Mayors from across the U.S. are less than optimistic about what the future holds for their cities as the coronavirus pandemic rages across the country.
“One thing we’ve noticed having done the survey for seven years is you tend to see that mayors are fairly optimistic figures about the futures of their city,” Maxwell Palmer, assistant professor in the Department of Science at Boston University and one of the co-principal investigators of the research, told Yahoo Finance. “And we saw much higher levels of pessimism about how long it’s going to take their cities to recover about major funding issues. They’re going to see now and in the near future about health challenges that will persist for a long time.”
(Chart: Menino Survey of Mayors)
Yahoo Finance spoke with several mayors and mayors’ offices across the U.S. to further gauge sentiment.
“COVID-19 has placed a difficult burden on our business and non-profit community, and it has certainly caused even greater, disproportionate damage to the many communities that are already struggling from historic disinvestment,” a spokesperson from Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s office told Yahoo Finance. “We found that businesses in the South and West Sides [of Chicago] had less cash on hand when the pandemic started and were less likely to receive funding from the Paycheck Protection Program due to the lack of existing relationships with lenders.”
Only 13% of mayors surveyed felt that the small businesses in their cities received enough money from the CARES Act, and 46% said there was a “large gap” between what was needed and what was available.
“It really highlighted throughout the limitations they have as mayors, especially around funding,” Palmer said. “A lot of mayors said the CARES Act is not providing nearly enough funding to meet their city’s needs.” (On Sunday, President Trump signed a bill that included $900 billion of coronavirus stimulus, some of which would help small businesses and public services but did not include direct aid for states.)
The federal and county governments have ‘failed the citizens of Stockton’
With an estimated population of 312,697, Stockton, California didn’t qualify for federal funding through the CARES Act since its population is under half a million. However, Calif. Governor Gavin Newsom provided the city with funding from the state’s allocation.
And Stockton’s mayor, Michael Tubbs, was grateful for Newsom’s assistance but critical about the overall response.
“Our county, San Joaquin County, received $142 million and gave $0 to the city,” Tubbs told Yahoo Finance, “despite the fact that they haven’t been able to spend the $142 million. So I think both of those entities, the federal government [and] our county government failed the citizens of Stockton in that regard.”
A pedestrian wearing her facemask and holding a cup of coffee walks past a Closed sign hanging on the door of a small business in Los Angeles on November 30, 2020. (Photo by FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images)
Because of a lack of direct federal assistance, mayors have had to turn to local financial support and regulatory relief for their small businesses, which they indicated in the survey were some of the most effective ways to help protect these businesses.
Unfortunately, despite these efforts, only 36% of mayors expect the small businesses that closed because of the pandemic to be quickly replaced by new ones. According to Tubbs, the biggest financial impact as a result of the pandemic has been to Stockton’s small businesses because of the city’s bankruptcy and cuts they were forced to make since then.
“We actually have a very lean city staff operations, so the city government, as a governing body, is doing OK,” he said. “We actually have a $13 million surplus this year, but at the same time, we know that next year and the year after for our residents, our young people, our essential workers, and our small businesses that these are very perilous times for those who rent. The majority of our community rent. So for renters, we know it’s very, very perilous times.”
A mother and son walk through one of the neighborhoods of Stockton where participants in the city's universal basic income program live in Stockton, California on February 7, 2020. (Photo by NICK OTTO/AFP via Getty Images)
The mayors who participated in the survey varied on what they thought was the best approach for their constituents in the meantime. However, 93% of Democrats and half of Republicans did express support for eviction moratoriums, which was the most popular policy in the survey.
The office of Fargo, N.D. Mayor Tim Mahoney told Yahoo Finance that the mayor “would support an additional 3-6 month moratorium on evictions.”
Tubbs said he supports eviction moratoriums “unequivocally” and voiced support for direct cash payments to residents, noting that he helped found the group Mayors for a Guaranteed Income.
Mayors expressed the most support for residential eviction moratoriums. (Chart: Menino Survey of Mayors)
“Because we’re in a pandemic, there are huge financial and health implications of people being evicted,” Palmer said. “People losing their homes, losing a place where they can stay safely, where they can isolate or quarantine, huge health impacts. Certainly, because of the pandemic, we’d be worried about eviction, but also COVID is creating a new housing crisis on top of an existing housing crisis with increasing rents and prices to buy homes and a real housing shortage before COVID.”
Tubbs added that the trend is “getting worse now as people are losing their jobs and losing work and can’t afford to pay their rents and are losing their homes. So I think mayors are very focused on how we address both of these issues. Many of them talk about how we need larger structural changes to housing in general as well, but needing to make sure that we can address this housing crisis now because of the health and economic impacts.”
The U.S. topped 300,000 deaths. (Graphic: David Foster/Yahoo Finance)
Racial inequities
The survey also showed significant concern expressed for immigrants, Latino residents, and Black residents in their respective cities.
“We know that the Latino community makes up a large part of our community and also makes up a large part of essential workers,” Mayor Tubbs said. “So we've seen sort of COVID spread particularly around our Latino farm worker population.”
(Chart: Menino Survey of Mayors)
Because of that, he said, it’s important for leaders like himself to be “very deliberate” about making sure the community has the right information and the workers have PPE and anything else needed to be safe. But there are more racial inequities that this pandemic exposed for Tubbs.
“We were also seeing this in urban housing, and we know people of color are more likely to live multifamily in housing because of income disparities and things of that sort,” he said. “So trying to mitigate that as well.”
Palmer, the assistant professor in the Department of Science at Boston University, noted that the housing issue is “tied to education and resources and to the racial wealth gap that we know exists and is very large and significant across the country. People of color, immigrants, we had Latino and Black residents in particular, the survey are all groups that were more likely to lose jobs or leave work than white regiments overall. That ties in too, of course, with small businesses and those communities being hit harder as a result and with evictions being a really, really costly side of this well being higher in those neighborhoods.”
A patron, left, purchases calendars from Frugal Bookstore owner Clarrissa Egerton in Boston on Nov. 28, 2020. (Photo by Erin Clark/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
Unfortunately, education may become the target of budget cuts to help offset the economic fallout of the pandemic. And mayors are particularly concerned about education, arts and culture, and the transportation industry returning back to normal in coming years.
The survey found that 45% of mayors expect “dramatic” cuts to school budgets, and approximately 33% anticipate making significant cuts to transit, roads, and social services.
As a result of the pandemic, 81% of mayors agree that long-standing racial health disparities will persist, although they do not think that the pandemic will exacerbate residential segregation. And nearly half of mayors see the racial wealth gap widening in the future, as most mayors “do not expect that COVID-19, which has tragically underscored long-standing racial health disparities, will ultimately lead to progress.”
An employee waits to assist a student off a bus as in-person learning resumes with restrictions in place to prevent the spread of coronavirus at Rover Elementary School in Tempe, Ariz., August 17, 2020. REUTERS/Cheney Orr
The biggest thing that the pandemic has underscored, according to Tubbs, is economic insecurity “and the fact that so many Americans are in very precarious financial situations, and they’re not going to be able to pay back the rent they owe, or their mortgage.”
“The majority of people weren’t doing well before this pandemic, and that’s only been exacerbated,” Tubbs added. “It further defies reasons where we see how many trillions, those who are already billionaires, have made during the same time when everyone else is losing everything. And that has to change.”
Adriana Belmonte is a reporter and editor covering politics and health care policy for Yahoo Finance. You can follow her on Twitter @adrianambells.
