Reimagining Cities with the Mayor of Cambridge, MA

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From the Watson Institute at Brown University, this is Trending Globally. I'm Sarah Baldwin. Over the past few months, we've talked with public officials, health experts, physicians, and students to try to make sense of this pandemic for our listeners. On this episode, we're looking at this moment from a new point of view, that of a city mayor.

Sumbal Siddiqui is the mayor of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her family moved to Cambridge from Karachi, Pakistan when she was two years old. She became a student activist and studied public policy at Brown before getting a law degree at Northwestern. After that, she moved back to Cambridge, got involved in local politics, joined the City Council, and was elected mayor just this past January.

Since then, of course, American cities have become hotspots in a global pandemic, and have transformed in ways no one could have expected. But they've become the center of something else, too. A bold reimagining of how to address inequality, health, and injustice in America, things that Mayor Siddiqui has been working for since long before the pandemic struck.

To talk with Mayor Siddiqui, we had a special guest host, Watson visiting professor and faculty fellow, Geri Augusto. Geri is a former activist who now teaches international affairs, public policy, and their intersection with social justice. She was also one of Mayor Siddiqui's professors back at Brown. Here's Geri.

GERI AUGUSTO: Good morning, Mayor Siddiqui, and thank you so much for giving us this time in a time when public officials and public servants don't really have a lot of time. So we really appreciate it.

So I'd like to start with place in space. Cambridge is nationally and globally recognized as the home of two of the world's leading educational institutions. It's also permanent home to a highly diverse population, which not a lot of people necessarily know. It's diverse not just by race and ethnicity, but by economic levels.

Would you give us a profile, Mayor, on Cambridge as home to its citizens, and a portrait of the kinds of minds and hands-- and for me, every person has both minds and hands going at the same time-- that make the city run? What is Cambridge? Who is Cambridge? And who makes it run?

SUMBAL SIDDIQUI: Sure. Well, thank you so much for having me. It's always great to talk to you. And as far as what Cambridge is, it's been my hometown and I've seen it change in so many different ways. We have people living here who are our essential workers, right? They are those who are working at grocery stores, including my own mom. They are those who are on the front lines daily.

I mean, there's a highly diverse population. But we also, with that, comes a real sense of income inequality that we don't like to talk about too much. But yes, we're home to MIT, and Harvard, and Leslie, but we have many families, over 3,000 families who are living in poverty. And we have so many households with children led by single mothers who are in extreme poverty.

And then, you know you position that to the many millionaires who live here, too. So it's a very interesting tale of two cities, a city, and there's a lot of high need. And it's become clear to me, just during this pandemic as we've initiated the Mayor's Relief Fund for COVID-19, and we've almost raised $4 million. And we've seen that we've had so many applications, and there's such need in this community, but then there's also a huge response from folks who want to contribute and donate.

So it's a city that has its challenges, and we're not perfect by any means, but we're trying to help as many people as possible. And that's what Cambridge stands out to me, that we do care about our neighbors and we want to help as much as possible.

GERI AUGUSTO: What's changed about your job, from being a city council member, which is busy enough and important enough, to being the mayor? What's kind of the hardest political choice you've had to make so far in your new office? Not a city council member, alone, but now. As the mayor?

SUMBAL SIDDIQUI: Yeah, certainly, I think it has changed a lot. Right now as mayor, I work very closely with the City Manager to make a lot of the critical decisions for the city. And I use my new role as mayor to really uplift the voices and communities that often don't have a seat at the table.

I think as city councilor I had a platform, but as mayor, you just have a much bigger platform to do the work that you care about. I mean, of course, this pandemic has shifted what is expected of a mayor. I chair the school committee, I chair the City Council, I'm still doing that. But I think my role is even more important now as people look for guidance, and reassurance, and resources. And so that's, like, I think, the biggest part of it.

And it is truly-- the City Hall, our city buildings are closed to the public. But I am certainly in City Hall almost every day in my office. My team is all remote.

And I think the hardest political choice, there's been a few so far related to COVID. I think one has been it's been very difficult to balance things that could improve mental health, such as going outside and creating more space for people, and also balancing that with these public health advisories. We're telling people to stay home, but then there's people who do want to get outside and have said, why can't you close down the streets for more recreation? All the other cities are doing this.

We have a huge area called Memorial Drive that closes on Sundays starting in April. And the City Manager decided they think the best course there would be not to open it up to pedestrians for the time being, even though myself and a few of my colleagues disagreed. So that's been the challenging part. This notion of balancing mental health with the public health advisory.

And I think we're learning as we go. And I think I've made it clear to the City Manager and others, including our health department, that as we move forward and reopen, we have to think about how we use space and reimagine space. I think people are going to need way more space to get out and properly social distance. But it is important to take some time and be outside.

So that's, I think, those are those choices I think right now we're really hearing it from the residents who are very upset that we have not made any movement on closing streets for more pedestrian-friendly ways for people to get out. So I think that's been a that's been a challenge.

GERI AUGUSTO: It's interesting that you talk about the challenge that you're facing in terms of balancing, because a lot of times just from what we see on television, or read in blogs, and on social media is not balanced. It's people on one extreme and people on the other extreme. And so thinking of the public official, the public leader as a balancer, as a person who helps people think about and finding the balance is interesting. And kind of a new twist for those of us who teach public policy and public administration. I don't know if we stress enough about that need for balance.

And then, the other word that you mentioned that really strikes me is reimagining space, and equipment, and services. And I'm just wondering if you could walk us through maybe the part of a day with respect to COVID-19. Who you listen to, who do you talk with? So on a typical day, with respect to this trying to find balance, trying to reimagine, who do you listen to? How does a morning go, when you're listening and talking?

SUMBAL SIDDIQUI: Yeah, sure. So this morning I was on a call with the Metro Mayors Coalition that we have in Massachusetts. This is made up of over 20 mayors and city managers, and we are on these calls every few days. And today, the call was with the Lieutenant Governor.

And we're supposed to be open on May 18. And so there's a lot of questions around that. And so these are kind of the conversations we're having of, what are we thinking about reopening? And what is the phased approach going to be? What metrics are you looking at?

So that was one phone call. And then, the day can look like talking to our public health department, our public health experts. I'm in constant communication with the City Manager and his team. And then, obviously, our residents, and hearing from residents and what they're experiencing.

And so that's who I'm listening to and who I'm talking to on a day-to-day. I think, as the mayor's office, we get calls on everything. And so we have a way of triaging those calls. And so a lot of the day is kind of caught up in those types of things. But I can tell you that no day is the same. So I'm never bored. It's always something happening, and some issue that's critical that's come up, and you have to put your attention to it.

And during the COVID, this crisis, just so much has happened. And the one thing I've learned is we've been able to do things as a city that I think would have, in the past, we've said often said, oh, we'll get to it, or that's impossible, we've been able to do things very quickly. And that's been exciting to see how, because we're in an emergency, we're all hands on deck, and we're going to make things happen really quickly. And so that's been pretty exciting.

GERI AUGUSTO: Tell me a little bit more about a couple of the initiatives that we've been aware of. One is the mayor's disaster relief fund. I'd just like to know how did the idea arise? And then, the other one is about, we understand that you now will be having, in Cambridge, testing open to anyone over eight years. Tell me a little bit more about how those arose and how they came together as steps, innovative steps, or at least bold steps that Cambridge would be taking.

SUMBAL SIDDIQUI: So the mayor's disaster relief fund, this was it was reactivated because of the COVID-19. In the past there's been fires that community members have been involved with. That's why the purpose of the fund was there.

Quickly, in the first few days of this crisis, we knew that we would have to reactivate the fund to support our families, and individuals, and many others facing hardship. And so that fund got started, and as I mentioned, it's now almost $4 million. And the fundraising has been, we've gotten some large financial contributions from some of our key partners who are in Cambridge.

Takeda Pharmaceutical donated $2 million. Biogen donated one million. We have a lot of, we're very fortunate as a city. And so that's I think with the caveat of so many cities, I think, would love to do something like this, but don't have that capacity, and don't have those partners. And so we've been able to get that going.

And we've offered a phone line in Amharic, Arabic, [? Bengali, ?] Chinese, Haitian, Creole, Portuguese, and Spanish for folks to call. And we have a team of about 50 people working on applications and getting people help. And so that's been, it's amazing to see how we've been able to get money out so quickly as well. And so that's been an important initiative, to me.

And the testing program really came through a partnership through the Broad Institute, affiliated with Harvard MIT, and in partnership with our Cambridge Public Health Department, to support, first, our long-term care facilities, because as we know, nationally, from the data, this is where the number of deaths, particularly in Massachusetts and in Cambridge, where our deaths are coming from. And so we were able to partner with this institute to provide testing to these long-term care facilities.

And then, our next step was our homeless population. And so we're testing our homeless population because we also know that that population is very vulnerable as well. So we wanted to get testing going. And now, we've been able to work with these partners, and we've used city money to buy these tests. And MIT has also helped us pay for some of these tests as we expand.

And then we pushed to get it in another neighborhood. And that looks a little differently from the other testing site, but it's more mobile. And it's in an area of Cambridge that's called the port, which is predominantly, it's a lot of low-income families, a large black community, and we really felt that we have to make sure that there's access to testing, and that people who are the essential workers can get these tests.

Because right now, the fear for me was, OK, we opened up this test site and we're going to have the people who have been home since the pandemic getting a test. And that's not, I think we want to test our most vulnerable. And so we've come up with some strategies on how to expand the testing through the neighborhoods that have been impacted the most. So it's exciting that we get to be able to do this.

Again, I think it goes back to Cambridge being a city that is well-resourced. But I always, I often think about all the other cities that aren't. And many cities I've worked in, and they're doing so much, too, with such limited resources. So it is one of those things where I'm fortunate that we have the resources to solve the problems here.

GERI AUGUSTO: You mentioned data. The things that you are consulting to help you think about making the balance. We hear a great deal about models, projections, big data with respect to COVID-19. And the stakes are pretty high for policy makers because depending on how you read, and absorb the data, and how you interpret it, then how you think about deploying it, you can be either achieving greater balance and equality or pushing inequality. So I'm wondering, what challenges do you face when you're looking at data, predictive models, projections, and that kind of thing, and how do you think about balancing that with that kind of voice within you, the person who was born and grew up at Cambridge anyway, and you're thinking about that balance between the use of data and the political decisions, the social decisions that you have to make?

SUMBAL SIDDIQUI: I think with this crisis, it's been very key to look at the data and use the data to guide our decision making. It has been interesting that, maybe March 12 when this was going on, the guidance was, don't wear a mask outside. It's mid-May, and two weeks ago we put out a advisory of saying, you have to wear a mask outside.

What has been interesting is that I've had to say, look, there's a lot of things we don't know. And it's really challenging. And things are going to change. One thing that was true one day is not going to be true the other day. And so because it's changing so much, sometimes it's like, oh my God, what do I believe in? What is the right answer?

And I think I've come to just realize that you have to really be open to it. And even with the City Manager, he and I had conversations with some key health department people in the beginning who were like, masks, there's no evidence right that they're going to protect you and all these things. And then, as studies came out and as studies continue to come out, we're seeing how, no, having a mask on, a face covering on can help with slowing the spread.

And so the data has evolved. But I think the data in these cases, we've been able to point to it and say, look, it's guiding our decision making and our decisions. And for the most part, the residents have really been, they've complied with everything that we're doing, because we've been able to back it up with data. With every decision we made, closing the schools, with shutting down businesses, with shutting down, with everything we did in the beginning of the crisis, it was backed by this idea of social distancing, and social distancing being key.

And people were like, they couldn't see it, right? Because the results of social distancing take awhile, but it all came back to making sure that folks understood that, look, we don't want to overburden the hospital system. We want to make sure there's enough beds for the people who need the beds. And really breaking it down in simple terms and saying, look, we want to make sure there's capacity.

And if you're outside, and you're mingling with people, and you're partying, you're going to overload our hospital system. And so we've been able to share with the public, weekly, our stats around the hospitals and the bed capacity, and how many patients are still in the hospital with COVID, how many patients have recovered. So it hasn't been-- all that to say data is a huge part of the political decisions that we're making. And sometimes data has changed from point A to point B, so that's been the challenge with using data to predict things, because it's changing so often. But it's also, I think, right now, as policymakers, we can't ignore the science, and we cannot ignore some of these key indicators.

GERI AUGUSTO: One of the hardest things for a public official to manage in societies like ours, which are diverse and also unequal, is dealing with difference. And it can easily get translated into hierarchies and rankings of who gets what, who gets surveilled, who gets tested, who gets treated. And it's also become increasingly evident how race, ethnicity, and being an essential worker, a front line worker, all interact in this country. In the whole country, not just in Cambridge, but everywhere.

So you started with giving us an understanding of how diverse Cambridge is. I'm wondering, in you're thinking about the reopening, we're all anxious for the reopening, how is Cambridge's diversity in terms of the essential workers? And frankly, they have color, they have gender, they have ethnicity. How does that come into your thinking about the reopening?

SUMBAL SIDDIQUI: Yeah, I think right now, what a hot topic is that the state has a it's own re-opening advisory board. And the criticism that's come up for that board is that there's really no one who works in an essential business, such as a grocery store, others represented. And there's a lot of big business and construction type of folks on the advisory board.

And I think, when we think about Cambridge-- I've talked to the City Manager about this-- I think the state will come out with some guidelines, but really the City has power to make its own decisions. We can go above what maybe the governor mandates, which we've done a few times. And I think when we think about reopening, there's these three categories. There's the essential workers, there's those who are unemployed because of COVID-19, and those that can work remotely and maintain their salary.

And I've kept all of these in mind, I think. We, as a city right now, have decided we're probably going to slowly think about reopening city government in June. But it's going to really look like-- we actually did a survey of employees just recently, where child care is going to be an issue. So all these things we have to take into account as we think about these different populations and their different needs. But we cannot ignore the fact that if you are really healthwise vulnerable, you shouldn't be coming into work, you should be working from home. And we should be paying you for that.

There's going to be some tough decisions, because some cities literally can't do that. Cambridge is fortunate. We have not, we've been able to pay everyone throughout this, and we hope to continue. But down the line, there's going to be some hard considerations to make.

GERI AUGUSTO: Let me pivot for a bit as we're coming to the close. Slightly happier vision of what your work has been and what you your time as mayor has been. We're all very, very proud of you at the Watson Institute. And that's something that the students who've met you've had the opportunity to share.

r Brown's graduating class of: 2020

SUMBAL SIDDIQUI: Next week was going to be the 10-year.

GERI AUGUSTO: 10 years. OK, you know how that dates me. I remember having you in the old Taubman Center building 10 years ago. But if you have that message for Brown's graduating class, or all of them-- and young people even further away, because other people in Cambridge, in your city, may be listening who are also graduating from wherever they're graduating from. Do you have a message?

SUMBAL SIDDIQUI: Yeah. I think I'd just say that you'll get through this time. It's very challenging. You have to just remember that you have to lead with information, with integrity, with grace. It's definitely going to be probably the hardest year you you've probably experienced in recent history, and hardest, probably this is the hardest year for many and what they've experienced. But I think it just means that we're all being challenged. But we're all growing in new ways as a result.

So it might be hard to know it right now, and to see what, like, the key learnings from this time period will be. But it's a trial that you'll get, we'll all get through, but it's going to take a lot of time and effort.

GERI AUGUSTO: Information, integrity, and grace. Now, there is a triage for people to think, to have, and to cherish going forward. The final question is a bit more personal. What are you doing to take care of yourself and your staff? I know you think about your staff a lot, but you and your staff. And then, what's your dream for how you will spend that first clear, fully reopened weekend, not with restrictions. That one further down, that first fully reopened one. What are you going to do?

SUMBAL SIDDIQUI: Yeah, so I think with, we have a weekly team meeting call where I just check in with the team. And we talk about books we're reading, or the puzzles that people are making, or the shows that people are watching. And we just take the time to laugh and be with each other.

And I think not seeing each other is hard. So it's very important for me to take that time to let loose with them and not talk about the work that we're doing, or the deadlines, or anything that would make us kind of stressed. And so because we're also, we're so apart. And so really, that that's kind of what I've been doing. Or sending group texts and joking as much as possible. And also saying, look, hey, if you need something, if you need to take a day, take some time off, you're welcome to do that because it is, it's a trying time.

And I think on the first clear, like, reopened day, I think I miss my mom and dad a lot. They're literally a mile and a half away, maybe two miles, but I haven't been able to really see them. So I'd love to, like, pick them up and take them out to just spend some quality time with them. And it's just nice to be doing something normal with them.

And my mom's an essential worker, so she's been working. And so my dad's also been working. And they're in their late 60s, and so there's been a lot of stress for me around that. Because I just wish they'd stay home. But again, that is a luxury for many. And they've not been able to do that. So I think just have a great weekend with them, and an eat, and spend time with them.

GERI AUGUSTO: Well, we wish you that great weekend. I can see it in the future. Maybe not right away, but in the distant future. And in the meantime, information, integrity, and grace, which is what you have in abundance. And I want to thank you for spending this time with the Watson, and sharing with us the real kinds of decisions, and quandaries, and challenges of leadership as mayor of Cambridge. Thank you.

SUMBAL SIDDIQUI: Thank you.

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SARAH BALDWIN: This episode was produced by Dan Richards and Jackson Cantrell. Our theme music is by Henry Bloomfield. I'm Sarah Baldwin.

You can subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. If you like what you hear, please leave us a rating and review on iTunes. It really helps others find the show. We'll be bringing you more episodes soon on the coronavirus pandemic as it unfolds, from our community of experts at Watson and Brown. For more information about Trending Globally and Watson's other podcasts, go to watson.brown.edu. Thanks for listening, and tune in soon for another episode of Trending Globally.