

Rosalyn: To go.

So we're we spend about $20,000 on the average per roofs.

I think last year we started the program July 2023.

We've done about 100 roofs so far.

We hope to do at least 100 roofs annually in these neighborhoods.

Most of the people are seniors that are on fixed income.

So that that's one program.

It's amazing.

And then we have our league, our LED remediation program, where we're trying to work with landlords and homeowners to to abate lead in their properties.

Rosalyn: What's your what's.

Doni: Your favorite project that's happening in in that area?

Rosalyn: My favorite project is the new way in Palmer Why there?

yeah.

And it's an example of what I call a transformational project.

It is if you invest in the neighborhood, you'll be surprised to see what's happening.

This is going to be a community hub.

This is going to be a place where our kids can go and swim and take classes, are mothers can take nutrition classes or financial literacy classes.

We're going to have a head start in the in the building.

The tackle is going to have some mental health support as well.

So this was just a when they first came to me, they wanted money to fix the roof.

So I said, well, you know, and I had gone to I had gone to the Y on Tremaine.

Well, I thought, I've seen all those.

So I said, Well, what?

Why is it that this y looks like this in?

Doni: Is it in.

Rosalyn: The Warren Sherman neighborhood?

Doni: Yeah, it's in the Warren Sherman neighborhood and it's at Franklin and Bancroft.

Yeah, they.

Rosalyn: Probably think it's going to be at Franklin and bankrupt.

So I said, You know what?

Why?

Why is this?

Why look like this?

Why don't we have a state of the art?

Why in this neighborhood?

So the first thing we did was to work with the Y to commission a market study.

Because you don't know, maybe.

Maybe there's no market here.

Doni: Right.

Rosalyn: But what we did the market study, we found out that while there are probably over 10,000 households that would use this Y annually, there are 5000 or more kids that would use this Y.

So we we, we started working on the design and the feasibility with with the community.

And luckily we we were able to use some ARPA dollars to build.

So this is a $28 million project.

And the hard part was when we started the project we had estimated that it would cost $19 million.

But then as you know, costs started going up.

So we had to we had to cobble together a variety of sources, including CDBG.

And we recently got some new market tax credit equity for the project.

So we were able to add on some features that we that we took off, like the splash pad, the outdoor splash pad.

So that's an exciting project.

Is there a construct drilling project?

Doni: And I live about half a mile.

Do you really?

I do, yes.

And I can tell you that the neighborhood is thrilled about this.

And we talk about changing neighborhoods.

That's going to change.

That's going to change.

Rosalyn: That neighborhood is going to change that neighborhood.

Absolutely.

The other project, a lot I'm excited about is on on North Detroit Avenue, right?

When you turn on North Detroit, there used to be an old blighted dairy.

Doni: Eggs, dairy.

Rosalyn: Dairy site.

So one of the first things we did was to use and I was appalled that that kind of blight was right there smack in the middle of a neighborhood.

Right, Right.

I mean, there were literally within a stone's throw of people living next door to that property.

Right.

And it wasn't as if we didn't have money to bring it down.

It simply was just not a priority.

We hadn't made it our priority.

So we we earmarked some CDBG dollars, which is an eligible funding source, and we brought down that blight that was in the neighborhood.

And we are we are going to be building 20 new townhomes on that site.

We're partnering with a developer and we will build 20 townhomes with three and four bedroom units, which is just unusual when you when you look at the needs of families right now.

So that's another exciting project that has taken four years to do.

And hopefully we will break ground sometime before the end of this year.

The other big project that we're working on is Swain Field.

yeah.

Swain Field, as you know, was once vibrant.

I I'm told that the mud hands played at Swain's Field.

Doni: And that was before my time.

But I remember that for your.

Rosalyn: Final before our time.

So one of the we've, we've engaged the community through some visioning, and we are going to be working with the owners of that shopping center to really upgrade the lighting new parking lot, new green space.

Doni: Where are you hopeful goes in that in that mall.

Rosalyn: Well we we we have some uses that are bubbling well we we want to we're looking at it as a potential home for our LED resource center where people can go in and get tested and contractors can get information on how to do LED abatement.

We've had several retailers that have heard about the the the plan renovation and are looking at the space.

Doni: So so any possibility for a grocery store?

Rosalyn: Grocery store?

We have not had a possibility.

Doni: We those are tough.

Rosalyn: Those are tough.

And people you know, the grocery business, the profits are just razor thin.

So they sort of follow the population, they follow the income.

The whole Inglewood area is a is a it is a is a whole inner city, is a food desert.

And a you ask about where we're going and what some of the things we want to do in these neighborhoods.

Council in this last budget approved a food policy officer so and we will be bringing that person on board.

That person will be part of my staff and they will be working with the council.

And to really look at this issue of food is in the city.

What can we do to incentivize grocery stores?

What can we do to provide healthy food options for the stores that are here?

You know, the little corner stores, What can we do?

Can we have more farmer's market?

What is there are there some strategies that you can do that are not just bringing in a big grocery stores, but there's there's strategies that you can employ to deploy, rather to improve the healthy food options in yours, in your food.

Doni: To support those grocery stores that have decided to remain sea way.

So, for instance, on Cherry Street's a little bit away from where you're talking about, but it's still in an area where it would be a food desert without that.

Rosalyn: But for example, Seaway, I've engaged them, I've talked with them.

They have stayed in this.

Absolutely.

They have.

They have stayed in the city.

They they they have marketed to the residents that are here in our city.

They contribute to the community.

So one of the things that that food policy officer will be doing is engaging see way understanding how they market, understanding their expansion goals, how we can help with that.

So food policy and addressing our need for nutritious food options in the inner city is something that we will be doing.

The other thing I wanted to to just highlight, we did a housing strategy when I first came on board, I looked at cost burdens and look at the needs and the housing strategy and said that we needed more affordable housing.

We needed mixed housing in the city as well.

But one of the things the strategy also said was that almost half of the city of Toledo's residents are tenants.

And there's no tenant strategy for for these for this population.

Doni: So I'm going to stop you there.

That's a huge topic.

I really want you to come back.

I'm so excited about what you shared with us today because this we need to support you and support your department and what it does because you absolutely change lives.

So you'll come back.

Rosalyn: I'll come back.

And my parting words, this would be neighborhoods need investments.

If the market was working, we wouldn't have.

All of these vacant properties are vacant where the market isn't working.

So we've got to jumpstart the market.

Thank you.

That's my goal.

Doni: Thank you so much for being with us today.

And thank you for being with us today.

We will see you soon.

On... To The Point.

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