H

owie Hawkins walked down Warner Avenue on Syracuse’s South Side. It was his neighborhood: He’s lived there since the 1990s.

“People in the community keep telling me, ‘Keep trying. Keep running for office,’” Hawkins said. “I get a lot of encouragement.”

Hawkins is running for mayor of Syracuse for the third time in the past 20 years. He’s never won the seat. But, he has no plans to quit politics any time soon.

“Howie is your Green Party candidate who has great ideals, but for some reason people don’t vote for him,” said Serena “Rahzie” Seals, a Common Council candidate for the city’s 4th district.

Seals, a leader of Black Lives Matter Syracuse and Black Cuse Pride — a program for LGBTQ people of color — is running on the Green Party ticket alongside Hawkins. In a red shirt and jeans, Hawkins accompanied Seals, going door-to-door canvassing, based off a list of voters they compiled with county records.

There wasn’t much of a routine.

Sometimes, Seals would call, “Howie, there are people who want to talk to you,” from across the street. Other times Hawkins would ask people, walking on the street, if they planned to vote or if they knew where their polling station was. A few of Hawkins’ friends embraced him.

The Green Party office is within walking distance of Hawkins’ home, which is halfway down Warner Avenue. Some houses along Warner were boarded up and abandoned.

One house had mail piled up on the porch. Hawkins still knocked, but nobody was there. He set his campaign card on the porch, atop the other mail and walked away.

Hawkins ran for mayor twice before, in 1997 and 2005, in addition to a run for city auditor in 2015 against former mayoral candidate, Marty Masterpole.

He has lost more than 20 elections since 1993, also running for the Common Council, Congress and governor of New York. Seals said Hawkins even ran against her father, Thomas Seals, for the city’s District 4 council seat. Hawkins lost.

“Even if you don’t win, you can move the debate (forward) on policy,” Hawkins said.

Arlene Brodbeck, a neighbor of Hawkins’ and one of his former canvassers, shouted his name across the street. Hawkins handed her his campaign card and asked how she was feeling about the election. Brodbeck said she wasn’t sure. She was still feeling it out.

“We just need somebody to help out the South Side,” she said, turning to Hawkins. “You would know. You live down the street.”

Brodbeck has lived on the South Side for the last 11 years. She said the city is threatening to take her home for tax delinquency. She’s had to decide to either eat, pay her utility bills or pay taxes, Brodbeck said.

There are absentee landlords throughout the city who abandon houses, leaving low-income people in the dust, Hawkins said.

Stanley Pearson, a retired Carrier Corp. employee living on Warner Avenue, complained about the broken sidewalk in front of his house. In the 30 years since moving to Syracuse from Virginia, he hasn’t seen any sidewalk improvements, he said.

Hawkins himself said he lived in more than a dozen apartments when he first moved to Syracuse in the 1991. Some had the roofs blown off, others had birds living in them. At one point, he refused to pay rent on an apartment without a roof until the city came to either fix it or give him another place to live, Hawkins said.

Christopher Alexander, sitting on the porch of a house on Warner Avenue, asked, “What’re you gonna do for us if we vote for you?”

Hawkins said he would focus on alleviating Syracuse’s high rate of concentrated poverty. That would help fight crime and improve the Syracuse City School District, he said.

He has been a longtime proponent for the desegregation of schools, where current education systems lump low-income students together, Hawkins said.

He has cousins who faced segregation in schools during the mid-20th century, Hawkins said.

“I just thought, you know, ‘My friends should have the same rights as me,’” he said. “So from that age, I was always worried about that issue.”

His life doesn’t solely revolve around politics, though. Hawkins unloads UPS trucks at night to help pay bills. He’s a secretary and treasurer at the Eat to Live Food Cooperative, a community-owned grocery store on the South Side.

Brandi Woolridge, general manager of the co-op, said Hawkins, “definitely puts his hands to the plow.”

She said Hawkins has a well-informed idea of middle- and lower-class Syracuse residents. He has a better understanding than any other candidate, she said.

“When he’s not running for an election for something, he’s out there doing something,” Seals said.