Lift Up Las Cruces is city manager's first major anti-poverty push. Here's the first target neighborhood.

LAS CRUCES - City Manager Ifo Pili said the city's new approach to poverty is to fight it with a "sniper approach" rather than a "shotgun approach."

On July 30, Pili and his staff will invite community stakeholders, residents, business owners and nonprofit organizations to a public block party to launch Lift Up Las Cruces, the first anti-poverty initiative of its kind within the city. The block party is planned to be held on Ash Avenue, within the area served by the program.

The city's Fiscal Year 2023 budget includes an allocation of $278,000 out of the city's Telshor Facility Fund, a reserve fund meant to assist the city's low-income and sick residents, toward the Lift Up Las Cruces program. Pili said the city has also applied for federal funding to help finance it.

Lift Up Las Cruces will be the city manager’s first major program aimed at reducing poverty since he was hired by the city council almost two years ago. There have been smaller steps previously — the city manager moved the housing department under economic development and authorized a virtual seminar for city employees about poverty — but Lift Up promises to be the most comprehensive and public effort yet to tackle one of the city’s major crises.

Nearly one in four Las Crucens, about 23.6 percent according to the latest U.S. Census Bureau estimates, live in poverty. Crime and homelessness, two problems often intertwined with poverty, have been more prominent in public discourse in the past few months than in the past three years, as some business owners and homeowners have complained about property crimes and the sometimes-aggressive behavior of some unhoused people.

Pili was hired with a dual mandate of economic development and poverty alleviation. One year into his tenure, he told the Sun-News he saw the two issues as inseparable. In that way, Pili said he was prioritizing economic development strategies that simultaneously addressed poverty — such as a focus on affordable housing, workforce development and the attraction of jobs that pay good wages.

Lift Up will first target one area of the city where there is concurrently high crime and poverty. The city partly came up with an area using the Distressed Communities Index, a project from the bipartisan Economic Innovation Group which examines economic conditions at the ZIP code level using seven socioeconomic data points.

“The goal is not to stay there though,” Pili said. “We're going to keep track of (the data), and then we're going to move and eventually the goal is to get to the entire city … But we're starting with the areas that need (help) the most.”

The area chosen is bound by North Solano Drive, East Madrid Avenue, Anita Drive, North Triviz Drive and Spruce Avenue, within the 88001 ZIP code, and includes winding residential roads on which sit rows of small, single-family, one-story homes. The area chosen also includes the Doña Ana Park Apartments, the Oñate Greens Mobile Home Park, St. Genevieve's Village Senior Apartments and Loma Heights Elementary School. Businesses line the area's Solano and Madrid borders.

Of the 1,428 households within the area, 48 percent made an income below the poverty line in the past year, and 69 percent of households made less than $39,000 a year. More than half of residents, 57 percent, identify as Black, Indigenous or people of color, according to data compiled by the city.

Pili said the city wants Lift Up Las Cruces to be as much of a community-driven effort as it is a city one. In that way, the city is planning to target its existing programs in the “footprint” served by Lift Up instead of, say, launching a bevy of new government programs. At the same time, it’s surveying addresses within the footprint to gauge what the area wants and needs most from the city.

“We're increasing access because we're bringing services to them versus people having to find services,” said Natalie Green, the city’s housing and neighborhood services manager.

Instead of new government programs, the city hopes to encourage community organizations and businesses to foster programs that address community needs.

“We want to identify projects that the city's going to do,” Pili said. “But I think, more importantly, we want the community to identify projects as well. So all the nonprofits, the faith-based community … We really want the businesses around there to get involved and really take ownership of the community.”

“We're not going in and saying we as a government know better for you,” Green said. “It's ‘What do you want us to do?’”

The city manager said the Lift Up program isn’t unique. A similar effort has seen success in Fort Worth, Texas, according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

“You fix infrastructure, you focus on crime, you clean. It just becomes a better place to invest,” Pili said.

But the city manager said Lift Up's launch doesn't mean the city government will pull resources from other areas.

“We're responsible for the entire city, so we're not going to leave,” Pili said. “We're not going to pull resources from other areas to put here. We're just going to focus here.”

For instance, the city's Pavement Management Program — which uses software to determine which streets the public works department should prioritize for pavement maintenance to ensure the maximum efficiency of limited resources — does not factor in the poverty rate or crime rate of an area, Pili said. With Lift Up, Pili said there will be an "extra layer" which will be used to prioritize the footprint when deciding what streets will be improved and maintained.

The city will likely prioritize the area for the installation of new streetlights and litter removal. Pili said Parks and Recreation plans to host more programming at Apodaca Park, which sits just outside the footprint at its northwest corner.

“Whenever you fix something, it has a positive tendency in economic terms,” said Deputy Economic Development Director Francisco Pallares. “The safer it looks, the more investment tends to go into the community … It's usually kind of a positive cycle.”

While the city manager doesn't know how effective Lift Up will be, he believes it will be successful in some capacity in reducing poverty and crime.

"I believe we're going to see some improvement, even if it's anecdotal," Pili said. "The ultimate goal really is to move that dial, to move that index, in the positive direction."

Pili said the city will evaluate the impact of the program in one year's time to get a better sense of what realistic expectations it can set for poverty reduction. But Pallares said some data, such as crime, is tracked and available more frequently than other data, such as poverty, which can make success tough to evaluate in the short term.

The city said organizations interested in getting involved in Lift Up Las Cruces should email liftup@las-cruces.org.

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Michael McDevitt is a city and county government reporter for the Sun-News. He can be reached at 575-202-3205, mmcdevitt@lcsun-news.com or @MikeMcDTweets on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Las Cruces Sun-News: Lift Up Las Cruces is city manager's first major anti-poverty program