Imagining Newark’s Green Future
NEWARK - Three blocks from City Hall, Market and Broad Streets meet in a swarm of shoppers, delivery vans, taxis, buses, parked cars, and weaving bicyclists. It’s been a long time, 87 years in fact, since this intersection at the center of New Jersey’s largest city was known as the “busiest in the world.” Still, the quickening pulse of commerce and the swirl of people attracted to Newark’s central business district are evidence, even in these hard times, of a metropolitan economy as hale as it’s been in decades.
There is more to come, potentially much more. With the help of the Apollo Alliance and a coalition of national and local partner organizations, the City of Newark is working with business and community members to pursue a new economic development strategy to make the city cleaner, greener, and more energy efficient, and to generate thousands of green-collar jobs.
The Apollo Alliance today published Imagining Newark’s Green Future, a report documenting how the Newark community chose a new narrative for economic development based on environmental sustainability and family-supporting green-collar jobs. The goals and strategies refined during 12 months of intense community meetings and planning sessions were formally embraced by Newark officials and community leaders during Newark’s Green Future Summit, a two-day conference in September 2008 that the Apollo Alliance organized in collaboration with the city and national and local partners. In exploring in breadth and detail the planning that led to the summit, the new report also serves as a manual for leaders in other cities who seek a cleaner and greener path to prosperity.
“Mayor Booker understands that a green city with good jobs will be a go-to destination for businesses and families alike,” said Phil Angelides, chairman of the Apollo Alliance. “Apollo’s report lays out a recipe for transforming struggling areas into thriving neighborhoods. As Newark’s successful model demonstrates, the key ingredients are innovative leadership, community engagement, and of course, hard work.”
A New Metropolitan Strategy
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For more information
Newark’s Green Future Envisioned During Summit People Making It Happen In Newark Working Group Priorities and Action Items |
The Apollo Alliance, a five-year-old national coalition of labor, business, environmental, and social justice leaders, believes that the rapid transition to a clean energy economy is essential to the nation’s safety and prosperity.
Imagining Newark’s Green Future is the Apollo Alliance’s third major report on new metropolitan development strategies. Last year, in Green-Collar Jobs in America’s Cities, co-written with Green For All, the Apollo Alliance laid out a model for how cities can combine environmental and economic goals to create green job programs. Readers from cities across the country asked for more detail - how to bring stakeholders into the process, how to define “growth sectors” in a green economy, how to better integrate city departments so that “sustainability” isn’t just one person’s job.
Imagining Newark’s Green Future answers more of the questions that leaders are asking about how to move a green development strategy in the face of financial woes and job loss. “We hope that our experience in Newark provides insight and value to other cities and organizations working to move the ‘green dream’ from vision to reality,” said Kate Gordon, co-director of the Apollo Alliance and co-author of the new report. “As in other major American cities that are proving the value of a development strategy based on energy efficiency, climate sensitivity, and resource conservation, Newark is charting a new path to prosperity that fits the distinctive economic and environmental conditions of the new century.”
Determination In Face of National Crisis
Imagining Newark’s Green Future comes at a moment of upheaval and opportunity for Newark and for the nation. After five straight decades of decline, the city’s population is increasing again. Among Northeast cities, only Washington and New York are growing faster. Housing construction and new business starts also surged in recent years. The city’s 39-year-old mayor, Cory A. Booker, sees the city’s greening as essential to attracting more residents, more businesses, and more family-supporting jobs - all of which will, he believes, improve public safety and advance economic growth.
Yet like every other American city, Newark’s progress has been suddenly challenged by a national economic crisis. Credit markets have seized up. Financial markets are faltering. Unemployment is increasing, as are fiscal deficits. Energy and transportation systems are in dire need of repair. Newark also confronts epidemic rates of lead poisoning and asthma, and ever-rising utility costs that are hurting households and businesses, and crippling the city’s budget.
In September, during Newark’s Green Future Summit, the more than 200 community leaders who attended were just coming to grips with the magnitude of what’s turned out to be an epic wave of economic trends rushing the wrong way. Instead of dismay, though, speaker after speaker expressed their determination to pursue a new path to prosperity, to devote more attention to building a cleaner, more efficient, greener economy, and to turn Newark into what Mayor Booker called “the greenest city in America.”
Newark Commitment to Clean Energy Economy
As the Apollo Alliance notes in Imagining Newark’s Green Future, this means restoring and reclaiming Newark’s natural assets, and realizing the economic opportunities that are part of the transition away from a carbon-based economy to a more sustainable future.
Mayor Booker said during the summit that he was committed to making the change. “It is not just a matter of ‘well, it’s nice to be green,’” said the mayor. “We urgently and desperately need to be green.”
The significance of Mayor Booker’s commitment cannot be overstated. Since 1666, Newark’s booms and busts - like those of all major American cities - have been tied directly to its dependence on fossil fuels. Coal and steam produced the lead and iron and steel and boilers that brought workers from across the country and the world to earn good industrial wages. During the last decades of the 19th century and first decades of the 20th Newark thrived as an industrial center. Its population peaked at 440,000 residents in the 1940s and early 1950s. In more recent decades, cheap oil fueled the cars that moved Newarkers to the suburbs and drained the urban center of its solid middle-class workers and jobs.
At this pivotal moment, it is clear that the United States needs to move past the old ways of doing business and toward a model of economic growth that is closely tied to environmental preservation and energy security. Imagining Newark’s Green Future provides a thorough assessment of how one city has begun to make that shift. Newark’s story, of a major American city articulating a new vision of progress in the green economy, is one that should resonate with other cities and communities across the country.
Keith Schneider, a nationally known environmental and energy journalist, is communications director of the Apollo Alliance. Reach him at keith@apolloalliance.org.
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