The United States Conference of Mayors still sees the shadow of recession cast over Syracuse and warns of five more years until an ailing city can get back on its feet.

A recent study conducted by the group focuses primarily on employment and the time it will take for those numbers to return to their pre-2008 levels. Syracuse lost 13,000 jobs in the two-year recession period, a nearly 4 percent decline in the total number of urban employment. Many of these jobs came from the manufacturing sector, and their return is doubtful.

This news came before Syracuse Mayor Stephanie Miner’s State of the City address on Thursday in which she announced her plans to focus on repairing the city’s decrepit infrastructure. Miner’s hope is that this initiative will make life in the city both easier for citizens and more attractive to prospective businesses.

Addressing the city’s infrastructure is a bold move to tackle the city’s continuing economic problems. If the city can cash in on the wave of technological advancement, as it is planning to do, it can create a stable infrastructure that has the longevity to span well into the future. Once this problem is confronted, Syracuse will have a strong base to focus on other problems plaguing the city.

Syracuse has disappointingly won the mantle of highest poverty concentration in an urban setting among blacks and Hispanics in the United States, according to the results of study on poverty demographics conducted by The Century Foundation.

In addition to “white flight” to the suburbs and a concentration of public housing in the city itself rather than outlying areas, the Syracuse area proves to be weak when it comes to supporting the jobs it does have, though fixing the problem is as daunting as it is paramount to the city’s success.

Paul Driscoll, Syracuse’s commissioner of neighborhood and business development, addressed this study in an interview with Syracuse.com conducted in September 2015.

“We’re just looking to address what cities can do to address poverty. We’re finding we’re pretty limited in what we can do,” he said. “We deal with the consequences at the local level, but a lot of these problems have to be dealt with at the state and federal level.”

State level assistance is precisely what central New York has been offered as Gov. Andrew Cuomo recently announced a proposal to award $500,000 grants to New York state’s 10 poorest cities, including Syracuse. This is in addition to $500 million grant awarded to central New York in late 2015 by the state. This stimulus’ purpose is to improve the regional economy and lift people out of poverty.

Indeed it seems state or federal money is something Syracuse can’t get enough of. The city itself is in need of extensive logistical repair including water mains, roads and sewer systems as well as the beefing up emergency services and personnel. These are problems the city plans to have solved in the coming years, if Miner’s address is realized.

Abdulaziz Shifa, an assistant professor of economics in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University, explained that the lack of jobs is one of the major factors that has caused this extreme poverty rating, as well as Syracuse’s excruciatingly slow economic recovery.

“One explanation for the continued recession is that businesses — specifically industry — take recessions as an opportunity to relocate,” said Shifa.

Moving forward the city should create a reliable, trained workforce from its citizens and take on the problems of unemployment by moving to fix infrastructure to create a conducive atmosphere for businesses of all types and generate local jobs in the meantime.

It is important for our city and community to recognize the causes of our economic strife and work toward preventing future suffering. We must also consider how this recent news will affect both future plans and projects currently in development and yet to be conceived. The Syracuse community must continue down the path our county and state have started on and use the money we’ve been given to invest in human resources to strengthen our infrastructure.

These issues will indeed require much investment and time, but Syracuse must be rebuilt from the bottom up if we are to ever see the return of prominent industry and business.

Theo Horn is a sophomore political science and public policy dual major. His column appears weekly. He can be reached at tahorn@syr.edu.

Published on February 1, 2016 at 12:52 am