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again. African-American legend series highlights the accomplishments of blacks and areas as varied as politics, sports, aviation, and business. We will explore how African-Americans have succeeded in areas where they'd been previously excluded because of segregation, racism, and lack of opportunity. I'm your host, Dr. Roscoe C. Brown Jr., and joining us on today's program is Deborah
Wright, who's the president and CEO of Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone Development Corporation, which is a long way of saying, Debbie runs the Empowerment Zone in Harlem. So could you tell us, Debbie, something about what the concept is for the Empowerment Zone and some of the things that you plan to do as the president and CEO? Thank you, Roscoe. As you know, the Empowerment Zone is really an experiment. It's an experiment that's legal. A legal experiment and a hopeful experiment is a Clinton initiative to try to couple tax incentives and some cash grants from the public sector to be a catalyst for private investment in poor communities, and there are nine across the country. New York was lucky enough through the auspices of Congressman Rangel, who was the architect of legislation, as you know, to get Upper Manhattan in the South Bronx a piece of that competition.
Could I interrupt at this point because we did say that you, the president of Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone, that suggests that there's another South Bronx Empowerment Zone. That's right. New York City received an Empowerment Zone designation, and part of that is in the South Bronx, the lower part near Yankee Stadium. They are receiving 17% of the cash infusion, and the Upper Manhattan area, which goes from East Harlem to West Harlem, Central Harlem, and Washington Heights, and Inwood, is the area that that Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone encompasses. And this comes under the Empowerment Zone legislation, which I think now you said they had nine across the nation, but some of them are more than some of them are urban, I don't know. Six are urban and three are rural. And the whole emphasis, and it's timely, actually it was prescient in the sense that now that you see a real rollback in government, there's all the more pressure on trying to kickstart private enterprise in these various communities across the country.
As you know, there have been many experiments before to try to address poverty. This is an attempt to use government money, not to create more government jobs, but to create private enterprise, new businesses, expanding existing businesses, and trying to give people that have a dream of entrepreneurship, trying to give them a leg up so they can get their dreams to a place of reality. Now, in the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone, there's what, $30 million a year for ten years to make $300 million, is that the financial part of it? Unlike the rest of the country, New York State, New York City, unique among the nation, matched the federal commitment of $100 million. So there's actually $300 million that's been over a ten-year period with the entire zone, so that $30 million a year is really Upper Manhattan as well as the South Bronx. And the tax credits are $3,000 a person that's working in the zone that is employed by
either a new business or an existing business, and that's roughly estimated to be valued at $250 million over the term. So that would be $250 million above the $300. That's right. That's just in tax incentives. Now those, I believe they call them targeted job tax credits. They for people who are residents of the zone and working the zone are they only for people who work in the zone. There are people who are first residents of the zone, and whose services benefit the zone, and that's widely interpreted as people who are working in businesses in the zone. But as you know, the zone is a very technical term, a specific census tracts. And so in the case of Upper Manhattan, there are places where one census tract is in the zone and across the street, you have a school or a business that's not.
And in those cases, as long as that person's work effort benefited the zone, it would be eligible. Now there's a lot of interpretation that has to go on. Now how do you interpret this to businesses? Because I know once someone says this is going to mean that was everybody wants to dive in and get a piece of it. But then there are certain regulations, and I guess certain procedures that you have established. So how have you tended to approach this as you have provided the legal or provided in the leadership for the zone? Well, we're trying to do it in a different way than perhaps has been done before and that people are used to. The board at the empowerment zone is made up of locally based business people and leaders who run not for profit institutions. There's also made up of a number of folks in the downtown communities, the financial industries and the major industries as well, the board of 24 people.
And the hope is that some of the answers for what's wrong up town are those answers reside up town in terms of people's ideas and their expertise. Some of it resides downtown and part of what we hope will happen during this process is that we will remit some of the relationships that ought to be there so that the entire city gets to benefit of the empowerment zone and obviously that residents of up town get the full benefit of the zone as well. Implicit in that is we've set up a very carefully put together set of criteria and procedures to dole out that $300 million if you will because $300 million is ultimately a drop in the bucket relative to as you know the problems that this area has had for so many decades and we have basically three areas that this money will be targeted. One is you know overwhelming emphasis on economic development and by that we really mean
job creating enterprises entrepreneurial enterprises where there will be not only jobs created but wealth that remains in the community and recirculates as it doesn't any other healthy community. But number two has to be an investment in people and institutions to make sure that the benefits on large part of benefits of all of this activity remains in the community. In other words that people who want to work are trained to work and have the support that they need to go to work as well as small businesses and not for profit institutions that they get the kind of technical assistance that they need to sustain themselves and to grow and expand over this next decade. And the last we call it kind of a catch all phrase a quality of life aspect because over the last few decades there's been a great deterioration in the physical infrastructure of the community and to make sure that it's an inviting attractive place where businesses
can thrive and tourists can come and people can walk to school and church you know in a positive environment we'll probably have to make some investments there as well. But it's tough because there are more proposals and more ideas. Good to tell us about that. I was going to ask you about the price of how does somebody get into the game? Well it's interesting we were the staff probably not the board but we were shocked we put out a request for proposals that was an open-ended proposal to request to the community we put ads in the papers and it was our first attempt to just get ideas and we thought that given the short time frame maybe a month or so people had noticed that we might get 50, 75 proposals and long behold we got 201 and so the staff has been literally you know working night and day trying to get through those proposals and it was just a first
shot to see what that pent-up demand is in terms of ideas and in addition to that we're constantly getting phone calls and letters from people across the city really and some outside of the city about what Harlem should be and what role they can play in this redevelopment effort but the proposals are all across the board and our hope is to take a small number of those and get started with them in the next month or so and to continue to work with those who perhaps are not exactly ready right now but could be in the next few weeks and next few months. Well let me give you an example I'm going to propose something for the zone and you're going to tell me how I can get it done. Okay I want to develop a sports arena for Harlem to seat 5,000 people in which we will have basketball games and some boxing and maybe some skating and the like and I'm a person and I have this idea I have a little money
maybe I have more than a little money. How would I get into the empowerment zone and what steps would have to go through to do this? I was going to leave it to you to come with some big bucks a big idea with with your bucks which we see a lot. What we really emphasize with people is to do their homework. Number one. Number one because a proposal like that a big idea and a small idea both have to make sense from a number of different perspectives. One is how do you define the impact it has on the community? If you build a sports arena obviously you're talking about a very significant impact because you're talking about a lot of jobs and you're also talking about a business that can feed other businesses. Somebody's got a sell hot dog, somebody's got a sell Coke, somebody's got to print up the programs. Obviously there's construction involved and
those are the kind of projects that are very exciting to do because you know that it will have a huge impact on the community and an impact that is definable, concrete that everybody can recognize. So that's one. What's the impact and defining that for both the staff as well as the board where these proposals will go to for review and approval? The second issue is feasibility. If for example this isn't the case in uptown but if there were no land for example where you could build a 5,000 person stadium or if there weren't enough workers or a number of other larger issues that would prevent that idea obviously prevent that idea from becoming a reality then you need to be able to figure out what the elements are required to get the project done
if we were to give you everything you asked for. And then sustainability is a core issue because we're not in the business of doing temporary one stop, one shot kind of things that look good but we want proposals where we know that if they get built we're going out of business in the year 2004 and we want to make sure that what we build in the interim is going to remain when we go. And so a lot of people come to us for example and say I could get this main dollar project done if you gave me a main dollar and I would say one that's not financially feasible because that's not the kind of thing that we want to be doing but also it's not sustainable because when we go away the financial support goes away. So we would press you very hard on how much is going to cost, have you tested the assumptions, who else is involved I mean is a major financial company like a
bank or venture capital firm involved. We would press you very hard on those issues and and that is a bridge to the last number one that lasted the four criteria which is really the qualifications of the team that have put together the proposal and again we got a lot of situations where people have a dream, haven't spent much effort on that dream in terms of having experience, having financial backing, having thought through the issues and that's okay because no one person or no one institution is going to have all of the elements to get a project done otherwise they wouldn't come to us but what it does mean is that if you have an idea and you got some experience but you don't have the financial backing put together a team of people that can put those elements in place or otherwise we can we can make some marriages ourselves but in that case we would ask you what you know about running a stadium, what you know about
constructing a stadium or any financial partners there that could help carry the load because we wouldn't we would not like to be in a position where a hundred percent of financing is on us, we want to leverage our three hundred million dollars into hopefully more than a billion dollars so that the impact, the total impact in the community is a lot larger so I know that sounds like a lot but the first step is doing your homework we've got an application that goes through each of those elements to give people some things they should think through I put the application in early rather than late because we can help you put some of those pieces together and then the process is the staff beats up every applicant to make sure they've thought through those things and it makes sense then we refer those applications to a couple of committees on our board which leveraged their experience all over the community as well as the city and if the committee
recommends a project that it goes to our full board for approval and after that I'm starting to say there's another step which is that there's a New York City empowerment zone that's made up of the mayor and the governor and the congressmen and others and they pass finally on the recommendations from the upper Manhattan board. Well you've already suggested that any good idea is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration I think at Thomas Edison somebody said that well that's number one but now I've done all this work. Right. Now what do I ask for? Do I ask for a loan or ask for tax credits? Do I ask for a direct grant? I think those are the three things that you could give me and what would be the guidelines for which of these I could ask for? Well the tax credits are as a right so thank goodness we're not involved in that they're directly tied to whether or not an employee is a resident of the zone and there are a couple of other tax benefits as well
that we didn't talk about. One is accelerated recovery of your investment in equipment which is also as a right and there's a third tax break which isn't as a right it requires us to do a lot of homework which is to actually issue bonds, low-interest bonds for new facilities and we haven't worked through whether or not we're going to do that in New York and how we would if we were. I'm just smiling because most of the stadiums in this country were built using those low-interest bonds and some people are saying well she'd private an industry get the benefit of those. Well as you know it's a raging debate there are some caps on our bonds so three million dollars of project which which by necessity limits it to smaller projects but so that's the tax side on the cash side one of the beauty one of the beauties of the empowerment zone unlike most government programs is that it's a completely flexible source of funds and it's left to the locality
really in terms of how that participation is structured. We could do a loan it could be a market rate loan or a low-interest loan it could be a grant it could also be a guarantee of a bank's position to encourage the bank to do a little bit more than they might ordinarily do it could be an equity interest and a company and fundamentally we analyze these transactions we got a couple of smart ex-investment bankers there that are viewing this as venture capital money of sorts some people view us as a foundation others as a bank others as a venture capitalist I guess we're all three but fundamentally we start from a perspective that a business idea that makes sense has to go through some some serious hurdles in order to get a grant it's for sure uptown there are a lot of different hurdles that you might have to go through that you wouldn't have to go through
downtown one one prime example being the condition of many of the buildings and so if a gap store was downtown they weren't the move from 14th street to 23rd street they're basically talking about some paint and you know new signs and a few things like that uptown they probably be talking about plumbing and windows and the whole bed and so we might step in and provide some gap feeling and that's really the way we view our mission gap feeling and money that's catalytic and in that case there may be a justification for a grant but most likely is probably a low interest loan but we're evaluating each of those in a case by case basis focusing on what is a business need to get started and be sustainable over time but obviously well everybody say let me turn it around you say what is a business needs I bring business to you it may not be a
business even though it's a good financial thing that the community really needs for example does haul them need that many more dance halls sports halls etc other other things and what you're rolling that is your role interpretive or is your role catalytic in terms of look there's a piece of land over here that we really need to have something more and maybe we need an automobile dealership or do you do both we're doing both right now we're very reactive because we're really just up there four months and trying to set up all of these guidelines that you mentioned and getting inappropriate staff and all of that simultaneously though we're putting together a marketing pitch that will go after industries and individual companies that ought to be uptown and you know there Roscoe the truth is that the basic amenities that exist uptown we've got a long list I mean for example something as simple as a salad bar would help me not expand my waistline over the next
eight and a half years hopefully coffee shop a messenger service you know a couple of decent car services you know how the taxi problem is I mean there's so many basic amenities of federal express office and I could go on and on and on at just a basic level of any residential neighborhood in this city has those basic things and you know my laptop computer broke a couple weeks ago and there's no place you can even buy a computer uptown so we've got a long ways to go just to satisfy the basic needs of the existing population and then we just start talking about the level of growth that we need to have uptown to deal with a real serious issue of jobs that are necessary for the population. Columbia University has been helping us do some solid research on
the economy uptown and the labor force and those kind of things. The shocking statistic that stays in my mind is that really only 48% of the working age population in upper Manhattan is working the official unemployment rate is just over 18% but what's more startling than that are the people who've given up the people that are out of the workforce and they don't count. So you've got that whopping number 52% and that represents 135,000 people I mean that's a lot of jobs that's more than the jobs that exist uptown now. So obviously in terms of job creation it's going to take more than the average retail shop that has you know five employees you're talking about some major thrust in terms of industries and we have some some strong feelings about that we haven't put together our full vision plan yet but we've got a few elements in that that I'd be happy to talk
through if that's of interest. Let me take you ahead eight years. You've been there got a nice reputation you got my sports arena and so on. What criteria do you have in your mind for the success of this and then I might ask the other question what criteria do you think the politicians have because they may be converge and they may not. What's yours because you're the president CEO you want to provide the leadership all of the politicians will get the credit. And that's fine I'm going to take the credit Roscoe and that's exactly the way it should be you know I'm a little ambitious in this regard but I'm not embarrassed to say that when our work is done I want the upper Manhattan community to be the urban capital of the world period and except no substitutes you think about it it it has a cashay that has refused to die and all of this based on an era
that was in the 1920s 30s and 40s. The Harlem Renaissance. And people from all over the world continue to come to Harlem looking for some piece of that history and the art part about it is difficult to find. It's there but it's difficult to find it's not a user-friendly situation why we don't have a tourist center where people can stop off and find out where they should be going. The average tourist thinks that there are three places to stop in Harlem they think if they touch the walls of their polo theater and they go to the Abison in Baptist Church for 15 minutes and they have a lunch at Silver. They've done up town and obviously those are three gems that are way ahead of the curve in terms of the best we have to offer in Harlem but there's so
much more as you know I mean the architecture alone could keep someone busy for weeks the history that's embedded at Schomburg and at El Museo at student museum and hundreds of other places that we haven't mentioned. People could touch buildings where Langston Hughes slept and Paul Robeson performed and oh no no no no. This is an African American community as well as this burgeoning Latino community where tourists from both of our communities would love to have a place to come up and spend an night at a hotel or bed and breakfast and go to jazz club and you know a bookstore and I really when I look in my crystal ball I see all of that. I see a lot just for me here when you talk first of all these zones are very
important to have somebody with the energy and the charisma and the desire. That's keeping it energy I'm sure you will. We've been talking with Deborah Wright who's the President and CEO of Upper Manhattan in Parliament Zone and we've been talking about the future of this very wonderful and historic part of America and New York City. Thanks for being with us today. Thank you.
Series
African American Legends
Episode
Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone
Contributing Organization
CUNY TV (New York, New York)
AAPB ID
cpb-aacip/522-qb9v11wn3m
NOLA Code
AAL 096011
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Description
Series Description
African-American Legends profiles prominent African-Americans in the arts, in politics, the social sciences, sports, community service, and business. The program is hosted by Dr. Roscoe C. Brown, Jr., Director of the Center for Urban Education Policy at the CUNY Graduate Center, and a former President of Bronx Community College.
Description
Deborah Wright talks to Dr. Roscoe C. Brown Jr. about the Upper Manhattan empowerment zone, and how "this magnificent experiment is now a wonderful reality." Taped September 23, 1996.
Description
Taped September 23, 1996
Created Date
1996-09-23
Asset type
Episode
Media type
Moving Image
Duration
00:27:51
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Credits
AAPB Contributor Holdings
CUNY TV
Identifier: 15776 (li_serial)
Duration: 00:28:06:00
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Citations
Chicago: “African American Legends; Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone,” 1996-09-23, CUNY TV, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC, accessed March 28, 2024, http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-522-qb9v11wn3m.
MLA: “African American Legends; Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone.” 1996-09-23. CUNY TV, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Web. March 28, 2024. <http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-522-qb9v11wn3m>.
APA: African American Legends; Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone. Boston, MA: CUNY TV, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Retrieved from http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-522-qb9v11wn3m