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Making Growth Work for All New Yorkers


While plaNYC is extraordinary in its ambition, it misses a vital opportunity to make New York a truly sustainable city - one that harnesses growth and public investment to generate jobs that pay a living wage and allows everyone to participate in our economy.

The plan will revitalize the city's infrastructure, reduce pollution and build better transportation. It will generate new opportunities for businesses and contractors. And it will require thousands of workers to dig the new parks and tunnels, install energy conserving equipment in buildings, plant green streets to capture storm water, clean up brownfields, and do scores of other heavy lifts.

But unless this vision includes an unerring focus on creating good jobs and training a new generation of skilled workers, the city's future growth will not benefit all communities. Wages have stagnated over the past five years, while the cost of living has shot up 15 percent. Almost one in five New Yorkers, including many who work, lives in poverty. Too often, private developers and large corporations receive generous subsidy and incentive packages but create mostly low-wage jobs, or worse, actually cut jobs over time. And too often, development proceeds behind closed doors, without meaningful community involvement or attention to the public interest.

In a city that grows more and more unequal, we must do a better job of sharing both the prosperity and the burdens that growth brings.

City-sponsored economic development, including the initiatives laid out in plaNYC, can help reverse these trends. For example, tax dollars spent for economic development can be tied to creating decent jobs, with wages, benefits and career ladders that help families thrive. The many environmental initiatives can generate skilled "green-collar" jobs that pay living wages. And the city can strengthen the business community by looking beyond large corporations, to helping manufacturers and small businesses struggling with rising rents.

There is also room for more transparency and accountability to local communities. We should track the number and quality of jobs created to better understand who benefits from the city's investments and who doesn't. We should channel growth to the people and places where opportunity is needed, not only where it is convenient. And we should target new training programs to build opportunity in low-income and immigrant communities.

One of the last stops of the plaNYC 2030 listening tour was Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village, where our organizations and 50 other community, labor, and religious groups met with the mayor's staff to discuss the next 25 years. We commend them for the meeting.

But one of the key messages to emerge from that forum needs to be repeated again and again: plaNYC will not meet the challenges of growth unless it directly addresses the need for living wage jobs that can sustain working families.

The mayor ended his Earth Day speech by promising to "swing for the fences." If plaNYC's public investment strategies are linked to commitments to build a new base of good jobs, Bloomberg will indeed have hit the ball out of the park.

Annette Bernhardt is deputy director of the Justice Project at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law. Adrianne Shropshire is executive director of New York Jobs with Justice.

 

What plaNYC Does Not Do


Let's give the mayor credit for all the good ideas in his visionary 2030 plan - and not just when it comes to transportation. The Open Space section of the plan also has important recommendations. One million new trees in 10 years will clean our air and waterways, improve our health and cool our sidewalks, schoolyards and parkland. The GreenStreets program has helped us imagine our city as a greener place. It will be expanded with new "plazas" in some neighborhoods. A number of long neglected city parks will see funding and finally be usable. Parking lots will be required to plant shade trees.

But a "visionary" document that adds a million people to New York with no significant new parkland is unacceptable. New York has less than half the parkland per capita of most other U.S. cities, and our parks are far more crowded because so many of us live in high-rise buildings with no backyards. The report notes that New York grew in population so quickly that neighborhoods like Flatbush (and many others) developed without public space, then it suggests we place what remains of public land in the hands of developers because we need more housing.

Yes, we need more affordable housing. But we also need a public waterfront with token additions of housing, not massive rows of skyscrapers or big-box strip malls with token private esplanades. Our waterfront and our few regional parks are the lungs of our city, which give us places to go for rejuvenation and physical activity. Housing should be built inland, where the subways are. When railroad yards are decked for housing, as the report recommends, 50 percent of the deck should be added to public space. Many of our subway and railyards are in neighborhoods that are significantly underserved by parkland. With good planning, we can have housing and provide a healthy environment.

The report does not mention community gardening. Opportunities for gardening should be increased in our city. Any food grown here does not have to be shipped to New Yorkers by truck. Gardening is a superb physical activity, which can also keep New Yorkers mentally healthy. Everyone who wants a garden should have one whether the goal is food or urban beautification.

New York's visionary 350-mile Greenways system should be extended and quickly completed. New York and Mayor Michael Bloomberg have worked to get greenways on the ground, but there has been much administrative foot dragging. Finishing our greenways by 2030 would have been a great goal for a more sustainable city.

Bloomberg, who noted that no one has ever called him a tree-hugger, has set the bar by calling for a "greener greater New York." If recommendations of PlaNYC are implemented, our waterways will be cleaner and we will have more opportunities for swimming and boating. We will drive less and have a better transit system. New buildings will use less energy. Land will be purchased upstate to protect our drinking water supply. Our streets will more often be tree-lined and some long neglected parkland will be made more useful.

No doubt well-funded lobbies will be working to knock the bar down as they already have by getting City Council to limit the number of pollution-free pedicabs on our streets. It is now our job to take the opposite tack and to get this mayor and his successors to raise the bar, not lower it.

Dave Lutz is the executive director of Neighborhood Open Space Coalition, which works for a healthier, greener city.

 

Developing Brownfields The Right Way


Mayor Michael Bloomberg's plan to build on an estimated 7,600 acres of contaminated land, known as brownfields, will eliminate health hazards that plague poor neighborhoods and communities of color and create space for desperately needed housing. The mayor's plan is visionary, courageous and insightful, and the implementation plan includes provisions that empowers residents and community based organizations and directs funds where they are most needed.

A Transparent Process

A dozen groups, including New Partners in Community Revitalization has lobbied the city to create a centralized office focused on redeveloping city brownfield sites. The mayor included such an office in his plan, but it now needs the authority, staff and funding to develop and implement his agenda. Moving forward, the office will also need to ensure that the projects it assists have emerged from a community planning effort or have support of the local community. And any project that seeks city help to develop a brownfield must demonstrate that their projects are consistent with the city's sustainability goals.

Duel Role

The primary focus of the city's new Office of Environmental Remediation is to advance the redevelopment of the city's brownfield sites, but it will also be charged with regulatory oversight. When the same agency that develops a project also has the responsibility for regulating it, an inherent conflict arises. To avoid that, the new office will needed to develop policies and procedures and hire the right personnel to assure a user-friendly program while achieving regulatory goals.

Making the Best Use of Funds

The mayor announced that the city will provide $15 million for a public-private revolving loan fund to finance remediation and related costs. But it is not clear how the city will get these dollars into specific projects. The city government should maximize its funds by leveraging private dollars for remediation through partnerships with community lending institutions such as NY Metro Brownfields Redevelopment Fund Program, which uses federal and city funds to credit enhance remediation loans.

Environmental Insurance

The mayor also announced a $10 million investment for an environmental insurance initiative, which will be important for developers of affordable housing. Because of the scope of the overall development, the city will be in an excellent position to negotiate reasonably priced environmental insurance policies (even for small sites), with few or no exclusions.

A Fight in Albany?

The Bloomberg administration is asking the state to give the city regulatory authority for cleanup oversight. This could be tough. State enforcement laws create the liability so it is the state that has the authority to provide liability relief. Delegating that authority to the city would be unprecedented, so such a change would likely take a long time. Therefore, the city needs to focus on getting the state to immediately fix the problems with its Brownfield Cleanup Program, so that contaminated historic fill sites (sites contaminated with debris or waste from commercial or industrial processes that was then mixed with soil to build up areas for development) are no longer excluded. This exlcusion provision disproportionately affects New York City.

Also on the mayor's to-do-list in Albany is fixing the state's Brownfield Opportunity Area program. The state government must release the funds promised for local planning for brownfield sites. These funds have been held up for years because two agencies, the Department of State and the Department of Environmental Conservation, have to sign off on every detail and every step of an already long and demanding process.

The legislature and the governor understand the need to fix this, and there seems to be agreement that the state's planning agency, the Department of State, should be solely responsible for this program. Yet, it is still unclear whether Albany will act to fix this in the few weeks before the legislative session ends.

Working with Private Property Owners

The mayor has also called for new incentives to encourage private property owners to participate in the state brownfield planning program.

One way to achieve this is to grant the existing eight percent increase in brownfield tax credits only to projects that built in a way consistent with plans that emerge from the state's Brownfield Opportunity Area program. If the project is not consistent, it would not receive any tax credits. Beyond asking the state to create incentives, the city should use its own resources to encourage private property owners to participate in brownfield planning and development and to take a strong role in improving these once blighted areas of our city.

Jody Kass and Mathy Stanislaus are co-directors of New Partners for Community Revitalization, a NYC-based nonprofit working to revitalize low and moderate income neighborhoods through brownfields reclamation.

 



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