EL: Let me start with the question of displacement. I think I saw a university study – this isn’t just people kind of marching in the streets and expressing their fears, although there was a lot of that as well – but, anyway you look at it, I go through there all the time, visually and I guess scientifically and analytically, there are a lot of people moving there, and they are of higher income than the folks that are there now. Is that at all a concern when it comes to the build-out that you want to do of Industry City?
AK: Let me say this. For 15 years, I’ve been very lucky to work on two of the nation’s most significant industrial turn-arounds, first the Brooklyn Navy Yard, a public project, and now Industry City, a private project. Both parallels, in that they’ve created thousands and thousands of good-paying jobs, innovation economy jobs, manufacturing jobs, but very different in one regard: one in that the Brooklyn Navy Yard was massively subsidized by your and my tax dollars. We leveraged a billion dollars of private investment off of that and ten thousands jobs.
In 2013, what attracted my to Industry City was new ownership that was willing to take on a decrepit facility that hadn’t seen any investment in 50-plus years. So, have we changed it in the last seven years? Absolutely. We’ve invested 400 million dollars, we’ve gone from 1,900 jobs to 8,000 – that’s a hundred new jobs a month for seven years.
So, let me talk about gentrification. Absolutely that’s an issue for our city, up and down the Brooklyn-Queens waterfront. But if you look at the numbers, for the seven years before we got here in 2013, sure, costs were going up. In the seven years after we’ve been here, they’ve been going up at the same rate. There was absolutely no spike based on the 400 million dollars investment we’ve put in.
So, look, if the city’s going to have a future in addressing this, the answer to gentrification is not killing good-paying jobs, particularly manufacturing and innovation jobs, the kinds of jobs that young people want to be in. It’s creating pathways to those jobs, economic opportunity, educational connections, and then it’s building workforce and affordable housing nearby.
EL: So, while it is a private project with private investment, and we’ll talk about what happens if you don’t get the zoning changes that you want, the zoning changes are public and there seems to be a fair amount of commentary from people who influence that process. I’m thinking of your local city councilman, Carlos Menchaca, who are saying, we don’t want this, when it comes before the City Council, we’re going to urge a no vote on the zoning changes. So you’ve got to have some kind of conversation with them about this. Is there a mid-point or a middle ground that you’ve explored where you could satisfy some of the public concerns with the private goals?
AK: We’ve been having years of conversations, Errol. We’ve had probably an historic number of public engagements, town halls, we’ve knocked on 15,000 doors, we’ve delayed our certification twice at the request of the local city council member so that there could be even more discussion. And then last September he sent us a list of 10 demands that he believed needed to get met for this project to go forward. Within 48 hours, we responded that we could meet all 10 of those demands. So, we’re ready to get at the table. I think that most folks in Sunset Park really care about the future. They care about jobs. They care about opportunities for their children, and they want to see growth. They think that a deal is better than no deal, and so we’re hopeful there will be leadership. But we’re also heartened that people across the city, council members like Robert Cornegy and Richard Torres and Donovan Richards have stepped up and said, wait a second. On a project of city-wide impact like this, we can’t just defer this decision. We need as a body to debate this. And as a time when the city is facing 25 percent unemployment, with record-breaking budget deficits, we can’t afford not to approve a project that can lead to 20,000 jobs and 100 million dollars a year in tax revenue. So, we very much hope that people will come to the table and we can get this over the finish line.
EL: One sort of a technical question. When you say 20,000 jobs, I know on different projects, that math is counted different ways. Sometimes, what they really mean is, 2,000 jobs over a ten year period and they call that 20,000 jobs, pursing jobs per year. When you say 20,000, what are we talking about?
AK: Those are 20,000 real jobs. So, again, we’ve gone from 1,900 to 8,000 in the last seven years. On site, we think we can grow that to 15,000, and then the economic activity based on the work here will lead to jobs elsewhere in the community and elsewhere in New York City which will take the job total well over 20,000 jobs. And look, I know there’s always debates about this when it comes to development projects. We certainly had a big one in Queens that we missed an opportunity on, but here’s what’s different about this project: this is not just words about what we will do in the future, this is based on a track-record of success of not only creating those jobs, but doing everything we can to connect those jobs to folks locally. We’ve created what really is historic in the private sector in terms of a workforce development center connecting those jobs to folks who need them the most. We’ve placed 500 people just in the last three years, and over 70 percent of them have just a GED or a high school degree. I would call that creating opportunity locally.
EL: OK. Let me ask you about the hotel component of it. We spoke with Peter Ward just a few nights ago, and he said that there was an immense amount of overbuilding of hotels even prior to the pandemic, and even more-so now with the vast vacancy rates, it doesn’t necessarily make sense. Is that something that is going to stay in your plan, or is that something might change?
AK: That was part of our plan we introduced now five years ago, and it was based on researching successful innovation districts across the country, whether it was Philadelphia or Baltimore or San Francisco, and every successful innovation district had two things – they had academic collaborations, colleges and universities embedded, in some cases vocational high schools, and that’s a big part of our plan, and they had hotels, because increasingly people were coming from all over the country and all over the world to work there. So from an economic development point of view, it makes huge sense to have commercial hotels here.
That said, and you asked about making a deal, you asked about listening to the community, that part of the plan is clearly not liked and wanted at the local level. So we have committed publicly and repeatedly to removing that part of the plan should the City Council ask that it be removed when we get before them in the coming days.
EL: OK. In our last minute, let me ask you finally – I think I read in local media that you’ve said, look, we can do a certain amount of this as-of-right, and if all else fails, we’ll just have traditional office space that’s built out. Is that still your position? Is that what we’re going to see if the City Council and other public bodies don’t approve this?
AK: Look, at both the Navy Yard and at Industry City, we’ve created very eclectic ecosystems that have a combination of manufacturing – that’s 2020 manufacturing, not manufacturing in the 1950s – with other creative industries, design, fashion, tech, gaming, film and television, the kinds of industries that most young people want to get into. But you have to have the ecosystem of uses. You have to have retail, you have to have other kinds of amenities. Look, under the current zoning, we can do unlimited office. What we’re saying to the local council member and to the city at large is that mixture of uses is what you should want us to do because this mixture will allow us to keep the broadest range of industry, including manufacturing, as opposed to going onto purely an industrial strategy with last mile, and other warehouse distribution that heavy (inaudible).
EL: We’re going to leave it there for now. Andrew Kimball, thank you for that passionate defense and enlightening explanation of the project, and we’ll wish you the best of luck as the city continues to debate what to do with Industry City.
AK: Thanks Errol.
Sunset Park Reports 