Abstract
Marge Misak recollects her early life growing up in Arlington Heights, Illinois, and attending Northwestern University where she received a degree in Journalism and met her husband, Jim. The young family then moved to Clinton, North Carolina, for four years where Misak got involved in a migrant ministry programs. The Misaks eventually decided to move to the Near West Side where they found a sense of community through Cleveland's Catholic Worker. While living on the Near West Side, Misak was involved with the Ohio City Near West Development Corporation. She highlights her experience in developing the Cuyahoga Community Land Trust to provide affordable housing in the community.
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Interviewee
Misak, Marge (interviewee)
Interviewer
White, Bali (interviewer)
Project
Near West Side Housing Activism
Date
9-27-2024
Document Type
Oral History
Duration
84 minutes
Recommended Citation
"Marge Misak interview, 27 September 2024" (2024). Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection. Interview 544016.
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/1346
Transcript
Bali White [00:00:00] So I’m going to hit record. Hi, everybody. My name is Bali White with the Cleveland Regional Oral History Project. Today I’m here with Marge Misak. We are at Carnegie West Library in the bridge room. It is September 27, 2024, and 1:07 p.m. How are you?
Marge Misak [00:00:21] I’m good, thank you.
Bali White [00:00:22] Good. So could you introduce yourself, kind of when and where you were born?
Marge Misak [00:00:27] Yes. So Marge Misak. I was born, actually in Arlington Heights, Illinois, in 1957. So I’m in my mid-sixties now and living in Cleveland, Ohio, at this point, have been for about 34 years now. So most of my adult life actually has been spent in Cleveland.
Bali White [00:00:48] Sure. So was Arlington Heights–
Marge Misak [00:00:52] Arlington Heights.
Bali White [00:00:52] Was that a suburban area?
Marge Misak [00:00:54] Yeah, it’s a suburb of Chicago, really very white suburb, growing up, very kind of close-knit. Well, this was the 1960s that, you know, growing up, and I come from a large Catholic family, a lot of Catholic families around us, kind of very, very parochial in a lot of ways, close to the Catholic church, close to a park. We had just very close-knit family, not a lot of extended family around us, but a lot of neighbors and the kind of neighborhood where, you know, you could go out your door and find a bunch of kids and hang out from, you know, sun up till sundown in the summer and go and play until dark in the winter. So, but so kind of a, you know, I would say for my family, middle-class kind of growing up, my dad was in his own business, so we did not have a lot of cash growing up, but we had plenty of everything we needed, the kind of professional class around us. But my dad was in his own business, so we were kind of a little, probably less cash wise, but, you know, a neighborhood where we had plenty of food, we had a park down the street, we had a library down the street, just kind of all of those suburban amenities that, that you take for granted when, you know, your parents could get their first house with help from their parents. This was, you know, they bought their first house soon after they got married with help from their parents. And all those things that I learned about housing and the kind of advantages of white people that I learned once I was an adult that were advantages to, you know, white privilege that I had growing up, even when we didn’t have a lot of cash money around.
Bali White [00:02:57] So you had mentioned you were raised Catholic, correct?
Marge Misak [00:03:02] Yes.
Bali White [00:03:02] Would you say that had, like, a big role in your life growing up?
Marge Misak [00:03:06] Yeah, probably because I went to Catholic schools for grade school and high school, and that was very important to my parents. And then probably for me then, too, as well, I went to Northwestern University and was involved in the Catholic church there, met my husband there. But for us then, I think the turn that I took probably once I was in college, was much more to a sort of Catholic social teachings bent. And Jim and I met, well, we’ve been married over 40 years now, and we met in college. So kind of peace and justice kinds of things from a Catholic social teaching. So think about the 1980s, and those were very important kinds of things to us. I joked with my daughter that she went to her first Peace March when she was in the womb. [laughs] So those were real important to us with being involved with our church and then larger kind of, you know, peace marches and peace movements, anti-nuclear at the time in Chicago and then in the church that we were in in Chicago. Well, we moved to Chicago, the city, after school. When we got married, Jim was, Jim’s a family physician, and he did his residency at the public hospital in Chicago. We lived there. And the other thing, in addition to sort of was I thinking in addition to sort of anti-nuclear kinds of things, those were important to us. The church that we were in was also down the street from the Wellington Avenue United Church of Christ, which was a sanctuary church for Central American refugees. Those refugees were Catholic, so they came to our church, actually. So just kind of an immersion in that kind of milieu, I guess, was a part of my early adulthood and who we knew and the kinds of friends that we had.
Bali White [00:05:26] So when did you attend Northwestern University?
Marge Misak [00:05:31] Yeah, in the late seventies. Graduated in 1979. I have a degree in journalism from Medill there. And then– So I just, I went through– I don’t have a graduate degree. And then, yeah, and then Jim went on to medical school there and residency at, very different, went to medical school at Northwestern and then did his residency at the public hospital, which was Cook County Hospital in Chicago. Very, very, very different experience from. [laughs] [crosstalk} Probably, yeah. So from ’79 to ’86, I guess. And then we moved to rural North Carolina. Jim had gone through medical school on a government scholarship and owed four years of service in an underserved area. So he decided to. He had learned Spanish for his residency, and so he decided to look at migrant health centers for his kind of service time. So we looked at a lot of different places and ended up in- He ended up at a migrant health center in North Carolina that was in a town called Clinton, which is southeast of Raleigh, and in Samson County, which is geographically the largest county in North Carolina, but very, very rural. One of the, I don’t know. Now it’s probably larger but more population wise. But at the time, Clinton was a town of 9,000 people if you counted the people who lived sort of outside of town in a couple of housing developments. And we knew people who had never been out of side of the county in their lives. So it was a different experience. [laughs]
Bali White [00:07:25] So how long were you living in Clinton?
Marge Misak [00:07:29] We were there for. We spent four years there. Yeah. Yeah. And it was totally eye-opening for us because I, you know, I got involved at that time. We had one child, our daughter and our son was born there. So I was home with the kids. Jim was working crazy hours. And I got involved with like, the migrant ministry programs. Both the Catholic and Episcopal churches had migrant ministry programs. So I was doing things like, you know, driving people from migrant camps to the clinic for appointments or working with the moms, you know, doing like a sewing class or that kind of thing. And then, and then kind of being home with my kids, which involved me in town and getting to know people so very, in so many ways, very alienating and very shocking for us coming from the North. It was like, wow, the racism here, the poverty, people can just live next door to people who are so much poorer than them. When you look at, like, farms and farm workers and the conditions that they live in, and then you say, wait a minute. You know, we, from the north, we put, you know, we manage to live far away from poor people. We just isolate poor people. We just isolate black and white problems and, you know, we ignore the racism in the North because we don’t have to live next door to it. And so it was very, in that way, it was very eye-opening for us. I think the kind of sense of white privilege that, that we realized was really a part of who we were and experienced, but still in many ways very alienating. I think for us, a lot of what really came home to us was the sense of this is not how we want to live our lives. We made friends there. We made a lot of friends there. People are very, this is a small town. People are very welcoming, very nice. And, you know, you come in as a doctor and they, their family and people are very nice to you. And so in some ways, we meet a lot of friends. But there was also just this culture about child raising that was just things like, just the things that people didn’t even consider violent child raising, like slapping their kid’s hands for any little thing. And it’s like, wow, I don’t slap my kid around, you know, or attitudes towards, like, Santa Claus. Like Santa Claus, you better watch out, you know, Santa and be good, because Santa comes to those who are good, which means Santa doesn’t come to you who are poor because you’ve been bad? And I had to confront that with my children who knew, you know, kids who were, whose families were migrants, you know? And it’s like- You mean, it’s like talking to Ann about José. Why doesn’t Santa come to bring José toys? Because he’s been bad, was her answer at three years old. And those kinds of things that Jim’s statement at that time was, if it’s us as a nuclear family versus American culture, culture’s gonna win. And so we knew we couldn’t live like that. We just couldn’t raise our kids in that kind of, not so much southern culture, but alone. And so I think we did have some really good kinds of experiences of connecting with people in particular. One, ironically, one big experience for me, was when the Ku Klux Klan was going to march through our town, I having felt very alienated and ended up thinking, they cannot march through my town, and I don’t do anything. It was like all of a sudden, it was my town and got involved in a number of things, just figuring out with a friend how we were gonna - that’s another whole long story [laughs] - how we were gonna do something about that and ended up doing some good things, I think, and feeling connected to people in the community through some organizing through the churches. That really, for me, ended up feeling some connection to people in town around that experience. But in the end, we decided we weren’t staying in this small town. It was not going to be where we were going to raise our kids. [laughs]
Bali White [00:12:14] So that actually leads to my next question. What brought you and your family to the Near West Side?
Marge Misak [00:12:19] Yeah. So Jim was at the end of his four years, and we were from the Midwest originally, both of us. He grew up near Chicago, in a city in Joliet, near Chicago. And we didn’t necessarily feel we wanted to go back to Chicago because it’s a big area. And so where were we going to put together kind of work? He knew what he would be doing as a family physician. I wasn’t really sure where I was heading work-wise, but we wanted some sense of community. We had visited a Catholic Worker community in Washington, DC, a number of times and done a number of things with that community up there. But we also knew that we had visited families who lived in that community. And we’re like, this is really chaotic to move into a Catholic Worker community with small children that we didn’t see ourselves doing that, but we didn’t really see ourselves going back to Chicago because it’s like, well, how do you put together church, work, where you live, family life, school? Our daughter would be entering school and all of that without driving, you know, 30, 40 miles for every different thing. So we started looking around at towns in the Midwest, in places, writing to Catholic Worker communities, to a couple of other kinds of intentional communities, and saying, what is life like for you? What do you have? This is who we are. And Joe Lehner from the Cleveland Catholic Worker wrote back to— He was actually the first one who wrote back to us. And this is the days of snail mail. [laughs] There was no email. This was like the late eighties, 1989. And he’s like, well, you know, there are a lot of families who live in the neighborhood kind of intentionally, and why don’t you come visit? So Jim arranged an interview with the Metro Health system, the public hospital system here. And we came up together, he and I went to visit the Catholic Worker and then met a couple of people in the neighborhood who took me on a tour. And then I was like, well, what are schools like? And went to visit a couple of schools. And there’s a whole story about Urban Community School and a connection with our small town across the street from us. But I don’t have to get into that. Our small town in North Carolina, where one of the Ursulines had spent a summer there, but visited Urban Community School, where our daughter ended up going to school. So met a couple people, and then we visited a couple of other places, some places in Chicago, Cincinnati, I don’t know where else. We, we corresponded with a couple other places, but Jim had a great interview at Metro Health. I mean, that was the piece of it. Just the work there potentially, where he would be working in a community clinic based clinic in a hospital system that was going to be- I mean, Metro Health is really a special place. I mean, I have to say that as a family physician, for him to be able to see patients and who could not, he would not just see his patients, but they would have a whole system of care where he could refer them to a specialist and they could have access. That, for him was just the clincher for why he wanted to go work there. So that was very important for us, moving here. And then we loved the idea that there were families who had intentionally been living on the Near West Side, raising their kids here with a sense of social justice commitments, some connected to the Catholic Worker, but others who had been here for, you know, all kinds of other reasons. Maybe they had been Jesuit volunteers or Marianist volunteers, or they were all the way back from, you know, the 1960s and seventies, part of the anti-war movement and had stayed or moved into the neighborhood because of that. Lots and lots of reasons that families sort of intentionally lived on the Near West Side that were close to our values. And so we came back then for a second visit with our family and the Schlechts, Jim and Patty Schlecht who were married at that time, had a potluck for us, and we met like 75 people on the Near West Side. So, I mean, it is a, you know, I tell people this story and it’s like, well, I moved into the neighborhood and I knew 75 people, and within a mile, [laughs] there are not a lot of neighborhoods in this entire country where you could do, say that.
Bali White [00:17:10] Right, Especially in an urban environment.
Marge Misak [00:17:12] Yes, yes, right. A small town you might meet that many people in- I mean, that’s probably so. I’ve always thought of Cleveland as a small town in a big city in some of the negative ways it is as well, a lot of parochial attitudes in the city as well. But so we just made that. And Ann met friends, although she has some, our daughter, she has different experiences, recollections of that potluck.
Bali White [00:17:46] But that’s definitely something I’ve noticed is that sense of community almost like everybody knows everybody a little bit.
Marge Misak [00:17:54] Yeah.
Bali White [00:17:55] Through reading, like Inherit the Earth, like the Catholic Worker newspaper, some of the older ones with Joe Lehner him writing about, like, the families in the newspaper, I thought that was really interesting, just seeing the different families in the community and how everybody kind of, like I said, knew each other.
Marge Misak [00:18:12] Yes.
Bali White [00:18:13] Especially in the Near West Side, in a neighborhood in Cleveland.
Marge Misak [00:18:17] Yeah, I think that that’s very true, that in those in, to some extent, it’s in a lot of ways, there are those kinds of connections still. But in the, well, for us, moving in 1990 was when we moved, certainly in the nineties, and I’m sure before that as well, because the stories that we hear of things like the food co-op then and the people’s furniture co-op and the meals programs that people started, that they just individually started things. I mean, people could just start things. It wasn’t like, you know, there’s this big institution, you know, nonprofit institution that came in and started some big program. It was individuals who got together and said, this is a need, and we’re going to meet that need. And a lot of the institutions on the Near West Side started with individuals saying sort of that Dorothy Day thing of, well, we’re just sitting around the table and we saw this need and we did that. And that is very much a Catholic Worker kind of attitude. And it’s very much, I think, how a lot of things happened on the Near West Side. Absolutely. And, yeah. And it comes from people just knowing each other and then knowing, oh, well, do you know so and so? Well, you should talk to them because that’s, you know, they’re interested in that, or I’ve heard that about them.
Bali White [00:19:44] So could you kind of describe what this area looked like in 1990?
Marge Misak [00:19:49] Yeah, it was really pretty rundown. It was. We, we found our apartment that we first moved into through neighbors, through our mailman, Bill Merriman, who you’ve probably heard about. I don’t know if you’ve interviewed him, but, as part of this, but so we, and it was, we lived next to, he just knew of someone who had, I guess, had probably just moved out of their apartment or something. And so he talked to them and, and, in fact, came in with some people and painted half the apartment because it was really kind of not in such great condition, but it was okay. Everything worked. And then it was next door to some people who are very good friends who had a daughter our daughter’s age, and they ended up being about 10 feet away. Their bedroom window. [laughs] Spent many, many a night talking to each other outside through their windows. And that was how we actually found our apartment because I don’t know how you would. There was no real estate market in the neighborhood at the time, and there certainly wasn’t anyone you could call and say, I looking for rental apartments. It just was all word of mouth at that time. So the neighborhood was pretty rundown, I would say. It was also very, I couldn’t really tell you the demographics of it. It felt pretty diverse at that time. There were certainly the, you know, the public housing, the big public housing estates, Riverview and Lakeview estates. And Riverview at that time had the low-rise apartments. So there were family estates and significant numbers of families that lived at Riverview in addition to the high-rise senior estate there. And then throughout the neighborhood, there were, you know, the sort of, excuse me, gentrifying sort of, you know, the parts. It was probably most of the houses that were renovated, people did on their own. So that was kind of the, you know, the Development Corporation by then. No, I don’t know the whole history of the mergers of the development corporations. Like was Ohio City Near West? No, it hadn’t merged yet because that happened after we were here, pretty soon after we were here. But the first Ohio, the first development corporation that was more related to kind of redevelopment. It was people doing that on their own and trying to get loans and fixing up themselves and hiring contractors for their own living situation. It wasn’t developers coming in and redeveloping homes. There was no. There was no mark there. Not that there wasn’t a market for it. There was. You couldn’t get loans for it, I’m sure, was the situation much more than. And so people, you know, scrambled for getting to get a loan, and they were probably going to places like Near West or Neighborhood Housing Services to get, you know, nonprofit loans and going to development banks. Like, when we bought our house, we got a purchase rehab loan from Ameritrust Development, which is no longer there. But we, you know, was an experience [laughs] to try to get a loan that you could then fix up a house because you weren’t buying a house that someone else renovated. And so it was. Yeah. And, you know, it was interesting too. I mean, just one quick story on that. A lot of- But what’s, but what’s also interesting is that it’s not like people weren’t making money off the neighborhood. And I’m not enough of a scholar on this to know the numbers related to it, but, like, one anecdote around that our house was that we were renting when we first moved here. I don’t remember what we were paying. Maybe $400 a month or something like that. It was a two-bedroom apartment with a kitchen and a living room and a dining room. And it was, everything functioned, and everything worked. Yucky looking carpeting. Like I said, Bill came in with friends and painted it, so it was okay. And I remember some kids from around the corner coming to the door, some black kids coming to the door selling candy for their school. So I invited them into the foyer, and they’re like, oh, my gosh, this is so nice your house. It’s so nice. And I’m thinking, well, there aren’t holes in the wall. You know, it’s okay. It’s. Yeah. Thank you. And they were just, they were like, how much are you paying in rent? And I’m telling them, and they’re like, you’re kidding because they knew how much their parents were paying in rent for a slum. It was so clear that very similar to or more than what we were paying in rent. And they were living in slum conditions. And so what happens in urban neighborhoods and I had heard other stories of a- Well, but is not that, you know, there is no money. There is money. It’s just that people pay rent for slums instead, and they’re paying the same kind of rent in those neighborhoods like ours at that time. It’s just they can get away with it. So slum landlords make money on people’s poverty. It’s not- And then, and then the conditions start to change, and then they can, I mean, you know, obviously now the rents are much, much higher, but I think that that’s very true. And, you know, when I was talking to someone at one point about sort of the history of what were they trying to do? They were trying to develop- I’m not going to be able to tell this whole story because I’m going to forget what they were trying to develop. And they were trying to develop co-ops in the city, but they were finding that while they had some funds to be able to purchase, slum landlords weren’t willing to sell and. Well, why wasn’t that? Because they were making money on slums in the city. It isn’t true that there is no money there, that it’s just that there’s no conditions where they’re being forced to improve their conditions. So it was really, I think that’s about what was kind of the conditions. And those who were individually improving things on their own were actually doing it more as individuals, [crosstalk].
Bali White [00:27:05] So I guess that leads me to the next question. How did you get involved in housing justice? Affordable housing work on Cleveland’s Near West Side.
Marge Misak [00:27:14] Yeah. So from the time we moved to Cleveland, I didn’t know that housing was the thing. I mean, I sort of had this sense coming from, you know, Arlington Heights, Illinois, is the home of exclusionary housing. The Supreme Court case that relates to exclusionary housing where the Supreme Court justified exclusionary housing was in Arlington Heights, and it was happening when I was growing up, there was a housing group that wanted to build affordable housing in our town, and the zoning was for single-family housing. And it was the Catholic boy’s high school who was willing to sell the land to this group from Chicago to build multifamily housing. And the town said, no, it’s not in our plan. Our zoning plan doesn’t allow for that. And the case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled that it was discriminatory but did not require them to change that zoning. It said, you have to build, but you don’t have to build there. And it had a big impact on me because, you know, I was just this, I was like in 7th grade. And I remember just in this practical, sort of my down to earth practical thinkers said, wait a minute, I knew where the school was because my brothers went to school where. So I knew where the land was and I knew, and I, a friend and I did this project at that time, we had to do some kind of social studies project on our town. And we interviewed people about zoning issues because her dad was on the planning commission. And that was one of the things we interviewed people I remember interviewing the town, the town manager’s wife. And she’s like, oh, those poor kids. They just won’t have, it won’t be fair to the kids moving in if we do this, they won’t have bikes, and they won’t be able to get to the park, to shopping, and the library. And I remember thinking, this person’s lying. You know, it’s like that one of those times when kids know an adult is lying to them, it’s like, wait a minute, I walk to the library and I walk a heck a lot further than those kids are going to walk. I walk to the park all the time. They have parks near them. It’s like you just knew this was not the reason. This was because black kids would be moving into our town. And so it just had a big impact on me in terms of just like, well, what is this really about? And I think that that’s in kept, you know, that’s a piece of where my sort of sense of housing justice probably percolated in the back of my mind. But it was never really going to be housing for me until we moved to the Near West Side. And then all anybody talked about was, do you know what that house went for? The next house and the next house. And I remember the first hundred thousand dollars in house price. I could tell you where it was on the Near West Side. And people just kept talking in like these shocked terms about, you know, how prices were rising. But it was like, well, what do you do about that? A lot of it was on the private market. So, you know, again, at the early times, I think it was, well, people pay what they pay. It’s all private market stuff. But then you start to realize what happens in terms of public subsidy. And that was where for me, the concerns came in and where I really wanted to see some changes. Because when you start to look at how is the city encouraging market, so called market rate development, what are they, what’s being incentivized by public investment and what isn’t. And that is where there was a lot of issues around the development corporation then, and the two development corporations merging into one to become Ohio City Near West. We weren’t super involved with that. I mean, I went to meetings around that and had people, and friends who cared a lot about that, but I was probably more involved with my kids in their school and school issues at that time. And so sort of like, you know, someone tells you to come to a meeting, you come to a meeting. You know, that was the neighborhood very much. [laughs] But I guess as I started to kind of think about some of those issues, what ended up happening then with the Ohio City Near West as a development corporation was people started to organize around the elections, and it was a membership organization, and there were board elections. So the members voted on the board, and people started running for the board specifically on an affordable housing agenda. And then what was that agenda going to be? What were you going to work on? And so for me, as I started thinking about it, what bothered me was the sources of funding for development were that there are two main sources of funding in the city. The city didn’t really raise, and it still doesn’t raise its own money. It doesn’t have a source of funding for affordable or for anything in terms of housing, like its own housing trust fund and its own source, it uses federal funding. So those sources of funding are the community development block grant funding, which was quite prevalent in the 1990s, and 2000s, much less now and then, federal home funds. Well, community development block club funding was being used consistently to subsidize market rate housing. So if you ever want to think about market rate housing, so called, in this town, you have to always say publicly subsidized market rate housing, there is not a thing that’s built in this town that is market rate, allegedly, that is not subsidized by tax abatement, by tax increment financing. At that time, it was usually CDBG funds. And so the idea that they were thinking about was always building up the middle class. Building up the middle class, because the city, the incentives are all, I’m going to just go on rant. The incentives are all misaligned. They are. The city gets its money from income taxes, not property taxes. And so it’s totally incentivized to siphon away those property taxes, which go to other things, and let those be used for development and then bring in higher income people to the housing that gets built, instead of focusing on how do we build housing for the people that are already there. And that just seems wrong, and continues to seem wrong to me. It did at the time, and that was probably my biggest incentive to getting involved in. So I ran for the board as one of those tickets in 1998. Getting back to your question. [laughs]
Bali White [00:35:00] You mentioned you ran for the board in 1998, the Ohio City Near West Corporation. Correct?
Marge Misak [00:35:06] Right.
Bali White [00:35:07] So can you kind of talk a little bit about that? Kind of, what was the outcome like, did you become a board member?
Marge Misak [00:35:13] Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we were pretty effective in at least a couple of cycles in sort of getting our slate of board members elected. And so I was in the sort of second wave, if you will. And so by that time, then we sort of had, I guess, a majority. But the question then was, what’s our platform? What’s our agenda besides saying, well, we want affordable housing? What does that mean? And so one of the, so we, there were a couple of things we looked at, and, well, one of the very first meetings that I went, the first meeting I went to, [laughs] there was a project on the agenda that it was the Orchard Park development in the neighborhood. It was single-family homes that were going to be built at, again, I would call it so called market rate development. They were going to be sold on the open market to people at a certain price point. But they were going to be heavily subsidized with CDBG funds. And so there was an item on the agenda to accept those funds. Well, we voted against it. And people were so mad at us. They called us crazy. They were so angry. I mean, I don’t even think we had a majority. I think it still passed. But they were very, very mad because we were not accepting public funds for a project in our neighborhood that was going to beautify the neighborhood, that was going to bring up housing standards. Why would we say no to this? It’s like, well, there’s no affordable element in this. You don’t have any affordable housing. You’re going to build like 20 some units in a neighborhood that’s going to directly, really impact this. It was south of Lorain. It was really a neighborhood that had a lot of disinvestment, and a lot of poverty. You are going to really impact that neighborhood with this really fairly large project, and there’s no affordability built into it at all. No, [laughs] is what we were saying was no. You have to think about some affordable element to it. And for me, I had actually gone, when I first got elected, my next-door neighbor, who happened to be the housing court judge at the time, Bill Corrigan, brought me to lunch with Norm Krumholtz, who was sort of the guru of equity planning at Cleveland State at the time. Right. And one of the questions I asked him was, why is it so difficult anymore? It seems like it’s harder now, you know, to do affordable housing. And we had a long conversation, but when I asked him that question, I said, is it the funding? Is it the resources? What is it? And he just looked at me and he said, it’s political will. It’s about political will. And I just decided I would take that as my mantra [laughs] in everything I did. And I- So we had this vote. We said, and maybe we did win, maybe it was a no. And they had to go back to the drawing board, because a week later, after that vote, when we said no, I get this call or not a call, but there was this announcement that there was going to be this meeting with the director of OCNW and the council person. It was going to be like on the tree lawn of this project, the Orchard Park development. I’m like, what’s this about? We go, and here t
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