The city of Springfield is hosting a program Oct. 7 designed to target 55 neighborhood blocks deemed to be in need of extra attention from municipal departments.
The targeted area was identified using police data on where gunfire is most often detected and public works information on areas receiving the most complaints for problems such as dilapidated housing, said Sai Joshi, the city’s Bloomberg Harvard fellow who is coordinating the initiative.
“So, we’re using both of these data sets to overlay and then map out a geography,” Joshi said. “Basically, it’s an agglomeration of blocks within specific neighborhoods where we could go in and pool all these resources.”
Last year, Springfield was one of seven U.S. cities selected to participate in the Bloomberg Harvard City Hall Fellowship program. Joshi is an architect, urbanist, researcher and a graduate of Harvard Graduate School of Design. She joined the city’s Office of Planning and Economic Development in August 2022 for a two-year fellowship, and her focus has been on developing a “whole block restoration strategy” for Springfield.
The boundaries for the initiative are from North Grand Avenue to East Carpenter Street and North Ninth Street to North 19th Street. The area encompasses some of the city’s highest concentrations of blighted homes, property crimes, violence, rental properties and housing and environmental code violations, she said.
Police officers and other city employees will knock on every door within the designated area and ask residents to identify persistent problems in their neighborhoods such as illegal drug dealing, fly dumping, derelict houses and yards overgrown with weeds.
The office of Public Works will be in the area for about three weeks following the Oct. 7 launch trimming trees, assessing sidewalks, performing alley cutbacks, sweeping streets, replacing signs and performing engineering assessments. City inspectors will be assessing possible code violations and answering residents’ questions.
Mayor Misty Buscher said this is her flagship initiative. She said she intends to have similar endeavors in other parts of the city during her time in office but they are starting in central and east Springfield because the need is perceived to be greater.
She said she will be among those knocking on doors and listening to concerns.
“The concerns could be about neighborhood cleanup. It could have to do with food needs. It could have to do with educational needs. We just will be really open and listening. Our volunteers will document where a household is and what their request is.”
From 10 a.m. until 4 p.m. Oct. 7 there will be a gathering of various city department heads and representatives from various medical and social service agencies at Bunn Field, 1300 East Division Street. Firefighters and police officers will have child-friendly displays.
“Sometimes children, including children of color, can perceive police negatively because of only seeing police officers in negative situations,” Haley Wilson, the city’s director of communications, recently told the Springfield Downtown Kiwanis Club. She added that is why it is important to have children interact with officers in other settings.
Police Commander Joe Behl added, “We’re just starting a conversation – a non-law-enforcement contact with the community members. It is always good to bridge that gap and break down those barriers. And that’s our intention, to build back our community and make a safer, more healthy community.”
Behl said between 20 and 25 police officers will participate in the project. Overtime expenses and expenses related to the project are being paid for through a $500,000 state grant.
Ward 3 Ald. Roy Williams praised the program, which began last year under the name Community Connections. The initial outreach efforts in October 2022 focused on an area bounded by 11th to 18th streets and South Grand Avenue to Cook Street.
“I think it’s a good program. If the citizens participate, it will take us a long way because it’s putting the directors – people in powerful positions – right in the face of ordinary people from the neighborhood,” he said. “In other words, instead of calling and making demands or calling the city and reporting a problem over and over, they’re going to be able to talk directly to someone who can solve the problem.”
Williams noted that much of the outreach area is within his ward.
“I’m from near east, and Pillsbury is a part of Ward 3, just like the rest of the east side. Pillsbury is dirt poor, and (there is) very, very primitive housing over there. … If they do it right, (department heads) can see some examples of these houses that I have turned in over and over and over,” he said. “I’m going to make the people show them instead of me showing them. Seeing these situations, they’ll see these houses should have been gone years ago.”
Williams later added, “It’s outright disgusting that these places continue to exist. If the mayor’s out there – I’m hearing rumors she’s going to walk through there – I think she will see things that are much worse than she ever imagined.”
Scott Reeder, a staff writer for Illinois Times, can be reached at sreeder@illinoistimes.com.
This article appears in Dying and disabled Illinois prisoners.
It is good to hear the city government is finally doing something with these extremely blighted areas of Springfield.
They have been ignored and allowed to violate existing city codes for years by the former administration.