Prof. Charles Kee:
Ok, first of all thank you very much for coming. I believe the session’s being recorded. I’m not sure how, but it is being recorded. But it’s my pleasure to welcome you to the “Economic Development of Flushing: the Other Chinatown,” which is really the other Asia now. It’s more than just Chinatown.
My name is Professor Charles Kee and I’m with the Business Department at the Kingsborough Community College. Our first speaker, I have the honor to introduce him for the second time in two weeks, the Honorable Wellington Chen. He’s a member of the Board of Trustees CUNY, and also the Senior Vice President of TDC Development Corporation.
Honorable Wellington Chen:
Thank you Charles. Show me with a raise of hands how many of you are still awake. I know it’s been a long day. We are talking about a long, long day. I do have a laptop here and I do have a PowerPoint, but I don’t think this is appropriate forum being that there are four speakers and we have less than forty minutes.
What I do alert you to on my right is Dr. Bernadette Li. She is a Professor of Asian Studies at St. John’s University, also in the borough of Queens. May 25th, there will be a packed – and if you think this is packed – that goes from the early morning to the late evening, including dinner. And the topic is strictly about Flushing. I will give a PowerPoint presentation then and I always give very good presentations, so be sure to come. Lunch is included and I think breakfast is included. And there is free admission. So bring your sleeping bag.
But as a general introduction, my background started out – I was in my last year of architecture school as a CUNY student and the town started having trouble keeping the stores rented. There were high vacancy rates on the tail end of Main Street and Northern Blvd. I was a medical student and I won’t say how long ago because it will give away my age. To make a long story short, there was an open invitation from some very distinguished community leaders asking for help. It was like a medical student seeing a patient dying in front of our eyes. So I said, well it’s my field of study, I’ll get involved in that. Lo and behold, to make a long story short, twenty some odd years later, and I would say more than that, we are still back at square one. I won’t go into the details of why because it’s a very, very complex subject.
What’s fascinating about it is here is a community that has so much potential. People always look at it from the negative side. I look at it from the positive side. It really is a diamond in the ruff. It looks like a giant gem and it just requires some work.
Let me just give you some interesting facts to show you how important downtown Flushing is to the Queens economy and to the New York economy. How many of you know what is the busiest subway outside Manhattan? Downtown Flushing. Exactly. We are busier than 59th Street and Lexington Avenue, where the Bloomingdale’s stop is. We are busier than World Trade Center and Chamber Street. We’re busier than Jamaica Center. We’re busier than 74th Street and Jackson Heights. I can name a lot of stops in Manhattan. We are busier than 72nd Street and Central Park on the Broadway. Do not underestimate it. Flushing is a critical, strategic asset to the city. It is shaped like the heart of Queens. If you take the county borough of Queens and place a dot in the center of it, that’s where Flushing is.
Flushing is also the single most important center of motor vehicle transportation in the city. It has 20 major bus lines, two major rail lines, the Long Island Railroad, the number 7 train. You probably don’t know this, but on the Long Island Railroad, you are 16 minutes from Downtown Flushing to Penn Station. One stop in Woodside and the following stop you’re in Penn Station. You have to drive 100 miles an hour to beat that record. What the presenters said this morning, about whether it’s by land, by sea, by air, it’s accessible. You have the Worlds Fair Marina, it’s two miles away from LaGuardia.
It’s not just the most diversified county in the United States, it’s also diversified in its economy. But also, Harvard Professor Michael Porter documented this, we are not dissimilar to other downtowns. We had issues, even before the Asians came in, about the downtowns declining. They would rather go out to the fields and open space and contribute to sprawl and dependency. These are major, major issues that all the cities around the world have to grapple with. Specifically, how do you attract a competitive downtown, so that you retain the workforce and attract the elite to come to work in your downtown. It’s a daunting task.
The other thing I want to say is also getting back to Michael Porter. Michael Porter is an expert on competitiveness. He’s a consultant to countries around the world from Taiwan to New Zealand to Australia. Everybody in the global economy in the global village, we’re competing around the world. How do you distinguish your market niche, knowing that the U.S. has only 4% of the world’s population? How are you going to compete in the 21st century, with this type of educational system, this type of environment, and this type of bureaucracy? How are you going to be able to maintain your competitive edge?
I must say what we are doing is all the right things for the earth – ecologically, environmentally. We are doing what’s called TOD (Transit Oriented Development). We are trying to encourage you to walk to work, to use the mass transit and don’t drive. We are trying to use – most of the land in Queens is gone. The few remaining available pieces of land are, what is called ground fields. Ground fields are basically to recycle these former industrial lands. So the only way unless you want to go upstate and start chopping down trees, this is what you need to do. You need to come look at these industrial sites and say, what should we do with them?
The other thing we are also doing is the public/private partnership. All the other cities that have done this revitalization that were successful require government involvement. It has never been done without government involvement. I am doing two things that will require your support. One is that I think we’re going to need a local entity to coordinate all the planning. There’s no planning. If you look to the [Baruch Human Institute], [Alan Hennessey] just gave a talk not too long ago. There’s a very slender book in which he says, as a former city official, he tells you there’s no planning in your city. The nature of the politics and the way the system is set up is that you borrow from Peter to pay Paul. You’re running for your reelection. You’re not thinking about using this year’s surplus to cushion for your future. You’re thinking about making sure that you are reelected. Those are some of the issues that we have to grapple with.
The number one thing that we need is a LDC, a Local Development Corporation, and that we have not reactivated. Downtown Flushing, with the appearance of success, was the first LDC to get disbanded in New York City’s history. We were successful in revitalizing commercially and economically the Main Street area, but it has no order. It is chaotic. As a result, it was first LDC in New York City’s history to be disfunded, so to speak. That is something that we need. The other thing is what S.B. Woo said this morning – that there is strength in numbers. I’m independently forming the 10,000 Friends of Flushing Organization that I hope you can all chip in to, because it is very worthwhile. It’s not being used for political gains. It’s really to say we rally around the course and what type of footprint do we want to leave behind for our children?
What type of legacy do we want to show the earth for the future generations, that we have this precious site that the world knows about us – the site of two Worlds Fairs (the ’38-’39 Worlds Fair and the ‘64-‘65 World Fair). The first UN General Assembly meeting was held in 1946 in Flushing Meadow Park. The Beatles landed there first in 1964. The State of Israel was voted in there in 1946. There are all these historical factors. Plus there are two 5,000 year old capsules to be unveiled 5,000 years from now. It will always be meaningful. (I think there’s a Beatles record in there if you want souvenirs.) There’s several tons of granite on it and we cannot remove it.
I think what Alex Chu said a little bit this morning is correct in the sense that public policy affects us greatly. The more I look at that, the more I understand it. And Donald is looking at me… His department is so influential and unfortunately they’re not given the power that they should be. Alex Chu mentioned this morning about Floor Area Ratio. Well guess what? Floor Area Ratio is affecting Flushing greatly. People think that has to do with real estate development, what does that have to do with us? I’ll give you two classic examples. For the last 15-20 years, the community board has been located in a basement office without windows, and they’ve been dying to crawl out of there. Queens College has been looking for space to educate students in downtown Flushing for the last 15 years. There is no space. It’s not just about commercial development and creating jobs. It’s about affecting the life of our education system, our civic organizations in downtown.
One startling fact, the reason I was appointed to the Board of Standard of Appeals is I spend all those 13 years (time flies by so fast) on the Community Board. What I became very good at was zoning variances, you know why? Because every damn office building that needs to be built, the zoning for floor area requires a parking variant. And Flushing has a high water table, because the Flushing River is nearby and the flight path from LaGuardia. And guess what? We have a standard growth. We never grew up to be even a teenager. You then have a shrinkage that you didn’t have. For the past 10 years, and Maria Nahikian will tell you this, the unemployment rate in Queens has been consistently higher than the rest of the nation. Here we have the highest density – we’re the 5th largest city in the United States – the borough of Queens is a city by itself. We are like the city of Houston and to show you how pathetic it is, we have only one shopping mall. If I tell you the city of Houston has only one shopping mall, you would be shocked.
The fact is, Queens is short 36 million square feet of retail space just to match the national average. To give you an idea of how big 36 million square feet is, the biggest mall in America is 4.2 million square feet. That’s the Mall of America in Minnesota. To walk around just the perimeter requires six hours. I need nine more of those just to equal our total. This requires work and it’s shocking to me because the more I dig into it, the more I think, how could this be? Here is a world renowned city, the world knows about it, and in ten years… God forbid.
I’m hoping we can bring the Olympics here. If anything else, they put a deadline on the urgency of getting this thing done. So in a nutshell there are a lot of issues we are confronted with. I won’t take up all the time, I used up 15 minutes.
Prof. Charles Kee:
Thank you Trustee Chen. Just for the sake of our time constraints, I’m going to try to leave the question and answer session for the last ten minutes of the panelists’ speeches today. Now I’d like to introduce Dr. Bernadette Li. She’s from St. John’s University. She’s a Professor of Asian/Asian American Studies. She’s the Founder and President of the Society for Chinese American Study and Founding Editor for the Journal of Chinese American Studies. Today her topic will be “9/11 Tragedy and the Future of Flushing.”
Dr. Bernadette Li:
I’m very glad to have the chance to talk about the future of Flushing. Thank you very much for coming to this session. Now as Honorable Chen had said, Flushing is a fantastic place. I think that there are no adequate words to describe the importance of Flushing. As he has just mentioned, the critical problem about Flushing is the shortness of space. However, I think we should not consider Flushing as the downtown of Flushing – that small area, Main Street and Roosevelt Avenue. Flushing is in a way connected with Manhattan. It’s connected to Fresh Meadows all the way to Long Island. I think it has a lot of space that we can expand, the question is to figure out how to establish all the connections for the growth of Flushing. This will be a major problem for honorable Chen and his TDC Development.
Now to my topic: September 11th and the Future of Flushing. September 11th, as we know, was a turning point for Canal Chinatown. I think it’s also a turning point for Flushing. That’s why I’m organizing a conference on May 25, 2002 called “The History of Flushing,” to look back at the development of Flushing through the past 30 years and to project our views for the future. The amazing thing about Flushing, and not just the strategic position, so many airports and railroads and buses – I think also, there is the incredible human resources. There is no other place in the world, as far as I know, like Flushing in terms of the abundance of human resources. You’ve got all nationalities there, ethnic groups, people capable of all kinds of linguistic and cultural abilities and they have connections literally with all parts of the world. So this is, in my view, not just another Chinatown. No, this is not Chinatown because this is reaching out. The traditional context of Chinatown is a rather enclosed community. Flushing is all reaching out. It’s a unique international city and intercommunity in America and in the world. I cannot think of another place like Flushing. You think about Chicago, Seattle or San Francisco, there’s no other place like Flushing.
Now we have all kinds of problems of course. But all problems are also opportunities. I think what we need most is some kind of leadership and overall planning, how to make Flushing an incredible place in the world. It will be of great service to New York of course. If Flushing enjoyed prosperity, New York would benefit. On the other hand, Flushing’s prosperity is dependent on New York’s prosperity. I feel that the future of Flushing is certainly connected with New York and with the world.
Right now Flushing looks quite prosperous, but anybody who lives in Flushing knows Flushing is actually having lots of problems with density. Actually some businesses are moving out of Flushing at this point. How to keep businesses and at the same time transfer them to other parts of Queens. The Queens Blvd., I think that’s a great area for development. So how do we connect Queens Blvd., Fresh Meadows and eventually Long Island, with downtown Flushing (and of course Manhattan) will be a major task for the next 20-30 years.
I think I will just make my introductory remarks like this and I will welcome any questions you may have. I have been there for 30 years and I know Flushing so well I really don’t know where to start. But I know Mr. Chan can assist you. He has been in Flushing even longer than me (45 years) and I think he would like to make some comments. I’ll save some time for you.
Wellington Chen:
Ok, one point of clarification, so they know. I’m just a private consultant for TDC, so I’m not trying to do development for development’s sake. I’m actually a community activist and advocate. The other thing was the point about Fresh Meadows. It’s too bad you cannot see on the PowerPoint, [Donald Yum] would know this, the reason that Flushing’s so important is not that Fresh Meadows is no good. In Queens, the reason we haven’t been able to get a full blown retail central business district or commercial center is because again, public policy.
Zoning does not allow – from Flushing eastward all the way to Great Neck, there is not another zoning that allows you to build the kind of thing that Dr. Bernadette Li just mentioned. Because only in downtown Jamaica, in one small pocket on the LIE, where K-Mart is, that’s about it. No other region allows you to achieve what Alex Chu said this morning, the minimal FAR is, 3.4. The only area that allows you to have a 3.4 FAR is in Downtown Flushing. So it’s either Downtown Jamaica, K-Mart, or a sporadic couple of sties fragmented on Queens Blvd. I think that’s something you should be aware of. Queens is predominately a bedroom community and any time you want to go into a bedroom community, and put some stores here, they go crazy and say, like hell you are. That’s an issue you have to grapple with. I will leave it at that.
Charles Kee:
Thank you very much Dr. Li. Now I’d like to turn the floor over to Mr. Joseph Chan. Mr. Chan is the Director of Commercial Development and Economic Revitalization at the Empire State Development Corporation. His topic today will be the Economic Development to move beyond 9/11, and the opportunities for the future. Thank you.
Mr. Joseph Chan:
Thank you very much. I’m bringing a little bit of a different perspective. I think Professor Li brought an academic perspective and Mr. Chen is a very passionate advocate. I’m looking from more from a historical context and more of a human resource perspective. I’m just going to go through my speech as quickly as I can and not take up too much time. As it is towards the end of the day and I think people’s brains are already overloaded with weighty information and issues about the Asian American community, I thought it would be more appropriate if I talked about something a little bit more uplifting.
I promised Dr. Tam’s office that I would talk about all the great restaurants and good food that one can find along the subway lines and Roosevelt Avenue in Queens. So I compiled a list of all the Cambodian, Columbian, Ecuadorian, Italian, Mexican, Tibetan, Chinese, Korean, Thai, Indian, Pakistani, and other restaurants you’re likely to get. If I were to creat a restaurant survey and go over each restaurant on the list with you, the list is going to be about 500 pages long. I just wanted to make sure that everybody’s still awake and that even though we’ve already had lunch, that you would still be hungry.
As we have on the panel today very distinguished guests who have years of economic development experience, I do not presume that I would add anything more enlightening or substantive to the workshop. Really what can one say about Queens after the tragedy of September 11th? From a geographic location, Queens has many unique economic assets and cultural strengths. The Underground Railroad, which aided the slaves escaping to the north and the Abolitionist Movement of the 19th Century started in a barn house in Flushing over 100 years ago. Queens has a population of 2.3 million people from every corner of the world literally, a growth of 14.2% from the 1990 and 2000 census. As Wellington said before, it was the host of two World Fairs where ideas about the future development of mankind and hopes of open society were promulgated. You have the Shay Stadium with the truly amazing Mets. How many people here are Mets fans? I’m a Yankees fan. It is home to the Flushing Meadows Park with 1,255 acres of green space, and the United States Tennis Association, and myriad cultural, arts and science organizations in the park.
Forty-three percent of the residents in the borough are home owners. That’s a very important fact because that’s an indicator for the actualization of the American dream. People come to Queens to lay down their roots, to call themselves Americans. The median household income in Queens is about $42,000. The borough’s manufacturers ship some $6.4 billion work of goods and merchandise (in 1997). Also in 1997, retail sales in Queens exceeded $8.7 billion even though we do not have sufficient per capita retail space. Minority owned firms accounted for 46.5% of the total number of businesses operating in Queens. Women owned businesses made up another 24% of the total. Both percentages are from the 1997 statistics, so the actual numbers today are much higher. In the year 2000 over 2,700 building permits were issued in the borough. Households with persons under the age of 18 comprised 36% of the overall Queens population which means that it’s a very young, energetic and vibrant borough.
Queens provides over 500,000 employment opportunities in the private sector, not including the public and non-profit sectors, which make up substantially more jobs. This is all based on the 2000 census. Per capita, retail sales in 1997 were $4,500, which translated into today’s dollars, is about $10.3 billion in purchasing power. So this is from the borough with 2.3 million people. As said before, the number 7 subway line has the highest daily ridership of any service outside of Manhattan. There are two airports in the borough – JFK and LaGuardia that respectively transport 14 million and 21 million passengers. I mean think about that 21 million…it’s mind boggling. Don’t forget that other than the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building, the Unisphere in Flushing Meadows Park is the most recognized symbol of New York. That emblem of the accolade is a demonstration of democratic ideals. The movie “Men in Black” was shot with the Unisphere as a major story element. Even alien life forms cannot resist Queens. They come crashing down in Flushing Meadows Park.
Without question as the host to the second largest concentration of Asian Americans in the City of New York, Queens has been affected by the events of September 11th. There are many similarities between the Chinatown community in Lower Manhattan and the one in Flushing. Both are retail driven, and dependent on food and grocery businesses. Both have manufacturing of garment and apparels and other light manufacturing industries. Both have an extensive finance, insurance, real estate and investment workforce. Some of that was addressed by the study by the Asian American Federation. The banking, investment and real estate are major industries in both Chinatowns. Flushing is less dependent on tourism and the jewelry industry than is Lower Manhattan, but it is a destination point for many immigrants arriving at LaGuardia and JFK airports. Both Chinatowns are famous for restaurants and authentic Asian American cuisine, which is a major source of work for unskilled laborers. Both provide employment opportunities for Asian Americans who face linguistic barriers in the mainstream workplace. Both support small retailers and mom and pop retail concerns. Both communities have the largest number of private tutorial and academic schools outside of the public education system.
Because we emphasize education, that’s a growth industry for people who are teachers, educators, and tutors. Because we send our kids to schools other than the elementary school or public school system. Both Chinatowns are the breeding grounds for technology related service providers, software programming and computer sales. Both are major hubs, of course, for preservation of the culture and heritage of Chinese Americans.
We all know about the devastation to the Chinatown community in Lower Manhattan after September 11th. I think if people are interested in the Asian American Federation study, it is on their website, which is, www.aafny.org. You can download that study. It’s actually a very good study. The study indicated that problems facing the Chinatown community on all fronts and on all sectors suffered a tremendous drop in a sales and loss of revenues, anywhere from 20% to 75%. Many businesses have not yet recovered. Unemployment is rampant in Chinatown.
In Flushing, such a comprehensive study has not been yet commissioned, but given the similar cultural and social dynamics and economic structures and interdependency, the transmigration of the workforce between the two areas, the same vendors, suppliers and business owners, it would not be unreasonable to hypothesize that Flushing has been severely impacted. What I would like to suggest is that this is a situation in which the glass is half full, rather than half empty. What made the Asian American population such a tremendous asset to the city and the nation is its entrepreneurial spirit, something that another speaker talked about before.
Over 160 years ago, Chinese immigrants came to this country and in the process built the transcontinental railroads, working in mines, cultivated lands and assisted in agricultural economies in California, the Pacific Northwest, and as far away as Montana and Middle America. They established trading posts and commercial infrastructure in small towns and cities. They helped to build a fishing and canning industry. They introduced new foods, medicines, plants, religious faith, and cooking to the country. They also engaged in myriad retail business enterprises and other services. It is this indomitable spirit that is not risk adverse. It is a spirit that seized opportunities rather than hardships, which contributed to the construction of this great nation and made Asian Americans special in their value as stakeholders to the continuing social and economic prosperity of this country.
What I say is that we should look forward to doing more of the same – that is, what we do best. Flushing is at the cusp of major changes from the rezoning of manufacturing to special districts in Flushing. To the pending 2012 summer Olympic games designation, which hopefully we will get, and Flushing will play a major part in that; to the millions in China with World Trade Organization membership; to the continuing influx of new immigrants to the area; to the pent-up demand for housing, quality merchandise, professional services, and quality of life issues. And of course the rebuilding of the city after September 11th. All of this convergence of events and forces mean economic and financial opportunities for those who are creative and are willing to invest in the future of Flushing and by extension, the city and state of New York. In almost every business category, there are opportunities and prospects for the Asian population.
As I’m taking up too much time, I’ll just limit myself to one topic. If you’re in the construction industry, which a lot of Chinese Americans are, whether in Chinatown or in Flushing, start thinking about bidding for city, state, and federal contracts as a minority and women owned business enterprise. Think abut doing work with the New York City Housing Authority, the New York City Construction Authority, the New York State Dormitory Authority, the New York State and New York City Department of Transportation, Port Authority and other public agencies. The public sector spends billions of dollars annually on improvements in capital programs, in construction, in management, in purchasing supplies, in goods and services, and in planning and forecasting. By becoming certified as an MWBE, for the city, state and the Port Authority, small contractors can participate in the bidding process for the next 3-5 years just for the rebuilding of Lower Manhattan because that’s how much longer it’s going to take. It’s going to be billions and billions and billions of dollars. Locally, think of construction jobs of the new retail and commercial redevelopments being proposed around downtown Flushing or other projects being proposed. If developed, millions of square feet of space will require skilled construction workers, carpenters, electricians, elevator installers, HVAC systems, and others.
My prognosis is that the fundamentals of Flushing as a strong and resilient community will more than meet the challenges ahead. By keeping faith, by working together, by having a vision according to these forces, by finding strategies, by working hard, by doing what we do best, by willpower, ingenuity, creativity and perseverance, by exercising our rights as citizens, by being actively involved in the community, Flushing as a second Chinatown will surely rebound and will become the portal from which other immigrants pass through on their way to the realization of the American dream. Thank you for staying awake.
Charles Kee:
Thank you. Actually you have an excellent voice there. Maybe we can get AAARI to post that on their website. Thank you. Our last panelist today, Ms. Marie Nahikian, is the Executive Director of Queens County Overall Economic Development Corporation. Her topic today will be on the economic potential for all of Queens, not just Flushing. Thank you.
Ms. Marie Nahikian:
Thank you. Last summer, the Queens County Economic Development Corporation embarked on an interesting trip in a way. That is, that we organized around the borough of Queens, six workshops on the subject of being a minority owned business. Because a major part of what our role is – and we are a private non-profit organization, we are not part of government, although we do have some government support, including the fact that our office is in Queensborough Hall. So we have these workshops, and we had one in the Korean community, we had one in the Hispanic community, we had one in the Chinese community, we had one in the South Asian community, and we had another one in the African American community. The African American community understood very well what it means to be a minority owned business.
What we found, of course, was what we expected. That is, the majority of the business owners who joined us for these workshops had no notion that they were even considered a minority owned business, number one. And number two, if they did, they were not so sure that was a good thing. And in New York City, in the past six or eight years, it has not been a good thing, because there has not been any commitment to the new American majority, which is now Queens, and to the entrepreneurs from the new American majority who I think will be the business leaders that we will all come to know in the near future. But I think, as Joseph Chan has indicated, that is about to change.
One of the reasons that is about to change is not only because we have a new mayor, which makes a big difference, but because we have the City Council and Queens Delegation that has said that the participation of minority owners of businesses in the full economy of Queens and of New York City is a high priority. So I think you’re going to begin to see some change. That’s a good reason to think about the issue of being a certified minority owned business. I’ll try to share some addition light on some of the facts that Wellington Chen and Mr. Chan have shared with you because I think it’s very, very significant – not just for the Asian community – I think it’s very significant for New York City. Queens has the third highest number of Asian owned businesses in the nation; second only to…Can anyone guess where number one and number two are? Los Angeles and Orange County. Absolutely. We also have the sixth highest number of Hispanic owned businesses and the seventh highest number of African American owned businesses in the nation, all in Queens.
Mr. Chan has already talked about the need for retail growth. For many years I think people had a very parochial view of Queens and what life was like in Queens and in many ways they did view it as a bedroom community without realizing that Queens historically is a collection of small towns. It’s the one place in the world, and those of you who live in Queens know this, that people will fight to keep their zip codes. Even though the post office might say you live in Jamaica, if you talk to somebody who lives in Queens, they don’t say I living in Queens. They say, “I live in Flushing.” “I live in Fresh Meadow.” I think that’s a very important characteristic of Queens and of our housing stock.
From 1990 to the year 2000, as you’ve already heard, Queens had a 14% increase in population. It had a 70% increase in Asian population, in ten years. We have had population growth in every sector ethnically and racially, except one. We had a 22% decrease in white population. What that means is that Queens is what the world is going to look like. We’re looking at it right now. If we can figure out how to make the dynamics in Queens come together and work, we’d make some huge strides forward. And I think the world will ultimately work. The five major areas of growth in Queens, and that’s part of the secret: we are a diverse economy.
Unlike Manhattan, unlike many, many other cities, we are not dependent on one economic sector. Our five biggest are: Manufacturing. Most people thing manufacturing’s dead. The Asian community understands very well that manufacturing is not dead. Without commenting about the value attached to it, I watched after September 11th as the mementos and the American flags, and scarves and the pins began to appear on the streets of New York with vendors. Guess where they were made? They were made in Flushing, many of them. If they weren’t made in Flushing, the economic trade deal was made to buy the products that were being designed almost instantly. There was no other segment of our local economy that responded more quickly than I think the Asian community did in its entrepreneur knowledge that people wanted to have something that would help them remember, if you need to have anything help you remember, what happened on September 11th. That’s just a little economic vignette, but I watched it and I was amazed. I have never seen anything like this in life. Seven days later all these products were on the street.
The second area that is the fastest growing job generator is heath services. This is a very, very important sector in Queens. Construction, we’ve already head about. Construction is the fastest growing and one of our highest wage paying sectors of the economy, and it’s very important to note that the number of jobs in Queens that are attributed to construction are not just because of the amount of construction going on in Queens, but because of the number of construction companies that have their headquarters and are housed in Queens, because the payroll comes out of Queens. Retail – I can give you a quick facts about retail. In Queens, people spend 16.4 cents of every dollar they earn in local stores. In Nassau and Suffix Counties, the number doubles. People spend 30.1 cents out of every dollar they make in local stores. That tells you a lot about how many million square feet we need. That’s right. We’re bleeding dollars right out of New York City. That impacts not just Queens, it impacts all of New York City, because we could capture those dollars and move them around if we can increase our retail opportunities, because people want quality.
Next week there will be a major step forward in the retail side that will happen in downtown Jamaica and that’s the opening of what will be called the “Jamaica One Center”, where there will be 15 movie screens, a Gap, Old Navy, [National Tents], and I think that those kinds of opportunities need to be captured in Flushing as well. The Chair of the New York City Economic Development Committee is from Queens, from Far Rockaway. Mr. Sanders had a piece of advice for developers. His piece of advice is: think local and find yourself a local partner, because that’s how you will be the most successful in getting over the barriers that you described – the difficulties of a local community saying, not here. I do not want another whatever it is here. But there are some realities. The Target store in College Point, is the highest grossing Target in the nation. Home Depot in Flushing, the very first one built in New York City is still the highest grossing Home Depot in the nation. So there are enormous opportunities there.
There are also some problems, and I’m going to talk a little bit about what I think the problems are. One is that I think there is a tendency for ethnic communities to be insulated and to some degree isolated from other communities. In Queens, not only is that not good for building for the future, but it’s not even good business. One of the smartest men I know is a Korean business owner who sells medical supplies. He was participating in an entrepreneur development course that we teach at Queens County. After about three or four classes, I finally said to him, Mr. Woo, I don’t understand why you’re in this class. You’ve been in business for six years. You’re doing very well. Why are you in this class? This is for people who want to start a business. He said, for two reasons: I want to practice my English. And I want to learn how to do business with a community other than my own.
I encourage within the Flushing community to begin to think about how to do business with someone different than you. It’s hard. Nobody likes to do business with people who are different then they are, because there are a lot of unknowns involved in it. That’s where I kind of get on my high horse and preach about cross-cultural and multicultural marketing. If you can figure out a way to sell something to someone who is different than you are, and make them feel good in the process, whether it’s a meal or a product, you will make money. Because they will bring people back. I think that is a real asset in Queens we haven’t figured out how to sell very well yet. People say to me all the time, you work in Queens? Do you know about where to go to do ‘x’?
We published a map, and if anyone wants a copy of the map, I’ll take your name and send you one, but we published a map called “Shop Queens, Shop the World,” because we wanted to encourage the cross cultural relationships at the retail level and at the neighborhood level. Housing is a huge issue because all of this cannot happen if we cannot figure out where people are going to live. I think that’s something really, really important, because you can only put so many bodies in so many square feet.
Finally I think the other problem to think about is wages – how high and unfortunately how low. Because one of the problems that we have in Queens, even though we’re generally a middle class community, is that probably 35-40% of the residents of Queens make under $25,000 a year. Even though we have very high income. We all know that when you’re paying very low wages, that is a problem. Those are my thoughts, my strategies and ideas, and I look forward to having a chance to talking about it more. Thank you.
Charles Kee:
Thank you very much. I am going to open the floor to questions.
Audience Member:
I appreciate very much that the panel gave the bright side of Flushing. I remember what Winston Churchill said, “a building a can people.” You know, Dr. Li, you mentioned about the space. The fact is the Chinese are very isolated, and even some of the commercial signs are in Chinese. If you don’t put it in English, that’s a very self-imposed isolation. Here I must say something about human resources. I wonder why the cultural and human resources are not connected. Why? You have the power. Even though John Liu has been elected, the problem is still there. I wonder whether you people are able to use your power to position and use strategic planning – the old housing. It’s like only in the mailroom do people get together; it’s like in the military, only in the bathroom do people get together. So I wonder, you build strategies to pull people together.
Wellington Chen:
I just want to commend, I think Dr. Li gave a very good point, which is the strength in Queens about our human resources, it truly is. One of the things I failed to mention, and Frank knows this, is that I’m active in trying to bring the Olympics here in ten years. One of the things – we have a pretty strong technical proposal – but one of the reasons why we think we’re going to win the Olympic bid is because we have three major themes. The slogan is what Dr. Li just talked about, that “New York City is the World’s Second Home.” The point is what Dr. Li just talked about. Just about every nation is here – from Fiji Island to Illusion Island, you can name it, we can find it in Queens. That’s it.
The unfortunate part about what Dr. Li just said is what’s so hard, not just for me, but it’s not that I’m a pessimist. City planning in the census of 2000 will find a disturbing trend. It’s very possible that we have a tremendous population growth in Queens. What you should look for is this thing called clustering. We are clustering among the different ethnic groups – that’s why you have Little Italy and such. They’re clustering and there’s this thing called the isolation index. The isolation index went up. That means what? Despite our being together, we’re so close to one another, we’re not talking with one another. We’re talking among ourselves. This is the point that you’re talking about. How do you be open? And the retailers are afraid to come in. They say Asians are…do you want quality goods? Marie you had an excellent point. I won’t come in because I don’t think you are. I went to Barnes and Noble and you know what they said to me? I’m not sure you people read our books. That gives you the difficulty.
That’s why the first shopping center proposal they had in Flushing dates back to 1946. The last time any shopping was built in Queens was in 1973. Not since 1973 have we gotten anything new. That’s the track record. The 1950s they wanted to do something. The 1960s there was a zoning change. The 1970s we got into trouble. The 90s was a rezoning, and now we’re in the 21st century with all these brilliant ideas, but I need something that I can implement. Not talk, not a piece of paper that says this is a master plan. This requires, like the Afghan war – a long time, commitment, resources, troops, and money. That’s my lesson. That’s why I’m thinking you need the LDC. You need that ground troop there to fight for it for about ten years and that’s about when the Olympics will come here.
Charles Kee:
Thank you very much.
Audience Member:
Hi, my name is Harold Shultz. I’m from the Department of Housing Preservation and Development. I’m also a long time resident of Queens. Density has been a theme of several of the speakers here, and density is also being an issue that we’ve confronting in housing in Queens. The concern is that many areas of Queens, unlike other parts of the city, are homeowners and are afraid of density. They fear it greatly both housing and commercial development and the experience of many communities (I happen to live in Forest Hill and have watched several fights on this issue) have been opposed to commercial development on the grounds that it would change the character of the community. To the extent that Flushing, as an Asian enclave sees density as a good thing and a source of development, is a source of tension between Flushing and the rest of Queens and is there a way to overcome that?
Wellington Chen:
I think this gentleman really touches the crust of the issue. I think the question was excellently posed. I’m so glad that he lives in Queens and he understands the dynamics. The point about this thing, that I have always said, is that you do not want to be a Greenfield developer, going into Montana ranches and cut down all these trees and say here comes housing. It is not about going into densely packed areas, which is one of the precious gems of Queens, to go in and say we’re going to double or triple your density. That’s not the point. The point is about, number one, the fear is unfounded.
The Asian population alone can never sustain the type of critical mass that we need. You need choices. What we are shortchanged on is choices. So you want to go into the Brownfield areas and break it open. Here it is under one roof. Joe talked about all these nations’ food. Well it’s very hard to find. There are Afghan restaurants, but you don’t know where they are. There are Romanian restaurants, but you don’t know where they are. They’re all along the 7 line. Now imagine putting that under one roof. At 2:00 in the morning, you can have all kinds of desserts from French and Vietnamese, to Italian to Romanian to whatever you want, under one roof. That’s the beauty of the future of the world: under one roof, a global village. A central town center, unlike anything you’ve ever seen. Over eighty languages there. That’s the beauty of it.
The last two points…why do you think Las Vegas grows and we do not grow? Las Vegas is one of the fastest growing cities, extreme heat, 110 degrees, right? Go to Calbury, Canada, the World’s Largest Mall. Whether it’s extreme heat or extreme cold, when you give consumer choices, people flock to it. They charter planes to go there for a one week shopping tour. The Mall of America is about 4.2 million square feet and they’re about to double it to 10 million square feet. Is the population of Minnesota supporting it? No. It is people from Japan flying in. That’s the point. We’ve been shortchanged.
What I lament about Flushing is that you name it, I don’t have it. If you don’t eat Asian food, you don’t have anything. You don’t have a Barnes and Noble Bookstore; you don’t have Borders Bookstores; you don’t have a movie theater; you don’t have a health club; you don’t have a Starbucks; you don’t have a sandwich shop. You name it, you don’t have it.
Joseph Chan:
In terms of the density portion, the development is really in the light manufacturing area. And in the past 10 years, in that area, the population has been greatly reduced. So in fact, you’re not only increasing density in terms of people there, you’re really replacing it. Essentially it’s not being used optimally.
Charles Kee:
Thank you.
Audience Member:
You recall that one of the other things that was happening on 9/11 was the primary election. And in that primary election on the democratic side, Hernando Ferrare was saying that we need afterwards, he said we need development in all the boroughs. Mark Green said, no we’ve got to focus on downtown Manhattan, central business district. That makes sense. That dynamic, that argument was not just a democratic primary argument, but my guess is it’s an argument that goes on all the time. Aren’t the interests in Manhattan and downtown Manhattan part of Queens’ problem?
Marie Nahikian:
Absolutely. Absolutely. Fifty percent of the people who lost jobs in Chinatown don’t live in Chinatown Manhattan. They live in Flushing. Some of them live in Sunset Park. But I think that that tension between lower Manhattan and Queens is a very clear one. With billions and billions of dollars that have come to the state and to the city to rebuild lower Manhattan, there is not a dime, not one dime committed to Queens or even to Brooklyn. It is all geared toward downtown. It is all geared toward grants and things that need to happen.
I have a hard time knowing that Deloitte and Touche got a $15 million grant to stay in the headquarters they’ve always been in. I have a hard time with that, because I think that we do not get our fair share. We have one of the most successful entrepreneurial development programs in the state of New York. Our statistics of people that take the course and actually start businesses and make it are very high. We have had a very, very small contract from the state of New York (Empire State) to run that program for nine years. In November, the governor ended all the contracts with us, with money left in the budget for minority and women owned business. Yet, our waiting list for entrepreneur training has doubled since September 11th. We’re teaching one class right now because we have a Newsday Disaster Relief Grant. I think the tension is clear and it’s there.
Just so people know, in case you’re interested, if you look at the Queens Library website, www.worldlinq.org, we published a book about how to start a business in Queens. It’s actually called Minding Your Own Business. That is on the Queens Library website in four languages, including Chinese, Korean, Spanish and English. So if you know of people who are interested in that resource, it is on that website. Absolutely. It’s also true that we have two airports and not a dime in the Empire State Plan, which I commented about and a lot of other people did, to deal with the second largest job market in Queens, which is air transport.
Wellington Chen:
It’s a known fact and I think you should check this out. March 16, 2001, front page of the New York Times, take a look at that census map. There’s an oxymoron in Flushing. That’s why they suspended the Downtown Flushing Development Corporation. They were thinking you’re fine. If you look at the population growth and loss of the Queens area or the entire New York City area, guess where one single sector lost more than 30% of its population in the past ten years? It was in Flushing. Take a look at the map. In the industrial zones, Flushing lost one big chunk of population, more than any other single sector in the New York City district. Why? Very simple. It’s the environment.
China is finding out the hard way. China is improving its environment. Why? They found by improving one coastal city, all the best educated workers want to flock to that city. So they started cleaning up the rivers in Dalian and Chengdu and all these cities are doing that. Flushing has a bleeding gum. The Flushing River is now one of the three most toxic bodies of water in New York City. In the 1940s, people used to swim there and go crabbing. In the 1950s, that’s when the junkyard came in. Now in that area, when you have a bleeding gum, don’t expect healthy teeth.
First off, west of the Main St. area, to give you the example of Flushing Mall, three prior owners have gone bankrupt on it. It has never fully opened. The forth one is now in his struggle. To show you how hard it is, these painful cadavers. That’s why I said public policy is so important, because you need an organization to carefully scrutinize on the radar screen. I spotted it on my own. Nobody told me the statistics. I just looked at it and said, where did we lose the population in one decade? There, in the past decade. Western Flushing. You think vibrancy, but it’s actually blight, unknown.
Charles Kee:
Thank you very much. Are there any more questions from the audience?
Audience Member:
Hi, my name is Karen. One of the questions that is intriguing is to find out because Queens and Flushing is sort of this area that has all the different cultural diversity there, I’m wondering what types of employment opportunities…I know that you alluded to the construction and the retail and encouraged entrepreneurship for the low income immigrant communities. But what specifically is Queens looking at? Is there any integrated approach to try to create jobs or linkages with the Manhattan Chinatown and the Queens Chinatown, as well as the other ethnic communities. I’m very curious to find out what’s happened to this population.
Marie Nahikian:
I think the issue of job creation workforce development is one of the toughest issues and there’s nothing that I think is very well integrated that actually looks at where the jobs are and tries to match people. We did a study based on a survey of employers that we published in February 2000. In February 2000, we discovered that there were 1,000 job vacancies just among the companies that we surveyed. There are a lot of barriers to matching. One is just the mechanism to do the match. The other is that until the last three or four months, all of the funds available for training and employment services had been moved out of the Department of Employment by the former administration and stuck in the Human Resources or Welfare Administration. So there were no funds available for workforce development.
I think that will begin to change because we’ve seen it kind of come back the other way. I think one of the areas that probably offers the biggest opportunities for job development for people who are lower income and who are stuck in those $5/hour jobs is to work on the air transport side to see if we can upgrade some of those jobs, some of which are very well paying. But I think there’s some real commitment on the part of the Port Authority to try to provide the leadership to increase the wages. That’s one of the areas that I see. Retail is tough because it doesn’t pay as well. But a lot of our larger retailers are beginning to understand the need to pay $7, $8, or $9 per hour, not $5/hour.
Joseph Chan:
Let me respond also. The apparel industry, about seven years ago, the Department of Defense had a contract with FIT to help the apparel jobbers set up the assembly line so that it would be automated using computers. So that even thought they’re losing business, at least they will convert their machinery and even thought they will fire employees, but at least they won’t fire all the employees. But the manufacturers will not willing to make the investment.
This is on the capital side. They were not willing to retrain their employees for some of the useful employment skills. This is a problem in the Chinese community that we’re so money oriented and so profit driven that we’ll outbid each other and we’ll shut each other down and go elsewhere and do something else. If you look at the manufacturing industry in Chinatown and Sunset Park, and even Flushing, that’s part of the problem. They’re outbidding each other to cut each others’ throats.
Marie Nahikian:
The other interesting little fact about that though is that within the manufacturing sector, the most rapid growth in ownership in manufacturing has been within the Asian community, who are niche manufacturers. There is a very boutique type of specialized manufacturing going on. I think that holds some potential.
In the 1997 Business Economic Census, there was a very interesting fact that we didn’t even know about and that was that within the manufacturing areas for furniture, textile, apparel and publishing, companies in Queens were 30% more productive than the rest of the nation. Now why is the question? Is it because people were working for very low wages for very long hours? Or is it because the companies in fact were more productive. And that’s something that we don’t really know the answer to.
Joseph Chan:
This is to follow up on the Department of Defense. Think about what’s happening in Afghanistan right now. The United States is spending about a billion dollars a month. Think about all the uniforms, all the stocks, equipment – canteens, belts, underwear, undershirts…that’s all being made somewhere. But the manufacturing in New York was not forward thinking.
NAFTA has something to do with it, but the fact was there was an opportunity where the government gave a grant to FIT to train the jobbers, but very few Chinese jobbers showed up. They said, I don’t have the time. I’m doing fine. And that’s very short sighted. It’s not thinking forward. It’s a business investment that has to be long term. You have to invest in your own business by using capital. You have to change your machinery equipment. You have to keep up. Another thing is called the [Federal] Data Interface through the federal government, where whatever the federal government purchases goes through online. This was a federal mandate that as of 1995 was supposed to be a fact. Very few people participated.
In Queens there’s a Chinese company that sells Dell Computers to the federal government. They’re just a middle man. They do very, very well. Everything’s done on the computers. The other Chinese businesses are not going to do that. So it’s really business owners that have to take responsibility.
Charles Kee:
Thank you very much. Are there any more questions for the panelists?
Audience Member:
Just one quick question. I think clearly everyone has to take responsibility but don’t you believe that perhaps there is another approach. People will only take what’s available if they know about it. Do you believe that all these businesses are given sufficient information and have a clear understanding? After all, these are immigrants who have just came over.
Joseph Chan:
The answer to that is yes. The Greater Garment Development Corporation is responsible for disseminating the information. But the jobbers didn’t show up.
Audience Member (continued):
Maybe do you think that there is room for improvement in getting that information out?
Joseph Chan:
I think what it was, was they knew about the information, they took a look at it and at the time it was a one time investment that they were not willing to make, because they felt that machinery conversion was too expensive. For the long term, it’s worthwhile. Think about the Japanese industry, when they went through their recession. They retrained employees. You think of Yamaha, they went into another line business.
Audience Member (continued):
No, I understand. I just wonder whether or not the message has been delivered.
Joseph Chan:
Sure absolutely. I can bring the horse to the water, but if the horse is not going to drink… There’s only so much that we can do from the government’s side or the public sector side. Then the business owners have to calculate whether it’s worth the investment.
Wellington Chen:
I think Don’s point is well taken. I took ten New York City area Chamber of Commerce and New Jersey Chamber of Commerce presidents, and we took them to China and tried to explore the opportunity for trade, and lo and behold you found out there were all these opportunities. The Europeans are high pricing and having a field day, and the American competitors and not here and there are all these opportunities. The U.S. companies are not aware, because I think especially like in Queens, just to try to get the data of what the pattern of development is, is hard enough. Just to get a picture and scrambling to get the data. I think there’s a point to be said, that’s why I talked about the entity before. If you have a stronger staff that reinforces the office or the LDC that we could disseminate this to, who would not want to do more business? Just like what that Korean man said. But getting there is just difficult.
The other thing about that lady’s point, I think one of the things that’s well-suited for a low entry job market is what Marie said. The retail industry employs a lot of people, albeit they’re not the highest wage jobs, but for the low-skilled, retail is worth taking a look at for the simple reason I just gave. Mall of America just on their staffing level maintains 12,000 people. That’s before they expand. They’re now going to go to twice that level. That just gives you an example and that is not counting the millions and millions of visitors that will come. Queens Center now gets 23 million visitors a year. Do you know how big that number is?
What famous tourist attraction only attracts only 6 million visitors a year? Queens Center, the one on Queens Blvd is trying to increase in size. They expect to triple, meaning that a shopping center…I don’t think any shopping center has ever attracted 6 million visitors. But they are going to achieve that with an aging mall. That shows you I have always said, Queens (and especially Flushing) is a Cinderella story. How long will we have to keep scrubbing the floor with things thrown at us? It’s about time we get off the floor. That’s the point I’m trying to make. And it’s for everybody, not just Asians. The Asians alone can never support the type and the magnitude and quality spaces you want.
Flushing has no place to meet. We have no town center. The only official town meeting place is that little triangle in front of Flushing Library. Did you know that? The only other open space is the Long Island Railroad basketball court. Those are the two open spaces. You look at Michael J. Fox in “Back to the Future.” Every town has a town green. Savannah, Georgia has nine town greens. We have none. That’s the pathetic nature. You look at the Flushing Chinese Village, you always want to meet with people. On a sunny day, you want to be on Park Avenue meeting people. It’s not that you don’t want to be in an air-conditioned office, you want to be close to your fellow human beings.
Marie Nahikian:
By the way I have to tell you that I went to see Spiderman, because it’s a Queens movie with lots of Queens Landmarks there.
Charles Kee:
We’ll take one more question.
Audience Member:
From all the speakers I heard about Flushing, and it seems like the information is not getting out to the public. When you talk about Flushing…when I try to get data about Flushing, it’s not there. Is there a way that I can find out how to do a report so that we can have all this data and then we can publicize it, so that the public can know about it. Then it’s not just lower Manhattan getting gall the attention. So if there’s a way…
Marie Nahikian:
I’d be glad to talk to you about it. We work a lot with data and information. What we have found that it is not available on a local level. We have to buy it, usually from the state and then try to break it out. It’s tough and it’s expensive. We publish something called the Queens Global Business Outlook, which is the only local economic trends report that’s published anywhere in New York City I think and maybe even in New York State. I will be glad to share with you copies of that, as well as some of the work that we’re doing now, that I think for the first time will give you data to work with. But it’s a very hard thing to find.
Charles Kee:
I want to thank all the panelists and all the guests today. Thank you.
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