Action Required for Southside

It’s high up there on the City Commission’s 2011 agenda, almost as important as job growth and expansion. It seems the city’s establishment is responding to the unrest and uncertainty in the Southside, and its about time.

For years, this town has made half-hearted gestures toward the Southside, tolerating a condition of de facto segregation and class alienation while pursuing any number of high-minded, if not faddish or irrelevant, initiatives. Two recent examples: sustainability and the gay rights ordinance.

Worthy or not, these issues put the Southside on the political backburner, and made its real-life problems ever harder to solve. Given the state of black unemployment—before and after the Great Recession in the Southside—creating a situation where meaningful employment can be found is a tough task, notwithstanding Bing Energy’s recent decision to locate to Tallahassee.

According to Orlando Patterson, a Harvard sociologist, in a revealing piece for The Nation, black families are in a situation comparable to the FDR depression of the 1930s, with black households in greater financial distress than white households, and with few means of relief.

According to the city’s 2010 State of the Southside Strategy report—-if there’s been a strategy it’s mostly ineffectual—-the median black family income in the Southside is $25,409, with 34 percent of the population below poverty, and 60 percent of black households headed by a single-parent, living in a rented house or public housing of some kind with half of their children on free or reduced lunch, though these numbers were based off of the 2000 census data.

Yet they clarify what’s at stake in the Southside, and in a way, make some of the improvements undertaken by the city through the Neighborhood Infrastructure Capital Improvement Plan, no doubt important, seem like surface fixes, or the money given to community organizations such as Bethel Community Development Corp. for affordable housing seem like piddling feel-good efforts.

It’s taken Leon County commissioner Bill Proctor, a Stokley Carmichael figure, to bring attention to the Southside and its myriad concerns such as inadequate sewage, lack of economic development and high utility bills.

But we need more voices than Proctor, and one cause for optimism is the Knight Creative Communities Institute’s Southside Sense of Place working group, which is a sign of the community’s growing awareness that the Southside is as much a part of this community’s forward thrust as Midtown, Downtown, or the Gaines Street revitaliztions.

Nevertheless, if the city is serious about a bright future for our town, it will shed decades of a tone-deaf approach to creating jobs by making Tallahassee a little less resistant to business dynamism; train a desperate population for skilled-jobs, do something about utilities —all of which, require action, now.