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Downtown, Not Just for Yuppies
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The American Prospect Downtown, Not Just for Yuppies
In
Denver, thanks to low-income and environmental justice activists, a new
mega-project will include affordable housing and good jobs.
Tara McKelvey
July 12, 2007
Tim
Lopez walks along the 800 block of south Lincoln Street in the Baker
neighborhood of Denver on a clear May afternoon. Trucks roar along a
nearby highway, and the street is littered with broken flagstone,
cigarette butts, and a flattened Miller High Life can. The block ends
at Interstate 25, two blocks from an abandoned plant, Gates Rubber
Factory, and when the wind dies down, the air smells faintly of sewage.
The most disturbing thing about the neighborhood, 44-year-old Lopez
explains, is not the noise, smell, or litter. It is hidden in the
grass.
"It's a monitoring well," says Lopez, pointing to a
metal plate sunk in the soil near the street. "They drill for
groundwater and test for TCE," a suspected carcinogen called
trichoroethylene.
In October 2002, fumes from TCE, an industrial
solvent, were discovered in the area, and this block, says Lopez,
turned out to be "one of the most contaminated areas." Lopez says
executives with Cherokee Denver LLC, a real-estate development company
that owns the factory and the surrounding 50 or so acres, as well as
city officials, were initially sanguine. "The company was saying,
‘There's not a problem,' and the city was saying, ‘There's not a
problem,'" he recalls. "We were saying, ‘There's a problem.'"
Cherokee Denver's president, Ferdinand Belz, claims
there never was any threat to human health. Nevertheless, executives
have overseen a cleanup of the area that is monitored by the public,
partly because of pressure from community activists like Lopez. In
addition, executives plan to knock down most of the factory and clear a
space for stores, restaurants, supermarkets, and 2,500 apartments and
houses, including 350 affordable housing units. The project will
provide roughly 8,000 construction jobs and jobs in the retail sector
once the work is done. In May, Robert Redford announced that a
six-screen Sundance Cinemas movie theater featuring commercial-free
films would open on the site in 2010.
In a reversal of fortune, this Denver brownfield
has been targeted for a development project that will transform it into
a neo-workers'-paradise. There is nothing new about a corporate
takeover of an abandoned site, and Cherokee Investment Partners
executives have much to gain from acquiring property located near a
commuter rail in downtown Denver. But what is new is how much time
corporate executives are spending considering the wishes of activists
with organizations such as Save Our Section 8, Denver Inner City
Parish, and 9to5, an organization that represents women in low-wage
jobs.
Leaders of these groups, along with 53 other
organizations, were members of a coalition that worked for four years
to push Cherokee Denver to create a worker-friendly community. Their
efforts culminated on February 6, 2006, when Cherokee Denver executives
and city officials signed a development agreement ensuring that
affordable housing and decent-paying jobs for people in the
neighborhood would be included. This kind of "community-benefits
achievement," as it is known, may sound quixotic. But it seems to be
working here in Denver and in other parts of the country. The success
of the Gates Rubber Factory project, say observers, is especially
important because it has implications for activists in other
conservative states.
"Denver is in a red state where [the] laissez-faire
ideal has permeated all politics," says Madeline Janis, the executive
director of the Los Angeles Alliance for New Economy (LAANE), which has
led the community-benefits movement in California and elsewhere. "To
have this kind of strategy working successfully here shows it can be
done everywhere."
It is a late morning in May. Lopez is sitting at a
table in a Winchell's Donut House on South Broadway, not far from where
he had shown me the monitoring well, eating a bear claw. Across the
street, a black MIA flag hangs over a VFW building, and an
advertisement on a building next door says, "Joe Onofrio Pianos/No
interest till Feb 2008." The nearby Samsonite Corporation factory,
where Lopez's father worked for 44 years, has been shut down. Gates
Rubber Factory, which once employed 5,000 workers, closed in 1995.
Apart from chains like Winchell's, the downtown
seems to have few job opportunities. Approximately 40 percent of the
jobs are in hotels, shops, and restaurants, and these jobs offer an
average starting wage of less than $8 an hour. Lopez and his colleagues
have been trying to fix that, and because the city of Denver has given
financial support, in the form of tax breaks, to the project, Cherokee
Denver is more likely to listen. In this way, activists are able to
link growth to social justice in a legally enforceable contract.
The first community-benefits agreement was signed
in 1998 in Los Angeles. A leading commercial developer, Trizec-Hahn,
proposed a development on Hollywood Boulevard that would create a
hotel, retail outlets, and other venues with the stipulation that
employees in these places would be unionized. That agreement was the
result of negotiations between LAANE members and developers. Since
then, progressive activists have succeeded in pushing through
community-benefits agreements over the development of Staples Center, a
sports arena in Los Angeles, and the expansion of Los Angeles
International Airport, along with projects in a dozen other cities,
including San Diego, Milwaukee, and Atlanta.
In Denver, Lopez and others began addressing the
contamination question after TCE fumes were found in October 2002. But
things took off once they joined forces with a larger group of
activists addressing other community issues around the development.
These groups included the International Brotherhood of Electrical
Workers and the Colorado Environmental Coalition -- all brought
together by members of a Denver-based organization called Front Range
Economic Strategy Center (FRESC), a group loosely modeled after LAANE.
They got together in semi-formal settings at churches, private homes,
and other venues to talk about what kinds of things they wanted to
happen at the Gates Rubber Factory site.
Their concerns varied widely. Lopez pushed for --
and got -- an agreement from Cherokee Denver executives to allow the
public complete access to documents relating to the testing of
contaminants and the site cleanup; the documents are now kept at a
local library, the Decker Branch, in Denver. A member of Save Our
Section 8, Jim Kittel, felt strongly about the housing needs of the
disabled in the development. Linda Meric of 9to5 pushed for an increase
in sick days for workers employed in the new community. To be sure,
these goals were not always universally agreed upon within the
coalition. There was the inevitable bickering and turf warfare, and
when a list of demands eventually emerged, some proposals, such as a
sliding-scale day care center, were left by the wayside.
With list in hand, representatives from the
coalition met with government officials and Cherokee Gates executives
to hash out a formal agreement. During this time, corporate executives
were working hard to win approval of government subsidies, which
obliged them to listen to local taxpayers. Activists used this to their
advantage, making it clear that the relationship could be mutually
beneficial: Incorporate our demands and we'll help you win government
subsidies. "We said, ‘If you're going to take our money, we need to
have some buyback,'" Lopez explains.
The Gates Cherokee project was given roughly $85
million in subsidies from the city of Denver and $41 million from
"special taxing districts," through tax-increment financing (this
means, basically, that companies working to improve polluted or damaged
areas receive financial support from a municipality because the
improvements will presumably yield higher property taxes, which will
benefit the city).
And in return, the Cherokee Gates developers made
promises of their own: They agreed last year to provide jobs that pay
competitive wages for local residents in both the construction and
retail industries. An operating engineer with five years of training,
for example, might earn between $18.52 and $21.92 an hour, according to
FRESC's executive director Carmen Rhodes. Workers will also receive
health insurance from their employer -- or a cash differential that
allows them to pay for their own insurance. It is an important step for
people who live near the former factory, especially since 36 percent of
them earn less than $35,000 a year, according to 2000 U.S. Census data.
Approximately 10,000 temporary and permanent jobs will be created over
a ten-year period, according to Rhodes.
At a May gathering of FRESC leaders, along with
other activists involved in the project, at Denver's Mercury Café, a
dry-erase board in the back of the restaurant is covered with handmade
signs including "ENVIRO CLEANUP" (in the shape of a leaf) and "HIGHER
WAGES" (written on a dollar-shaped board). Rhodes, 30, who has chunky
highlights in her dark hair and wears dangly earrings, looks at the
signs -- representing the demands activists had made of the developers
and of the city -- and then at a group of roughly 30 people, including
activists and donors, sitting in the café.
"Isn't that awesome?" she says. "I just want to say
that when we first introduced the list, they thought we were crazy. But
we were able to jump off into a policy discussion."
The project has required pluck and determination --
which both Rhodes and Lopez seem to have in abundance. Rhodes, who
graduated from University of Colorado-Boulder in 1999, had a 1997
summer internship in an AFL-CIO program and worked on SEIU's Justice
for Janitors campaign. She learned the value of steady, sustained
commitment to a project: It has taken more than two decades for
janitors in downtown Denver, who once earned $3.00 an hour, she says,
to a point where nearly all have unionized jobs. For his part, Lopez
joined a union at age 16 and worked as a painter for the Denver public
schools until 1987. That year, he broke his back in a work accident and
lost his job. As a unionist and the son of a marine ("I learned to sing
‘The Halls of Montezuma' before I was two," he says), he is disciplined
and plainly suited for the job of helping to organize a massive project
like Cherokee Gates.
There have been plenty of obstacles. One of the
biggest is that many of the new jobs Cherokee Gates is creating are in
retail, an industry that offers mostly minimum-wage jobs with little
prospects for advancement. Still, organizers are optimistic about the
possibility for change. "Back in the '20s, people did not think that
manufacturing could offer good jobs," says LAANE's Janis. "Retail jobs
are the auto-manufacturing jobs of the 2000s. If we have a vision of
retail, which means good jobs as well as unionized jobs, there are
tools that can make it a reality."
Local organizers have helped draw up the final,
written agreement that was signed, with a stipulation, for example,
that stores larger than 75,000-square feet that earn more than 12.5
percent from groceries will not be allowed on the site. That means no
Super Wal-Mart. In this way, organizers hope to help create a space for
locally owned supermarkets -- places that have traditionally paid
higher wages than chains like Wal-Mart. "It is going to take a long
time in a place like Denver," Janis says, talking about their efforts
to create higher-paying retail jobs. "But it's not going to take a
lifetime."
Meanwhile, activists and developers have worked out
agreements in other areas, including one in which "prevailing wages and
benefits [will be paid] for every construction worker engaged in the
publicly-funded construction," according to FRESC, and the "selection
of a union construction manager and general contractor with a strong
record of good wages, health care and retirement benefits." In other
words, workers are more likely to receive the equivalent of union wages
-- a big improvement over Colorado's $6.85-per-hour minimum wage.
A neighborhood-cleanup advisory board has also been
formed to help oversee the monitoring of toxic solvents such as TCE.
Levels of TCE had been found "in such high concentrations in the
groundwater near the plant that it presented a potentially harmful
vapor intrusion threat to the indoor air of homes" near the plant,
according to FRESC. "The groundwater concentrations of TCE near the
plant site were some of the highest found in the western United
States."
This monitoring is an improvement over what had
been done in the past, but some experts say it is not enough. Lenny
Siegel, a Mountain View, California–based executive director of the
Center for Public Environmental Oversight, has testified before the
U.S. Senate on issues concerning the environment and community
development. In a September 2006 report entitled "Gates Rubber Site,"
Siegel wrote that he did not believe the environmental standards of
Colorado State are "stringent enough" and questioned the Cherokee
Denver findings that residents are safe from contamination of TCE and
other chemicals. Still, he said the strategy that had been put in place
-- namely, cleaning up the ground water -- seemed more prudent than
other approaches to the problem, such as trying to mitigate the
potential damage in local houses.
The task of monitoring environmental damage and
creating a large-scale community like the one planned for Cherokee
Gates is monumental. Labor experts familiar with the project believe it
offers an excellent chance to help create a community in which workers
and their families will have good jobs and decent lives. The fact that
public funds are being invested in the site gives activists and workers
a chance to speak out for things that should be incorporated into this
kind of urban-renewal project. It also forces political leaders and
corporate executives to listen to their demands.
"It was very contaminated, old rubber factory, and
[the activists] weighed in and said, 'This is a huge taxpayer
investment. It will have profound implications, and we need to be
really careful to do this project right,'" says Greg LeRoy, author of
The Great American Jobs Scam: Corporate Tax Dodging and the Myth of Job
Creation. "They succeeded in drastically reshaping the project. It's a
really great story."
"Real change just takes so long," says Rhodes, late
in the day, sipping a latte at a dessert bar (gluten-free optional) in
the Mercury. "We describe this work as moving glaciers, and sometimes
it's hard to see any change unless you say, ‘Look, the glacier has
moved a centimeter.'"
This article, part of our series on "The Road to Good Jobs," was made possible through the generosity of the Ford Foundation.
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