An uphill effort to recover in New York (photo: Benjamin Kanter/Mayoral Photo Office)
As New York City continues to recover and rebuild after the devastation of the COVID-19 outbreak, which had immense health and economic consequences, ideas are being offered to ensure a city that is more inclusive, creative, and responsive.
During a recent event hosted by the Center for an Urban Future, a leading nonprofit think tank offering many ideas for the city’s short- and long-term recovery, panelists offered suggestions for New York City that have been implemented in other cities across the country. Those policies and programs include investments in small businesses, young people, gig workers and freelancers, and others, with a focus on people of color and other often disadvantaged and excluded communities.
Participants included Gary Cunningham of Prosperity Now; Joseph Parilla of Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program; Sarah Treuhaft of PolicyLink; and Winston C. Fisher, co-author of The Opportunity Agenda: A Bold Democratic Plan to Grow the Middle Class. The panelists discussed nine policy ideas that could help New York City create more economic opportunity.
A Service Corps
Parilla said that cities should follow the lead of Birmingham, Alabama’s Bhamstrong initiative, a public-private partnership that provides small businesses with access to technical assistance, loans, and federal aid, as well as hiring displaced workers as paid volunteers, and connects with community businesses to rebuild.
New York City could both connect out-of-work residents and help them learn skills toward moving into higher-paying jobs like “training to be community health coaches or digital health coaches.”
Corporate Community Help for Minority-Owned Businesses
According to Treuhaft, New York City should model Cincinnati’s Minority Business Accelerator program, which helps businesses owned by people of color to grow. As small businesses throughout the city are closing down due ramifications of the coronavirus pandemic, related shutdowns, and a lack of activity in certain parts of the city reliant on office workers, the next mayoral administration can call on corporate sectors to provide resources to help minority-owned businesses. She also said the city can do this by working with its Department of Small Business Services to further allocate resources to businesses owned by people of color.
Invest in Babies
Low-income Americans do not have an emergency fund, said Cunningham. By expanding NYC Kids RISE, continuing the Save for College Program, and implementing baby bonds, a program that would set up savings accounts for newborns in families that make under a certain income, the city could help close the racial wealth gap, according to Cunningham. The “bonds” grow until a child reaches the age of 18. When a child reaches that age, they can decide what investments they would like to make with the money set aside for them. “They can go to college because someone invested in them. They can buy a house. They can start a business,” said Cunningham.
Help Freelance and Gig Workers Gain Security Through Portable Benefits
Fisher suggested that both cities and states model themselves off Oregon’s universal portable benefits program to enhance financial security for gig economy workers and freelancers.
New York City should create a system whereby these workers can access and bank benefits tied to their own work, not an employer, such as health care, retirement, worker’s compensation, paid sick leave, and paid parental leave. “Portable benefits would create a strategic advantage over other places,” said Fisher. “It’s not creating one program, it’s creating an ecosystem for low-wage and gig economy workers to thrive so that they can get that safety net that only exists for people working at big companies,” he added.
Retool Economic Development Organizations
In order to build a more inclusive economy, New York City needs leadership from local economic development organizations, said Parilla. He argued that New York City can do this by following San Diego’s ConnectAll program, the goal of which is to “boost startup growth, especially for low to moderate income” groups, according to its website.
“ConnectAll is about finding and scaling minority-owned businesses and (investing in) digital skills training,” said Parilla. “That is the type of coalition that it’s going to take to start to address the problems that we’re talking about today,” he added.
Increased City Support for CDFIs and Federal Spending on Small Businesses
“Before the COVID crisis, the federal government spent about $4 billion on small businesses in this country,” said Cunningham. “That’s enough to buy one nuclear submarine. We need to quadruple that and make sure that that money is getting to businesses of color. We’re going to have to make the critical investments that have left people of color behind, particularly in access to capital for minority businesses,” he added.
Cunningham said that New York City could do this by boosting financial support for community development financial institutions, CDFIs, which are private institutions focused on lending to disadvantaged groups. Although CDIFs have “the strongest track record of helping minority-owned businesses,” according to Center for an Urban Future, the network “lacks sufficient funds to meet the demand for technical assistance or microlending.” Cunningham said cities and states can bring more capital to organizations like CDFIs with municipal bonds. “We need to build on that network because many CDFIs suffer from the same issues that their clients do, which is access to capital. Each one is shopping for capital independently. The city could be that bond,” he said.
Center Equity in Policy-Making
Treuhaft said cities like New York should follow Seattle’s Racial Equity Toolkit program, which infuses such a focus throughout city government and beyond. Treuhaft said New York must “center racial equity in every aspect of policymaking,” according to a press release about the event. “All of the City’s (Seattle) policies are analyzed through the lens of equity: Who is going to be impacted, what are the root causes, what are the structural barriers, where is systemic racism showing up? And then changing and adapting policies accordingly.”
Enact Universal Child Care
“Access to affordable child care is one of the greatest taxes on families,” said Fisher. “The average cost of early childhood care is $12,000 to $13,000 a year, much more in New York. People drop out [of the workforce because] they can’t afford it. What it does to lifetime earnings is traumatic,” he added.
By implementing a universal child care program, New York City could help provide economic relief to working-class and middle-class families “and expand economic opportunities for women, on whom the burden of childcare typically falls,” according to Center for an Urban Future.
Back a Federal Jobs Guarantee
According to Treuhaft, the federal government should “embrace a federal jobs guarantee." And one way to help New Yorkers survive amid a pandemic fallout or otherwise would be such a guarantee that anyone who needs a job will have a job, Treuhaft said, which could include work in infrastructure, caregiving, community development, or other areas that would help produce public benefits. Treuhaft also said that this would “ensure that everyone who wants a job can have one [with] a living-wage income, and it would dramatically change the quality of work.”
***
by Anna Conkling, Gotham Gazette
@GothamGazette
A long early voting line (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)
New York City's first early voting period in a presidential general election saw 1.1 million in-person votes cast, hours of waiting across the city, and the threat of a court challenge to expand voting options. Experts and administrators didn't know exactly what to expect because of the unprecedented confluence of the coronavirus pandemic, universal absentee voting, and Trump-era political zeal.
The results point to a number of potential changes that could improve the option in the future, including the major citywide elections in 2021. Highest on the list for voting rights advocates is eliminating assigned early voting sites and expanding the total number of early voting poll sites in each county.
In the two election cycles since early voting was adopted in New York State, the option has always played second fiddle, garnering significantly less turnout than Election Day, including during the June primaries this year. But the nine days this general election has seen a surge of in-person early voting across the state, especially in New York City, and has led to renewed calls to improve the option in the five boroughs.
"Because it was new we didn’t quite know what to expect but always assumed it would be a very popular option once deployed, as it has been around the country," wrote Jarret Berg, co-founder of the advocacy group Vote Early New York, in an email. The system proved to be "indispensable to ensuring voter access during Covid 19 social distancing," he wrote.
By state law passed in 2019, early voting takes place over a nine-day period ahead of Election Day, with one off-day between the last day of that period and the final day of voting. In the 2020 general election in New York City, the turnout rate for early voting was 21% of registered voters, across 88 assigned polling locations. In June, only about 52,000 people voted early citywide following the first-ever expansion of absentee balloting to all eligible voters due to the pandemic. About 2.5 million New Yorkers (about 18% of registered voters) voted early statewide for the general election, which is expected to see a modern record for overall turnout.
Throughout the week, and especially on the weekends, lines of voters extended for blocks at some poll sites leading the New York City Board of Elections to add more hours to the early voting schedule for the last several days of voting. In one Upper East Side district, the BOE even added an alternate site after Assemblymember Rebecca Seawright, a candidate for reelection, announced her intention to sue over what she called "the horrendous treatment of the disabled, senior citizens, and working men and women," who had to wait in line, sometimes in the rain. Before that last-minute additional location was opened, the one early voting site in the area was that with the most voters assigned to it of any in the city, a Campaign Finance Board analysis showed.
There are a number of reasons early voting may have been higher this month than in the small previous sample of electins offering it as an option, beyond the sheer volume of voters for a presidential election. One could be the high visibility of early voting in other states; where standing in long lines, by analogy, became synonymous with both civic duty and Trump resistance in the heavily left-leaning city. Another could be the emphasis on early voting as a more certain and less burdensome alternative to mail-in voting, and as a safer and more speedy (at least in theory) option than traditionally-crowded Election Day poll sites. Voters were also primed to explore alternative voting methods in the general election after having been rapidly introduced to absentee voting on a mass scale this summer, which to some extent broke the dominance of Election Day.
Voting rights advocates say turnout unpredictability like this is exactly why the Board of Elections should offer as many voting options as possible -- while there wound up being 89 early voting poll sites, there are 1,201 poll sites open on Election Day across the city. By extension, flexibility in early voting site choice could at least in part mitigate the impact of high turnout elections. New York City is the only jurisdiction in the state that does not offer universal early voting sites because of carve-outs in state law for counties with certain practical hurdles to implementation. Exemptions were crafted for counties where the complexity of the election system means it would be difficult to prevent double voting across multiple sites or to produce a ballot style for every possible voter (given the number of districts or languages spoken) at every site.
"The rest of the state permits voters to visit any site in their county during early voting, which can help balance out lines in high turnout years, and gives voters the flexibility they were promised when the program was enacted," Berg said.
He added that the New York City Board of Elections has the discretion to create universal early voting on the county (AKA borough) level. To do so on a citywide basis would likely require a change in state law, he said.
Deputy Mayor J. Phillip Thompson said on Election Day at a press briefing with the mayor that the city would be pursuing an agenda that includes universal polling locations, though he did not elaborate on how the administration would secure the Board of Elections-controlled change.
Election observers have pointed to operational fixes that could facilitate better early voting experiences. Having more entry points, check-in tables, and ballot scanners at poll sites could reduce lines outside. In many cases, doing so would require administrators to secure sites with more space -- especially under social distancing restrictions.
One of the surest ways to reduce lines at polling locations is to build out early voting infrastructure. At least three bills in the State Legislature aim to increase the number of early voting poll sites in each county and ensure that they are located based on potential demand. Only one, however, would have a direct impact on New York City's system.
Legislation introduced by State Senator Michael Gianaris, a Queens Democrat and deputy majority leader, would double the number of early voting sites, from one per every 50,000 registered voters in a county to one per every 25,000, and would make that ratio a binding requirement (the law currently allows counties to stop opening locations after they reach seven, regardless of the ratio to voters). The bill, introduced on October 30, during the last weekend of the nine-day early voting period, does not have a companion in the Assembly.
A second bill, which would not have an impact on New York City's current operation, would increase the minimum number of early voting sites per county from seven to ten and, in larger counties, to each town or city. Good government groups say the measure would help ensure local boards of elections are meeting the nonbinding goal of having a site for every 50,000 voters, which is outlined in state law. Advocates have called for that goal to be made a mandate.
State Senator Zellnor Myrie, a Brooklyn Democrat and chair of the Senate elections committee who sponsored the enacted early voting legislation, said the ratio of voters to sites was a concerning problem and advocates have said the assignment process is nontransparent.
"There were clearly too few sites to accommodate the level of interest we saw from voters, and there was also a wide disparity in the number of voters assigned to each site (from just 10,000 to over 100,000)," Myrie wrote in a statement Monday.
According to Berg, the city's program "suffered from an unaccountable site assignment process and the lack of borough or citywide access, both of which should be implemented as soon as possible."
A third bill, which would primarily impact upstate New York and Long Island, would require the largest municipalities in each county to have an early voting site. That bill passed both chambers of the Legislature in July but has not been delivered to the governor, who may request it at any time, for signing.
The League of Women Voters of New York State, which supports the bill, says the state should approach the reform with caution as it could place untenable burdens on some counties.
"While we’re 100% in favor of increasing the number of early voting poll sites, it is not feasible in most counties without financial support from the state," said Jennifer Wilson, the League's deputy director. Fifteen of the 34 counties with only one early voting site in 2019 did not have that site in the largest municipality, according to an analysis provided by the League.
"We’d love to see every county add early voting sites and hours going forward but most counties do not have adequate funds to make that happen," Wilson wrote.
Any changes to early voting could quickly impact the 2021 New York City elections, where all of city government is on the ballot and voters will select a new Mayor, among many other new and some returning office-holders, via June primaries and a fall general election.
***
by Ethan Geringer-Sameth, reporter, Gotham Gazette
@GeringerSameth @GothamGazette
Flushing Waterfront development rendering
When the developers behind Industry City, a massive retail and manufacturing space, announced that they had pulled the plug on their plan to rezone a portion of their property on the Sunset Park waterfront in Brooklyn, community activists in Flushing, Queens celebrated.
The proposed Special Flushing Waterfront District is a planned rezoning to usher in massive development along Flushing Creek, and is now being eyed by both proponents and critics as the next big New York City land use battle. The debate over the Flushing development hits on a number of persistent themes related to housing, development, gentrification, displacement, jobs, and more.
Given the defeat of the Industry City proposal, which had spurred fears of gentrification and displacement in a largely immigrant community, opponents of the Special Flushing Waterfront District appear to have some momentum on their side as the developer’s proposal works its way through the City Planning Commission and to the City Council. Politics in the city have turned decidedly against major development projects pushed by wealthy interests, most notably the aborted Amazon ‘HQ2’ plan for western Queens, which prefaced the Industry City outcome.
“Sunset Park set the tone that predatory rezoning is not acceptable, and communities should be in control,” said Seonae Byeon, the lead housing organizer of the MinKwon Center for Community Action, a tenant advocacy group and one of the most prominent opponents of the Flushing waterfront rezoning. “Whether you live in Brooklyn or Queens, racist rezoning shouldn't be happening in any neighborhoods.”
The proposed project in Flushing, which is itself home to large immigrant communities, would turn 29 acres of the waterfront into a 13-tower luxury complex with retail, hotel, and office spaces, plus over 1,700 residential apartments, 61 of which would have below-market rents deemed affordable.
The plan would also include a public waterfront walkway and outdoor open space. Other benefits cited by the developers — F&T Group, Young Nian Group and United Construction and Development Group, who have formed the consortium, FWRA LLC — include the creation of nearly 3,000 permanent jobs, with an additional 558 average construction workers per day during its building, and clean-up of Flushing Creek. While the project was originally estimated to generate $28 million in annual tax revenue to the city, the developers now say that new economic studies suggest the special waterfront district will generate $164 million in anticipated annual tax revenue.
(view of the Flushing site as it currently stands)
To realize the developers’ goals, which include removing some zoning restrictions to raise the height of 11 of the proposed towers, they must seek approval from the city, which includes votes by the City Planning Commission, which passed it on Wednesday, and the City Council, as well as other advisory opinions.
But opponents argue the project would fast-track gentrification in the surrounding areas, devastating working-class immigrant residents through rising costs of living and housing displacement. And, more generally, critics argue that it is the wrong type of use of valuable real estate, which they say should have more community-focused purpose with designs by and for the people who live nearby now, with taking on the city’s affordability crisis front and center.
Both the Sunset Park and Flushing rezoning debates are the latest manifestations of the “Vision 2020” Comprehensive Waterfront Plan, which was conceptualized during the Bloomberg administration with the aim of revitalizing New York City’s waterways and waterfront areas. Although the Special Flushing Waterfront District is largely a privately-funded endeavor, public money has underwritten the project since it was originally conceived in 2010, when former Queens Borough President Claire Shulman’s Flushing Willets Point Corona Local Development Corporation (FWC LDF) was granted a $1.5 million Brownfield Opportunity Area (BOA) grant from the Department of State to plan for revitalizing Flusing’s waterfront.
In effect, FWC LDF partnered with the Department of City Planning to develop the proposal called Flushing West, which would’ve rezoned approximately 47 acres of the Flushing waterfront before the plan was withdrawn due to concerns over infrastructure, traffic, affordable housing, and displacement. A somewhat different model of collaboration has distinguished the newly envisioned Special Flushing Waterfront District and rezoning application, namely when Community Board 7 Vice Chair Chuck Apelian served as a consultant to the developers before recusing himself from the rezoning vote.
But activists in Flushing say that, among other examples, both the opposition to Industry City’s proposed expansion and to the Flushing special district are proof of a growing movement for community-led rezoning efforts, in which New Yorkers refuse to be taken advantage of by monied developers. Through extensive coalition-building across the city, activists say they are pushing back against the status quo of the city’s land use processes to galvanize change that will put communities’ voices first.
The City Planning Commission, a body made up of appointees of city elected officials, voted to approve the rezoning application on Wednesday, sending it to the City Council for consideration, with 50 days for a vote by the Council. In the meantime, negotiations between the developer and local City Council Member Peter Koo are expected to unfold in both public and private, including through a Council zoning committee hearing on the proposal.
While other elected officials in Flushing have voiced their disapproval of the waterfront project, Council Member Koo has not taken an official stance one way or the other. He hinted at his opinion in a statement to Gotham Gazette, saying, “The Special Flushing Waterfront District has many merits that would provide our community with tangible benefits we wouldn't have under an as-of-right scenario. We're working with stakeholders in hopes of making this project the best it can be for Flushing.”
The Flushing waterfront rezoning plan has been divisive since the developers submitted their application in December 2019, with opponents arguing in part that environmental remediation and affordable housing should not be dependent upon the interests of private real estate. When the Department of City Planning certified the waterfront project without an Environmental Assessment Statement on the basis the rezoning would not result in significant impacts, effectively bypassing initial community input, critics said the city exploited the inherent weaknesses of the land use review process, known as ULURP, to rush the rezoning application despite the needs of Flushing residents.
The move emboldened a trio of groups — Chhaya Community Development Corporation, the Greater Flushing Chamber of Commerce, and the MinKwon Center — to file a lawsuit against the Department of City Planning and the City Planning Commission, calling for an environmental review of the development proposal and ultimately more community involvement in the waterfront project.
“There are lots of questions about the impact of this particular project that we will never find out because the city has rubber-stamped the developers’ rationale that there is not enough of an environmental impact,” said John Choe, executive director of the Greater Flushing Chamber of Commerce and a Democatic candidate running to replace the term-limited Koo via next year’s city elections.
Activists have also expressed doubt concerning ULURP’s ability to empower community voices after the City Planning Commission’s first land use hearing in six months was held virtually due to the coronavirus pandemic, on September 16.
“Having a public hearing [online] in a district where 41% of people don't have broadband internet access is not a public hearing,” said Elizabeth Oh, a community organizer with Flushing Anti-Displacement Alliance, citing data from City Comptroller Scott Stringer’s office. On the day of the hearing, Byeon decried on Twitter, “Our First Amendment rights are violated.”
Not unlike Industry City’s 11-hour City Council hearing, the City Planning Commission’s public hearing for the Flushing waterfront rezoning went on for over six hours. Some criticized the developer’s presentation at the start of the hearing for being too long and taking time away from community members’ testimonials. The expected City Council hearing on the Flushing proposal will likely also be a long, contentious affair.
On the other side of the debate, the collapse of the Industry City rezoning proposal coupled with the immense economic stress of the coronavirus recession has only heightened the sense of urgency surrounding the Flushing waterfront project. Carlo Scissura, the president and CEO of the New York Building Congress and a supporter of the Flushing development plan, objects to opponents’ claims that such major development won’t address the community's needs in the midst of a pandemic. “This is exactly what we should be doing when we’re in a crisis,” he said in an interview. “We need to invest.”
How and where to invest is, of course, precisely the crux of community members’ concerns, but, according to Scissura, “There will be opportunity at the community board, borough, and City Council levels to shape the project moving forward.”
Unemployment in Queens spiked from 3% in February to 15.1% in April, at the height of the pandemic, according to data from New York’s Department of Labor. The rate was down slightly in September, but remained high at 13.8%.
In zip code 11354, where the Flushing waterfront land to be rezoned is located, the percent change in unemployment is even more extreme. Data from The New York Times shows that the unemployment rate in the neighborhood in February was a mere 2%. In June, the estimated unemployment rate jumped to 23%, with other parts of the area as high as 28%.
Several proponents of the project have voiced anxiety about growing, blanket antagonism toward development in the city, a political climate that Tom Grech, head of the Queens Chamber of Commerce, has characterized as “the environment of ‘no.’” As the city lags behind the country in terms of a coronavirus-related fiscal recovery, Grech argues, “We should be rolling out the red carpet for people who go through the proper channels to create investment opportunities.”
In a statement to Gotham Gazette, the consortium of developers behind the Flushing waterfront project, FWRA, LLC, likewise attributed the failure of Industry City to a misguided anti-development ideology.
“Industry City was yet another example of politics over people,” the statement reads. “The Special Flushing Waterfront District is an entirely different project, the biggest difference of which is our District is NOT A REZONING. We are not asking for additional density except where affordable housing will be provided. We have been working with the community and its stakeholders for years on this project, including the opposition. Flushing's waterfront has been a contaminated wasteland for decades. Without development, there is no progress or growth. Can we for once put politics aside and prioritize the residents of Flushing?”
Grech asked of the project’s opponents, “What is your alternative? What do you suggest instead of the developers’ money?”
Ideally, Flushing activists say they would like to put forth their own community-developed plan for revitalizing the waterfront, as organizers in Industry City did. But that plan does not yet exist, and the organized effort to create it is in development.
While Industry City rezoning negotiations were also ongoing for years, public debate intensified greatly when the proposal entered ULURP, was passed by the City Planning Commission, and hit the City Council countdown clock. Pushed by organized local activists, Sunset Park Council Member Carlos Menchaca decided to oppose the rezoning altogether, even after many of his earlier demands had been met by the developers. With some of his colleagues in the Council expressing support for the proposal because of its promise of thousands of additional jobs, Menchaca rallied many other Brooklyn elected officials against it over fears of displacement and what they saw as too-few community benefits, leading the developer to pull the plan.
While Council Member Koo appears open to considering the Special Flushing Waterfront District proposal and negotiations appear set to enter a new stage given the ULURP process, Queens Borough President Sharon Lee has recommended to reject the proposal, and local State Assembly Member Ron Kim has also voiced his disapproval of the plan. Lee’s likely successor, Donovan Richards, has not taken a public stance on the project, but he recently voiced his support for the proposed YourLIC development plan along Long Island City’s waterfront. State Senators Toby Stavisky and John Liu have expressed public enthusiasm for the waterfront rezoning. Mayor Bill de Blasio has not addressed the issue at all, just as he also didn’t take a position on the Industry City proposal, saying it was a private application, not city-backed, and that while the promise of jobs was intriguing he wanted to let the City Council process play out, which it then did to the proposal’s demise.
Some believe that one of the reasons why the rezoning project in Flushing has flown “below the radar” of politicians is the ethnicity of the transnational developer team, whose members are Chinese- and Taiwanese-American. “If this was a group of white developers, displacing African Americans, Latinos, people would be paying a lot more attention to what's going on here,” said Choe. “But because it's Chinese-American developers pushing out Chinese-American residents and small business owners, no one seems to be paying attention to what is a very similar situation as other neighborhoods that have been gentrified.”
Proponents of the project have emphasized at public hearings that the developers are members of Flushing who want to empower the community. However, Dr. Tarry Hum, professor and chair of Urban Studies at Queens College, argues that this wrongly conflates transnational affluent developers with Flushing’s marginalized groups, such as immigrants and small business owners, who are more likely to experience displacement as a result of gentrification.
“When [the developers] say they’re from the community, you have to wonder which community they’re talking about,” said Hum, who has long questioned the proposed redevelopment.
While organizers in Sunset Park had necessary time — seven years — to develop a comprehensive alternative vision to their waterfront rezoning, activists in Flushing say they do not have that luxury. “This rezoning plan just hit us like a bomb that’s already lighted,” said Byeon.
For now, local groups say they are collaborating closely to develop an alternative plan to the developers’ that reflects the needs of the community.
Not only that, they’re in contact with organizers and groups in other neighborhoods, including those in Sunset Park, Long Island City, and Inwood, as part of a larger effort to form a city-wide coalition. During a time when the coronavirus has created a broader sense of isolation in the city, Flushing activists say they are grateful for the solidarity and empathy found in these other communities. What’s more, activists say that the increased reliance on technology during the pandemic has better enabled community-led planning across a larger, geographic scope.
The ULURP process has “forced people to fight for concessions from the developers and sell off communities bit by bit,” said Sarah Ahn, an organizer with Flushing Workers Center. Activists hope that their alliance will function as a network for those experiencing unwanted rezoning to share strategies and build power against the prevailing system.
No matter what vision plan the opposition drafts, however, the Flushing project’s developers are adamant that only one of two options is possible: the currently proposed mixed-use development, including public waterfront and open space access, as well as affordable housing, or an “as-of-right” development without any public benefits. Critics have cast some doubt on whether the developers can build as of right.
To this, Choe suggested a simple solution: “Let’s call their bluff.”
***
by Allison Smith for Gotham Gazette
@allison_n_smith @GothamGazette
Note: this article has been updated with the latest tax revenue projections by the developers and to note that the developer team is both Chinese- and Taiwanese-American.