The “Innovation Lab” is a 7,700 square-foot facility for teaching classes based on prospective employment positions for the businesses that supported its construction. These labs were looking to be introduced in areas with a high population of immigrants that were lacking in formal education, and with high unemployment rates. The businesses would look to employ skilled workers but a majority of the neighbors were not skilled. These facilities would specifically target these workers, and teach them computer and entrepreneurial skills that would allow them to take up these positions. Offering more training helps locals qualify for higher paying jobs and the number of residents being displaced by more skilled newcomers should decrease.
The CEO of Industry City in Sunset Park, Andrew Kimball, is looking to put in place a one billion dollar redevelopment plan to transform the Sunset Park waterfront into a manufacturing and technology hub by creating thousands of new jobs. He claims that this project will create one of the largest centers for the “innovation economy” and one of New York’s biggest engines of job growth. Industry City’s zoning initially prohibited local development for retailers and hotels, but the new development proposal will have a “special innovation zoning district”, in which will be permitted the development of hotels, universities, conference centers, and retail chains. Developers use this method of having zoning rules bent in order to make for more profitable uses, and seek city aid on top of that. These projects are largely funded by public dollars.
Though they are trying to prevent residents from being displaced, this new economic activity definitely affects the popularity surrounding Industry City. The commercial rents rise in response to the popularity of the neighborhood, and this will lead to harassment on the part of property owners trying to get immigrants out of their rent stabilized apartments. They are attempting to bring Industry City up economically, and trying to prevent displacement and gentrification simultaneously, but it just won’t play along together well.
Diana, you are correct to point to a basic tension, or even a contradiction, in the strategies of developing Industry City. On the one hand, the developer financially needs retail facilities to attract tech firms and visitors, and pay higher rents than industrial tenants. On the other hand, those retail facilities may encourage residential gentrification in the surrounding communities. What authority can be the arbitrator???