One of the many crystalizing facts the coronavirus pandemic has laid bare is the devastating fragmentation of and disinvestment in the United States’ manufacturing sector. Municipal governments are scrambling to source personal protective equipment (PPE); manufacturing companies are rapidly retooling their factory floors; and we are all wondering how to move forward from the health and economic crisis brought on by COVID-19.
Over the past year, UMA and ANHD have been engaging industrial policy stakeholders across the country to derive best practices for creating and preserving affordable industrial real estate, culminating in the upcoming release of our Mission Driven Industrial Development Toolkit.
Today, as manufacturing is being touted as a mechanism to support our economic rebound and public health, our findings, which emphasize the importance of collaboration between manufacturers, community organizations, developers, and government to inform development, business services, and land use policies, are more relevant than ever before. As we have always known, the manufacturing sector holds a source of employment for the middle class and those without a college degree, and the promise to lift up local economies and neighborhoods. Most notably, it presents a path out of the current public health and economic crisis.
Together with ANHD, UMA hosted a webinar featuring some of our members to highlight their experiences fighting for industrial neighborhoods. Barika X. Williams, ANHD’s Executive Director, and UMA Executive Director Lee Wellington kicked off the conversation with remarks on the importance of doing this work around the growing recognition importance of manufacturing and the racial justice uprisings. Leah Archibald, Executive Director at Evergreen in Brooklyn, talked about how her organization leveraged community planning initiatives that included manufacturing to challenge development plans imposed by the city. Hannah Jones, Director of Economic Development at the Industrial Council of Nearwest Chicago, discussed how a major industrial corridor in Chicago was doing well despite the economic impact of COVID. And Andrew Dahlgren, a Research Partner at UMA, talked about how preserving industrial space was a shared interest among the community development stakeholders he spoke with as he researched the new UMA and ANHD toolkit. The conversation was moderated by Armando Moritz-Chapelliquen, Director of Capacity Building at ANHD.
Below are some takeaways from what they dug into:
COVID has revealed how vulnerable our medical and consumer supply chains are. That’s reason enough for cities to wake up to the importance of local manufacturing. Jones mentioned how the industrial corridor she oversees is seeing major activity and stable occupancy rates because of the demand for medical supplies. Meanwhile, tenants are leaving the office space that has slowly encroached on the industrial corridor. “People are realizing they don’t need as much [office] space while industrial users are shifting to produce things that are needed now, like PPP and ventilators,” she said. The incubator her organization oversees is still operating at a 97-percent occupancy rate.
Archibald said she’s seeing something similar in Brooklyn. “We’re not seeing lots of folks shutter,” she said. “You can’t work remotely when you’re working a lathe or a steam press machine.”
From a health standpoint, there are obvious risks to keeping work places open during a pandemic. But looking at the big picture, it becomes apparent that cities with local manufacturers likely have an easier time responding to crises like this one because they don’t only rely on importing products.
“COVID definitely had the effect of waking up the city of New York to the fact that manufacturing is a really convenient thing to have in your city,” said Archibald. “Heretofore they’ve been kind of indifferent, but all of a sudden it’s like, ‘Who can sew gowns? We don’t have enough masks.’”
Promoting industrial space and promoting affordable housing aren’t mutually exclusive. In fact, they both serve the same constituents. Archibald mentioned how the organization she represents, Evergreen, was founded by an affordable housing organization. Working to keep good-paying manufacturing jobs in cities is just as important as promoting affordable housing in cities, she said, because manufacturing jobs can bring more income to populations that benefit from affordable housing. At the end of the day, both are within the realm of community development. “No housing is affordable without a job,” added Archibald.
Organizing with community members and stakeholders is key to keeping developers and even city development plans in check. Some years ago Chicago announced an industrial modernization plan which was less modernization and more “knock it down and build high rise condos,” according to Jones. Her organization worked with business owners, community members, and the city to preserve existing industrial land in the Kinzie Industrial Corridor and create an area plan that still allowed some non-industrial uses nearby.
When Archibald’s organization was awarded a brownfield planning grant by New York State, they used the funds to produce an area-wide land use study that focused on creating more opportunities for manufacturing job growth. Right after they put the study in motion, the city announced its own plan for industrial development in Brooklyn. Not all of it overlapped with what the community wanted.
“We were able to truly engage our community to say demonstratively that ‘this is our vision for development,’” said Archibald. Having the area-wide land use study in place provided them with the ammunition they needed to push back on the city’s plan where they felt pushback was due. “We were well positioned to debate them, and debate them we did,” said Archibald.