A Victory in the New York Harbor Community Benefits Campaign!

GANE kicked off the year by taking on a Community Benefits campaign around the largest redevelopment project taking place in the New York metropolitan area: the ten billion dollar redevelopment of the former army base located on prime real estate on New York Harbor in Bayonne.

Bayonne was long a thriving center of high-quality blue collar jobs.  The parents of many town residents worked at the local Maidenform factory or as longshoremen at the local port.

Without strong leadership, the army base conversion could bring most vivid extremes of the postindustrial economy to Bayonne.  A cruise line, five-star hotel, and luxury condominiums will be built to serve the Manhattan elite.  And the hundreds of service jobs in the hotel, the office buildings and condominiums, and the retail shops could too easily become poverty jobs.

With strong leadership, the Peninsula at Bayonne Harbor could represent a model for the new economy:

The hundreds of service-sector jobs created at the Peninsula at Bayonne Harbor, and the light industrial jobs also envisioned for the project, do not have to be poverty jobs.

And, as Bayonne builds a new community on a piece of land larger than the City of Hoboken, that area could become a mixed-income community of stockbrokers and nurses and firefighters and housekeepers.

GANE has had early success in promoting a model of development that will bring broadly-shared prosperity to Bayonne for generations to come.  After six months of educating government officials and the public about the potential for "high road" development, in one-on-one meetings and at public hearings, GANE's proposed language was incorporated into the Request for Proposals that was released last week.  Developers are asked to provide information, in detail, about the quality of the jobs their proposals will create and the affordability of the homes they will build.