Walls Divide Us:Reconnecting Albany

we're going to get started i wanted to welcome everybody to on the park bench a public square conversation brought to you by the congress for the new urbanism on the park bench presents interactive conversations with thought leaders in new urbanism and allied industries providing an opportunity for the audience to engage in real time the webinar series is a platform for cnu members to engage debate and collaborate on pressing issues of the day and today we have walls divide us reconnecting albany with sean hamelin rafe larson and adam zarenko and a discussion with robert stewartville that's me share your thoughts on hashtag on the park bench www.tinyurl.com otpb feedback and register for the next week's webinar which is uh january 25th at 12 noon also uh join conrad kickart author of dream city creation construction and reinvention in downtown detroit dream city traces two centuries of ups and downs in downtown detroit downtown is in the midst of an astonishing rebirth in contrast to nearby neighborhoods or not doing all that well and yet downtown does provide a hopeful path for the motor city as a whole in the coming decade i go to cnu.org resources on the park bench to find out more and register and of course cnu 30 in oklahoma city march 23rd through 26th it's going to be cnu's first in-person congress since 2019 it's an amazing opportunity to reconnect with uh urbanists from around the country and around the world including some of the best uh planners and urban designers you'll find anywhere we have extended early bird registration due to what's happening with covid so that's going to be available for for for a longer time at least the end of the month and so please learn more at cnu.org cnu30 also i put an award for oklahoma city which has done some amazing things for uh bringing back their downtown and surrounding neighborhoods and it's really worth visiting so join slash renew your membership to seeing you become a current member and save 200 off of your cmu 30 registration check your membership status today members.cnu.org memberships and today we're going to have a discussion on albany new york which is of course the state capital of new york and a mid-sized city albany was severely damaged in the middle of the 20th century by poorly conceived interstate i-787 which cuts the city off from its major geographic feature and the reason for its existence to begin with the hudson river the highway was built to move state officials in and out of the state capital complex quickly but it also divided the city along racial and class lines there have been many uh attempts or at least people who who thought that this highway should have been removed in in decades past but these attempts have failed however the political winds seem to be shifting and there's new momentum nationwide for removing unnecessary highways from cities and we have a dynamic group that has launched a campaign and they have a lot going for them and uh they've gathered a sizable coalition and we'll be hearing from three of their leaders today they are sean hamlin the founder and managing principal of hamlin design group an architect and urban planner who grew up in albany practices in albany his family is from albany and he has both a personal and professional perspective on this highway adam zaranco is president of the new york land bank association and the executive director of the albany county land bank corporation he previously worked for the city of new york where he was a senior policy advisor in the mayor's office and he has degrees in urban planning and civil engineering as well as involvement in economic and community development professionally and rafe larson is a novelist and a journalist and he founded the future of small cities institute in 2020 he also runs the focus lab and exhibition space on urban design in troy new york which is a few miles north of albany i'm rob studeville editor of cmu's public square and i'm going to give a very brief overview of the highways to boulevard movement nationwide followed by a presentation and discussion with the panelists followed by q a from the audience so please use the q a function of zoom to ask your questions as they occur to you once upon a time about 70 years ago our cities consisted of continuous urban fabric mostly downtown's connected to neighborhoods with main streets with which connected to other neighborhoods with main streets there was small blocks and interconnected streets and this worked in many ways economically and socially but we built highways through cities damaging and tearing the urban fabric dividing neighborhoods from neighborhoods and and cutting them off from key assets such as downtown often neighborhoods became devalued with businesses and middle class leaving we've seen this in city after city this slide by steve museon gives a sense of the scale of what was destroyed on the right is a uh is it one interchange in atlanta georgia it's not even a full highway just a connection uh but you have the uh the on-ramps and uh off-ramps and and the overpasses um and in between those you have like largely big box stores and parking lots and that all that sprawlscape is all the same scale basically as uh the center of florence italy where the renaissance began highways seem permanent hard to remove but this has successfully happened many times upper left we have the deer district in milwaukee where they in 2021 they celebrated the bucks nba championship and in 2002 this was the park east freeway which was removed in that year um on the top right is san francisco's embarcadero and fair ferry terminal set up as an open-air market it used to be the embarcadero freeway and in the bottom left we have boston's rose kennedy greenway downtown and uh the central artery was buried in 1991 the bottom right we have chattanooga's riverfront plaza and that used to be the riverfront parkway removed in 2004 the highways boulevards movement is nationwide to date american cities have opted to remove highways build large scale caps or relocate highways in 15 different places or cities we'll look at one of these a little closer this is rochester new york and the the inner loop east and that in 2014 as shown here was basically 12 lanes of um dedicated to traffic this was removed in 2017 and you can see in that image on the right that you now the street and then there's vacant lots that could be developed and this project cost the city about 25 million in the first two years after its completion it generated 229 million dollars in new development on land reclaimed from the highway that was about 10 times the return on the return on investment was about 10 times the original and you can see some of that development taking place in this photo from about 2019 if they had kept the highway it would have cost them 34 million dollars in maintenance and repairs that's 12 million more than it cost them to remove it and all this activity has produced new opportunities for the city and development including affordable housing is ongoing union street which replaced the highway features ample sidewalks two-way protected bike lanes signaling signaled crosswalks bike racks benches trees landscaping this is paid dividends uh walking has increased 15 50 percent um from 2014 to 2019 in the project area and biking has has increased 60 in the project area the inner loop east removal has been very successful and and now the city is moving forward with the removal of the northern part of that inner loop highway state dots across the country are still proposing to expand highways in cities and this hasn't gone away but there are also many grassroots campaigns to remove highways and stop their expansion and these are the logos from the many campaigns or many of the campaigns across the country these campaigns are starting to have an impact and congress recently made the one billion dollar reconnecting communities program law the first ever dedicated and funded um for uh program for restoring communities by removing highways that one billion dollars may not seem like a lot in comparison to building a highway but it will leverage local funds and pay for a lot of planning that is likely to move many projects forward this movement could grow substantially in coming years so i with that i'm going to stop my screen share and pass this along to the folks from albany thank you rob and good afternoon everyone um thank you for joining us to learn about this exciting and growing movement to reclaim uh space and repurpose it here in albany from outdated highway infrastructure we really appreciate the opportunity to present cnu and it's pleasure to be here today so i'm adam zuranko i'm the executive director of the albany county land bank i'm also a someone who who has was raised in the capital region and have moved back here recently a few years ago to raise my family and i'm one of the many people here uh through our effort our collaboration albany riverfront collaborative that's working uh collectively to to make you know albany set it on a better trajectory to improve the lives of a lot of different people so um great you can go to the next slide please so so arc or albany riverfront collaborative is essentially a diverse and growing group of people from all different stakeholders that have an interest in some respect to see the infrastructure along albany's waterfront be reclaimed and used for something better to advance the greater good there there was a lot of disparate efforts uh disparate efforts here in albany over the years to kind of look at this through individual lenses and over time i think we realized that although each vision is a little different we share the common goal of repurposing what what divides us or could connect us along the waterfront um we don't have like the perfect plan we don't all have 100 consensus on exactly what the outcome should be here but we all agree um at the collaborative that the fate of this project shouldn't just be in the hands of any uh individual elected officials or traffic engineers or planners um but rather you know the stakeholders that that have to experience this the most and the people who have been living in communities and and will be living in our neighborhoods and have in some cases been left behind as we'll talk about a little bit they really need to to be leading the discussions and we need to be helping and collaborating and that's kind of the vision here this is our official mission statement um but ultimately what the collaborative is is is it seeks to introduce just a vision to get the conversation going and serve as a platform to bring in all these different stakeholders and help provide the support that we need to be among the different cities across america trying to bring the investment that we need to reverse the damage caused by the highway infrastructure here in the city of albany next slide please so i'm glad rob pointed it out but sometimes we have to say this out loud the capital of the state of new york is not new york city it's actually albany it's about three hours to the north and it's a city of around 100 uh sorry 97 000 people it's the seat of state government and this is just an aerial view of of our highway infrastructure it's interstate 787 which is um along the waterfront here across the river the bridge goes into rensselaer and then you can see empire state plaza which is kind of the official government center if you will and it's surrounded by various different neighborhoods in the city of albany i would note um the south end neighborhood on the left hand side of your screen on the other side is north albany of the empire state plaza sheridan hollow arbor hill these are the neighborhoods that helped um that have formed around the center of albany and essentially were there first before the the empire state plaza was constructed but you can see pretty clearly along the hudson river where um the highway infrastructure has kind of carved up the city and been anchored by the empire state plaza which which essentially uh removed 98 acres of land in our city and was rebuilt for this purpose albany has a lot going for it there's a lot of strengths in albany we're located at the crossroads between the city of new york which is about three hours away boston is less than three hours away to our north is the adirondack state park which is six million acres of preserved forest land and down on the west side down i-90 we have access to um syracuse rochester and home of future super bowl champions the buffalo bills in buffalo and and we also have a broader region right so we have collectively in a multi-county multi-city region we have a population of over one million people um albany schenectady amsterdam troy we've all kind of come together and have been working to kind of revitalize our our cities along the river and reposition ourselves a lot of people refer to this area as a tech valley it's our answer to the silicon valley bringing in those type of investments that we need to see albany's definitely kind of your textbook legacy city it's the state's oldest city um the building stock and infrastructure reflect that it benefits from a lot of things though as much as it has the challenges that that legacy cities have like um like like this investment the vacant properties the challenges with the manufacturing leaving there's a lot of strengths that all that are unique to albany especially our presence of higher educational institutions the the enduring presence of government the state government is here it's it's not going anywhere it is an economic generator and we have several major medical centers um unfortunately in a lot of respects we're probably most well-known albany for our famous or infamous politics depending you ask that sometimes that casts an unfair sometimes fair light on on what happens in albany with regard to politics but there's so much more to albany than just the things you read in the paper the things you hear um one of the things we're trying to do with with this with this proposed project is just change that and make albany known for it it's willingness to to work together to to get progress right accomplish progress and not just for its politics um what's a little bit less known about albany but but probably not to this audience is the challenges facing us is is how divided uh albany's neighborhoods are like a lot of other legacy cities we're suffering from um decades of disinvestment um discriminatory policies and practices and that's manifested in population loss high levels of vacancy um low low levels of income high concentrations of poverty and and and some really atrocious disparities for a very small city if you can go to the next slide please um just to give you a sense of the work that i do at the albany county land bank which is a new york state uh not-for-profit organization formed by state government to help reclaim vacant properties and under utilize properties and repurpose them in a way that benefits communities neighborhoods and surrounding areas you know this is albany's redlining map from the homeowner's loan loan corporation from 1938 which is a federally sanctioned government agency which which basically set these maps based on the folks who lived in these neighborhoods and told people whether or not financial institutions or others businesses whether or not they should get capital to start investing in these neighborhoods so if you look at this map you can see very clearly that west hill arbor hill sheridan hollow the south end north albany those neighborhoods that surround the empire state plaza that are separated from the hudson river which is our greatest natural asset we're all designated as hazardous areas because of the people that lived in the neighborhoods their demographic makeup if you can go uh to the next map please um this is an overlay of the organization that i lead the albany county land banks real property acquisitions and dispositions since we were established to combat vacant and underutilized properties um dating back to i think 2015 and it just shows you at a glance something that's probably not surprising to people that are that are practice urban planning or associated fields but the the legacy of those decisions and and purposeful disinvestment uh dating back to the 1930s is is really creating a lot of challenges here in the disparities in albany right now um 30 of albany's population roughly is are black but um 70 of the households in the red line areas are are black individuals or families um there's there's in the red line historically red line neighborhoods over 40 percent of the households are under the poverty rate and the childhood opportunity index for some of these neighborhoods is as low as one out of a hundred and and what's striking in me in albany is is if you know in the green neighborhood if you were born in the green neighborhood versus the red line neighborhood you have probably a a life span on average of of five years less than someone born across the street essentially and so you know we're working to address that and some of the record disparities around home ownership levels albany new york given the number of black households has uh the lowest black homeownership rate and also the largest gap between white and black homeownership mates rates in the nation um and buffalo new york is also another city that's struggling with that so we're not alone it's indicative of legacy cities and so through what we're trying to do at the riverfront albany riverfront collaborative is is is work to reclaim the space occupied by 787 and and reverse some of these disparities through a purposeful and deliberate look at what could go there right and so we're thinking about ways to stitch these neighborhoods back together into the urban core the downtown core and the and the riverfront and do it in a way that views all our projects through climate change addressing disparities and creating equity striving for better racial justice thinking about sustainability and thinking about balancing community development and economic development we don't think those should be mutually exclusive things we think we can do both and we think that we have a team in place that can help foster that discussion you're going to hear from some of those folks today and that's just a few of the people um that are involved in this effort what we are trying to do though is build on the investments that are happening here um in albany there's been a lot of public and private investment to revitalize our communities lots of work around the waterfront the albany skyway is repurposing a portion of one of the ramps of 787 to create a public space there's investments proposed for one of our major rail line bridges of liberty avenue bridges and most recently the port of albany which is just outside the south end here along the hudson river was it was announced that it's going to be the uh the site of of the uh green infrastructure the wind turbines for for the nation essentially and that's gonna create an estimated 500 000 jobs right there so so what do we do we don't have an exact plan right now but we do know that we can address a lot of these disparities and achieve a lot of our goals through repurposing this and we want to take the harness the energy that's out there as rob described the build it back better act the reconnecting communities program and also our governor governor hochul again today has has announced that making uh reclaiming and reconnect space from outdated infrastructure and reconnecting neighborhoods is a priority for her administration and being a seat of government where we think we're in a great position to be part of that conversation and dialogue and flip this question from you know you know can we afford to do this to to talk about you know can we afford not to do this right now can we let this opportunity pass us by and that's why arc formed and that's why we're all working together and trying to eliminate silos and navigate the politics and um with that i'm going to pass it to to mr hamlin just another member of the not just another member but a member of the albany riverfront collaborative team and he's going to share some of his his personal perspectives and experiences with the waterfront so thank you for listening and thank you for joining and uh all yours john thank you very much adam um and i'm gonna speak just for a couple of moments brief moments as i am the native albanian in this collaborative that's a picture of me and it's been almost unbelievable but it's over 50 years old i'm the little guy and the big guy is my dad and uh this is the west uh hill neighborhood that was on the slide uh our family owned a home there um and we were one of the first black families to move into that neighborhood one of the key elements in this picture is the vehicle to the left which is the family station wagon and a couple of years after this picture was taken relative to our discussion about 787 is traveling from albany northbound to troy to visit family friends my dad began to reminisce and tell all the entire family us kids about his life experience on the river how he used to play swim fish horseplay uh go back and forth across the river on little skiffs or little boats my brothers and sisters thought my dad was making up the entire story because by the mid 70s there was no connection there was no social or community connection to the hudson river mind you at this time the hudson river was known for being filthy uh you can't eat it can't you don't definitely don't want to swim in it and it was something that was also difficult uh to see or experience if we go to the next slide this is a view looking east and that is the river the famous hudson river that uh henry hudson came up from new york city and uh fort orange is to the right that was the of course the the first uh location of the settlers and from right to left um is uh heading north and if you can see 787 depending upon the elevation and traveling um from north to the south or from the south to the north you do not even see the river and that was the experience that i had growing up that there was this idea of this river that we learned about in school with henry hudson um but our day-to-day lives there was no connection as we mentioned and for years living in here in albany and even working as an architect there have been various efforts to reconnect the city to the river uh there is the corning preserve there is the pedestrian bridge um and if we go to the next slide uh even these uh the city has tried to utilize this space that has been somewhat lost or forgotten these are the elevated portions of 787 and the arterial going into the empire state plaza and while there are all well intentioned to provide perhaps color or paint or graffiti or to hold a concert these mammoth structures have separated neighborhoods made very uncomfortable uh spaces um or spaces that perhaps one doesn't feel that they're welcome to uh traverse and this is uh where we are in albany and so to hear discussions of perhaps uh thinking differently about the future um as an albanian i'm happy to have that discussion i'll turn the next set of slides over to reef please hi everyone it's uh great to be here my name is rafe larson i'm with the future of small cities and i'm part of the albany riverfront collaborative so i'm i'm going to talk about sort of the the formation of the collaborative and then how we went about kind of packaging our messaging because i've gotten a lot of questions from other cities about you know what's the best way to tell this story and and to kind of gain a sort of critical consensus um that was certainly the difficulty in albany is that there had been a number of attempts to kind of you know galvanize action it seems like every four or five years there was a think piece in our local paper the times union um and then you know every six or seven years there was a feasibility study but then everything inevitably sort of petered out the scope of the project was was um was limiting to the point where everyone kind of threw up their hands so one of the things i do with the future small cities is get cities to talk to one another which they don't often do because they're so busy running their own city um so back in may we had this uh this event this webinar um called on the road to nowhere in which we gathered together all the the four upstate cities who interestingly are all in different spots in their life cycles when it comes to considering urban highways um as was mentioned rochester is probably the the furthest along and that they've actually enacted removing part of their inner loop the east the east inner loop and they're now in the process of because they're so successful um planning for removing the north loop they just broke ground in syracuse with i-81 and then buffalo has a number of really interesting projects and as part of this call we had representatives from each um and i was really uh among others of our of our coalition was really inspired by the buffalo group the skodaquita corridor corridor coalition because it was a coming together of a diverse cross cross-section of stakeholders um parks managers non-profits architects designers neighborhood groups um equality advocates all kinds of people coming together and they produce these really beautiful renderings that i think spoke volumes um and gave people a chance to dream about what's possible because often and i think this is true in albany we didn't have a collective vision that we could all kind of circle around not something that would be perspective prescriptive as adam said but something that would galvanize discussion and start that discussion it's it's very hard to go into a community and say what do you want without for sort of showing them something that they can critique that they can walk around that they can talk about so that was our goal is to get to a place where we could at least talk about something some kind of vision and and give people permission to talk about that vision um another model that we looked to that was very inspirational is is um the duluth waterfront collective their website is awesome i really suggest that you go there um in which they kind of lay out the narrative of you know why is this important how could this happen um what are some of the the reasons and as adam spoke about this there's a number of different um kind of avenues that you can go to convince to convince people about this right there's the economic development argument there's the community and equity um argument which as adam said i think those often have been divergent but i think we're putting forth that they can be uh certainly uh par collaborative and part of the uh part of the solution together and then there's also the kind of sustainable uh climate change argument which is increasingly becoming a more urgent one particularly for waterfront communities so all three of these considerations you have to kind of balance as you put forth solutions so with a couple of these examples in mind and as rob opened with there's now i think almost 30 cities which are in some state of of of considering their their waterfronts or they're considering their highways i should say so albany is really joining a kind of nationwide coalition and particularly with the passage of the infrastructure the federal infrastructure act and hopefully build back better or some form of it we're seeing for the first time um real funding for these kind of projects and that was one of the kind of arguments that was always put forth that we don't have that the funding is not there but that that argument now looks less and less plausible because there's big money actually for these kind of projects um from the state and federal level um our our our collaborative is is is vast i should say and it it touches upon a lot of different parts of of the community and i think this is a really important slide maybe the most important that we're going to show um in that any movement needs wide scale buy-in across different sectors to give it the kind of gravitas the the authenticity the the community rootedness otherwise it just becomes pretty renderings but when it's backed up by a wide swath of people like this who all care about it and are all approaching it from different lenses all of these people aren't going to agree on what the what the path forward is but they're all willing to come to the same to the same room and i think that that's really important and our ethos from the beginning has been to welcome everyone with open arms and hear them out invite them to be part of this and uh for the most part everyone has been really appreciative of being well welcome to the collaborative so i'm going to just um stop my presentation and show you briefly our website which i think is probably um the best uh kind of representation of what we're doing and and and talk a little bit about some of the design choices that we made um from a narrative perspective um i'm a storyteller i'm a writer so i'm always thinking about what's the story that we're trying to tell um so we got we put up we put a drone in the sky and shot uh the footage of what this highway looks like just to really show that it is essentially a wall that cuts it out from and this has been mentioned a couple times our greatest natural resource the river albany is not really a river city it could be but it's not if you come here as sean so so eloquently described growing up here um a lot of the mid-hudson cities have a much more intimate connection with the river than albany does so what we did wanted to do with our um with this website is actually give people an empowered ability to reimagine the waterfront themselves so we created these sliders um and the simple act of interacting with this image and we've seen this um you know this it's just frankly crazy when you look at it how overbuilt the infrastructure with uh is um you know i think it was the dream of a engineer or team of engineers that they could put this together but they their priorities back then were much different vastly different than what we our priorities are now so we came up with a rendering that the user can kind of reveal themselves and i think this very act of of revealing yourself uh empowers people to imagine this themselves so sliding back and forth i've seen people kind of do this for hours being like what's this finding their neighborhood um but our vision here and i think it's been mentioned is towing that line between economic development between community development between sustainable sustainability development we could have packed this with new buildings right we decided very carefully to take a sort of modest route legacy cities need income tax they need um they need new buildings but in this case we were very mindful of a community like the south end which has been you know cut off from the rest of the downtown by the the arterial which has been brought up a bunch it's this kind of center piece running into the empire plaza you've seen this in a lot of cities where someone from the suburbs can drive into the empire plaza without ever having to touch the city essentially and it's incredibly damaging privileging that kind of travel over communities then we've seen that um so this kind of vision asks the question what does the south end want right um i think when we've talked to people from the south end they're nervous about gentrification and we've seen this with other highways bolovites projects if you remove a highway it does a lot of good but it can also raise prices uh housing prices so there's there's some embedded dangers there um and i think there's also a question of planned fatigue and we can talk about that people have come up with plans a lot and people are tired of just the planning stage um so we we offered a series of images um that again are meant to kick start the conversation rather than be prescriptive we created a documentary film which you haven't if you haven't seen um we have some really talented documentary filmmakers as part of your collaborative have some have some documentary filmmakers on your collaborative that might be part of the the recommendation um but all of these are meant to kind of allow people to reimagine what the possibility is because sometimes you're so entrenched with these landscapes you don't realize what's possible um and then i'll finish here we gave a series of metrics that again towed that line between economic development and community development and sustainability development we actually did a economic analysis and a fiscal analysis of the project where we looked at how many jobs this would generate and how much income tax and property tax and sales taxes would generate um so we're trying to address multiple audiences with this because in albany you have multiple audiences and as part of this we've also created a faq that tries to address some of the most obvious questions that come up again again like commute time or cost of project or what's happening with a railway and then we've also created a resource page which gathers together all the articles there have been so many written about 787 when you see them all back to back to back to back it's quite something um but also studies and plans and then critically the the the social justice redlining aspect of this and then giving us some natural context which cnu has really done such an amazing job um we really want to firmly place albany as part of a much much larger movement um so i'm i'm mindful of time uh and maybe i'll stop there and we can open open this up for for uh questions so i'll stop sharing and we can uh we can chat about everything that we've thrown out there well thank you guys very much that's uh it's so impressive what you have come up with it's been um i think you launched this about two months ago maybe even a little less than two months ago um a lot of people out there are looking at the highways in their cities and uh you know how um it's a bit daunting to figure out how to come up with a campaign that really could impact these pieces of infrastructure um you guys uh really have done something uh very impressive with your website uh you know and especially the coalition um uh i wanted to ask you how did you gather uh this impressive coalition which includes uh the state assemblywoman representatives from the city the downtown business improvement district uh the industrial development authority the planning board chair businesses foundations architects and planners and others it seems so critical to have a group all sort of willing to like stand behind this idea how did you gather that all together i'll i'll jump in here and you all can piggyback on me it was a lot of it was uh one of our members um scott townsend um i think watching today he did a lot of the work uh he's been he's been pounding the pavement about this for the last you know 15 years i would say and has met with all these people and has been part of the studies so he's done a lot of that that critical outreach but honestly a lot of people want to see this happen i mean it's it's we're sort of giving a platform for an existent um desire and we're we're giving a place we're giving permission for people to believe but we're also i guess now giving some images and and a kind of website and a platform but if you talk to almost anybody in albany i think they'd be like oh yeah we would we would love to see this happen i think now it becomes a sort of political question of uh a kind of ownership question who's who's going to see this through it's a dot question now but from a from a kind of citizenry perspective i think everyone has kind of coalesced not just around that it has to happen but it has to happen sooner rather than later which is i would say and maybe you sean or adam you can speak this that that's a change it used to be like people kind of almost were like well i hope it happens and now it's not a if but a win question yeah um i would say that one of the things that's that's helped you know it's kind of pros and cons albany is not a large city and sometimes that's a helpful thing and sometimes that's a that could be a harmful thing in terms of introducing large-scale transformative uh proposals but i think in this case the albany and the capital region um there was enough people that that knew uh the relationships in different groups just how to bring everyone together and say and and meet the timing which is our timing is very nice because a lot of people are more there's more awareness of this this type of effort going on right there's a lot of stuff at the federal level it was a big deal during the election to build it back better bill so more people who don't focus on this on like a near daily basis we're aware of this concept and that it's possible in other areas and in fact a lot of other places are already doing it it's including all of our peer cities along i-90 so so i think i think that those two things combined led to a larger willingness of people just to kind of maybe get a little bit outside their comfort zone and be open to these discussions and kind of embracing the possibility of change and i think a lot of people today realizing that you know there's a lot of global and macroeconomic forces that if we don't start adapting to what's around us because we can't control them they're going to pass us by or roll over us and things could get more you know we could be worse right things can get more challenging and we don't want to do that so we just want to make sure that we're creating a space for the conversation and giving a voice to people who aren't listening to us today don't practice this aren't reading the white papers on the benefits and like having those folks be part of the conversation not just the people that have access to kind of all the information that we're putting out there so we're trying to create kind of a broad spectrum of voices here i wanted to ask i wanted to remind people to ask your questions in the in the zoom um in the in the q a function of zoom um rather than the chat and uh uh your point adam um about uh about the community members uh uh is important um you have a coalition that is a lot of leaders um and that's uh you know really important to begin with but how do you engage the community uh what are your status you know strategies for building the community consensus in a broad sense we've we so we're in the process of um scheduling a series of community engagement sessions with all the affected neighborhoods so that's it's about six or seven community engagement sessions um as i mentioned i think it's it's tricky with these communities because they've seen plans come and go and i think there's so many acute immediate needs for their community they want a community center they want a green grocery store when you start talking about um you know taking down a highway that seems so pie in the sky that there is a risk towards sort of alienating folks and i think the key is one engaging with people again again showing up um being in their community having presence in their community making this part of a of a crucial larger conversation about quality of life um in the south end for instance there's an ongoing health issue in the ezra apprentice corridor there's a housing project that a lot of truck traffic uh goes through daily it's something like a thousand trucks um and it's and and these um trains where they're called bomb trains filled with petroleum idle idle right next to there so i think making this project part of that equation right so it's if we if we redid this highway and redid this waterfront we could do it with a whole new set of priorities where we had uh we had a different route where we could put trucks away from the community or we could do a pilot project with electrified trucks um where we pri so we start privileging things that the community uh enjoys and and is important to them so i think that that that's it's a crucial part of it and community engagement particularly in the time of covert has been really tricky but it's you can't do it you can't do a project like this without community engagement um sean is the native albanian and i've never heard that word before i'll be describing albany residents but how do you how do you reach the broad consensus here in the neighborhoods well i i think the statements regarding fatigue are accurate i mean that webs that web page with the many articles and the times you uh many of our in our community have as i said discussed this previous administrations in the city of albany have discussed it um but i think as was mentioned you have to start grassroots for this type of major infrastructure change to a city and you have to start the discussion there from a grassroots effort but i think that's it has to be done with sensitivity um because of the very different needs in the various communities and those communities are also changing as well uh communities that perhaps the south end that were predominantly african-american there are other immigrants from other areas of the world that have settled in albany so their perspective is completely different or their needs are completely different so uh it's it's that's i think that's where this uh program and this collaborative as i think some good success because it's just starting initial discussion i'm gonna get to the q a in in just a minute just one more question um and one thing that i was very impressed impressed with was uh the visuals uh um you know they they seem to you know your your vision and you talked about uh not being prescriptive but but but detailed enough the people could actually picture uh the city without the highway but also it wasn't you didn't seem to make the mistake of having too much development shown in these images um you know i've seen this before and people kind of that can be scary people can recoil from the idea of too much economic development when a highway is removed but you chose to you know look at it and i think the way a city would really naturally develop um you know with with buildings of various height buildings not too overwhelming and uh can you talk a little bit about how you thought about presenting this so that people would be more attracted to the concept and not maybe put off by it i think we were lucky to have a on our in our collaborative some really talented designers um and i i wanted to shout out to adam benoski um swbr and and uh lincoln as well they put together you know fabulous uh you know both renderings but also i i love some of the watercolor work that they did which gives that kind of human element that you're talking about and i think we were very conscious of you know towing that line between giving a sort of um you know a vision a vision that could make people excited but not that would box us into something and certainly not using uh some of the kind of overly modern modest uh glass boxes that sometimes architects put in because i think up upstate you know you you run into some you have to be careful with the vision that you present it has to appeal to a lot of people and that that could be you know a turn off to a lot of folks so i think that's that's the line that you have to tow and as i said i think that the idea of developing a waterfront is really um tricky because a lot of people see that and see some people see dollar signs right that they want market rate luxury condos other people see it as a land grab um and uh you know an avenue for gentrification so i think you know if this project went forward there would have to be a lot of negotiation about what how do we want to use the waterfront what do we want to use it uh and also from a sustainability perspective what kind of uh climate resilient features are we building in um you know if this if the if we get a mega storm we don't want just all these condos to be flooded we we want some kind of form of mitigation and adaptation so i think but i think having that conversation is really important putting forth these arguments of what what should our waterfront look like that's kind of the first step that for for our community rob one of the things just in the conversations around there's a million ways you can present what this may look like right giving off a space that would be reclaimed but we were very deliberate everyone that was involved i think in making sure that we we were looking at not building something just for one group right and and in a lot of respects would be creating a different type of disparity and we would be exacerbating the disparities we already have but really trying to focus on the community development aspect like what can we do with this space to address the disparities we have build neighborhoods but strengthen also the people the existing neighborhoods and the residents there and start to like feather it back together not just drop like like i said those those shiny boxes down that look awesome in renderings but who are those for because again it's going back to who are we trying to help bring up and who's left behind here and when people see the renderings which is one of our goals is that translates very clearly that this is a bold but ambitious and achievable plan it needs to look like something that isn't just for one group of people but someone could really see that i can be part of this and and once you dive into kind of the other benefits become like this is something that that would benefit me as well and i think that that's how a lot of the massing and stuff ended up let me get to q a um first of all uh this is going to be posted on the cnu website so you can see this again and see the slides again and it'll be posted probably tomorrow [Music] and there's a couple of questions as to how you know whether the new york state department of transportation is is involved how you have approached them uh somebody asked whether the commissioner of the new york state department transportation marie there is um to domin i don't know how to pronounce it um uh dominguez uh to uh to join whether she could join this coalition or maybe seeing you uh um i don't know have you approached the d.o.t at all and and what are they what have they said they can be tough yeah i mean i think that i'm as someone who's studying cities in the transition of cities and small cities i'm fascinated with large entities like the dot and the the kind of the changes that they're undergoing right a lot of these big state agencies in the age of climate change and the age of like you know equity and community development are being asked to change their mission change their ethos change their kind of existential purpose the dot has for decades been in the purpose of building and maintaining highways you know and building bigger highways and i think we're asking them and this is happening in cities across the way to turn into essentially a community development organization right to think about taking down highways when it's appropriate and that's a big ask and i think we should recognize that but i think that doesn't mean we shouldn't ask them in our particular case the dot hasn't been part of our collaborative i think in the past they've been obstructive towards movements that's not to say that they wouldn't be now but i think we wanted to get our our message and our vision and our collaboration together and then approach them with a kind of strong community ask i suppose um but they have to be part of the they have to be part of the solution i mean they're the they're going to be the planners they're going to be they own a lot of the land there so they're going to they're going to be a key key constituent here i think in the past they've been able just to say no because it's easier to say no but now in this context uh it's it's a lot trickier um so and they've been and in other cities they've been the lead right in syracuse they were a lead planner in the organization buffalo too so it's not like everywhere they're just uh they're just a brick wall yeah um uh i'm not uh i haven't been in albany much uh but um i said there was a question uh you know would 787 still be an interstate north and south of albany but it seems to me that 787 isn't a very long interstate and it doesn't really carry through traffic is that correct it does i mean it's used uh you know most at most uh volume to separate peak volume it's definitely we are overbuilt especially as people have been shifting to remote but especially given how much atlanta takes i think the vision is is is acknowledging that it's still an important you know connective point but to treat it more like a boulevarding um rather than the elevated superstructure and 787 does tie together other river cities like cahos and and waterville and provide access up to troy so you know our initial vision looks specifically at the albany segment but that's not to say because we had to start scoping somewhere but that's not to say that it couldn't be expanded to other municipalities or others you have to view it as kind of connecting the waterfront so um that's kind of where we left it the other thing that that we acknowledge is the rail lines that will be serving the port there will be so that are utilized and we do have an active port that's that's growing and being invested in so trying to strike that balance between being pragmatic about those rail lines are there and to get them to go someplace else is probably not viable right so how can we coexist those things and not hamper not hamstring ourselves on the economic development investments that are happening at the port that could carry across to bolstering some of the community development work so that you'll see also in some of the renderings and discussions that we have it's a really good question um go ahead i would i would just like to add as well to what adam said um the use of 797 is perhaps uh at its highest point uh you know traditionally seven a.m to eight a.m in the morning and then from five to six as the state workers that you see at the state plaza i believe there's about 40 to 50 000 state workers that come into the city and then exit and that's a that's a pattern that we've come to know in many cities where you have commuters come in and then they exit the city but with that aside i think that 787 as a thoroughfare for uh many people or at least that path as adam mentioned that connects the other smaller cities along the river there is a value to that um that i think the boulevard or a lesser of a element would be able to provide so yes it is something that is utilized but it's utilized to come and then exit the city immediately i think also we have to acknowledge that the idea of a commute is changing right so there's going to be a lot more possibilities for remote work we have an amazing public transit authority in the capital region that is already a nationwide leader in rapid bus networks so i think any sort of boulevarding of a highway has to come hand-in-hand with a really robust uh public transportation solution that you know with an actual dedicated bus line that might make it quicker than driving a private car um and i think also you know sean mentioned the 40 to 50 i've heard up to like 80 or 90 000 state workers you know what if we developed albany's downtown and made you know housing and work play housing so that 10 000 of those people actually lived in downtown albany and walked to work so i think there's and that's that's happening as we're speaking so i think you know boulevarding a highway has to come in in tandem with other sort of community development economic development and transportation development um initiatives as well in fact bounce on what reef mentioned regarding how we this may be a silver lining as we all live through a pandemic as we begin to rethink remote work i have a business right in downtown albany i have employees that come and then go but now those employees are all at home and now those employees want to stay at home so revisioning how we work or even the structures that we have the state offices that i now i know that are now empty because of the pandemic is something that i think may be a silver lining after the past two years um i got a very good question from dustin um and that is is there an effective way to really give voice to the uh residents of albany the city and uh and uh he's he says that uh um he here's uh some opposition some fierce opposition to this project from people who commute from troy malta or clifton parks outside of the city um and how are you how can we really give the city of all the new residents a strong say in this process i mean from my perspective i think that's exactly one of the reasons the collaboration exists is to try to bridge that because one of the largest threats to a vision like this is is the the voices that are heard more often the people that see this as i might be worse off if this vision was to be realized for from my daily commute and things like that and in other areas we've seen that slow down or even and stop projects in their tracks we're trying to do is create parity through the collaborative by bringing in a lot of different stakeholders and not just depending on local or state governments to do this work this isn't something the local state government is not going to solve for this by themselves right like rave said they're trying to keep potholes filled balance the budget address what's going on today and tomorrow so we're trying to create a forum for those voices and elevate the voices of the people that are are usually these projects happen at the expense or around these neighborhoods and again bring them back into the conversation and let them let the residents lead the conversations and help shape what this could look like um but that's kind of why the collaborative that's one of our goals you know at least at least from my perspective is to to do that um because we're thinking about that a lot and also the larger question is you know people are like what's it going to do my commute time is it going to go from 12 minutes to 14 minutes i think shifting the conversation to being like perhaps but what if you get a world-class city that's adjacent to your suburb like what if you've got a waterfront that can host concerts and food truck festivals and what if you want to move to all downtown albany because it's suddenly an awesome place that has all these green spaces and so there's i think shifting the window of what we're talking about is important and giving some kind of larger context to what does it mean to actually have a because albany i think the the reason why uh so many of us dedicate all our time to this we see the potential of albany right it could be a really world-class city um but it can't realize that without it's without without addressing the waterfront addressing this kind of legacy of this highway well an hour has passed us by and uh but i want to ask you know if you could just quickly uh talk about how people can get involved and what are the next steps so uh definitely check out our website um if you just google albany riverfront collaborative it's the only one of that name i believe so you'll take it right to us um the team has put together a really informative newsletter and you can sign up for it for the emails and there's a lot of information that will include i think what what the next steps are also specifically the engagement opportunities and kind of what what this year will look like and i think now that there's more wind in the sales with respect to the state budget and the federal discussions may be changing even more in our favor you'll start to see kind of a ramp up of those efforts because time is of the essence and we know we're essentially competing against all the other great projects that rob described so website's probably your best one-stop shop portal there's a way to email some of the the leadership and to get involved and i would say that uh people the collaborative's always looking for more people it's not an exclusive we're trying to make it very inclusive so if you're interested in participating in really any shape or form um contact through the website yeah i would just piggyback and say donate and join us if you have a talent or a skill or say i can do this i've done this before another city reach out to us because that's the great thing about this collaborative is that you know all this work was done uh you know because we leaned into people's talents um so we really uh we we're kind of stronger together in some ways so we're appreciative and we're we're very thankful for cnu's work um it's been inspirational and we feel like we're we're part of a larger a larger pack uh uh among your leadership so thank you well that's awesome sean have any last words i can't say any more than that okay well thank you every you know adam uh rafe sean thank you so much for being here and spending an hour with us and uh good luck with everything you're doing i hope to make it to albany uh soon it's not far um and maybe uh connect up with with you guys uh and uh so i thank everybody for attending and once again this is going to be posted tomorrow on the cnu website so have a good day everybody thanks thanks so much