A hallway in one of the buildings at the Nob Hill Apartments. Credit: Michelle Gabel | Central Current

The Community Ambassador program, a partnership between the city of Syracuse and the Center for Justice Innovation, has helped more than a thousand tenants remain in safe and stable housing during the past five years, city and program officials say. 

Now it faces an uncertain future.

The Common Council is set to vote Tuesday on a measure to appropriate $200,000 already allocated in the city budget to fund the program for the next year. That is about half of the program’s typical yearly operating budget.

City officials and housing advocates say the ambassador program has been key in helping the city’s Division of Code Enforcement inspect properties and help homeowners avoid tax foreclosure. But some councilors say they don’t have a good grasp of how effective the program has been. 

The program, managed by CJI, appoints one community leader per quadrant of the city — the north, south, west and east sides — who can help residents access tools like code enforcement inspections to secure housing repairs. Ambassadors also help homeowners stay current on delinquent tax payments. 

“We show up for them when they are in crisis, when they feel tired or frustrated, and we make

them feel heard,” said Leah Russell, CJI’s coordinator of community development and the overseer of the ambassadors program.

In addition to facing scrutiny from councilors, the program has also lost about half of its funding as the American Rescue Plan Act expires.

Uncertainty about the future of the program, which has been running for the past five years, comes at a time of crisis in the city’s housing market. 

Rent in Syracuse is among the fastest rising in the nation year to year, the number of unhoused people is at an all-time high, the supply of housing available shows visible signs of distress, and some of the tools the city has to bring landlords to housing code compliance are not yet working as intended. 

Councilor Patrona Jones-Rowser,who chairs the council’s committee on neighborhood preservation, homeless and housing vulnerable, said she will vote in favor of appropriating the funds found in the budget to pay for another year of the ambassadors program. 

Jones-Rowser, however, noted that she does not know what the program’s outcomes have been. She also said the ambassadors are often reacting and aiding tenants living in homes known for being in disrepair, rather than finding tenants in homes and bringing them into the fold of the city’s solutions to tenants’ concerns.  

“There’s a greater concern that a lot of the work has been reactionary versus being proactive,” the councilor said. “Where we think that we should be seeing some of the ambassadors at, some of us aren’t seeing them, so we’re just not sure how active they are in these communities.”

Ambassadors do help tenants in high profile situations address concerns, Jones-Rowser said. 

“That’s what we don’t want,” she said.  “We want them to be proactive instead of reactive.”

Councilor Jimmy Monto said the council would like to see more data on how the program helps tenants. Monto added he will vote Tuesday in favor of entering an agreement with CJI to administer the program for another year. 

“I’m not sure how many people that are actually in the most need are getting reached,” he said. 

Russsell and a city official who helped create the program disagree. They say the ambassadors’ work is both proactive and reactive. 

Russell said ambassadors regularly conduct proactive outreach to community members throughout the year. They knock on doors, attend community events and tenant meetings, and field calls from people in crisis.

“We see there being value in having both resources available to add capacity that we’re just not in a good position to do ourselves,” said Michelle Sczpanski, the city’s deputy commissioner of Neighborhood and Business Development who helped start the program in 2020. 

For Sczpanski, councilors’ concerns come down to a matter of time and resources. She believes the ambassadors’ work is mostly proactive but that their work helping homeowners catch up on their tax payments has also lessened their capacity to proactively identify the housing issues of Syracuse tenants.

Sczpanski said the community ambassadors primarily perform a vital task: They act as liaisons among three parties, who she said don’t trust each other, to help tenants secure repairs for their home and avoid eviction.

“There’s a significant degree of mistrust in all directions between tenants, their landlords and the city,” she said. “Having the ambassadors in place can serve as a bridge to help people make sure they are aware of their rights and responsibilities.”

One of the most useful functions of the program is helping code inspectors perform interior inspections. Code violations cited for issues inside homes often stay open the longest and represent major health hazards, Sczpanski said.

In cases of interior code violations where community ambassadors are involved, violations are open on average for about half a year, Sczpanski said. Interior code violations typically stay open for a year, she said. 

Ambassador involvement in tenant cases where “major life safety” code violations are present in the home are addressed by landlords within 90 days about 50% of the time, a 10% increase from cases without the work of the community ambassadors, Sczpanski said.

“It maybe doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you’re the person that’s living in a house with mold, that is something that I think is important,” Sczpanski said.

Tenants who engaged with the program also reported being satisfied with the program, Russell said. About 46% of clients reported increased familiarity with available housing resources, she said. Just over 40% reported being more comfortable calling code enforcement.

Last year, at the request of councilors, ambassadors also started helping homeowners in the tax foreclosure process. The program, Russell said, helped the city recover around $190,000 in delinquent payments.

Housing advocates also said the program is helpful in easing the workload of helping tenants remain in their homes, which often falls to volunteer groups like the Syracuse Tenants Union.

“The program has been really successful at connecting tenants with code enforcement. But the city can’t just offload that responsibility onto volunteer groups like Syracuse Tenants Union — we’re not set up to handle dozens of tenant calls every week,” said Jocelyn Richards, an organizer with the Syracuse Tenants Union. “If they want this success to continue, they need to keep funding the community ambassador program.”

Sarhia Rahim, who has been a community ambassador since March, said councilors’ concerns came as a surprise to her.

“The data that we have goes five years back, so I’m not sure if there is a full understanding of what we do with newer council members,” she said. “… These concerns could have been brought up a lot earlier and we could have had a conversation about them and talked through them.”

Rahim, who works with tenants in the Southside, said the ambassadors’ outreach is key to helping tenants at a time when tenants are experiencing major issues of habitability in their homes.

“When you talk to people you hear about their fear of losing their current housing because they know there’s nothing out there in the city,” she said. 

Rahim said she worries for tenants if the program loses its funding or is eliminated outright.

“If it’s gone, I am very worried about what that would look like for future tenants who decide to move to Syracuse,” she said.

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Eddie Velazquez is a Syracuse journalist covering economic justice in the region. He is focused on stories about organized labor, and New York's housing and childhood lead poisoning crises. You can follow...