{"id":536,"date":"2018-05-01T04:16:12","date_gmt":"2018-05-01T04:16:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/newarkspeaks.com\/?p=536"},"modified":"2018-06-11T04:20:10","modified_gmt":"2018-06-11T04:20:10","slug":"newarks-radical-mayor-has-been-good-for-business","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newarkspeaks.com\/index.php\/2018\/05\/01\/newarks-radical-mayor-has-been-good-for-business\/","title":{"rendered":"Newark&#8217;s Radical Mayor Has Been Good for Business"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"ember982\" class=\"nypr-story-byline ember-view\">\n<footer id=\"byLine\" class=\"text text--medium text--dotted\">When Ras Baraka was elected, he promised to be\u00a0Newark&#8217;s &#8220;radical&#8221; mayor. After seven years of Cory Booker, who\u00a0ushered in an area of downtown development but was criticized for being an absent mayor\u00a0focused on national political ambitions, the city would\u00a0be run by a native son from\u00a0activist royalty.<\/footer>\n<\/div>\n<div id=\"ember985\" class=\"ember-view\">\n<section class=\"text\">\n<div id=\"ember1006\" class=\"ember-view\">\n<div class=\"django-content\">\n<p>That scared some people.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;He came in with a skeptical outlook from many forces in the state and in the county,&#8221; said Domingo Morel, assistant professor of political science at Rutgers University in Newark.<\/p>\n<p>Essex County leaders and the business community supported his opponent, Morel said, fearing Baraka would\u00a0be hostile.\u00a0But four years later, Baraka has become part of the political establishment:\u00a0 He is\u00a0running with a unified slate of\u00a0long-serving council members, he has the support of the Essex County executive, the governor and even Senator Cory Booker, who he used to mock and villainize.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;This is just the politics of it,&#8221; Morel said. &#8220;But then when you also take into account the business side of it, the development side of it, there also seems to be a type of partnership and relationship building there that has surprised many people.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>One can get a clear view of those partnerships on the rooftop of\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/jerseydigs.com\/shaquille-oneal-tower-tops-off-newark\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">One Rector Street<\/a>,\u00a0Newark&#8217;s first brand new luxury residential high rise since the 1960\u2019s.\u00a0It\u2019s still under construction, and on a recent tour, real estate development consultant Anthony Marchetta pointed at the old Hahne\u00a0&amp; Co.\u00a0building, a\u00a0swanky department store that closed in the mid 80&#8217;s and stayed vacant for almost three decades.<\/p>\n<p>Now, the building is home to Newark&#8217;s first Whole Foods, a Petco and\u00a0160 apartments\u00a0\u2014 all part of a downtown landscape that&#8217;s drastically changing.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;For years, Newark stayed fallow when Jersey City and Hoboken were starting to come back. New Brunswick was starting to come back, and it was really [the] Booker administration that got it started and Ras Baraka is doing a great job in extending it and expanding it,&#8221; said Marchetta,\u00a0who also served as executive director for the New Jersey Housing and Mortgage Finance Agency.<\/p>\n<p>Waseem Boraie, the developer behind One Rector street, said Booker laid some of the groundwork for redevelopment in Newark and courted business giants like Audible. But he\u00a0said many projects languished during the Booker years. His own high-rise sat on Booker\u2019s desk for two years before getting approved in 2008.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I came because of guys like Cory Booker bringing excitement to Newark and my project got done because of Ras Baraka\u2019s administration,&#8221; Boraie said.<\/p>\n<p>Baraka has boasted about attending ceremonial ribbon cuttings every other week. At a recent groundbreaking\u00a0at the\u00a0shuttered St. Michael\u2019s Hospital, Baraka\u00a0gave an unscripted but practiced speech praising\u00a0for the city and its promise.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I have had the opportunity to be in at least two or three spaces this week that were old spaces, spaces of the past, 20, 40 years, abandoned even. Spaces that were retreads of old Newark,&#8221; he told a crowd of artists and community advocates.<\/p>\n<p>Newark is\u00a0almost 50 percent black and more than 30 percent Hispanic. It&#8217;s a city with a tiny middle class, the median household income is $37,000 a year, that\u2019s about $30,000 less than the statewide figure. Most Newarkers rent, and\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/law.rutgers.edu\/sites\/law\/files\/CLiME%20Report%202018.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">a recent Rutgers report<\/a>\u00a0found median rents have gone up 20 percent while incomes have fallen 10 percent.<\/p>\n<p>Some locals worry that Newark&#8217;s revitalization is not for them, and could eventually price them out of their city.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Down here, you got the cosmetic stuff. But the real issues is where the real people live, and that\u2019s up the hill,&#8221; said 56-year-old Amarette Grisham.<\/p>\n<p>She\u00a0has lived in the\u00a0West Ward most of her life. There, Grisham said, she still deals with potholes and streets that go unswept for weeks. The changes downtown, like the new Whole Foods, don\u2019t feel like they\u2019re for her.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Oh my God, I haven\u2019t been in there,&#8221; Grisham said of grocery store, as she stood on the sidewalk outside of it. &#8220;Because I don\u2019t have the money for that, I just don\u2019t.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The challenge of bringing development without displacing Newark&#8217;s residents led Baraka to seek advice from David Troutt, a Rutgers Law School professor who studies structural inequality, and author of the report that found a rise in Newark rent.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;He was specifically concerned about that woman outside of Whole Foods feeling like the changes in the city, the cultural attractions, the shiny new objects would not be made available to them and that she would be followed by an increased police presence and her children would not be made to feel welcome,&#8221; Troutt said.<\/p>\n<p>Troutt has been at Rutgers 22 years and he said it\u2019s the first time a mayor has reached out for this kind of help. And Baraka needs it. Troutt said Newark\u00a0has to attract a middle class to build a robust tax base, but fear still keeps people away.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;This is a despised city,&#8221; he said. &#8220;I mean, it\u2019s important to understand the level of hatred that is directed at the city of Newark in the various narratives that are used to describe it.&#8221; The only stories told are about high crime, poverty and blight.<\/p>\n<p>But in his latest state of the city address, Baraka said his administration is changing that narrative and the proof is in the numbers: more than $2 billion spent in downtown development; the unemployment rate is down from 12 percent when he first took office, to eight percent; crime is at a 50-year low; and Newark is among the 20 cities shortlisted for Amazon&#8217;s second headquarters.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The headlines about Newark are changing, and anyone that tries to tell you other than that is trying to tell you lies,&#8221; Baraka, who is running against\u00a0Gayle Chaneyfield Jenkins, told the crowd at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center.<\/p>\n<p>According to Troutt, if Baraka gets another four years in office and manages to transform the city\u00a0while not pricing out its current residents, that\u00a0<em>would<\/em>\u00a0be radical.<\/p>\n<p data-gtm-vis-recent-on-screen-2802105_128=\"143747\" data-gtm-vis-first-on-screen-2802105_128=\"143747\" data-gtm-vis-total-visible-time-2802105_128=\"100\" data-gtm-vis-has-fired-2802105_128=\"1\">&#8220;Then what Newark represents is really scary, because it represents the triumph of black political leadership over what are primarily black and brown lives,&#8221; Troutt said. &#8220;It just has not been done before<\/p>\n<p data-gtm-vis-recent-on-screen-2802105_128=\"143747\" data-gtm-vis-first-on-screen-2802105_128=\"143747\" data-gtm-vis-total-visible-time-2802105_128=\"100\" data-gtm-vis-has-fired-2802105_128=\"1\">by\u00a0Rebeca Ibarra<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When Ras Baraka was elected, he promised to be\u00a0Newark&#8217;s &#8220;radical&#8221; mayor. After seven years of Cory Booker, who\u00a0ushered in an area of downtown development but was criticized for being an absent mayor\u00a0focused on national political ambitions, the city would\u00a0be run by a native son from\u00a0activist royalty. That scared some people. &#8220;He came in with a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":540,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":""},"categories":[13,23,2,19],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v20.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Newark&#039;s Radical Mayor Has Been Good for Business - NEWARK SPEAKS<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/newarkspeaks.com\/index.php\/2018\/05\/01\/newarks-radical-mayor-has-been-good-for-business\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Newark&#039;s Radical Mayor Has Been Good for Business - NEWARK SPEAKS\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"When Ras Baraka was elected, he promised to be\u00a0Newark&#8217;s &#8220;radical&#8221; mayor. 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