Wolf-Powers, Laura
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Publication Building in Good Jobs: Linking Workforce Development with Real Estate-Led Economic Development(2006-12-01) Wolf-Powers, Laura; Reiss, Jeremy; Stix, MargaretMunicipal governments in the U.S. are increasingly devoting public resources to the redevelopment of abandoned, contaminated or underutilized land. Private sector appetite for new development opportunities and public sector creativity have combined to create "building booms" in a number of central cities that only a few decades ago were in seemingly irreversible decline. In the midst of this government-supported revitalization, however, both working poverty and chronic unemployment in central cities remain disturbingly high. Without explicit efforts to link property redevelopment with efforts to put un- or underemployed people to work at family-supporting wages, the negative impacts of growth (displacement, housing cost appreciation) often affect the historically disadvantaged far more profoundly than its positive impacts do.Publication Reading rival union responses to the localization of technical work in the US telecommunications industry(2007-01-01) Wolf-Powers, LauraBetween the early 1970s and the late 1990s, the market repercussions of state deregulation, combined with technological change, sparked profound changes for employees in the heretofore highly unionized US telecommunications sector. The wholesale restructuring of the AT&T Bell System and the growth of competitor firms' market share led to declines in union density, yawning wage disparities among people doing similar work, and increased casualization and insecurity for holders of both customer service and technical jobs in the industry. However, these trends have manifested themselves somewhat differently for customer service and technical workers. While employers have typically followed a strategy of consolidating and regionalizing customer service and clerical labor, a significant amount of technical work, specifically the installation and maintenance of telecommunications infrastructure on customers' premises, has grown more fragmented, structured by local labor market conditions and institutions (see Batt and Keefe 1999, Keefe and Batt 2002).Publication Remaking New York City: Can Prosperity Be Shared and Sustainable?(2004-11-01) Lander, Brad; Wolf-Powers, LauraChanges in the organization of global economic activity – in particular, the ascendance of services over manufacturing in global cities – have had a profound impact on labor, consumer, and real estate markets in New York City. New growth in service sectors has generated spectacular new wealth, and the city has firmly re-established itself as a capital of commerce and culture, after being ravaged by disinvestment and fiscal crisis in the 1960s and 70s. New York City's contemporary economy is a vibrant one in many ways, but it is also a highly unequal one – one in which residents who are not part of the professional class (disproportionately immigrants and people of color) face increasing challenges. Mayor Michael Bloomberg's administration has wholeheartedly embraced the shift from an industrial to a post-industrial economy, launching ground-level redevelopment strategies in over 20 neighborhoods (many tied to the proposal for the 2012 Olympics), which add up to a transformation of the physical city. These plans seek to open the city up for new commercial office and luxury housing development – through a mix of rezonings, subsidies, and infrastructure investments in public transportation, open space, culture, and spectacle. The public sector resources on which these plans lay claim are substantial – an estimated $20 billion in capital spending. The development that would result from these plans offers many benefits for the city's future, including new jobs, a higher capture rate of high-end commercial and residential users, increased tax revenues, and enhanced public transportation and open space. The Bloomberg vision for New York City's future is compelling in many respects: its focus on livability and public space, its high design standards, its acknowledgement that adaptation to a largely post-industrial economy is needed in land use planning, workforce development and economic development policy. But the vision also implies several assumptions with which we disagree. First, it equates real estate development with economic development. Second, it posits a future city that exists primarily for its most privileged residents, with too few real benefits of growth reaching the less-wealthy 80% of the population. The plans emanating from the current administration's bold vision for New York are likely to amplify the inequalities embedded in the service-intensive economy and further drive up real estate values. As a result, they will displace additional low-income housing (thus increasing segregation) and additional viable manufacturing (thus reducing blue-collar job opportunities). Few corresponding gains (e.g. affordable housing, living wage jobs) are being offered for low- or moderate-income families. In addition, the environmental burdens of growth in an increasingly polarized city will continue to be borne disproportionately by low-income communities of color. Fortunately, the choice is not between inequitable growth and no growth. There are innovative strategies for utilizing planning and redevelopment tools – without abandoning most of the current plans – not only to generate prosperity, but to share it more equitably and to produce it more sustainably. Housing advocates, community organizations, labor unions, business groups, environmental/environmental justice groups, and advocacy/smart growth planners around the country are experimenting with new tools. Smartly applied, in combination, many of these tools could reshape proposed redevelopment plans to create more shared and sustainable prosperity in New York City.Publication Up-Zoning New York City’s Mixed Use Neighborhoods : Property-Led Economic Development and the Anatomy of a Planning Dilemma(2005-06-01) Wolf-Powers, LauraThis article examines land use policy and real estate market activity in the 1990s in two mixed use industrial neighborhoods on New York City's East River. Based on case studies of Greenpoint-Williamsburg in Brooklyn and Long Island City in Queens, it finds that a strong adherence on the part of public 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 as a whole remains the subject of fierce debate in the city's planning community and beyond. The article contributes to the literature on property-led economic development in central cities by engaging with the complex task of planners charged with regulating areas that not only are logical sites for commercial and residential expansion but which also serve as niches for lower yielding uses such as light industry.Publication Information Technology and Urban Labor Markets in the United States(2001-06-01) Wolf-Powers, LauraThe technologies that now dominate the production of goods and services, especially in advanced industrialized countries, have irrevocably changed the dynamics of the demand for and return to labor. Employment in technology-intensive occupations such as computer programming and network technology has increased at double the rate of US non-farm employment overall since the mid-1990s (US Department of Commerce, 2000), and thousands of other jobs in offices, factories and retail establishments demand technological infrastructures unneeded ten years ago. The ability to manipulate information, and to service and maintain the delivery systems by which information travels among users, has become increasingly linked to earning power. This is particularly true in cities. According to Rondinelli et al., the basis of urban economic development is now 'a technology- and knowledge-based system of production and services' (1998: 83) and those without the skills to participate in this system are confined to secondary, futureless roles in urban economies.Publication Beyond the First Job: Career Ladder Initiatives in Information Technology Industries(2004-01-01) Wolf-Powers, LauraIn the past two decades, major growth drivers in the U.S. economy have included computers and software, information "content" such as broadcast entertainment, and advanced services and manufacturing that rely on information technology. This is particularly true in leading metropolitan agglomerations, where synergies between the global reach of communications systems and the local intensity of face-to-face communication are crucial to getting the most out of talent, entrepreneurial creativity, and productivity (Graham and Marvin 1996; Hall 1999; Sassen 2001). The polarity between information haves and have-nots in the most dynamic urban centers is stark, however. The digital divide creates or reinforces cultural distance among people who are geographically within a few miles of one another (Mitchell 1999; Servon 2002). Significantly, since it has as much to do with earning power as with access to information, the divide also reinforces income disparities among urbanites (Schön 1999; Hall 1999; National Telecommunications and Information Administration 2000).