Rebecca Kemble was one of 14 alders who voted to a delay a vote on a State Street recovery proposal at the July 21 council meeting.
The arguments made by Dave Cieslewicz in his July 27 post, “The city council makes everything worse,” exemplify why Madison and Dane County have some of the worst quality of life indicators for Black people in the country. Simply put, people with decision-making power have focused a disproportionate amount of attention and resources on the interests of property owners — especially downtown — at the expense of other pressing social and economic needs of people in our community.
The cumulative effects of thousands of local government decisions spanning decades have magnified the systemic racism we now live with in Madison. Cieslewicz is just one in a long line of mayors who championed the investment of an inordinate amount of public resources into the downtown area while predominantly Black and brown neighborhoods languished from neglect.
In June, the “Save State Street” group penned an anonymous 19-point letter that demanded immediate public action and investment to benefit landlords and business owners. In response, Madison’s Economic Development Director Matt Mikolajewski noted that the downtown has historically received a lot of city support: “More efforts are focused on the broader downtown than any other neighborhood in our city," he wrote in a June 23 letter. "Year after year, more city staff time and resources from departments throughout city government are devoted to State Street than any other commercial corridor.”
There is a shameful history of racial segregation and exclusion in our city, especially downtown. Common Wealth Development, Inc. Executive Director Justice Castañeda has studied the history of gentrification in this city. In a July letter summarizing his research, Castañeda writes “the history of Madison’s downtown is one of exclusion, corruption and of boosterism and land-grabbing.”
“The development of the downtown neighborhoods was done with deliberate exclusion of ownership and investment opportunities for Black families and families of color,” writes Castañeda. “[It] was concurrent with the lack of investment and peripheralization of the neighborhoods that housed significant Black populations and other residents of color."
Given this context, I stand by the comments I made at the Common Council’s July 21 meeting singled out by Cieslewicz. They were uttered in response to a member of the public who referred to the Neighborhood Indicators Project, which identifies downtown neighborhoods as among the whitest in the city, and a business district that serves mostly white clientele. I erred in leaving off “among” in my comments, but not in my general point.
Cieslewicz also fails to mention how the city has already prioritized downtown business interests during this time of global pandemic and social unrest. In the first Emergency Order issued by Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway in May, 16 of the 23 provisions provide monetary or regulatory relief directly to businesses. More orders easing restrictions on businesses, particularly downtown businesses, followed, as families face eviction and non-renewals of apartment leases, can’t afford childcare, are food and healthcare insecure, and are forced back to work on the frontlines.
Meanwhile, the Greater Madison Chamber of Commerce, Downtown Madison Inc. and other business advocacy groups played an integral role in shaping the Forward Dane plan to reopen the economy, according to the chamber’s president Zach Brandon.
“I don’t know that the public and the business community will really know the work that was done by these organizations — late night calls, weekend Zooms, lots of emails,” said Brandon at DMI’s What’s Up Downtown Breakfast May 28. “None of that would have been possible without the trust of Public Health [Madison and Dane County] and the mayor and the [Dane] County executive to share early documents, to share early thinking.”
Brandon revealed that he knew about the reopening order a week before it was formally announced. This at a time when county supervisors, city council members, the Board of Health for Madison and Dane County, and by extension the general public, were left completely out of the conversation.
This is another glaring example of institutional racism in action. Reopening risked — and now has actually resulted in — a resurgence of the virus. COVID-19 is disproportionately affecting poor, uninsured, low-wage workers who have no alternative but to go to risky jobs that make them vulnerable. According to data from Public Health Madison & Dane County, the virus is disproportionately affecting Black and Latinx people.
Because decision makers have not responded to chronic and acute crises that have devastated so many lives in our community, Black youth have taken to the streets. They are demanding that public institutions own up to the decades of institutional racism created by thousands and thousands of decisions such as the one in front of city alders regarding the State Street recovery initiative this month.
It's time for city government to take a radically different approach to public investments and public policy. We are forced to rethink all of our social and economic systems in light of COVID-19, including the “supremacy of downtown,” a notion pushed by Brandon at the What’s Up Downtown breakfast. Instead, we need to prioritize dealing with the root causes of the racial, social and economic divisions in our community. Funneling more public funds to private entities that already get the lion's share of public investment and services is not the answer and sends one more message to Black people in Madison that their concerns take a back seat to downtown business interests.
[Editor's note: This column was updated with the correct spelling of Common Wealth Development.]
Rebecca Kemble is an alder for Madison’s north side, including the Cherokee Park, Kennedy Heights, Lake View Hill, Lerdahl Park, Mendota Hills, Nobel Park, North Lake Mendota, Parkcrest, Ridgecrest, Sherman Village, Trinity Park, Vera Court, and Whitetail Ridge neighborhoods.
