When Mandates Work: Raising Labor Standards at the Local Level

Chapter 10. Community Benefit Agreements and Economic Development at Hunters Point Shipyard

286 1 . i n t r o d u c t i o n Over the past twenty years debates about urban economic development in the United States have shifted markedly. Environmentalists used to oppose development as intrinsically bad for the environment. Now environmentalists have come to see smart growth, with a focus on reclaiming brownfields, as an important way to reduce the environmental impacts of development, achieve energy efficiency, and combat global warming. This position is strongly supported by empirical evidence (Norman, T E N Community Benefit Agreements and Economic Development at Hunters Point Shipyard Ken Jacobs *Portions of this chapter are based on or appeared in Ken Jacobs, “Raising the Bar: The Hunters Point Shipyard and Candlestick Development Community Benefits Agreement,” University of California, Berkeley, Center for Labor Research and Education, 2010, available at http://laborcenter.berkeley.edu/livingwage/. c o m m u n i t y b e n e f i t a g r e e m e n t s 287 MacLean, and Kennedy 2006; Golub and Brownstone 2009). Community organizations and unions now recognize that dense urban development is more likely to lead to living wage jobs (LeRoy n.d.). Economists point to the benefits of clustering for the development and retention of high road industries (Rogers and Luria 1999). At the same time, the failures of traditional urban economic development strategies have become more widely recognized. Cities were routinely trading off the future tax bene- fits of development in order to attract any jobs, with little evaluation of how many net new jobs would actually be created in the region, who would have access to those jobs, and the quality of those jobs (Gross, LeRoy, and Janis-Aparicio 2005). In previous decades, urban renewal disrupted communities and displaced local residents. In more recent years, investors found new opportunities in urban areas as middle-class professionals flocked back into cities, sending land and housing prices soaring. While development projects bring new tax revenue into a city, the costs to local residents from displacement and rising rents became a central concern for community organizations (Wolf-Powers 2010). Although affordable housing and other mitigations became standard parts of community development projects, the level of affordable housing production is well below demand. Local residents in high-cost cities have fewer affordable options if their incomes increase beyond the point that they are eligible for subsidized housing. As a result, stakeholders that were previously on opposite sides of development conflicts have created new coalitions to promote accountable development. Accountable development brings the community into the decision-making process and places conditions on development projects to ensure broad community benefits, including affordable housing, living wage jobs, job access for local residents, parks and open space, and environmental mitigation. These goals may be achieved through a combination of broad public policies, such as living wage and inclusionary zoning laws, and negotiated conditions tailored to specific development projects. Many of these new coalitions are also using a new tool: community benefits agreements (CBAs). CBAs are legally binding agreements 288 m a k i n g t h e m a n d a t e s w o r k between developers and private community organizations. Under CBAs, developers agree to provide specific community benefits as part of a proposed project and in exchange obtain broader community support and reduced risk of litigation. CBAs enable local residents to gain legal rights to direct benefits from the development project, while the developer gains a valuable benefit by eliminating potential disruptions and gaining support for a more rapid approval process. In this chapter I first describe CBAs and discuss their emergence and evolution since the early 2000s. I then turn to the history of economic development policies in San Francisco, tracing how they evolved in a direction that led to CBAs. In Section 4 I discuss changes in the Bayview– Hunters Point section of San Francisco that gave rise to the most expansive CBA in the United States. Section 5 reviews this CBA in some detail. Section 6 asks whether the affordable housing mandates have been successful . I conclude in Section 7 with some of the lessons that the Hunters Point Shipyard and Candlestick Point CBA offers to other locations in the United States. 2 . w h a t a r e c o m m u...