Looking Forward: The Future of NYC Jobs with ABNY

A huge thank you to An Association for a Better New York (ABNY) for a thought-provoking panel on the future of jobs in New York City. As an urban planner, I am constantly reflecting on solutions to our city's systemic #workforcedevelopment challenges. While NYC created a staggering 900k new jobs over the past 10 years, it should come as no surprise that this growth was disproportionate across boroughs, sectors, and education levels.

Panelists Purnima Kapur, Gail Mellow, Seth Pinsky, and Ritchie Torres explored pathways to creating middle-income jobs centered around alternatives to higher education, on-the-job training and human capital investments, and job growth strategies tailored to a hyper-local scale. I've shared some highlights from the conversation here - dig in!

Center for an Urban Future Director Jonathon Bowles opened the conversation by sharing some data around our current workforce landscape. The numbers on a citywide scale are telling the story of a thriving job market with one of the lowest unemployment rates in our history. They’re also revealing vast disparities in the types of jobs that are driving this growth: we’re seeing an increase in high-wage tech jobs paired with a sharp expansion of low-wage sectors like home health care, restaurants, bars, and employment services. Growth in some of New York City’s traditionally high wage sectors like hospitals, finance, legal services, and manufacturing has slowed. In fact, we lost a staggering 13,500 manufacturing jobs in the past ten years. New Yorkers without bachelor’s degrees often do not qualify for middle income jobs and the data shows that attainment varies greatly between boroughs: 60.7% of Manhattan’s population over 25 years old holds a BA while only 30.8% of Queens’ population holds the same accreditation. With this baseline data in hand, panelists explored:

• What are we doing to create pipelines for middle income jobs?  

• How are we connecting our economic development and workforce development efforts?

• How can we address the geographic disparities between our boroughs and neighborhoods when it comes to access to high-quality jobs?

• What role should employers play when designing and implementing workforce development strategies?

“You can’t be pro-affordability and anti-economic development (or density),” shared RXR Realty’s Executive Vice President Seth Pinsky. “The only way to fix this problem is more development,” pointing to the massive displacement in the Bay Area as a cautionary tale of what New York City could look like without increasing density or expanding our existing housing stock. He also challenged the audience to consider how we can make it less expensive to do business in New York City. Companies in the finance sector, for example, have moved many of their middle income jobs out of state and, in turn, away from qualified New Yorkers.

LaGuardia Community College President Gail Mellow asked fellow panelists to revisit how we define economic development and who currently drives it. “When we think about economic development, we don’t normally have enough people in the room,” pointing to missing representation from those who design workforce pipelines and the communities they design them for. She believes that investing in human capital through education as early as high school, vocational programs, apprenticeships, and specialized trainings - in lieu of brick and mortar economic development projects - will nurture our missing middle class workforce. Mellow advocates for working with employers to design curricula and initiating feedback loops with those employers around what is working and where there is room for improvement.

City Council Member for District 15 Ritchie Torres shared that residents in his district are experiencing notably higher unemployment rates than the citywide average. As a result, he advocates for workforce development strategies that are designed on a hyper-local scale. “Economic development without human capital will only take you so far,” he notes. In fact, “it will perpetuate disparities we already have.”

We look forward to continuing the conversation around the future of jobs and again, thank ABNY for convening this panel of cross-sector experts. Karp Strategies often explores, designs, and informs strategy around workforce development. You can find selected projects where we delivered community and workforce development strategies on our website, here.

The Hub of Ingenuity: Exploring Transportation Equity at the WTS Conference 2019

From the rapid redevelopment of waterfronts to emerging mobility options, our urban places are experiencing a spatial revolution and  women in transportation are at the forefront, leading some of the most innovative infrastructure projects. Nur Asri, Senior Consultant at Karp Strategies, joined over 800 members of WTS International at her first conference in Boston last week.

WTS International, an organization founded by a group of pioneering women in transportation more than 40 years ago, themed its annual conference, ‘The Hub of Ingenuity’. The theme this year perfectly encapsulates the vision of the organization to create an equitable  venue for women to connect, collaborate, and innovate. Sessions and tours we attended ranged in topics, including the evolution of the Boston Harbor, collaboration in infrastructure resilience, micro mobility trends, big data for infrastructure planning and operations, and financial innovations for mobility projects.

Among many lessons shared, one that echoed across sessions was the critical need to ensure that our work, as planners, engineers, or construction managers, impacts communities equitably. To echo Jennifer Cohan, Secretary of Delaware DOT, the  work that we do impacts the quality of life of citizens on a daily basis - it is vitally important work and so we must make every effort to understand the people and the environments that we are working in before making any plans or improvements. At Karp Strategies, we strive to achieve this by working closely with our clients to design robust and customized public engagement strategies that consider the world of stakeholders and their influences on projects. Our equity-driven approach enables us to meet communities and stakeholders where they are so that they feel encouraged to participate in the betterment of the urban fabric and local  economies.

As we continue our work on major transportation and infrastructure projects across New York City and the region, including BQX streetcar and the NY-NJ port master plan, our team will no doubt continue to refine our approach and strategies to ensure transportation and infrastructure plans positively impact local communities. As a WBE, Karp Strategies is thrilled to have attended our first WTS Conference, and we look forward to further engaging at a local level with the women leaders of transportation in the Greater NY Chapter.

Exploring Questions of Resiliency and Coalition Building at the RPA 2019 Assembly

As the city releases its OneNYC Plan: Building a Strong and Fair City and Mayor De Blasio pursues an extension of the Island of Manhattan along the Financial District waterfront, the Regional Plan Association 2019 Assembly levied climate resiliency as an equity issue. Rebecca Karp and Joseph Sutkowi were part of the conversation at the event last week. We heard from visionary leaders like Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont but some of the most energizing discussion came from two climate-focused panels. Leaders from the NorthLight Foundation, the New School, Rebuild by Design, joined New York State Assemblymember Nily Rozic and NYC Chief Resilience Officer Dan Zarilli for the Climate Justice for All panel. Discussion centered on stakeholder engagement and the importance of building coalitions for major climate resiliency projects.

Discussions with stakeholders are becoming standard in implementation projects. As a firm, we’re deeply embedded in this work and take pride in amplifying the voices of community members to find solutions that work for the community. Conversations with residents in particular, however, often happen after key decisions that set the direction of a project have been made. This can mean that they focus on mitigation of adverse effects rather than working with agencies and elected officials on setting an agenda from the very beginning.

As a firm active in resiliency engagement efforts across the region, we’re asking ourselves a series of key questions:

• How do we build links between the policy advocacy community that so effectively pushes legislators and local officials with on-the-ground neighborhood organizations that have site-specific expertise that can be incorporated into planning and policy?

• How can residents engage with the appropriations processes that make crucial decisions around the scope of projects and priorities in their neighborhood?

• Given that resilience is more than simply an environmental issue, how do we ensure that we get advocates and experts on housing, public health, job creation, transportation and other fields to the table to address challenges and work in partnership with community members?