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May 12, 2003
Made in New York City
Made in New York City
There’s not a lot of green in Greenpoint. When kids from the Greenpoint Youth Soccer League arrived in Central Park last fall to play an away game against a team from the Upper West Side, they were amazed by the enormous, lush fields.“They said, ‘Wow, that’s a totally different game,’” says Dewey Thompson, founder of the four year old Brooklyn league and father of three players.
According to Thompson, who moved to the gentrifying industrial neighborhood seven years ago, Greenpoint and the surrounding areas of North Brooklyn are at the bottom of the barrel of city neighborhoods in terms of open space per capita.
This might explain why more than 100 people showed up at 7:45 a.m. Tuesday at the Brooklyn Brewery on North 11th Street to listen to the Department of City Planning present a plan to re-zone large swaths of Williamsburg and Greenpoint formerly reserved for heavy industrial uses.
Under consideration is 100 acres of mostly derelict waterfront stretching from the massive Domino’s Sugar plant at the foot of the Williamsburg bridge to Newtown Creek, the dividing line between northern Brooklyn and Queens.
Fenced off, abandoned, and with stunning views of midtown Manhattan, the waterfront is a daily torment to people like Thompson and Joe Vance, President of the Greenpoint Waterfront Association for Parks and Planning. Where there is now broken concrete and razor wire, Thompson and Vance see a leafy esplanade and children running freely across full-size soccer fields.
“We need active open space,” says Vance, an architect, who has helped to raise $150,000 to fund a study that he hopes will influence the city’s plans for the area.
The re-zoning proposal for North Brooklyn is only one of several major projects currently under consideration by City Planning which will open up some of the city’s last large industrial areas for new residential, commercial, and municipal development -- in the pipeline also are zoning overhauls for Long Island City and the Hudson Yards on the far west side of Manhattan.
That the areas under consideration need rezoning seems as obvious as the burnt-out, abandoned buildings that mark large parts of them. It’s as inexorable as 40 years of declining industry and as necessary as might be suggested by children in awe of Manhattan’s pastoral bounty. But decisions regarding land use in New York are never straightforward. Zoning battles are the crucible in which most major social and economic policies in this city are tested.
The current slate of proposed re-zonings effectively represents the city’s largest reduction of industrial real estate in recent history. At the same time, the revenue-starved city has terminated or reduced funding to a number of incentive programs created over the years to help struggling New York manufacturers remain viable. Taken together, these developments represent a clear vote of no confidence in the city’s manufacturing sector.
It is a lack of confidence not shared by a committed group of local business people and urban policy activists who see the loss of manufacturing not as an unpleasant inevitability but rather as an avoidable blunder of serious economic proportions. While this group does not oppose a child’s right to play soccer on a regulation size field, they worry about the loss of good jobs and the declining diversity of the city’s neighborhoods.
The potential losers in this round of re-zonings are the city’s surviving manufacturers, many of whom operate in the areas under consideration, and who will likely be forced out of their neighborhoods by soaring rents and newly-arrived residents intolerant of the noise and odor of “old economy” operations.
“SoHo is a vertical mall,” said Stephanie Eisenberg owner of American Metal Stamping in Williamsburg at Tuesday’s meeting. “It’s horrible, and they’re going to get the same thing here.”
Eisenberg’s analysis was echoed around town by other manufacturing proponents, virtually all of whom feel that the city’s industrial policies have been ad hoc -- the result of a longstanding but unexamined anti-manufacturing bias fueled by short term pressures and compounded by a lack of coordination between relevant city agencies.
“There’s not really a comprehensive citywide industrial plan,” quietly noted Cara McAteer, a staffer in the Brooklyn office of City Planning who lurked in the back at Tuesday’s meeting.
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“If you are a pharmaceutical company or a steel company, you do not need to be here,” said Mayor Michael Bloomberg in March in an interview with The Financial Times. “New York City should not waste its time with manufacturing.” Few doubt the Mayor’s commitment to revitalizing the New York City economy -- and even fewer doubt his appreciation for the virtues of the service sector -- but his comments did not sit well with the more than 200,000 New Yorkers who work in manufacturing jobs. Perhaps sensing the need for diplomacy, Daniel Doctoroff, Deputy Mayor and Czar of Olympic Planning, told Crains last week that the major re-zoning planned for the Brooklyn waterfront would be “nuanced” and would “preserve the balance between housing and manufacturing.”
“Nobody wants to imply that manufacturing isn’t important,” Doctoroff said, adding “Manufacturing jobs play an important role in the economy of the city.”
Doctoroff’s words quickly hit the email grapevine linking the small community of urban policy wonks and local business people who form an emerging consensus around the viability and importance of maintaining a manufacturing sector within the city. But even supporters of the Mayor remained skeptical.
“I'm definitely pleased to see the deputy mayor acknowledging the important role of manufacturing,’ said Jonathan Bowles, Research Director for the Center for an Urban Future, and someone who describes himself as being “surprisingly a fan” of Mr. Bloomberg. But, he added, “I'm not convinced that the administration is really prepared to do what it takes to ensure that manufacturing can survive over the long run in neighborhoods that are on the cusp of gentrifying.”
Bowles and others point to an endless stream of zoning variances granted by the city’s Board of Standards and Appeals -- as well as a reliable tendency on the part of the city to look the other way when industrial spaces are converted to residential -- as proof of the city’s tacit disregard for manufacturing.
“If you buy a building and you warehouse it for a few years,” says Bowles, “you can assume that the city will let you do what you want with it.”
Critics of the new zoning proposals are equally concerned about the planning department’s new “mixed use” zoning category, “Mx,” which many claim lacks any of the restrictions necessary to protect manufacturers from being almost immediately displaced by a flood of new residential neighbors.
“’Mx’ is a much more permissive iteration of ‘mixed use,’” says Paul Parkhill, a manager at the Greenpoint’s Center for Design and Manufacturing, adding “I’m not sure ‘mixed use’ as a concept really works. When push comes to shove, nobody really likes being woken up at 2:00AM by a truck.”
City Planning, for it’s part, explains its hands-off approach by saying that its mandate is not to fight the market, but rather to help guide it.
“It’s policy to let residential happen,” says Brooklyn’s McAteer.
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Proponents of manufacturing in the city, like Bowles, readily acknowledge that the days of mass production jobs in New York are long since gone, but argue that certain types of manufacturing businesses – typically smaller operations that turn out high margin, custom products on short notice -- still make sense and are vital to the city’s long term economic health.
The banner carrier for this new urban manufacturing consensus in New York is perhaps Adam Friedman, Director of the New York Industrial Retention Network, a non profit started in 1997 and dedicated to the mission implied by its name.
Friedman’s pro-manufacturing argument is one part economic theory and one part pragmatic plea for social justice -- though where one stops and the other starts is hard to determine. At the heart of the economic case is the virtue of diversification – and diversity.
As a matter of record, the city has become increasingly reliant on the financial services sector. According to the Independent Budget Office, New York’s securities firms today account for 15% of the city’s tax revenues despite employing only 5% of the city’s workers. The ever tighter coupling between the city’s budget and Wall Street has, not surprisingly, increased the volatility of the local economy. This accounts in large part for the city’s current fiscal melt down as well as the fact that the city’s unemployment rate of 8.5% tops the latest ranking of major metropolitan areas by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Along with stability, the city also appears to be losing its middle class. Data from the State Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that between 1989 and 1999, the city’s only net job growth was in “low wage” jobs, or those earning less than $30,000 per year. During the same period, the city lost 68,000, or 3.7%, or it’s “middle wage” jobs.
“New York has the highest percentage of population [of major U.S. cities] with a college degree,” says Kelly Wachowicz co-head of the Strategic Planning & Policy Development for New York’s Economic Development Corporation. “And the highest without a high school diploma.”
Given these trends, Friedman is not alone in encouraging the city to promote growth beyond the financial service sector -- proponents of the biotechnology and new media sectors abound. He is somewhat unique, however, in addressing the wage disparity problem by promoting manufacturing businesses that can provide upwardly mobile jobs to unskilled workers, notably New York’s more than healthy supply of immigrants. The approach of his “Industrial Retention Network,” which was founded in 1997, is to target manufacturing companies that have a chance of making it in the city’s costly environment and then help them navigate the local real estate market as well as the city’s Byzantine collection of economic incentive programs. His clients include companies in high-end apparel, furniture design, food, and custom printing, among others – all generally operations which benefit from proximity to their New York clients, operate with short lead times, and deliver high margin custom products.
A Brooklynite, Friedman would almost certainly welcome a greener waterfront, but he also dreams of the holy grail of modern urban economics – the moment when a dense and diverse labor force combine with urban infrastructure, culture, and capital give rise to a virtuous cycle of innovation and economic growth.
“Tourism is a strategy of third world countries, it’s a strategy for the downwardly mobile,” commented Friedman at Tuesday’s planning meeting in Greenpoint.
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Showman Theatricals designs sets for television programs, Broadway shows, and museums. Among many other projects, the company built MSNBC’s on-air newsroom. Founded in 1986, Showman employs over 100 skilled stagehands, carpenters, and welders in two large buildings on the water in Red Hook. This year, however, Showman’s lease came up, and its landlord doubled the rent. Though business had been strong, and they were happy in Red Hook, Showman had no choice but to move.
Hoping to avoid a similar fate in the future, Showman was determined to buy their next home. Bob Usdin, one of two co-founders, says the hunt for real estate was not easy. They found few available properties with the high ceilings and wide column spacing the company required.Very few in New York, that is, as there were plenty of options in New Jersey at roughly half the city’s going rate of $100 per square foot.
Showman is a good example of the sort of manufacturing operation that makes obvious sense in the city. The company is tightly connected to media and entertainment, virtually all of its “products” are made to order, and turnaround times are short.
“Most of our projects deliver from a few days to eight weeks,” says Bob Usdin, one of two co-founders. Proximity is a big thing.” Usdin, who is in his late 30s, lives in Red Hook and is a member of the local Chamber of Commerce, also typifies the sort hands-on, community-oriented owner that Friedman champions.
“We are very much a Brooklyn company,” says Usdin and adds that Brooklyn’s deep labor market is a big upside to working in the city.
Showman eventually found a space in Long Island City, but according to Usdin, staying in the city was possible only because the company’s union helped finance the property acquisition and also thanks to a package of incentives cobbled together from various city and state programs. He says tax breaks and energy cost cuts reduce the price premium for doing business in the city from 30% to 10% over New Jersey -- a point at which it just barely makes sense to stay. Showman’s story is common.
Like Usdin, Sy Babbit, the founder and President of Camelot Card Samples was forced to move his operation when the 400,000 square foot Williamsburg building in which he leased space was sold to a residential developer intent on converting it to co-op housing.
Babbit, a fifty year veteran of manufacturing in Brooklyn, looked hard at moving to New Jersey. “We were offered all kinds of money to go to Jersey,” he says. “It made sense to go.” But the company stayed, finding space at at the Brooklyn Army Terminal.
“We were fortunate to run into a young lady,” explains Babbit describing Susan Gillette, one of Friedman’s staff. “It was a match made in heaven.”
Others are not so lucky.
“I can’t think of any printers that went to Brooklyn that made it,” said Eric Davos who runs a niche printing operation in West Orange, New Jersey and who is a refugee from lower Manhattan’s printing community where he had followed his father into the business. “New York City has not been friendly to small businesses.”
Davos says the business atmosphere is very different in New Jersey. Without immediate access to Manhattan’s local network of buyers, he has specialized his product and gone after more national, and even international clientele. He sells at lower price points, but thanks to the Internet, he has access to broader markets. Today, he believes that he is “the largest seller of book displays in Iceland.” He says if was in New York City, he’d be losing money.
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Davos’ experience seems to confirm what a few in the administration secretly suspect: that no matter how comprehensive and overarching the city’s industrial development policy, the ultimate effect will only be to slow down, but not to stop, the decline of manufacturing.
“Even the companies that most people view as ideal – they are not very viable,” says Wachowicz at the Economic Development Corporation. Others disagree, however. Sara Crean at the Fiscal Policy Institute points out that the city’s land use and business incentive practices have been so inconsistent for so long that the notion that recent economic experience in New York represents the demands of the “free market” is itself not viable.
“We have allowed all sorts of things that have warped the situation,” says Crean. “It’s not a level playing field.”
If manufacturing is viable, then the city’s challenge is how to engineer this vision of an economically diverse New York that is at once compatible with the city’s expanding residential population and the attendant aspirations of community groups like the Greenpoint Waterfront Association.
I think we can do both,” says Bowles. “I don’t think it’s a zero sum game.” According to Bowles, the critical missing element is simply a much clearer and comprehensive program on the part of the city.
If this is the case, the obstacle may be the Mayor and his administration, who tend to be skeptical of Friedman’s apparent attempt to swim against the current of globalization and who are also understandably preoccupied by a $4 billion budget deficit. In the absence of a mandate coming from the top, however, few expect a major change from the Economic Development Corporation or the Department of City Planning.
“If they want to turn New York into this big shopping mall – like SoHo is – then he’s going in the right direction,” says Richard Schemton owner of Dune, a Brooklyn furniture manufacturer from whom Mayor Bloomberg purchased four chairs for his offices.
“It’s a shame. You take all of the individualism that makes it special, and then everyone works in a handful of companies…in banking…and New York is just a big financial society. Where would Bloomberg get all of his furnishings? He’s not going to go to Target?”
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Posted by oliver at May 12, 2003 01:06 AM