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A Vision for the Future of the Tri-State Region


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New York, New Jersey and Connecticut must reform their governing institutions, overhaul and integrate their transit networks, fight climate change, and make it less costly to live in the region. Those are the four major thematic prescriptions of the Fourth Regional Plan, a comprehensive vision released on Thursday by the Regional Plan Association (RPA), a prominent urban think tank that has advocated for comprehensive urban development projects in the tri-state region for more than 90 years.    

The RPA is a private group composed of urban experts and business leaders who first came together to release a broad holistic plan for the New York metropolitan region in 1929. It has since grown into an influential research and advocacy organization and many of its proposals have informed state and local policy. The latest plan, as with past documents, proposes long-term solutions to major urban issues such as economic growth, mass transit, affordability, and housing.

The new plan is “much more inclusive” than past iterations, said RPA President Tom Wright, at the Thursday release at The New School in Manhattan. The RPA sought input from civic groups, community-based organizations, and thousands of residents from the region, he said, and employed analytical data tools that were unavailable in the past.

“The challenges that we’re talking about with this plan are clearer than they’ve ever been because we’ve been tested,” Wright said, referencing the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, the great recession, and Hurricane Sandy, which he called the “three great shocks” that have affected the region since the last regional plan was released, in the mid-1990s.

At the core of the plan are four guiding principles -- equity, health, prosperity and sustainability -- on the basis of which the plan recommends actions to improve state institutions, fix the region’s transportation infrastructure, tackle the challenges of climate change, and increase household incomes while creating more affordable housing.

“Unless we dramatically increase our infrastructure capacity, housing supply and productive capabilities, economic growth over the next 25 years will be half what it was over the last 25,” Wright warned. “And without this growth, we won’t be able to raise our living standards, expand opportunities or pay for the investments that we need.” He predicted that the plan’s recommendations would double predicted job growth from 850,000 jobs to nearly 2 million jobs by 2040, and that it would end homelessness and sharply reduce inequality along racial, ethnic and gender lines.

Many of the recommendations would require broad cooperation between state and local authorities from the three states. They include creating an integrated regional rail network for the three states and modernizing major transit hubs and airports in the region.

Building on commitments already in place in the three states to reduce carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2050, the plan recommends that the region follow California’s lead to expand their carbon pricing efforts to transportation, residential, commercial, and industrial sectors. Those efforts could generate $3 billion in revenue a year combined, the plan estimates.

The RPA also proposes a more proactive approach to coastal resiliency instead of one dependent on federal aid to respond in the wake of climate disasters. It imagines a Regional Coastal Commission of the three states which would take a “long-range, multi-jurisdictional, and strategic approach” to resilience and sustainability. It also puts forward the idea of a Tri-State Energy Policy Task Force, to focus on sources of sustainable energy to create a greener electrical grid.  

Many of the recommendations deal with New York City’s own public transit and traffic crises. The plan supports a congestion pricing strategy and changes to highway tolling to reduce traffic. It also addresses the specific problems of the MTA, calling on New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to create a Subway Reconstruction Public Benefit Corporation to renovate stations, reduce overcrowding, repair the signal system and improve accessibility for people with disabilities. One of the apparently less popular proposals involves shutting down more weeknight service on the subway system to create longer windows for subway repairs. An apparently more popular aspect includes several subway line extensions.

The plan also suggests reforming the structure of transportation authorities such as the MTA and the Port Authority to provide more accountability and transparency while reducing the cost of constructing new transit infrastructure. The plan also proposes new divisions at the Port Authority to handle operations and a separate infrastructure bank for major projects.

Addressing the audience, First Deputy Mayor Anthony Shorris, who is set to leave the de Blasio administration in January, praised the plan and RPA’s focus on long-term outcomes across political jurisdictions. “You have to challenge us, you have to challenge the conventional wisdom,” he said of the plan, expecting that one government or the other, even de Blasio’s, would find fault with parts of the proposal.

But he said it was invaluable in thinking of the prosperity of the larger region with which New York City’s future is inextricably linked. “We rise and fall together,” he said, “and it’s time we recognize that.”

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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

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Max & Murphy Podcast: Previewing De Blasio's Second Term


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Ben Max, left, of Gotham Gazette, and Jarrett Murphy, right, of City Limits


November 27, 2017 - Max & Murphy: Previewing De Blasio's Second Term

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Max & Murphy discuss the next steps for recently re-elected Mayor Bill de Blasio, who, as his second term gets going, will surely be dealing with some cabinet changes and will have to navigate the election of the next City Council Speaker. De Blasio's 2018 will also include a variety of complex city issues, from transit to schools, the effort to close Rikers Island jails, and much more; and federal and state-level elections. We break it all down in a fast 20-minute conversation for this episode.

Listen to the full conversation and let us know what you think -- we're on Twitter @TweetBenMax and @jarrettmurphy. You can listen to the episode through the embedded audio below or download the episode wherever you get your podcasts.

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by Ben Max, Gotham Gazette
     

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City Council, Outside Experts Push De Blasio Administration on 'Career Pathways'


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Council Member Daneek Miller (photo: John McCarten/City Council)


In June, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a plan to create 100,000 new jobs in New York City over ten years by investing in high-wage industries where there is potential to grow with a boost from city government. The jobs will all pay at least $50,000 per year, he promised.

The jobs plan, first outlined as the signature proposal of de Blasio’s 2017 State of the City speech, builds on other jobs programs, such Career Pathways, a workforce development initiative announced in 2014 intended to fill gaps in areas like training that were keeping people from attaining positions or entering higher wage roles. But when the jobs program was announced, advocates and service providers quickly pointed out that Career Pathways has not been funded at recommended levels.

According to the administration, the desired result of Career Pathways was for agencies overseeing workforce development to “reorient their services toward career progression instead of stopping at job placement.”

The Career Pathways Task Force, which came up with recommendations for filling the gaps, recommended large investments in new workforce development, including $60 million annually by 2020 in “bridge programs that prepare low-skill jobseekers for entry-level work and middle-skill job training,” and $100 million annually by 2020 in “career-track, middle-skill occupations, including greater support for incumbent workers who are not getting ahead.”

But with 2017 nearing an end, the city appears to be significantly behind schedule on the program. And on Monday, the City Council’s Committees on Small Business and Civil Service & Labor held a joint oversight hearing on Career Pathways and its progress.

A glaring question for Career Pathways is funding. Of the projected $100 million annually by 2020 in career training for middle-skill jobs, about half of the proposed amount has been allocated in the city budget, now about halfway between the 2014 introduction and 2020.

Significantly, of the $60 million projected annual investment in bridge programs for low-skill workers, only $6.4 million has been allocated, according to the Center for an Urban Future, a think tank focused on the city’s economy.

Barbara Chang, the executive director of the Mayor’s Office of Workforce Development, testified Monday on behalf of the administration. When Council Member Daneek Miller, chair of the labor committee, questioned Chang on the funding deficiency in bridge programs, which combine industry-specific training with more basic educational training, she offered a slightly more optimistic number: $7.5 million out of the $60 million. Citing the success of Seattle’s bridge program, Chang noted that New York presents numerous challenges not present in other cities, making efficient use of funds more difficult to ascertain.

“What we’re doing is we’re beginning to pilot bridge programs in the setting of New York City,” Chang said, “where we have a much more diverse population [than Seattle]. And we’re looking to see what works in New York City as it relates to bridge programming, and so as those pilots come out with data, then I think we’ll be in a better position to make strategic investments.”

For some advocates, the administration’s process is not nearly fast enough. Kevin Stump, vice president of policy at JobsFirstNYC, called for an immediate new investment of $20 million in bridge programming in the city’s next budget, and for another $33.6 million the year after to bring the total annual investment to target levels.

“We appreciate the City’s careful approach to systems-building and recognize this can take time and applaud the City for taking steps in the right direction,” Stump said. “However, after nearly three years of building, the time to make a significant investment in the system is now.”

Previous workforce development initiatives had been criticized for attempting to simply shoehorn people into jobs without care for fit; the de Blasio administration’s aim for its program was to prepare workers for and place them in high demand sectors that, combined with the education and training programs contained within Career Pathways, would topple barriers to employment and focus on the human capital aspect of economic development.

The task force identified six high demand sectors: healthcare, technology, industrial/ manufacturing, and construction, retail, and food service. The first four are the focus of investment in training, while the latter two are the focus of investment in improving the quality of low-wage sectors.

The intention is to advance career progress for workers rather than simply place them into a job. But an unintended consequence of this focus has been neglect of small businesses.

“Despite the laudable goal of career-track skills building articulated in the Career Pathways plan, workforce development providers are evaluated and reimbursed largely based on how many people they can place into jobs,” said Christian Gonzalez-Rivera, a senior researcher at the Center for an Urban Future. “This economic reality means providers have an overwhelming incentive to work almost exclusively with large businesses that can hire big batches of workers at once, rather than with small businesses that might add only one or two employees at a time.”

Gonzalez-Rivera’s testimony further noted that small business job growth has, since 2001, outpaced corporate (500 employees or more) job growth nearly 3-to-1; but small businesses often “report that they are encountering challenges in recruiting and retaining workers,” which can be a death knell for a business aiming to stay in New York.

CUF also notes that the program is not sufficiently helping immigrants, a group that comprises nearly half of the city’s workforce but have disproportionately low education levels.

“This makes immigrants the prime clients for the city’s workforce development system, yet our research found that publicly funded workforce programs are just not producing results for them,” said Gonzalez-Rivera. “As a result, many turn to predatory for-profit employment agencies that charge high fees to place them into jobs or take a cut of their wages.”

The city, on the other hand, said that the bridge program has been designed with immigrants in mind.

“These programs allow job-seekers with limited educational attainment and low English proficiency to make progress toward occupational goals as they build their basic skills,” Chang said.

The Career Pathways program is included in the mayor’s jobs plan, New York Works. While it is not touted as part of the administration’s newer initiatives to provoke job creation, Career Pathways is named as a program already expanding employment on the way to de Blasio’s 100,000 marker.

Council Member Robert Cornegy Jr., chair of the small business committee and a candidate to be the next Council speaker, was scheduled to be at the hearing, but couldn’t attend due to a family medical emergency. In a statement, Cornegy emphasized the need for the program to focus on small business growth rather than just job placement.

“The Career Pathways report released in 2014 identified key areas we as a City need to improve in order to ensure we are developing our human capital in the most efficient and effective way possible,” Cornegy told Gotham Gazette. “Today’s hearing was meant to measure our progress against the strategy outlined in the report and renew our commitment to ensuring the City’s commitment to workforce development strategy functions accordingly. As Chair of the Council’s Committee on Small Business, it is clear there is more we can do to ensure our workforce is capable of helping the City’s small businesses build capacity. Toward that end, I introduced and the Council recently passed two bills (Int. 1510 & 1511) that will survey small business owners’ workforce needs, and develop and implement a comprehensive workforce development plan that addresses them. I look forward to working with my Council colleagues and the administration moving forward to further fund and scale workforce development initiatives, like bridge programs, and find ways to better serve our small businesses, the true drivers of this City’s economy.”

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by Ben Brachfeld, Gotham Gazette

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