2004 Eco-Metropolis Conference

"NYC Apollo: Forging a Strong Economy and a Healthy City"

Jeremy Reiss
Project Director, Urban Agenda

June, 2004

Good afternoon. My name is Jeremy Reiss, and I am the Co-Project Director of Urban Agenda. Urban Agenda is connecting organized labor with the larger civic community to address public policy issues in a way that will create a more socially, economically, and environmentally just New York City. We are a joint initiative of the NYC Central Labor Council - the local AFL.CIO affiliate - and the Queens College Labor Resource Center.

We are implementing this approach to address the question of energy through our NYC Apollo project. NYC Apollo is a growing coalition of labor unions, business leaders, environmental justice advocates, and educators convened to optimize energy usage in a way that allows us to create jobs, revitalize underserved communities, and improve our internal and external environments.

We have two marching orders for our NYC Apollo project. The first is the recent NYC Energy Task Force report showing that our city will require 3,780 additional Megawatts of capacity by 2008. This figure roughly translates into five new power plants. What we are trying to do with NYC Apollo is prevent the need for these new power plants because labor will inevitably want to build them - we'll build anything, tear it down, and build it again - while the communities where they are cited - which would most likely be low-income communities of color - would rightly and inevitably oppose them.

Our second marching order is the new Community Service Society study showing that approximately 50% of African American men in our city are unemployed. In a climate where low-wage service sector jobs are our only growth sector, we believe we need to be looking to develop new markets, rather than focusing our efforts on placing people in low wage jobs with no benefits and no opportunity for growth.

We recently released our Ten Point Plan for a Strong Economy and Healthy City which outlines our strategy. What is so compelling about this strategy is that it is a win-win-win for everyone - for environmental justice advocates, for labor, and for the business community. It is a strategy to retain our status as the preeminent global city. How can we consider ourselves a world class city if we can't figure out how to integrate high performance technologies on a broad scale? From a job creation perspective, examining our economy through an environmental lense - as we are doing through NYC Apollo - prevents tremendous opportunities that I see as falling into three distinct industrial sectors.

The first market concerns the creation and retrofitting of energy-efficient, high performance buildings and infrastructure. If we would focus our attention on building a high performance city - rather than fighting about the west side and other development projects - we would have an amazing potential to create a generation of good family sustaining jobs for our city's workers. Obviously worker training, re-training, and education is critical here and can also help jumpstart the market. Healthy and high performance buildings are not a job. They are a hundred years of work.

The second market is the niche manufacturing sector that would support a high performance market. It is absolutely critical that New York City maintains a thriving manufacturing sector, a source of good, family sustaining jobs. A strong manufacturing sector is a leading indicator of a strong economy. High performance buildings present the opportunity to develop a green industrial sector that would produce the products - i.e., solar panels, window fixtures, energy efficient heating and cooling systems, etc. - that support the high performance building market.

We are constantly disappointed when we hear that far-sighted engineers, developers, and architects must turn to Canada, the west coast, and even Europe to find the products they need to build high performance buildings and infrastructure. There is no reason that these products can not be produced here. NYC has the talent and the capacity to become a global manufacturing center for the high performance building market. We must capitalize on our proximity, and help manufacturers in decline transition to the new. The economic vitality of our city and the lives of our workers depend on it.

Furthermore, technologies that can help power high performance buildings have been proven to generate jobs. Through production and installation, wind power creates 2.77 jobs for every Megawatt produced; solar photovoltaic installations create 7.26 jobs per Megawatt; solar thermal creates 5.93 jobs per Megawatt; and geothermal creates 5.67 jobs per Megawatt . (CALPIRG, Renewables Work, 2002). These job creation figures are especially important now that New York has passed a 24 percent renewable portfolio standards (RPS), which will increase market certainty for renewables and investments in local production capacity, and thus we hope will spur job creation and cut our city's unemployment rate.

Besides being a source of potentially thousands of jobs, healthy and high performance buildings have the potential to revolutionize the way the city is powered. Our waterfront and other neighborhoods are being rezoned and luxury residential construction is on the rise. Residents increasingly demand air conditioners, dish washers, and other amenities, yet do not want power plants sitting in their back yards. As I said earlier, an increasing demand for power cannot continue to be simply addressed by citing power plants in the city's poorest neighborhoods. This is absolutely inequitable and forces us to rethink the question of how our city is powered.

I now want to pose a few questions in terms of what is possible, specifically about the role government and public policy can play. Two pieces of legislation before the City Council, which we are supporting, would jumpstart a local green building market. The first, Intro 324-A, would alter the city's administrative code to require both municipal and city-subsidized construction to be built to LEEDS Silver, a national energy-efficiency standard. Equally important, Intro 438 would create a fast-track permitting program for developers who want to build "green". Rather than offering tax breaks - which the city can ill afford - the private sector would be lured by a transparent, expedited, and time sensitive permitting system which would increase market certainty and predictability.

I'm wondering what other role government can play and if it is enough? How can we change zoning codes, building codes, and the operating of city agencies and the priorities of elected officials to make our vision for a healthy and high performance city possible? And how can we take the lead at the city and state level - in light of such repressive federal leadership - to make our vision for a healthy and high performance city a national norm?

From the perspective of organized labor, I believe that focusing on environmental jobs will help us grow. As we all know, organized labor is in decline, representing only 13% of the national workforce. Organized labor, if it is going to remain relevant, needs to become a workers movement and expand its focus beyond the bread-and-butter issues of wages and working conditions, which are obviously crucial but not enough. The NYC Apollo approach will help the labor movement begin to more systematically address the needs of workers not only in their workplace but in their homes, schools, and communities.

Finally, and I'm just posing this as a thought in light of the recent election, NYC Apollo - and focusing on the linkages between jobs and the environment - is a way for progressives and the left to unite and build power. It is an economic development approach, but it is also an approach for social and environmental justice. There is certainly some common ground we can find in this agenda, and brining diverse stakeholders together and forming new coalitions and developing new forms to create new norms is key to building a larger movement for change.