Empowering Public Property: Simulating New Housing, Economic Development and Greenspace Policy with Newark’s City-Owned Property Inventory

This is a report about how cities can better organize and manage their data about the property they own in order to promote transparency and advance critical policymaking. Newark, like many legacy cities, owns hundreds of parcels through tax foreclosure and abandonment that can be put to more productive use and even generate needed revenue. Because of different inputs from different departments, its property data system contained duplication and gaps that prevented policymakers and stakeholders from getting a clear picture of these public assets. In partnership with city staff, CLiME helped to resolve the data organization problem and set property management on a new, more accurate and user-friendly course. Along the way, we learned details about the nature and amount of city-owned properties, how they’re zoned and where they’re located. We concluded that much more of this significant inventory can and should be put to work advancing long-held goals of equitable development. We built three demonstrations to simulate this usage that cover three major areas of policy: affordable housing production, commercial and industrial development and green space/environmental risk mitigation. Each of these is an area in which the Baraka administration is already active in setting aggressive policies. Some of those policies already make use of the asset of city-owned land. Until recently, it was impossible to see the scope of particular uses because the data did not readily permit it. Now the data is cleaner and clearer.

Individual break-out reports from the full report are also available:

Publication, ReportRutgers CLiMEFebruary 14, 2024Housing, Economic Development

Barriers and Benefits of MBE Contracting in Newark

Locally owned businesses are vital constituent members of an economic community because they provide jobs to local workers, sustain the tax base for city services, offer goods and services that grow other businesses and build wealth for equity owners. They are vital. Where they are in short supply communities struggle to grow economically. Where that growth has been stymied by factors arising from ingrained racism, growth is even more challenging. Local businesses owned by Blacks and other people of color face a disproportionate range of constraints to growth including, but not limited to, patterns of market discrimination. Given Newark’s overwhelmingly Black, Latino and working-class population, the city’s challenges with locally owned economic development are as great as anywhere in the nation. There is evidence that recent trends have not been good for minority small businesses across the country.

ReportRutgers CLiMEFebruary 8, 2023Economic Development

Who Owns Newark? Transferring Wealth from Newark Homeowners to Corporate Buyers

This report shows that the national trend in investor buying of 1-4 unit homes in predominantly Black neighborhoods is most acute in Newark, New Jersey where almost half of all real estate sales were made by institutional buyers. The trend grew out of the foreclosure crisis that wiped out significant middle-class wealth in particular Newark neighborhoods. Those neighborhoods became the targets of investors seeking passive returns from rents. Those largely anonymous outside companies now set neighborhood housing markets on terms that primarily benefit their investors.

While CLiME detected no illegal activity, the threats to Newarkers and government policy goals are significant. They include rapidly rising rents, decreased homeownership, higher barriers to affordable housing production goals, renter displacement and less stable communities. Sadly, this reality continues a long pattern of economic threats to predominantly Black and increasingly Latino neighborhoods in a state whose communities are among the most segregated in the country. From racial exclusion to predatory lending, from foreclosure to the extraction of rents, Newark’s experience demonstrates what can happen when local economies ignore equity.

CLiME’s analysis documents a dramatic increase in institutional investor activity in Newark’s residential market starting around 2013. As of 2020, almost half of all Newark’s residential sales were to institutional buyers.

PublicationRutgers CLiMEApril 29, 2022Housing, Economic Development, Gentrification, Inequality, Poverty, Race

Investing in the Equitable State: How New Jersey’s Tax Incentive Programs Fail to Bring Equitable Growth

This report and accompanying matrix are a critical evaluation of New Jersey’s tax incentives programs through the policy lens of equitable growth. Persistent inequality between New Jersey’s communities and households hurts all of New Jersey. We assumed that the expenditure of taxpayer dollars for private economic gain should further a public interest in making weaker markets stronger—i.e., equitable growth. We identified every state tax incentive that contained some aspect of economic fairness and analyzed each for how well it contributed to producing equitable growth. As the matrix at the end of the report shows, we found few gains and many lost opportunities.

If economic development broadly represents New Jersey’s interests in promoting economic welfare, then equitable economic development refocuses state policy on the state’s interest in improving economic welfare in the places where market need is greatest. Since many of these needs converge in communities of the state that have struggled with disinvestment and undernourished markets for many years, we believe a critical public purpose is served when the state steps in to revitalize markets where no one else will. This represents a policy of equitable economic development, an expansion of growth and opportunity.

PublicationRutgers CLiMEApril 13, 2022Economic Development

Publications

Center on Law, Inequality and Metropolitan Equity