RECRUITING HOMEOWNERS McCarthy says workers at Ellis Medicine, Union College, Golub Corp. and other big companies will buy houses here if the city tries to market itself. “We haven’t reduced it down to actual numbers but I want to pick a target of 150 to 250 homes a year that we convert back to owneroccupied housing. Those are not unrealistic numbers,” McCarthy said. “You have some turnover that’s occurring anyhow. It’s not only getting a house owner-occupied, but you don’t want to lose the ones you have.” He would start by aggressively marketing the North End, which is near all three of the city’s big businesses. Residents could walk to work, there’s a burgeoning business corridor on Van Vranken Avenue, and there’s a wide variety of housing, from high-end to fi xer-uppers, McCarthy said. Hull says he wants to offer incentives to get new homeowners. He has pledged to raise money privately for a program he dubbed SHINE, in which he would pay for two year’s tuition at Schenectady County Community College for the child of anyone who bought and renovated a distressed house in the city. He acknowledged that some students wouldn’t be interested in community college, but he said many others would. “Certainly when I spoke to a group of Guyanese on Sunday, they were very receptive to the concept,” Hull said. “It’s in essence roughly an $8,000 tax-free contribution. So that is pretty signifi cant.” He would also meet with area Realtors to talk up Schenectady and find out why more homeowners don’t buy here. “I love it here. I think it’s a great place. The perception certainly doesn’t meet reality,” Hull said. “But I need to attack the tax issue, because people aren’t going to be enticed by the type of 4.5 percent tax hike we have.”
I work with all Guayaneses and they were slapped by the full tax bill they received after being enticed to move here from downstate with the promise of subsidised property taxes for, I think it was 5 years......very dissapointed they were... some have moved back, others stayed stuck it out and wonder WTH is the value of their tax bill, and others joined the street gangs.....
...you are a product of your environment, your environment is a product of your priorities, your priorities are a product of you......
The replacement of morality and conscience with law produces a deadly paradox.
STOP BEING GOOD DEMOCRATS---STOP BEING GOOD REPUBLICANS--START BEING GOOD AMERICANS
For Schenectady, A Guyanese Strategy; Mayor Goes All Out to Encourage A Wave of Hardworking Immigrants
By SARAH KERSHAW Published: July 26, 2002
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This small city in the Mohawk River valley, where industries built in the early 20th century on the hard labor of immigrants from Italy and Poland crumbled long ago, is in the market for a new ethnic group.
The mayor has found one, and he is doing everything short of packing up their homes in New York City and driving the moving van to get them here.
They are Guyanese immigrants living in Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx, and since May, Mayor Albert P. Jurczynski has gone to rather unusual lengths to persuade them to move to his struggling city of 62,000 people.
He is their guide on a weekly bus tour that brings dozens of Guyanese immigrants here every Saturday for a three-hour tour of the city. He takes them to Schenectady's own Central Park for ice cream cones. He takes them to his in-laws' house for homemade wine. He promises to build them a cricket stadium one day, to personally review all their résumés, officiate at their weddings and learn to love their spicy soups.
He has given out his cellphone number on a New York radio show that is popular among Guyanese immigrants. He makes regular trips to Richmond Hill, Queens, the city's largest Guyanese neighborhood, where he walks along Liberty Avenue practically demanding that everybody move to Schenectady on the double. He flatters the merchants, buys Guyanese products and dines on braised bass, curried goat and 15-year-old Guyanese rum.
''Let me ask you something,'' the barrel-chested mayor boomed through a microphone as a bus filled with 43 visiting Guyanese immigrants rolled away from Schenectady City Hall on a Saturday in July. ''Bloomberg, down in New York City, would he be doing this? For that reason alone you should move to Schenectady.''
His plan is working. From the time last year that Mayor Jurczynski (pronounced jur-ZIN-ski) heard there was a a small Guyanese population in his city, some 2,000 have moved here, according to Schenectady officials, with each weekly bus tour bringing more. They are buying dilapidated or condemned homes -- some for as little as $1 -- and fixing them up, making plans for restaurants and shops and taking jobs as construction workers and nurses' aides. Most important to the mayor, they are telling their friends and relatives about an obscure and hard-to-pronounce place called Schenectady.
...you are a product of your environment, your environment is a product of your priorities, your priorities are a product of you......
The replacement of morality and conscience with law produces a deadly paradox.
STOP BEING GOOD DEMOCRATS---STOP BEING GOOD REPUBLICANS--START BEING GOOD AMERICANS
Market Itself? ROTFLMAO!! Here's how you market Schenectady. Dump the DEMS from City Hall and the County Building. Chase them out if necessary. Then let Roger Hull market the City. Not before you remove all the tax and borrow working together DEM morons can anything improve. McCarthy is trying to build on mud. It can't work.
Market Itself? ROTFLMAO!! Here's how you market Schenectady. Dump the DEMS from City Hall and the County Building. Chase them out if necessary. Then let Roger Hull market the City. Not before you remove all the tax and borrow working together DEM morons can anything improve. McCarthy is trying to build on mud. It can't work.
NO middle class family with children would move into the City to pay the highest taxes in the Northeast and have their children attend one of the worst school systems in the State.
Hull is trying to entice the college-bound because he's savvy enough to know that the public school system is not a selling point for most families.
Why is McCarthy missing the mark EVERYTIME!! People will not come to Schenectady until you lower the taxes. Then you have a shot of the middle class coming back....well....a shoot-out every weekend isn't giving the City a positive reputation either.
NOT EVERYONE GOES TO COLLEGE....IF THEY DID IT WOULD BE 'FREE' JUST LIKE THE PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM....JOKE JOKE JOKE.......
but I would still vote for Hull and fight him on his view....because if college loans weren't government subsidised or part of the county/state system we wouldn't have this conversation......
make the public school system work for it's 'candy'.........
...you are a product of your environment, your environment is a product of your priorities, your priorities are a product of you......
The replacement of morality and conscience with law produces a deadly paradox.
STOP BEING GOOD DEMOCRATS---STOP BEING GOOD REPUBLICANS--START BEING GOOD AMERICANS
Logged
Market Itself? ROTFLMAO!! Here's how you market Schenectady. Dump the DEMS from City Hall and the County Building. Chase them out if necessary. Then let Roger Hull market the City. Not before you remove all the tax and borrow working together DEM morons can anything improve. McCarthy is trying to build on mud. It can't work. 
