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Food Manufacturers Can't Eat NYC's High Costs
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On June 1, Crain's highlighted the various challenges food manufacturers face and the growing need for affordable space for viable industrial businesses. The lack of affordable manufacturing space and capital for small business investments are significant hurdles that demand immediate attention.
On June 1, Crain's highlighted the various challenges food manufacturers face and the growing need for affordable space for viable industrial businesses. The article, Brooklyn's fancy artisanal-food businesses are getting chewed up, described how the dream can quickly become a nightmare, where businesses "run out of capital, cash and room for expansion and throw in the towel or relocate to another city." The lack of affordable manufacturing space and capital for small business investments are significant hurdles that demand immediate attention.
We applaud the de Blasio Administration's and City Council's proposed industrial policy reforms, captured in the Council's Engines of Opportunity report and in the Mayor's Industrial Action Plan. However the Administration's current proposal for a commercial/ industrial mixed-use building, the Industrial Business Incentive Areas, do not address the high costs the businesses featured in Crain's face. City Planning's current zoning proposal does not include any affordability protections on the manufacturing spaces to ensure that they are affordable to the industrial businesses being squeezed out of the City.
Our City cannot afford policies that will continue to allow us to lose these businesses, their contribution to our local neighborhood economies, and the vital jobs they provide. Instead the Administration should look to build on its establishment of the City's Non-Profit Industrial Development Fund. This $150 million fund is still receiving applications for the first year application round, but is already a new opportunity for the City to create a variety of affordable industrial and manufacturing spaces available to businesses across the city. As we have seen with affordable housing, putting space in the hands of non-profit, mission-driven developers can ensure the affordability of industrial and manufacturing space for the long-term. Neighborhood CDCs, having already built strong relationships with communities through their work on affordable housing, now have the unique opportunity to apply their experience more broadly.
At the same time, they are uniquely poised to develop spaces that are conducive to the needs of local businesses, meaning that the space mismatch described in the article can be minimized. By seizing on the opportunity to partner with non-profit, mission-driven developers on new industrial and manufacturing space, the Administration is taking the right steps in advancing an equitable economic development vision. Taking this approach to industrial and manufacturing development can provide similar long-term benefits to not just the food manufacturers highlighted in Crain's, but manufacturers across the city.