By Zach Zeliff

It can be difficult to have a frank, public, political conversation in Syracuse. We are often very polite and rarely direct. You hear things around town, but we don’t really have it out. Yet there are real issues facing our City where people sincerely disagree, and in those cases our civic discourse would really benefit from a blunt exchange. 

Take one of the most controversial, and important, local governance issues of the past two years: Good Cause Eviction. Sure, there was a lot of discourse about it. People wrote op-eds, the Common Council invited interested parties to speak at committee meetings, the Post-Standard reported on all of it. But never was there a public confrontation between the parties who disagreed about the law. You’d hear landlords make their case, and then—at a separate time—tenants would make theirs. Even people who followed all this talking could be left confused about what Good Cause would actually do because there was never an opportunity for a back-and-forth discussion to clarify what disagreeing parties actually disagreed about.

To opponents of this incredibly common sense measure, I would like to ask a series of questions:

If a tenant calls codes/otherwise advocates for conditions to improve at their home, what is preventing a landlord from non-renewing their lease in retaliation the next time it is up? Should the landlord be able to do that? How would a tenant be able to prove this was retaliation and stay in their home? If this isn’t acceptable to you, how can you vote against good cause eviction?

Maybe they have good answers I haven’t thought of. Maybe they will realize the overwhelming error of their ways and come to have correct opinions. Either way, we will have had it out and clarified what it is we’re actually talking about when we talk about Good Cause.

There are probably a bunch of different ways to facilitate more honest public conversations like that, but I have one idea that would also be a lot of fun. I call it The Square. 

We get people together on a Friday around 5 PM in a public square-shaped space—Lemp Park, maybe—and hash out some disagreement in a very loosely structured way. The interested public are all invited, and encouraged to picnic, and maybe bring travel mugs filled with various beverages. It will be festive! 

Some of the conversations would be confrontational, some may be more chill and informational, some might even end in agreement, but they would all help fix the issues in the town.