Creating more good jobs is key to revitalizing the borough

From Long Island City to Queens Village, re-zoning and re-development are changing the face of Queens neighborhoods, but it may not be doing all that it should to help improve the quality of life for the borough’s working families.

A startling 34% of working people in Queens are struggling to get by on jobs that don’t let them support their families or contribute to our local businesses and economy.

With nearly a third of all New Yorkers struggling to stretch their paychecks to cover high rents and rising costs for groceries and transportation, the problem is systemic and calls for new policies that will help ensure the city is investing in increasing the number of good jobs.

Yet, while the city spends millions of dollars to redevelop buildings, blocks and entire neighborhoods as part of its economic development program, too many projects fail to create the good jobs New Yorkers need. Instead, our tax dollars go to developers and companies that create more low-wage service jobs that continue to plague our community.

New Yorkers have had enough. We can’t afford to see our hard-earned tax dollars go to developments that keep our families and neighbors unable to pay their bills. Government should be creating jobs that do more than add to the city’s number of working poor.

Redevelopment throughout Queens has and will continue to transform neighborhoods and provide hundreds of new jobs. But there are no assurances that these jobs will pay a decent wage that will allow workers to provide for their families.

This is not only a missed opportunity for the city to help create the good jobs that Queens needs, it’s a short-sighted, inefficient way for us to be spending the hundreds of thousands of tax dollars going into the project.

Cities around the country are addressing this problem by instituting policies ensuring that when developers are given financial incentives from taxpayers, they give back good jobs to the community. The City Council is considering the Good Jobs Bill, based on this model. The bill does not ask developers to pay extra for the workers at their sites but simply that they pay the going wage or “prevailing rate” that most established businesses already pay. In this way, the Good Jobs Bill would work to protect our limited tax dollars from being used to undercut business and working families.

Guaranteeing good jobs through economic development programs is a smart public policy that has been working across the country. Cities have found that developer tax breaks and subsidies alone do not lead to good jobs. As a result, they are resorting to citywide measures that guarantee good wages and health care at subsidized developments so workers can make ends meet, contribute to their local economy and get off public assistance for food, housing and health care.

Here in New York, less ambitious policies to ensure development creates good jobs have proven not to hinder economic growth. And job-quality requirements, like those in the Good Jobs Bill, would create more than 500 good jobs for office cleaners, apartment building workers and security officers at Willets Point and Coney Island.

We need a reform of our economic development programs so that hard-working, tax-paying New Yorkers will see the benefits of these government programs, and working people in Queens have the good job opportunities they need.

Jimmy Van Bramer’s City Council District includes parts of Woodside, Sunnyside, Long Island City, Astoria and Maspeth. Julissa Ferreras’ district includes parts of Corona, East Elmhurst and parts of Jackson Heights. Daniel Dromm’s district includes parts of Jackson Heights, Elmhurst, East Elmhurst, LeFrak City, Corona, Rego Park and Woodside.