A Roadmap to Winning the South

[Tanuki]

https://www.facingsouth.org/2019/09/black-southern-mayors-issue-endorsement-roadmap-presidential-hopefuls

"Some of the South’s most prominent Black mayors, in four states with the earliest and most competitive primaries, are telling presidential candidates seeking endorsements that they'll first have to show how they plan to invest in their communities.

The mayors of Birmingham, Alabama; Columbia, South Carolina; Jackson, Mississippi; and New Orleans have released "A Roadmap to Winning the South," a detailed list of policies that they say are needed for their communities to thrive. And presidential candidates will have to embrace them if they want the mayors' help in winning over their cities' combined 1.7 million residents, including more than 345,000 Democratic voters, and the 196 Democratic delegates from the states the cities serve.
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The policies the mayors are promoting aim to holistically address the disinvestment and other structural problems major Southern cities have faced for decades. With the region's Republican-dominated state governments often loathe to invest in Democratic-controlled cities and the social safety net, local governments must increasingly step in to fill the gaps. The mayors are asking candidates to commit to increasing resources on more than a dozen policy fronts.

Their most specific recommendations relate to affordable housing. The mayors want increased funding for five federal programs that address urgent housing needs: McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Grants, the primary source of federal funding for fighting homelessness; Section 8 Housing Choice Vouchers, which help low-income families pay for private-market housing; the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, a tax incentive program HUD calls “the most important resource for creating affordable housing in the United States today”; the National Housing Trust Fund, a federal block grant that creates and funds affordable housing for extremely low-income people; and the Capital Magnet Fund, which directs grants to community development financial institutions and nonprofit housing organizations.
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In addition, the mayors are asking for commitments to expand investments in infrastructure and disaster resilience, to address the racial wealth and opportunity gap, and to reform the criminal justice system. The roadmap also offers a strong health equity agenda. Besides requesting a plan for comprehensive and affordable health care, the mayors want presidential candidates to commit to funding federal programs that preserve environmental quality, including the Superfund and Brownfields programs that have cleaned up contaminated urban sites. The agenda recognizes how environmental quality is inextricably linked to public health in the South, where there is a long history of environmental racism."...(more)