RED NYC in the Press

Gotham Gazette

"Redefining Economic Development"
By Mark Winston Griffith
February 2006

A fledgling coalition of some of the most prominent economic development groups in the city have been meeting over the last year to create a blueprint that offers a comprehensive and alternative vision of what development should look like in the Bloomberg era. “Re-Defining Economic Development” RED NY began as an attempt to make new development projects in the city more accountable.

The roots of Re-Defining New York go back to a series of meetings in 2004 -– the Subsidy Accountability Strategy Sessions -- that were put together by Jobs with Justice New York, a group that organizes to support the rights of workers and increase their standard of living.

...more than a year later, at a meeting in November of 2005, Jobs with Justice, along with Good Jobs and Pratt, again invited dozens of activists to participate in a series of meetings, this time called Re-Defining Economic Development (RED NY).

This gathering did not try to come up with a new city-wide campaign, but rather to coordinate existing organizing efforts. The ultimate goal was to craft a comprehensive template for the public and private pursuit of economic development in New York City that served the interests of New Yorkers with low and moderate incomes.

Since the November meeting of RED NY, a working group consisting of more than a dozen organizations has emerged to establish a set of principles that could possibly be “endorsed” by a broad range of organizing and advocacy groups in the city. One suggestion is that these principles could then be used to judge the candidates for governor, and encourage them to adopt a progressive platform on economic development. RED NY is also organizing training sessions designed to help people from different economic development disciplines establish common ground and a common understanding of the issues.

The greatest challenge for RED New York is to turn what is now an ambitious conversation about a new economic development “vision” into something that will have a measurable impact on people’s lives. One problem is that economic development means different things to different people.

But Michelle de la Uz, executive director of the Fifth Avenue Committee, is very clear on the practical uses for a new economic development blueprint. What de la Uz envisions is a set of standards for job creation, environmental impact, buy-in from the surrounding area, etc. that the city or a private developer could be held to whenever they planned to use public resources.