Thomas MacMillan Photo
For 14 months now, Elias White has been looking for a job. Two city officials are pushing two different ideas about how to get thousands of recession-hit people like him back to work.
One approach comes from Mayor John DeStefano. He’s pitching a two-prong plan: Target science/ medical-oriented development projects. And get people ready to work, through school reform and job-training.
The other approach comes from West Rock Alderman Darnell Goldson. He introduced a bill to the Board of Aldermen Tuesday night to spend about $4 million on incentives of up to $10,000 for area businesses to hire unemployed people.
The plan — called the Hiring Incentives for Residents Employment (HIRE) program — would set aside the equivalent of one mill of property taxes to pay businesses that hire city residents. Employers would be eligible for an initial grant of $10,000 and a follow-up grant of $5,000 if the resident is still employed at the business after one year.
Click here to read the proposed bill, which is now headed for a joint meeting of the Finance and Legislation Committees.
Both approaches — Goldson’s and DeStefano’s — seek to address job losses the recession has brought to New Haven, as it has across the country. The city’s unemployment rate was 7.9 percent in Dec. 2009. The estimated number of jobs in New Haven dropped from 78,000 to 73,000 just in 2009. DeStefano said Tuesday he expects the drop to continue this year. The latest threat: Shaw’s plans to close its Whalley Avenue supermarket in six weeks if it can’t find a buyer, putting some 100 jobs at risk.
Targeted Growth
Melissa Bailey File Photo
A day after his top aides blasted Goldson in a Register news article for introducing the jobs proposal, Mayor DeStefano praised him.
“It’s worth being discussed. It’s useful for people to think about these things. Maybe there’s something I can learn in the discussion,” he said in an interview in his office Tuesday afternoon.
Goldson’s idea works better at the state and federal level than at the municipal level, for two reasons, DeStefano (pictured above) argued. You should think of jobs as regional, he said: A plant may be in Cheshire or North Haven, but the workers come from all over. Similarly, 70 percent of New Haven’s 73,000 jobs are held by people who live outside the city, he said; while slightly more than half the employed New Haveners commute to out-of-town jobs. Also, broad job-creation plans, not targeted to a specific industry, don’t play to a city’s strength, DeStefano maintained.
Other tax incentive programs — like the state film tax credit program, or efforts to lure sports teams — can prove a waste of money over the long term because governments are competing for jobs they can lose a few years later to a different bidder, he argued.
“To me the better and more sustainable investment [for a city] is to promote growth that can sustain jobs that will stay here” and develop people to be able to keep those jobs, DeStefano argued. A city has to target its money to grow jobs for which it can compete, he said. In New Haven’s case, that means “eds and meds” — medical and science-related development (the cancer hospital, Science Park) and higher-ed expansion, like Yale’s proposed new $145 million School of Management campus and the $198 million Gateway Community College campus going up downtown. Those jobs — blue, pink, and white-collar — will likely stay here long term and support secondary jobs, from supermarket cashiers to accountants and lawyers, DeStefano argued.
To that end, he announced recently that he plans to spend some $25 million to close part of the Route 34 Connector and build a platform over it, so developer Carter Winstanley can build a new tech center called 100 Church St. or “Downtown Crossing” similar to its 300 George St. building a block away. The city’s applying to the feds for the $25 million. The project would created an estimated 1,200 construction jobs and 900 permanent jobs.
DeStefano said he also aims to make more of the land around the Yale medical district available for building. To that end, his staff has begun working on a plan to reconfigure Lafayette Street, a jumbled crossroads in the Hill near College Plaza and Route 34, made desolate by urban renewal.
The mayor said the second key component of his jobs strategy is preparing people to hold and keep positions.
“Most people who ask me for jobs on the street express a desire to work,” he said. “The work habits to hold the job is another matter.”
That’s why if he had to choose how best to spend $4 million in city money, he said, he’d rather pour it into improving public schools, as part of his nascent school reform drive.
“I would argue that school change is ultimately a workforce development strategy,” he said.
As for older potential workers, DeStefano spoke of boosting training efforts already underway through his Commission on Equal Opportunities. The CEO has trained over 1,000 New Haveners for construction jobs over the past seven years, he said. “We are probably the biggest generator of construction workers in the state.”
The budget proposal he sends to aldermen in coming weeks will include a modest increase for the CEO so it can expand efforts to link those new workers to jobs, DeStefano said. Right now it focuses on city government-funded projects like school construction. He’d like to see the agency build ties to more projects throughout town.
HIRE Power
Darnell Goldson.
After Tuesday night’s Board of Aldermen meeting, Goldson sought to clarify his proposal. First, the cost is negotiable, he said. One mill, the amount of money he proposed spending on his plan, is a starting point, he said. “My intention is never to raise taxes,” he added.
Nevertheless, one mill — approximately $4 million — is not a lot when you consider that the city spends a total of $6 million just on police and firefighter overtime, Goldson argued. Money for jobs can be found, he said, perhaps from agencies like the Livable City Initiative. “I wonder what they’re actually doing,” he said.
Goldson said his proposal is meant to start a discussion about how to grow jobs. “We shouldn’t just say no without talking about it.”
Development may lead eventually to more jobs, but “that doesn’t mean we can’t do other things,” Goldson said. “Why not put more tools on the tool belt?”
“It doesn’t have to be $4 million,” he said. The HIRE program could start off as a smaller, pilot project, he said.
Goldson agreed with Mayor DeStefano about the strengths of regional job initiatives. “Regional is certainly better,” he said. “Because it lowers how much we have to spend.”
“But we say that about everything,” he continued. Goldson mentioned homelessness as an example of a problem that should be handled regionally, but often isn’t. “If we can’t get the regional, we should go it alone.”
Ultimately, the HIRE program would be a regional program anyway, Goldson said. The grants would be available not only for New Haven businesses but for employers that hire New Haveners in towns like Hamden and Milford and Woodbridge. The money that the city gives to out-of-town businesses would ultimately come back to New Haven as salary brought home by a New Haven resident, he argued. With a job, that resident might be more likely to buy a car or house in the city, bringing yet more dollars back to the city, he said. “We’re getting a lot bigger bang for our buck.”
Goldson voiced skepticism about the mayor’s plan to grow jobs through development.
“I don’t know if it builds permanent jobs,” he said. Building projects create jobs during construction, but after the job is over, the laborers are out of work again, Goldson said. “They’re being left at the curb.”
Goldson acknowledged that his plan is not a long-term proposal. “It’s not a new entitlement program,” he said. He characterized it as a short-term injection to jump-start hiring during a difficult time. “I want to see it done and out.”
(On a national level, some studies have been skeptical about the ability of incentive programs to convince employers to hire people they wouldn’t have otherwise taken on. Click here and here for examples.)
On The Street
Whatever strategy New Haven ends up taking, it won’t be too soon for job-seekers like Elias White (pictured at the top of the story).
White was laid of from his job 14 months ago. He worked in a warehouse in North Branford. Since then, he’s been looking for work “every day, everywhere.”
On Tuesday afternoon, he was waiting for the bus at the corner of Elm and Church streets.
“It’s rough,” he said. “No one’s hiring.” White said he’s tried hospitals, warehouses, and he’s looked for driving work. He’s had two interviews, but no luck. His unemployment payments have already been extended. They run out in two weeks. “What can you do?” he said.
At a bus shelter on Chapel Street, Bernard Miller said he’s been looking for work for a “solid three months.”
“Where haven’t I been looking?” he said. An experienced cook, he’s tried for jobs in construction, masonry, landscaping, cooking, and painting.
Miller said he supports any government action that will create jobs, as long as it happens soon. “We need work now,” he said. “It’s rough.”
Dennis McFadden (pictured) is on disability and is not working. He said he knows at least a dozen people without jobs who have gotten so frustrated they’re ready to move out of New Haven. “It’s too hard,” he said. His friends are looking to move south, where the cost of living is lower and it’s easier to find a job.
Goldfield Is Inspired
When he was elected to his third term as president of the Board of Aldermen last month, Carl Goldfield announced that he wanted to focus on jobs. He mentioned starting a Works Projects Administration-style program that would hire residents for jobs that the city currently contracts out, like paving roads.
Goldson’s plan is not exactly what he had in mind, Goldfield said on Tuesday evening. He voiced concern about the precedent that would be set if a mill is set aside for jobs. The city has a lot of needs that could use a mill’s worth of money, he said. If that money goes towards jobs, people might start asking for a mill for things like streets or tree trimming, he said.
Goldfield said he looks forward to hearing more about Goldson’s proposal. And it’s inspired him to get cracking on his WPA-style plan, which he said he has been too busy to take up. “It’s got me thinking,” he said.
Carl Goldfield.
How about the government, at every level, immediately uses every last dollar designated for highways, and general road projects to instead fund a massive rail rebuilding project. Rebuild the abandoned rails, improve existing rail and lay trolley lines in urban centers. This would put millions of Americans to work and would benefit our country financially in the future. Highways are budgetary blackholes, while rail is much more cost and use efficient.
Then after that, perhaps we can get some jobs back from Mexico, India and China. After all, we are still a manufacturing economy, its just that we don't employ our citizens, we employ other country's citizens. We're still an industrialized nation, we just export our dirty industry to Mexico and we buy our oil from Canada and the middle east. Our way of generating wealth in the last couple decade apparently doesn't work, because pushing money around on computer screens doesn't create anything of value.
The groups that have been economically struggling for the better part of the last century deserve the opportunities that were available to European immigrants when they arrived here so that they, too, can become valued assets for our country.
While job growth in science and medical-related fields is nice, that's all we've been seeing for the last 2 decades and the poverty rate has only gone up since 1990, which implies that poor people have not been a part of the job growth, which is true. Jobs for highly educated people are great but what about everybody else?
Are we supposed to wait until today's children are educated through school reform to get these highly-educated jobs? We've been waiting for about 6+ decades, so perhaps its not unreasonable to ask this. But I have my suspicions about school reform. I think it is more important to put these children's parents to work, then the entitlement culture of inner cities will likely be replaced with more positive, fruitful and useful things that comes when populations are actually providing products that people need and value-e.i. what is currently done by India and China, even the railroad project would suffice. Instead of children going home after school to neighborhoods where drugs and McDonald's are the only perceived solutions and going home to households with unemployed moms, dads, grandparents, etc who have bleak outlooks on life and who communicate that to children, children could go home to neighborhoods and households of encouragement and hope-this would have the most positive effect on children's education by far.
I wish that instead of paying middle eastern countries $400 billion a year for oil to spend on building and repairing blackhole highways, cul de sac subdivisions, big box chain stores, malls, and other costly, inefficient, out-dated and unsustainable endeavors aka things that cost more and more and more to maintain in the future, I wish we were using that energy to rebuild rail lines, rebuild walkable, mixed income communities with a variety of housing, access to schools (that don't look like prisons), parks, local retail and trolley lines aka things that cost less to maintain in the future.
Unfortunately, America is probably going to keep trying to bail out banks so that we can keep buying stuff, that we can't pay for, with credit until finally we can no longer afford to export hard earned American pay checks to the middle east and to the imaginary-capital producing banks and not because China stops subsidizes use, but because citizens no longer have any money.
We've been pursuing the biggest oopsy doopsy in the history of the world for the last 60 years.