From WXXI news.

This is connections I'm Evan Dawson.

Our connection this hour was made nearly one year ago January 31st, 2025.

Former Rochester Mayor Bill Johnson paid tribute to his late friend Jean Duprey during the praise funeral at Saint Mary's Roman Catholic Church.

Those remarks were later printed in the Rochester Beacon.

Johnson described his friend and colleague as, quote, a person of intense passion, incredible insight and selfless service.

Johnson said that under his leadership, the agency he founded became an invaluable collaborator on many important community initiatives, and the agency he's referring to is the Rochester Urban Area.

The organization was devoted to helping residents become more engaged with their local government to try to solve local problems.

It was particularly focused on social equity and justice issues in Rochester.

It might sound exactly like what people talk about today, but to pray founded the urban area in 1970 at the Rochester Museum and Science Center, and a year later it moved to RIT to pray.

Served as its first and only executive director until the urban areas closed in 1984.

As former Mayor, Johnson has said, the urban area was not designed to be a think tank but a center of action, and it was when he went to visit to pray at Saint Anne's home before the holidays last year.

Bill Johnson said his friend desired for his work to be remembered.

And it is.

It will be from an exhibit at RIT to an event this weekend.

The praise work will be celebrated and studied to carry on his legacy in 2026 and beyond.

And we're going to talk about not only Jean to pray, but that kind of work.

Decades ago, that kind of work today.

Let me welcome our guest this hour, and we'll go around the table.

Welcome to Bill Shoemaker, creative director for the City of Rochester.

Thank you for being here.

Thanks for having me.

And next to Bill is Justin Murphy, research and communications coordinator for our local history.

Hello, sir.

Yeah, across the table.

Hello to Simeon Bannister, president and CEO of the Rochester Area Community Foundation.

Thanks for being with all your friends.

Nice to be with you and Susan.

Suzanne Mayor is co-founder of Hinge Neighbors.

Welcome back to the program.

Nice to see you.

Thank you.

Very happy to be here.

On the line with us is Liz Kaul, former university archivist at RIT and current head of the Eberly Family Special Collections Library at Penn State University.

She's an organizer of the symposium this Friday and Saturday.

Hello, Liz.

Thanks for being with us.

And you want to tell us a little bit, Liz, about what's coming up on Friday?

Saturday?

Yes.

Thank you.

And thank you so much for this opportunity to be able to talk more about this and to continue to honor Jean, to present the amazing work and legacies left.

So the event will be Friday, January 30th, and Saturday, January 31st.

And on Friday it's going to be at RIT and the event will be at the Wegmans Theater, Magic Spell Studios.

And, it starts at 430.

There's going to be a reception and a pop up exhibit about the urban area.

The pop up exhibit, it's actually being curated by a group of art students.

We have.

So there's a club called the Archives Collective.

And the, RTR University Archives will be present as well.

So from 430 to 6 folks can come know about, check out the exhibit, speak to the student curators, learn more about the urban area.

And then Jean, have some food.

And then from 6 to 645, Simeon Banister will be giving a keynote address.

And then from 715 to 830 about there will be the screening of Think About It, which was a film that Jean to pray.

Produced and made, about the housing crisis in Rochester in 1968.

Then on Saturday, we invite folks to join us at, Bausch and Lomb building on the first floor of the Central Library of Rochester, at 115 South Avenue, that starting at ten, and it'll be running until four.

There will be two panels in the morning, one that looks at, design, graphic design for a greater Rochester.

It's called.

And then the second one will be about centering citizens.

And I think they're both really engaging panels.

And then there will be a workshop, about, that just, can talk more about, build a better Rochester advocating for inclusive housing.

So really excited that this is happening.

And we're school.

We planned it for this weekend specifically to honor her Jean's, life and death.

In fact, his birthday and then his death were around the same exact time.

So this will be a year, since he has passed away.

Well, and, you know, some in Manchester before the program began, I mentioned, you know, this is one of those people who I wish I would have had the chance to spend time with and really regret hearing all these stories, regret not having had that chance.

What do you remember about Jean?

Yeah.

So Jean and I did have a chance to spend some time together, and frankly, I lament that we didn't have even more time, to share with one another.

So many significant contributions, to this, to this community.

In fact, if I recall.

Right, I actually think it was, Mayor Johnson, Bill Johnson that that initially introduced us, actually, when Jean came back to town, from, having a very robust business doing site planning and site selection all across the globe.

Came back here to Rochester, to spend, his final, his final, what ultimately became his final years, somebody that was just deeply thoughtful, someone that had an eye towards, social justice and had a fundamental belief.

And people's ability, human beings is ability to create the kind of places that would be generative.

And that would be, restorative and that would be equitable.

And we certainly need, that voice, to continue in this community.

There's a couple things that stand out to me that I don't know how to feel.

I feel, in a sense, despair, and in another sense, a kind of com connection.

Because when you read about, you know, you're coming out of the 1960s and to pray helps found the urban area.

It's 1970, in Rochester.

You had a period of unrest across the country, but certainly Rochester saw its events in the 1960s, which I hope our audience is pretty familiar with.

There were issues on school integration.

There's issues on civil rights and social justice.

Finding out now in 1968, he's working on a film on the housing crisis.

So many of these things, 50 plus years later, do we have a housing crisis?

We do.

Do we have issues with social unrest?

I hope not every day, but certainly, yes, other issues of deep inequality, despair.

There's a lot that looks like it hasn't changed.

And so the despair I feel is going like, whoa, we're more than half a century out here.

What have we done?

But then maybe the comfort is that when you think it's never been as bad as it is right now.

Because we often I hear people call me, oh, this is the worst it's ever been.

Maybe not.

So, I mean, I don't know, how am I supposed to feel here?

So.

Yeah.

Well, this is tradition of the social jeremiad.

And the idea here is that in the tradition of the of the of the biblical prophet Jeremiah, this is pining away for a past that didn't necessarily exist.

That's interesting.

A lot of times in this community when I hear people talk about the 1950s and 1960s, we talk about it like it was the zenith, that there were no problems in Rochester at that time, that things were great in Rochester or the or the country or the country that the economics of the of Rochester, where the wind was in our sales.

And if we could just get our way back to that period, that we would be all right.

Right.

And just like, the prophet, Jeremiah was, was was off base, on on that diagnosis, those that take that tack about Rochester would be off base.

Many of the challenges that we see today were, in fact fomenting, growing, during that period, folks that, come out on Friday and check out the film, I think about it, are going to sit there and be guffawed by many of the folks that, were the leaders of those days diagnosing problems.

I think that maybe we would believe that they would just be ignorant, to those challenges.

But they were.

Joseph Wilson from Xerox was talking about this issue, of housing, instability in the crisis that was burgeoning in the community at that time.

So it is disappointing that we haven't made more progress.

But it's when did our sales to know that it's time for us to get serious about it.

And it's not just time for more reports, not just time for more, data.

What, Jim was trying to do with the urban area, as you mentioned, was to make it a site of action, of doing something.

And to me, that's the opportunity that's in front of us now.

Justin Murphy, I mean, you work in our local history and and is it more despair?

Is it more disappointment, or is it solidarity?

When you look at the challenges in the late 60s into the 70s and the feeling today that a lot of the headlines might sound the same?

I think that a hopeful way to think about it is that while problems still feel like they're the same, and that, I think, is always the case, there's also so much to learn from the way that people in the past attacked it, and what they got right and what they didn't get right.

That's kind of the the nature of our workshop that we're running on Saturday.

We, it's called Build a Better Rochester.

And we sort of in shorthand, we call it redlining 2.0.

And the the premises by the late 60s, in 1968, there's the Fair Housing Act and, kind of all the, like explicit housing segregation and discrimination is abolished.

And so that should have solved it.

But it didn't as, as we all know, it didn't.

And so what happened?

And we look at the way that, zoning was used, for instance, and in ways that communities, especially suburban communities, were able to kind of button up against people of color coming in or poor people coming in and acknowledging the similarities, acknowledging the way that hits home for us, because these are the same places that we live today.

But then what were what were the things that people did that in fact helped?

So you'll see what Joseph Wilson tried to do in the film.

And, you know, I think that in terms of Jean in the urban areas, what is for me, really the takeaway from his work is when we think about our relationship to the places that we live, it's not just we're allowed to vote or we're allowed to to go to a public meeting.

Simeon used the word create, and that's the way I think about it.

We we create our communities.

We all have, enormous agency in the places that we are.

And I think that that's that was Jean's message is that, we go in and whether it's through organizing, whether it's through creating nonprofits or doing whatever kind of work it is, we create the places, that we live in, that we want our children to live.

And that was something that he was very deeply involved in.

And that's a very empowering way to think about your community and your place in home build.

You want to add to them?

Yeah.

I mean, I think it's, you know, it's tempting to give in to despair because, you know, there are a lot of these issues are still, you know, you know, on the forefront here.

But, you know, I think it's also important to remember some of the things that have really changed, like before the urban areas.

You know, there was a there was an idea that, you know, it's my worry, the highway when it comes to, you know, city government, you know, now we have built in to, like a lot of our projects is public input, like it is part of it.

And it's and it's, it's it's done for heartfelt reasons.

We understand that, public input is important because it, it creates a sense of ownership.

You know, it creates, you know, if and if you if you don't have that, that sense of ownership, then you don't go anywhere, you know, and, you know, another thing that really came out that was great about the urban area is the idea that, you know, design, whether it be in, in the public sphere or graphic design or communications, is is important for good government and important period.

And, you know, the, the, you know, one of the, the, the things that are coming up this this year, it's the 50th anniversary of the, city of Rochester.

Mark that the flower that we see on everything and that was that directly came out of the urban area.

There was a, a symposium that year was before my time.

But, that, that, that got the ball rolling, that the city and the community could really use, you know, an identity system so that, you know, you know, the city could better communicate with its constituents, in a clear, concise manner.

So, you know, there are good there are a lot of good things that came out of it, lasting things that came out of the urban area.

And I like to think about those things as well.

And, Susan, one of the themes, the to pray, especially in 1970 with the urban area creation had, was that people can be decision makers in their community.

They don't just have to be to Bill's point, sort of guided by dictates from elites who are outside of their influence.

And that's kind of what you do, right?

I mean, like with with hinge neighbors, you guys got your hands on a lot of a lot of we do, we do.

And probably people think where I was tending to build, but, that's we're known as like they see us coming and maybe they want to have, you know, get away from example.

You really good trouble.

We, we really think that, my grandfather used to say instead of worrying about something, do something.

So I think that's sort of where, Sean Dunwoody, my partner, has really we've really learned from each other and an enormous amount of time through time we spent sharing our backgrounds and realizing that he said to me, you know, this inner loop that's coming going to be destroyed.

We are going to fill it in, and we need to make sure that our neighbors are involved, and we look like the neighborhoods adjacent to the inner Loop north.

And with that, we've had a lot of fun and a lot of, at times of what are we going to do with this?

And we've gotten a lot of people to come to the table, be invited to the table, and have trying to do something different than what was done the first time the inner loop was filled in on the east side.

Can I also ask you just briefly before I turn back to Liz, because Liz's time is short here, but it was boy oh boy, what is time anymore?

Might have been a couple of years ago when we were talking about the Inner Loop North and the way that some neighbors were concerned about reconnecting parts of the city and what effectively happened when you build this moat, and what you separate and what you separate yourself from.

And what I mean more bluntly is white neighbors who have to confront the fact that this kind of change may diversify their neighborhoods.

Yes.

And your in my first conversation with you, you just struck me as someone who was not the typical I know, not saying that every white neighbor in Rochester doesn't want diversified neighborhoods or people would move away, but white flight, of course, was very real across this country.

It was real in our communities.

We have I mean, just in in his team, just among many others, have done the work showing us everything from deeds, property, deeds, the rules that suburbs had these days.

I mean, what are you working on that allows for, I think, in an embrace?

It was what it seemed to me, an embrace that change is coming and we're not going to run from it.

Right?

And we're not going to flee to the suburbs.

Right?

We're going to work together.

What's what is 2026?

What's happening now in your neighborhood?

Well, there's still a lot of discussion.

Are we going to have enough money to fill in the inner loop.

And we we we know we have $100 million coming from the state.

And whether that's matched by federal money is what isn't being discussed everywhere.

Yeah.

But we feel that we just keep going because the discussions are I've been invited to places I never thought I would be invited.

I walk around Weld Street and people look at you and say, why are you walking around Weld Street?

Don't you know that reputation?

I haven't had that because I've had.

Sean introduced me to a lot of the guys that are there that are hanging around, and I go there all the time and walk around by myself.

I'm a I'm a 79 year old white woman from a privileged background.

There are many ways, and I think that just because we we need to make those, I have friends now that I would never think I would have a friend when I was a farm kid, upstate New York, and I think one of the things that you have to be as a creative and Sean, as a creative, is to be curious and curious about what's going on.

I'm curious about Simeon.

That's how I met Simeon.

I'm curious, like, who are you?

Why are you?

And that's what I get.

Reciprocity.

When I'm out in the neighborhood and when we bring people together to do something like if the the city does a lot of community community advisory groups, and we try to make sure that they're not just talking to agencies and others and people here who know something, but the people who actually are living in the in the neighborhoods and have had a direct experience of being so-called mistreated or not at the table.

So we're trying to make sure that people at the table are doing something, or at least we're thinking something in a parallel fashion.

And the East Side fulfillment, there wasn't community involvement to the extent of neighborhoods really being talked about, really.

And so it was a fact.

They are they're the reason why it's fast tracked.

So we are going to fill it in.

They filled it in.

And then we decided how we were going to talk about filling in the eastern third and I apologize.

Thank you.

Yeah.

And then and saying, well, what's going to be built here?

And the city just sort of like said, here's what's going to be determined and what we're going to build because we needed housing.

No, I'm not following that principle.

It was something that we need housing.

So when Sean and I became involved and we asked people what could we do?

And they said, get more people involved.

And that's what we've been doing and that's been very positive.

Have we have our ups and downs and have I had my arguments with, who's being included or not included?

Yes.

Have we decided and bringing two neighborhoods together to talk more?

Yes.

We had an event in 2024 on the bridge of the South Street Bridge that brought people together.

One of my white neighbors said that was the best event I've ever been to, and it was small.

It wasn't huge, but it brought two neighbors together.

Realizing that they're going to be a community in the future, we're going to need to get to know each other and go forward and solve problems together.

Liz, before I let you go here, you know, you're hearing Suzanne's story as a citizen getting involved, you know, not not an elite, not an elected, a citizen.

But there's a lot of American citizens right now who don't have a high regard for institutions.

And that's a whole other show about why some of that's by design from the people in power.

Right now.

But regardless of the reason, trust in institutions is not high.

Is it hard to get people to come out to events like you're putting together with a symposium?

Are you worried about that?

Liz I'm always worried about that.

I mean, I think there's a couple different reasons why I'm worried.

I mean, I think, you know, it's cold.

No one wants to go out.

Yeah, it's a real big thing.

Luckily, the snow storm happened last week.

It's just, I think in general, I've done a lot of programing and it's, it's, it's hit or miss.

So it's great to have be able to be on the air today to try to, promote it and get people to go because I think it's going to be a very impressive event.

I think it could really be, we need a lot of we need community right now.

I have a really great bumper sticker I got from somewhere that said, community, where is a it says community is a form of resistance.

And I think, we need we need more and more community right now and we need to come together.

And I think forums like this will allow for us to meet each other, discuss, and then really, bring more hope to the situation and learn more about what people are doing, what they have done, get inspired from one another, network.

Liz, call, I'm going to let you go just because I know you're going back to work and you are very generous to be able to share some minutes with us.

But thank you for making that time.

And I know you're looking forward to the weekend.

Thanks for coming on the program today.

Thank you so much, everybody.

Liz Call is a former university archivist at RIT and current head of the Family Special Collections Library at Penn State University, and one of the organizers of the symposium that we're talking about on Friday and Saturday.

So, you know, I mean, a big theme of the conversations you and I have had over the years is just being direct about accountability, diagnosing problems directly, not being afraid of of calling it, and then asking the people with the power to not put all the pressure on the people who are powerless to change, leading the change.

So I'm looking at I'm listening to Suzanne story, but I'm also seeing that Rochester and frankly, the northeast of this country has some school districts that are counties in the northeast, in this country might be more divided and segregated by race than they were generations ago.

Neighborhoods might be more segregated and divided than generations ago.

I'm always moved listening to Suzanne story, but it's not necessarily the norm.

And I, in the light of Jean, do praise work?

How much optimism or despair do you have about the way we continue to separate ourselves and as a society?

Well, I mean, it's an interesting question.

It's always, you know, it feels, demoralizing when you see the kind of, you know, political strife that certainly has feels definitional for, for this moment that we're that we're in right now.

We've also talked a lot about, you know, kind of historicity in this idea that there's sometimes narrative and, frankly, myth that kind of persists about, our storied past.

And then there's an actual history, that, that, that, is usually much more a gray area, a little bit more challenging, a bit more problematic.

What we do know is that for all of the strife and the challenges that we're experiencing now, if we think back to the early part of the 20th century, it was a time when political violence was at an all time high in this country.

It was certainly a time of of of, of political strife and economic strife.

Yet what produced out of that era was what many of us know as the Progressive ERA, kind of small p where community really comes together.

There's a book by, Bob, Putnam, where he describes what he calls the I, we, I curve that in the early part of the 20th century, we see this kind of trenching of, cultural sentiment of economic, outcomes that look like people coming together.

And it looks like it's based on, the idea of community fermenting as opposed to the sense of individualism that feels like, we're braced and gripped with, in the moment that we're in now.

It was also a time for big ideas.

And I think one of the things I appreciate about Jean was that he was willing to advance big ideas, to try new formulations, to try new things.

We tend to think of innovation in technological terms.

But guess what?

Social innovation is something that's very real.

And we have a very storied and deep tradition in social innovation in this community.

I think the other thing, and I think, Justin rightfully points out that, this has not been for lack of trying.

I think you watch a film like think about it and you hear not just, the, city manager and county manager and their equivalent would be the executive and mayor at the time.

In this video, not just the head of, you know, the second largest corporation in the community at the time.

And Xerox, but the town supervisors in this film from, Pittsford, from gates, the superintendent of schools from Greece, who are all saying this is a real challenge, this housing crisis that we're up against and we need to do something.

And again, this was happening when this is 1968, 1968, we have to take one of two tacks.

Either all of these people in this film were lying, right.

Which is possible or disingenuous or disingenuous.

Right.

Or there was an awareness that these were issues and challenges and people were trying things, but those things just weren't making the kind of headway and progress that they needed to make.

That's the opportunity, I think Justin presents us to learn from the past what was tried that worked, and what didn't work in the urban areas case, Jean and I talked about what happened in 1984 that ended the urban area.

Part of it was a plan for sustainability, for funding, for being able to resource that effort.

And so what can we learn?

Is it time for us to give another go at that kind of structure, but to resource it right this time?

That's an option for us.

So those are the kinds of things that I think, you know, can be our definition for this moment.

Last thing I want to say about this is so much of our history has also been steeped in inertia.

Things can't change.

You know, we're kind of stuck with, you know, kind of what we have.

The moment that we're in now has obliterated inertia.

And I mean, it's an opportunity that.

Right, right.

There's a whole interesting.

Right.

And so because of that, those of us that have an eye towards human dignity, that believe that the best is still ahead of us, now's the time to take action.

And I think to do something in a moment where there's so much tumult, we can help to define what our future is going to look like.

Certainly in this community that's so interesting and I would say listening to Simeon's point, Justin, that we sometimes have these rose colored glasses on the past.

And this is not, by the way, just a veiled comment about Make America Great Again.

It is how we talk about our past, our our shared past as a country, what it meant to be prosperous, what we imagined life was like for our parents or grandparents.

And I can't tell you how many people who, after your book came out, I would talk to people because I live up in Charlotte.

I'm up and down Lake Avenue every day, and I hear people like, oh yeah, that whole thing about, you know, people hiding in the cemeteries, throwing rocks at the busses that can't that could not have been real.

You know, they don't want to believe it.

They don't want to believe that when we integrated schools or attempted to integrate schools, the black kids right on the bus had stones thrown at them from people hiding behind walls at the biggest cemeteries in the city to try to dissuade them from going to school.

And I just bring this up because how do we kind of contextualize history appropriately and not get in that rose colored glasses, but be willing to engage that says, okay, if it happened, it happened like I, I wasn't alive in the 1960s in the early 70s.

But I'm part of this community.

We're all responsible for where we are now, as opposed to, wow, you know, I don't want to believe that.

I don't want to.

I want to preserve this idea of the greatness of the past.

Yeah, in a lot of it is the power of narrative.

There is so powerful.

I think, I mean, forget people not having the proper understanding of why school or any other kind of desegregation failed in Rochester.

People don't realize that it did fail.

People say, oh, Brown versus board that fix.

That's exactly.

Yeah.

I think that this point about inertia and about feeling like we're stuck with what we have that really connects directly to this idea that we have agency in our time.

And like, as we think about Simeon mentioned Bob Putnam and he wrote an incredible book called Our Kids, where he says that part of the shift was that when the majority of the community felt bound together by various institutions, including living within the same municipality, including social organizations of different kinds, they they were responsible to each other in ways that we don't feel like anymore.

In ways that a person who lives in the suburbs doesn't feel responsible for.

People in the city or other suburbs, for that matter.

But that's all created and contained by the structures that we either, make ourselves or assent to as citizens as we go along.

So, for example, coming back to housing, one of the main reasons that we don't have enough housing of the sort that people need is that a lot of the communities in our area and elsewhere in the United States have laws that say, you can't build that kind of housing, right.

And laws that can be daunting.

I mean, that's like that's on the books, that's how it is.

But that's also our duty all along as we go is to change laws that we don't like, to use our, our historical basis and our imagination and our values to create the kind of communities that we want.

That's something that we've seen.

So this, this workshop that we'll be running Saturday, and I really hope people will be able to come up for it.

We've run it a bunch of times all throughout the area, in the city, in the county.

We've done a lot with the Greater Rochester Association of Realtors.

We do it in collaboration with with partners, Empire Justice Center, our AP Reconnect Rochester and and that's our whole thing is here's here's what happened, here's what worked what what didn't.

And then how can we be inspired by that, for better or for worse?

And know I can say anecdotally that, it has been empowering for people who have done it, and, and that's all that we can ever ask for is to to see ourselves as empowered and having agency and following our own principles for the kind of place that we want to live.

This is going to be a separate conversation soon because I do want Justin, really, the whole team with our local history, to come back on connections and tell some of these stories, because I think there is a false binary about the American past, which is that either you whitewash it, you tell the story that everything was great and perfect, and that we are not guilty of any sin or you.

You self-flagellating to the point of self-loathing because of all the sins of the past.

And there's no in between.

And the in-between is a has to be grappling with what did happen, and then a question of why it happened and what it means for us today.

It doesn't have to be the two polarities.

And the other binary is that when we go back into either the good old days or the bad old days, there were heroes and villains.

And so Joe Wilson is a great example.

He often gets held up as kind of the counterpoint to Kodak, and he actually was engaged in the community and trying to do the right thing.

And he certainly was in 1968.

It's also the case that he sat on the boards of some of the banks that weren't giving out loans earlier than that.

So he's a complicated person, just like everybody else's.

And just like we don't get to pick our families all the more so we don't get to pick our ancestors.

So it's not a question of of dividing people up into winners and losers.

It's a question of understanding how they're acting in their time, what their motivations were, and then doing the best that we can.

Today.

I'm I'm far afield, but that's why we're here.

We're having these powerful conversations.

And when we come back, I'm going to ask Bill and Suzanne and Justin and Simeon, who's given the keynote, to kind of just kind of zero in on some of what they're going to be talking about this coming weekend.

So we get kind of focused again on what's coming up for the event called Engaging Rochester, a symposium in honor of Jean Duprey.

If you don't know the name Jean to pray, I don't feel bad about that.

I mean, a lot of people, as time goes on, we lose a little bit of, the legendary folks.

And I don't want to over elevate Jean, but he really is a kind of a legendary name locally that I wish I would have had a chance to spend some time with.

He passed away a year ago.

He was very, very big on in the 60s into the 70s in Rochester and pulling community members together, solutions oriented work, not sloganeering, but but real work and in honor of Jean, that kind of work is is happening this weekend and beyond.

So let's take this break.

We'll come right back and talk more about what's coming up this weekend.

I'm Evan Dawson.

Thursday on the next connections, we're joined by state Assembly member Sarah Clarke.

She's talking about the governor's proposed budget and the priorities she wants to see in Albany this year.

When we talk to our elected leaders on this program, it's your chance to ask questions about your taxes, about the economy, about school funding, about child care and more.

Assembly Member Sarah Clarke Thursday on connections.

Support for your public radio station comes from our members and from Bob Johnson, Auto Group.

Proud supporter of connections with Evan Dawson, believing in informed public makes for a stronger community.

Bob Johnson Auto group.com.

This is connections.

I'm Evan Dawson producer Meghan Mack sent me some some numbers on how we think of our neighbors that I think is as we continue this conversation, this is good for us to kind of stop and think about, because one thing that we talk about a lot is how we have not only been segregated by race economics, but also by ideology.

I mean, back when Jimmy Carter was elected president, that's 50 years ago, only about a quarter or less of Americans lived in landslide counties that were presidential election counties with a 20 point or bigger gap.

And now that's almost flipped on its head.

It's in the mid 60s that we 60% of us live in landslide counties, which means like, you don't have a ton of neighbors who think differently or vote differently.

And so the good part for me is at least as much as we think suspiciously, if people who vote differently in your neighborhood, hopefully at least you love your neighbors, well, Pugh is says yes, but here's some data from Pew.

So back, about a decade ago, 31% of Americans said they knew all or most of their neighbors.

52% said they trusted all or most of their neighbors.

Today, 26% say they know all or most of their neighbors.

That number is going down, and only 44% of American adults say they trust all or most of their neighbors in their own neighborhood.

So less than half now, first time ever.

It's not great.

It's not great.

And, reconnecting in physical spaces, reconnecting to talk, reconnecting, talk about solutions in your community can only help.

So the event that's coming up this weekend has a number, of, different sort of smaller events and panels and discussions.

Bill swap curse, creative director for the city of Rochester.

And, I want you to talk a little bit about the Saturday session.

It's called design for Greater Rochester Past, Present and Future.

And our first half hour.

You said the design really does matter in ways that will affect people in tangible ways.

So tell me a little bit about what you're going to talk about this weekend.

And I want to hear from you about when design is right, what that looks like and when it's wrong, what that looks like.

Okay.

So, you know, I, I didn't know Jean.

Well, I might have introduced I might have, interviewed him like maybe once or twice, but, you know, one thing that a lot of people don't know is he started out as a graphic designer.

That was that was his original, bailiwick there.

And it was something that ran through a lot of the things that that he was, he was going for with the urban area.

And, I, you know, you you, you were talking about how, you know, fragmented people are in their opinions and, and where they get their information and that, that that's a tough one.

And one of the best things that we can do is make sure that when, you know, in my case, a municipality or if you are the head of your neighborhood association, you're very clear what it is that you're trying to say, and you're, you're, you're you're, you know, not mucking it up with, information that not might not be important.

And then that's one of the things that, that, that Jean really brought home in the whole, the whole, design symposium that came out of the urban area.

I'm talking about clear communication.

You know, the for before the urban areas happened, you know, I'll just talk about the city because I know most about, the city didn't really have a communication strategy at all.

You know, believe it or not, the city, you know, talked with its constituents with nothing more than, you know, basically a classified ad in the back of the the Democrat and Chronicle that nobody would have seen.

You know, there wasn't a real conscientious effort to, you know, really market to the people to to really get people to understand what the programs are about, what you're entitled to and the like.

And, and that's where really we're going to be talking about on Saturday, as far as I'm concerned, is just the importance of good, solid communication strategies and how that how the urban area, really set Rochester as to its to be really, a poster child of how that can work.

One of the other things we'll be talking about, as I alluded to it before, was the, 50th anniversary of the city flower Mark that everybody, anybody who's lived long enough in Rochester can recognize, you know, Rochester is unique in having a mark like that.

You will not go anywhere else in the United States and see something that has had that kind of longevity and not and not just longevity, but the ability to bring community together.

You see that, Mark?

And, you know, Sean Dunwoody uses in his artwork.

You see it, people are tattooing it on their their arms, you know, talking about some, you know, embracing something and putting it on your body.

That's something.

And it's it's something that is, is very unique to Rochester and it's something that came out of that, you know, traditional corporate, you know, signature but transcended that to become, you know, owned by the community in a way, you know, and embraced by the community is really, you know, brought us together a literal symbol of community that is unique to us.

So the bill, the panel, the bill is on on Saturday, it's called design for a Greater Rochester Past, present and Future.

There's another Saturday session called Centering Citizens, Democratizing City Planning.

And Suzanne's going to be part of that.

What do you hope that comes out of that?

Well, I want people to say, if it's not us, who then is going to do this?

I think that's been our mantra.

And with hinge, one of the things is we've two things we have going on alleyway activation of an alley.

And from that, the city decided to have a look at all of their alleys and say, what are they?

How are they serving our community, and what do we need to refresh them and get them better?

The other thing is that we decided we would, put a proposal in for 125 Charlotte Street, and say, here's what we think should go there.

We are going to say you two are doing that and the question is, if not us, who is going to do that?

And the point is that they're, we're trying to do an introduce a concept if we get it, look, a great if we don't, we still have opened up people's eyes to a different kind of design, which means we're talking townhomes within our auxiliary dwelling unit in the in the first floor.

That would allow people who, to who owns the these homes three stories top two floors could be for an individual.

They would own the bottom floor.

They can rent it out.

Who can they rent it out to?

People who have a need of having access.

And we have their design totally for, for people who need access and who are accessibility.

So we're just trying to provoke good design, good discussion and that type of thing.

And I, I think to many people my, my age, and my, my, my skin color are just not involved as much as they can.

They should be so angry now.

I'm so angry.

Every time I get up in the morning.

What am I going to?

What?

How am I going to recenter myself today?

This is not a time to be quiet.

This is not a time to say we can't do anything about it.

This is our time that we need to be reaching out to people and saying, what am I going to do?

Not what is Simeon going to do tomorrow?

What is just and doing?

What is Bill doing?

What are you doing?

Evan?

It's really about I have to do this.

And who am I going to connect?

I came from the quality background and it was always heard.

What's.

What's the problem?

What is who does it affect and how am I going to connect with them.

That's something that we've tried to do is reach out and say, that person ought to be involved in here.

They ought to be on this committee, that type of thing.

That's our responsibility as citizens.

Two questions.

What makes you most angry these days?

Well, the administration obviously.

I mean, that's one.

But I also think it's apathy.

Apathy is the destruction of our community.

What can I do about it?

Let them do it in the city.

That's what they're paid for.

But that's baloney, in my opinion.

And we as representatives are as citizens, citizens, we've always say the American has citizens.

We can vote.

We can do this thing.

Well, get up off your touch and do something about it.

That's what we need to be doing.

I'm sorry if I'm profanity.

No, no.

That's okay.

But if I'm talking about doing something, you talk about alleyways y alleyways.

How did that, we we we looked at the alleyway that is near the area that we're looking that we work in.

And the alleyway, it was unsafe.

It was a dumping ground for people from the suburbs to dump stuff in the alleyway, because that's where they could do it.

That was grandmother's attic.

They didn't know what to do with it.

So they went down an alleyway in the city and threw it out.

We have a lot.

There's a lot of garbage oil from restaurants and things like that that just shouldn't be there, tires, all of that.

So we cleaned it up and we said, if we can clean this up, maybe the city can do it all together.

So we there isn't.

Or that was a actually a group that got together.

Commissioner it's called, mobility.

It's called the alleyway activation.

And it was it's not finished.

But the whole idea was maybe we should look at these alleys and say, what good could they do?

Are they things we should close or should we revive them?

And Europe, they've revived them and they're the place to live.

And people we talked to, they said, why do you call it an alley?

As it's a terrible connotation.

Well, let's call it we call it the Market View Mews because it has a it's a nice nickname.

It doesn't have that unsafe, feeling.

Right.

Thank you.

Interesting.

Simeon Bannister's delivering the keynote for the symposium on Friday night.

You talked a little about that.

But, you know, in if if I'm coming out on Friday, I'm going to walk out of your keynote feeling like what?

Ready to run to a wall?

Hopefully.

On behalf of justice and making this community as vibrant and as strong, as I believe it can be a personal aspiration that I've had for our community, really is to be a national model for social innovation.

And I think that that's very much, within our grasp, in part because of the history of this community.

When I think about, the tradition that I want to live in, it's it's in the tradition of everybody from, Thomas Johnson, former mayor of Cleveland, to Frances Perkins to Bayard Rustin and Ella Baker and Huey Newton, folks that were embracing creative maladjustment as, as King described it, folks that were willing to say we can do better and not just say we can do better, but then get about the work of doing better.

We have a level of sophistication that we can bring to our work today.

That was not possible even when, Gene was, was creating the urban area.

And so with the resources that we have today, imagine what more is possible.

One of the things that is very frustrating, I think, about this administration, but is also in some sense a bit of a lesson is the audacity, that these folks, bring to action that they are just doing stuff, in my opinion, crazy stuff.

But they are doing stuff.

They are doing stuff.

In many instances, those of us, again, that want to stand on the side of justice and equity have found ourselves sitting on our hands, and not taking action, not doing, not creating, not building, not innovating.

And to me, this moment calls for that, in a way that, that, in many ways moments before, have it.

And so I think Suzanne is right that if our focus is on complaint, passing blame, judgment, a sense of resignation, a sense of powerlessness, a sense of lost agency, if that's where our focus is, then we can expect to get the same thing that we've been getting for a long time.

But if our focus is on, how we activate one another.

Right.

If our focus is on a sense that we are creating our future, not only for ourselves, but for our children and their children, and that we've got something to fight for, that we've got a stake in this, but that we have the possibilities here of doing something that could be beautiful.

I think if we embrace that sensibility.

And I think that's what Gene in many ways stood for, even back in 1970 when he was creating urban areas.

And the audacity to do and to try new things that would try to make life better for folks.

I got one little curveball for you, but I don't want to premise this as saying, when we talk about people have children versus people, don't people if you don't have kids, then you can't care as much about the future.

I reject I reject that.

I'm simply saying that my experience is having kids is feeling an almost urgent desperation to not get to a point where you go, well, things are gone a certain way, but I'm going to be gone because they're going to be here.

And I feel that urgency.

When you think about your kids, what scares you the most?

Well, I mean, I will can just confess, that on the night of, November fifth, 2024, I found myself, you know, demoralized like so many others, because I thought about the prospects for my two children.

Both of my kids, but especially my daughter.

When I just watched, the glass ceiling look like it was being reinforced.

That that was certainly, Yeah, I wept.

And then I came across a quote, that was actually from, from a talk that Doctor King, never gave, actually.

But, but it written where he says that the suffer for a righteous cause is to live into the full measure of our humanity.

And I realized that I was certainly decrying the loss of some comfort, but that our full humanity was requiring us to step up and to take action and to get to, and to get to the work of, of this community.

I had certainly, been, you know, working before.

But if ever there was a clarion call that it was time to redouble our efforts, then that certainly was one of them.

If we have a future that we want to create, you know, and I just happen to believe that, the world, can be better as a result of something that can happen in Ludlow, Rochester, New York.

And I'm audacious enough to think that we can be the seed that gets planted, that blooms into something that, shapes, shifts and changes the trajectory of this country.

And our society is on Tinder last couple of minutes, Justin Murphy is going to be part of a Saturday afternoon workshop called Build a Better Rochester, advocating for Inclusive housing.

We've been talking about housing, but just in in brief here, can you define inclusive housing?

We think about inclusive housing kind of in part we we think of it as attainable housing.

It's essentially everything other than a big old house on a big, old lot.

And there's a million ways you can define it.

Communities should have their own voice in defining what that means.

But housing that, that includes people who need housing, which is not just the desperately poor, which is not just minorities.

Everybody these days needs housing.

And if I can just very briefly, I want to tie in the the design piece with kind of the community building piece.

Part of the reason why I think it's hard to know and trust your neighbors is that, your front door and their front door are a quarter mile away.

And when we think way when we think about the good old days, so to speak, in the 50s, part of what we have in mind with that is these physically concentrated neighborhoods, in part of solving the housing crisis, will be, in some measure, going back to something that looks like that people live in and duplexes and triplexes and houses on small lots.

And when you do that, it's easier for a business sustain itself on the corner, it's easier to put in a bike lane.

And those are all the ways that, in the spirit of Gene, to pray, we connect with our neighbors.

We talk about stuff, we find ways to escape apathy and move toward action.

Well, for listeners who knew and loved Jean to pray, I hope this hour has been a testament to the work that he did in his life, and in his career passed away just about a year ago.

But the event that is coming up this weekend, we're going to have information in our show notes so you can register, you can attend.

They would love to see you there.

Engaging Rochester a symposium in honor of Jean to pray.

And it's two days coming up here Friday, Saturday that again, all the information is going to be on our website.

So plenty of time for you to get involved and a lot of different aspects of discussion, learning, workshopping, etc.

thanks to Liz Call, one of the organizers who was with us earlier this hour and I'll go around the table.

Justin Murphy, Research and Communications Coordinator for our local history.

Thank you for making time for the program.

Nice to see you.

My pleasure.

Bill Shropshire, creative director for the City of Rochester.

Nice to see you in studio.

Thanks for being here.

Thanks, Evan.

Across the table Suzanne Mayor, co-founder of Hinge Neighbors.

Nice to see you.

Thank you.

Thank you very much for being here.

And Simeon Bannister, president CEO of the Rochester Area Community Foundation, giving the keynote on Friday.

Thank you for being here.

Good to be with you from all of us, a connection.

Thanks for listening.

Thanks for watching on our various platforms.

We are back with you tomorrow on member supported public media.

And.

Our.

This program is a production of Sky Public Radio.

The views expressed do not necessarily represent those of this station, IT staff, management or underwriters.

The broadcast is meant for the private use of our audience.

Any rebroadcast or use in another medium without expressed written consent of Sky is strictly prohibited.

Connections with Evan Dawson is available as a podcast.

Just click on the connections link at WXXI news.

Org.