Newark’s Green Future Summit
In the two years since Mayor Cory A. Booker took office, various measures of the city’s well-being have begun to tick upwards. Now Booker has teamed up with the Apollo Alliance to improve green-collar job opportunities for all city residents.
Apollo, Mayor Cory Booker promote sustainable urban development
NEWARK –Last October, just after Mayor Cory A. Booker teamed up with the Apollo Alliance to plan a summit to showcase development practices that could create thousands of green-collar jobs in this historic East Coast city, Green Depot, one of the nation’s leading suppliers of environmentally friendly building products, opened its newest showroom in Newark.
On Friday morning, after nearly a year of planning and organizing, Newark’s Green Future Summit gets started at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. The two-day event is expected to attract over 400 participants. Along with Newark’s dynamic mayor, Newark’s Green Future Summit features nationally prominent authorities on sustainable development and job creation from the Apollo Alliance and other national organizations, along with a number of local urban development groups.
Also attending will be Paul Novack, Green Depot’s director of sustainability, who has agreed to help implement the sustainable ideas and the green-collar jobs development strategy decided at the summit.
| For More Information
Newark’s Green Future Summit Joint News Release Newark’s Green Future Summit Convenors and Sponsors Lincoln Park Coast Cultural District Ella Baker Center for Human Rights |
“Focusing on green in the urban context is meeting a moral imperative, an economic urgency, and an energy crisis,” said Mayor Booker in a statement. “In Newark, we know that with renewable and efficient energy we can have a triple win: we can find a way to clean our environment, to create jobs, and to generate wealth in sections of our city that have been closed out of real and substantive economic opportunity for generations.”
“I’m excited about what’s happening here,” added Novack, whose company employs five people in its Newark showroom. “We’re at the early stages of something big. There is a mandate from the mayor to pursue a new economic strategy. This is a strong start.”
First of Its Kind in Newark
Newark’s Green Future Summit stems from a commitment that Newark, the Apollo Alliance, the Washington-based Center For American Progress, Christensen Global Strategies, and several more organizations made at the Clinton Global Initiative in September 2007. The idea was two fold. First, to bring Newark’s diverse talent and experience together with leaders from other communities to develop a roadmap for sustainable development. And second, to support the city in developing green urban initiatives – integrating green buildings into energy-efficient neighborhoods, developing new parks, fostering business development in clean energy that produces green-collar jobs, greening the Newark port – that create jobs, increase community welfare, and expand economic opportunity.
Nothing like Newark’s Green Future Summit, a partnership between the city of 280,000 and the four-year-old Apollo Alliance, has ever occurred in this 342-year-old community. The high profile green economy event is meant to show how clean energy, environmental, and green jobs principles can be incorporated into the city’s economic development priorities.
Mayor Booker has set out to make Newark a national model for clean and efficient energy use, green economic development, job creation, and equitable opportunity.
Three Priorities
In short, with the Apollo Alliance’s help, Mayor Booker and his city this weekend take a big step down that path. Newark’s Green Future Summit will bring residents, community leaders, business executives, and government officials together to decide on recommendations that Mayor Booker insists will improve opportunity and the quality of life for all city residents and especially those in its most economically and environmentally distressed communities.
Conference leaders and attendees will focus their work on three specific goals:
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Building clean and green market opportunities, like those that attracted Green Depot, to support entrepreneurs and existing industries. Newark also is intent on greening its port, one of the largest in the United States. The idea is to more firmly base economic development in green strategies that grow new and existing businesses, and create and retain well-paying career-track jobs.
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Constructing new, green buildings and encouraging green rehabilitation on existing buildings. Establishing new green building standards and incentives for city-owned and other large buildings – as Washington, D.C. did in 2006 — could create tremendous demand for skilled construction and building service workers, who earn family-supporting wages.
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Create green open space that connects park development with urban forestry jobs and entrepreneurship opportunities. Newark can integrate green spaces into infrastructure planning, from managing stormwater to reducing urban heat; promoting urban farming and community gardening; and linking green spaces with programs that promote personal fitness and a connection to nature.
“Now is the time for us to be ambitious and uncompromising, to be daring in the pursuit of our boldest hopes and dreams,” said Booker. “The urgency is obvious but I believe the opportunities are almost infinite.”
A Part of Alliance’s New Apollo Program
The conference also comes as the Apollo Alliance undertakes a nationwide release of The New Apollo Program, a comprehensive national economic development strategy to scale up and accelerate development of the clean energy sector and millions of green-collar jobs in and outside American cities. “This is a tremendous undertaking for Newark and the Apollo Alliance at a time of transition and opportunity,” said Phil Angelides, the chairman of the Apollo Alliance, and one of the summit’s speakers. “The tools and practices of the clean energy, good jobs economy are being put to work in this great city.”
A number of other cities – Seattle, San Francisco, New York, Boston, Charleston, just to name a few — have embraced these strategies, piece by piece over years of action, and realized enormous economic gains, job growth, and improvements to the quality of life.
Chicago, for instance, started with an aggressive program of planting trees in the early 1990s, then invested in improving its Lake Michigan waterfront, then spent considerable sums on promoting energy-efficient buildings, and neighborhoods, and new park construction. These and other green development measures helped Chicago attract more than 100,000 new residents in the 1990s, add tens of thousands of downtown jobs, prompted a high-rise housing boom, reduced poverty rates, built thousands of affordable homes, spurred a $9-billion-a-year visitor and convention industry, and transformed itself into one of the most beautiful cities in America.
The difference in Newark is that creating green-collar jobs is the core priority. Mayor Booker has asked residents and community leaders to consider the range of green economic development ideas shown to work elsewhere, use that information to inform local strategies that sense for Newark, and then insert them into the city’s governing apparatus to encourage more good jobs. The summit’s decisions will find their way into a number of economic development programs, including playing a role in shaping a new city sustainability plan managed by Chelsea Albucher, Newark’s new sustainability officer.
Clean Energy, Good Jobs Opportunity
These objectives also fit those of the Apollo Alliance and its New Apollo Program. The Alliance’s work to help Newark organize Newark’s Green Future Summit is a feature of The New Apollo Program to reduce pollution, increase efficiency, provide good jobs, and expand opportunity for all.
“The New Apollo Program is a comprehensive investment strategy to build America’s clean energy economy,” said Kate Gordon, the Apollo Alliance’s co-director, who spent countless hours helping to plan and organize Newark’s Green Future Summit. Gordon and Jerome Ringo, the president of the Apollo Alliance, are scheduled to address the summit. “The clean energy economy is the sum of many parts. It won’t just happen in Washington. It will take action at the federal, state, and local levels. Newark is a model of how older industrial cities can take the lead in moving this country toward a future of clean energy and good jobs.”
Though there is considerable enthusiasm surrounding the summit this week, it’s also clear that pursuing a new era of prosperity founded on clean energy will not be easy in Newark. In the eight decades since the city’s wealth and population (480,000 residents) peaked in the late 1920s, Newark has faced challenge after challenge. Unemployment. Poverty. Fiscal deficits and more.
But in the two years since Mayor Booker took office, various measures of the city’s well-being have begun to tick upwards. The city is demonstrably safer, according to FBI crime figures. Real estate development and the number of new housing units are increasing. Property taxes have stabilized, and the mayor’s program of park development has attracted significant public and private capital.
City Fortunes Tick Up
According to recent article in Business Week, London-based Standard Chartered Bank opened a new office downtown that will hold more than 500 employees. The Newark offices of big companies such as Verizon Communications, AT&T Cablevision Systems, Public Service Enterprise Group, and Continental Airlines are beginning to hire more residents from the city. Audible.com, a subsidiary of Amazon.com, moved its headquarters and 165 employees out of Wayne, N.J., and into a 50,000-square-foot office in downtown Newark.
Part of Newark’s narrative of improvement rests on how the Booker administration is already leveraging green strategies to foster more business development. For instance, Newark is scheduled to complete 20 new or refurbished parks by the end of Mayor Booker’s first term in 2010. The summit organizers leveraged this achievement in proposing measures to improve Newark’s open spaces.
The Lincoln Park Coast Cultural District, a noted community development corporation and a partner in Newark’s Green Future Summit, is transforming a low-income neighborhood into an arts and cultural district that will include 300 mixed-income housing units designed and built with environmental and energy-efficient features. Summit organizers took this project into consideration when discussing new standards and incentives for green buildings in Newark.
The Lincoln Park Coast Cultural District also announced at a summit planning meeting earlier this year the start of the Green Collar Apprenticeship Program. Mayor Booker praised the program, which was developed with the help of Van Jones, the founder of Green For All, another summit partner, who will address the conference on Friday.
In other words, several of the pieces of a green development strategy are already in place and starting to produce results. Ralph Izzo, the chairman, president and CEO of PSEG, the parent company of PSE&G, and one of the summit’s principal corporate sponsors, said momentum is gathering around sustainable development in Newark. “It’s critical that every community- no matter how affluent - have access to the benefits of conservation and renewable energy,” said Izzo, who is Friday’s luncheon speaker. “That means giving everyone the opportunity to make their homes and businesses energy efficient, and preparing people from all communities to fill the green jobs that will make our transformation to a clean energy society possible. We’re working to make that a reality.”
“The American Dream,” concluded Booker, “is a green dream.”
Keith Schneider, a journalist and editor, is the communications director at the Apollo Alliance. Reach him at keith@apolloalliance.org
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