Laura Wolf-Powers

Community Benefits Agreements and Local Government

Problem: As community benefits agreements or community benefits arrangements (CBAs) become more common in redevelopment practice they are generating conceptual confusion and political controversy. Much of the literature on CBAs is focused on local organizing coalitions’ inclusivity and political strategies, or on the legal aspects of the agreements, providing only limited information to planners who encounter advocacy for CBAs. Purpose: I aim to help planners prepare to deal appropriately with community benefits claims in their communities by closely examining four urban redevelopment projects in which CBAs have been negotiated by stakeholder organizations, legislators, developers, and government agencies. Methods: I characterize the 27 CBAs in effect in the United States as of June 30, 2009, based on their participants and structures. I then examine four of these CBAs in detail using the semistructured interviews I conducted with individuals involved in crafting, advocating, and implementing them and coverage in major daily papers, alternative newsweeklies, blogs, and the business press. Results and conclusions: The cases featured in this article suggest that four key factors influence the way CBAs work in practice and the extent to which they vindicate or refute the claims of CBA proponents and detractors: the robustness of the local development climate; the local politics of organized labor; the accountability of the community benefits coalition to affected community residents; and, most importantly, the role of local government in negotiation and implementation. Takeaway for practice: Public sector actors, including elected officials and the staffs of redevelopment agencies, housing departments, workforce development agencies, parks and recreation departments, and budget departments become implicit parties to CBAs and often play significant roles in implementing them. Thus, public sector planners should carefully review and evaluate the implications of community benefits claims for local governments interests and goals. Depending on the circumstances, these evaluations may lead local officials to support community benefits arrangements or to oppose them. Research support: This research was supported by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Up-Zoning New York City’s Mixed Use Neighborhoods : Property-Led Economic Development and the Anatomy of a Planning Dilemma

This article examines land use policy and real estate market activity in the 1990s in two mixed-use neighborhoods in New York City. Using data from case studies of Greenpoint-Williamsburg in Brooklyn and Long Island City in Queens, this article finds that adherence on the part of officials to the principle of highest and best use, together with an incremental approach to planning and land use regulation, has contributed to opportunistic development and industrial displacement in these areas. The question of whether this trajectory is in the interests of the public at large remains the subject of fierce debate in the citys planning community and beyond. The article contributes to the literature on property-led economic development in central cities by exploring the complex task of planners charged with regulating areas that not only are logical sites for commercial and residential expansion but also serve as niches for loweryielding land uses.

Chains and Ladders: Exploring the Opportunities for Workforce Development and Poverty Reduction in the Hospital Sector

In this article, the authors investigate the potential of hospitals to offer low- and semiskilled workers employment and advancement options.This study uses the job chains approach to measuring economic development impacts devised by Persky, Felsenstein, and Carlson to compare hospitals with three other industries highly concentrated in central cities and examines the practical challenges facing workforce development professionals. The findings suggest that growth in hospital employment has the potential to outstrip the impact of growth in accommodations, legal services, and securities and commodities on the well-being of low-income workers and should prompt economic development practitioners to take the sector more seriously as a locus for attention and investment. To maximize welfare gain and distributional equity, economic development policy makers must accompany investments in health care—based economic development both with strategies to promote skills attainment and credentialing among low-paid health care workers and with formal strategies to facilitate upward movement.

Human-capital-centred Regionalism in Economic Development: A Case of Analytics Outpacing Institutions?

Drawing on the case of the Delaware Valley Innovation Network, a regional consortium funded under the US Department of Labor, the paper argues that sophisticated analytical tools developed to facilitate workforce- and occupation-led economic development are running ahead of the institution-building required to put new approaches into practice. There are two main reasons for this. First, tensions persist around the role of the public-sector workforce system in regional development initiatives. Secondly, regional stakeholders disagree about whether ‘knowledge economy’ investments should include the training of manufacturing, transport and logistics workers. The documentation of regional occupational specialisations, ‘talent gap’ analyses and the clarification of career pathways are crucial components of human-capital-centred regionalism in economic development. However, best analytical practices are of little use without the institutional capacity to translate analysis into coherent, effective policy.

Teaching Planners to Deal The Pedagogical Value of a (Simulated) Economic Development Negotiation

This paper describes a classroom exercise in which students apply negotiation and project finance skills in a simulated economic development negotiation. The goal of the exercise is that students’ experience of negotiating a deal will lead them to constructively explore concepts of “good process” and “just outcomes.” Public–private development dominates redevelopment practice, and its vocabulary—that of negotiation and contracting—has gained ascendance in the field. Trends in planning pedagogy reflect this phenomenon, but training for professional planners also needs to encompass their future roles as exercisers of situated ethical judgment.

Expanding Planning's Public Sphere STREET Magazine, Activist Planning, and Community Development in Brooklyn, New York, 1971—1975

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, a paradigm of activist planning became a new “tributary” feeding the stream of the planning profession. STREET magazine, published from 1971 to 1975 by the Pratt Institute Center for Community and Environmental Development in Brooklyn, NY, offers a lens through which to examine the expansion of the profession to encompass a range of ideas associated with this paradigm. This article, drawing on an extensive review of STREET magazines content within the historical context in which it was produced, as well as interviews with people involved with the publication, argues that STREET reflected the introduction of new modes of practice into the city planning profession, as well as influencing those modes in a particular place, New York City.