The Long Island City northern waterfront currently hosts the Ravenswood Generating Station, the largest fossil fuel plant in New York City, providing over 20% of the City’s local power capacity. After Rise Light & Power committed to transforming it into a renewable energy hub, the Office of the Queens Borough President brought on HR&A to lead “Reimagine Ravenswood,” a community-driven site reuse, neighborhood improvement, and workforce development planning process to guide a just transition to an inclusive clean energy economy in western Queens.

The work will advance New York’s climate goals and yield significant benefits for union labor and environmental justice in Queens, serving a population of over two million residents. HR&A’s efforts are supported by funding from the NYSERDA Just Transition Site Reuse Planning Program, matched by Rise Light and Power.
 
Stakeholder engagement played a central role in the community planning process, with the community participating through a steering committee, public workshops, focus groups, and a public survey. In addition, the team, in partnership with Fu Wilmer Design, conducted both an evaluation of the existing site and an economic analysis of opportunities for talent development and business development in green industry, small manufacturing, technology, life sciences, the arts, and other growing industries in Western Queens.

The engagement and analysis are informing alternative site reuse plans for the power plant parcel, community revitalization strategies for the broader neighborhood, inclusive workforce development strategies focused on green jobs and other growing sectors, and a focused action plan and timeline for reimaging the site and its connection to the surrounding neighborhood.

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NYSERDA Just Transition Site Reuse Planning Program 

Press 

Ravenswood Generating Station is going green, Borough President launches community study — LIC Post 

HR&A supported the New York City Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice (MOCEJ) to develop the AdaptNYC initiative, including a Climate Adaptation Roadmap, a led a multi-disciplinary team to summarize and forecast climate impacts to New Yorkers through 2100, including how particular hazards (extreme heat, extreme storms, chronic flooding) will impact people’s health, homes, mobility, economy, culture, and community. The work addressed systemic and institutional racism disproportionately impacting New Yorkers of color.

Alongside the analysis we conducted with engineering firm Arcadis and local nonprofit planning firm Hester Street, we conducted stakeholder engagement which included an advisory group of environmental justice advocacy organizations to elevate historically marginalized and disinvested communities. With these quantitative and qualitative inputs, HR&A designed a prioritization framework to equip City staff with tools to evaluate potential policy pathways for climate adaptation, centered on racial and social equity.
 
HR&A supported the development of a public-facing website that makes climate science and New York City’s adaptation measures accessible to New Yorkers.

The New York City Mayor’s Office of Recovery and Resiliency and the New York City Economic Development Corporation engaged HR&A to develop a strategic plan for Lower Manhattan as part of the Lower Manhattan Coastal Resiliency Project following Superstorm Sandy. Our work led to capital projects with over $1.7 billion in committed funds, as well as the innovative FiDi and Seaport Climate Resilience Plan.

HR&A’s work on climate adaptation in Lower Manhattan began in 2013, when we led local planning through the New York Rising Community Reconstruction Program, which led years later to the Lower Manhattan Climate Resilience Plan. HR&A’s team assessed climate vulnerability, looking at long-term climate hazards including chronic stresses, to inform the development of potential strategies for Lower Manhattan. Strategies were evaluated based on the ability to mitigate against climate hazards and their economic and community impacts. As part of the Lower Manhattan Climate Resilience Study, HR&A conducted a financial feasibility assessment and identified a series of next steps towards implementation.

Building on the Lower Manhattan Climate Resilience Study, HR&A helped manage an interdisciplinary team to develop the Financial District (FiDi) and Seaport Climate Resilience Plan, as a subcontractor to Arcadis. In addition to supporting overall project management, HR&A created an inclusive stakeholder engagement plan that emphasized education and advocacy. As the planning process turned toward implementation strategies, HR&A analyzed the public and private flood insurance landscape to estimate the potential savings that could be generated by the planned flood protection infrastructure. Working with Munich Re, we found that flood protection infrastructure could save property owners in the FiDi and Seaport areas over $75 million annually in private flood insurance premiums by 2050.

In October 2021, Mayor Bill DeBlasio announced a $110 million City investment in drainage and bulkhead improvements to protect the South Street Seaport from sea-level rise and storm surge in the coming decades. The City released the full Financial District and Seaport Climate Resilience Plan in late 2021.

HR&A served as a strategic advisor to Brooklyn Bridge Park Development Corporation by guiding the development of the award-winning master plan.

The transition of 85 acres of vacant, post-industrial piers into active open space and development marks a reconnection of Brooklyn’s vibrant neighborhoods with its waterfront. The park commenced construction in 2009 and is now nearly complete, with over 85 acres are now open to the public. Planned development to support the park includes residential, retail, hotel development and parking. HR&A’s effort helped break a 20-year log jam by identifying a funding strategy for this award winning public space. Michael Van Valkenbergh’s extraordinary design provides residents and visitors with one of the great parks of New York City.

HR&A led predevelopment planning for Brooklyn Bridge Park.

HR&A was retained to staff a new citizen-led organization commissioned to prepare a plan to develop one of the most dramatic sites in urban America. This successful effort combined skills in public facilitation, design management, financing and executive leadership. Specifically, HR&A:

• Led a complex, multi-year stakeholder outreach process to the project’s numerous constituencies, including City, and State officials as well as diverse interest groups;
• Created a funding plan that uses future, on-site development to sustain the Park’s operating costs;
• Worked with the City and State to create a memorandum of understanding to provide capital funding; and
• Procured and managed the BBPDC’s team of master planners, counsel, and other consultants.

In 2014, New York City’s tech sector was growing rapidly on the heels of significant public and private investment, as Big Tech firms such as Google and Facebook and homegrown startups such as Etsy and Zocdoc established significant footprints in the city, and the city continued to draw tech talent from across the world. Amid a change in mayoral administrations, tech industry supporters – led by the Association for a Better New York (ABNY), Google, Citigroup, and New York Tech Meetup – sought to understand the scale of the tech economy in New York, the types of job opportunities that were created by the tech economy, and what investment would be needed to continue growing the tech economy and ensure that growth benefited a broad range of New Yorkers. The consortium hired HR&A to conduct a comprehensive industry assessment and guide an approach to briefing the incoming administration.

Unlike most industries that are neatly defined by the North American Industrial Classification System (NAICS), HR&A recognized that tech jobs are embedded in industries throughout the economy, requiring a customized methodology for accurate measurement. Through interviews and case studies with a broad set of New York City employers, HR&A developed a definition that reflected the full range of tech ecosystem jobs. A guiding principle of HR&A’s definitional process was that the tech ecosystem should be defined based on both industry and occupational data to capture all jobs enabled by tech, including: 1) tech roles (e.g. software developers) within tech industries, 2) non-tech roles (e.g. sales associate) within tech industries, and 3) tech roles in industries that are not classified as “tech,” such as finance or health care. This latter category, often excluded from economic analyses, makes up a significant share of all New York City tech jobs.

HR&A’s analysis found that, as of 2013, the tech ecosystem employed almost 300,000 New Yorkers and had grown by 18% over the preceding decade, outpacing overall job growth in New York City (12%) and nationally (4%). Additionally, the economic activity engendered by these direct jobs supported an additional 250,000 jobs throughout the City’s economy, generated $125 billion in total spending, and created more than $5.6 billion in annual tax revenue. A major finding of the study was that 44% of tech jobs did not require a bachelor’s degree, and those jobs on average had wages nearly 50% higher than jobs in all other industries that did not require a bachelor’s degree. Based on this finding, the study recommended workforce development and hiring practices focused on job candidates without a four-year degree, including community college students, and actions by employers to remove the bachelor’s requirement as a barrier to employment for positions that, elsewhere in the industry, did not require that credential. The report also included policy recommendations to sustain the growth of New York City’s tech ecosystem, many of which have since been adopted, including the creation of centralized tech hubs across the city and investment in step-up space for growing startups.

The findings and recommendations from the report – NYC’s Tech Ecosystem – were reported in media outlets including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, National Public Radio, Bloomberg, and numerous technology-related media outlets.

In 2019, on behalf of the New York City Economic Development Corporation, and in collaboration with LaGuardia Community College and Jobs for the Future, HR&A updated the original tech study with a focus on broadening opportunity in the tech ecosystem. The report – Building a More Inclusive Tech Workforce – found that NYC’s tech ecosystem grew at an accelerated pace from 2013 to 2018 and continues to offer higher wages at all educational levels; yet female, Black, and Latinx workers are severely underrepresented across the ecosystem and especially within tech roles at tech companies. Although women make up 50% of NYC workers, they hold only 35% of ecosystem jobs and only 23% of tech roles at tech companies. And whereas Black or Latinx workers make up 37% of the workforce, they hold only 23% of ecosystem jobs and 17% of tech roles at tech companies. The report – the most detailed analysis of underrepresentation in NYC’s tech ecosystem to date – summarizes findings from employer interviews and student surveys regarding barriers to more inclusive hiring and recommending changes to employer recruiting, hiring, and retention practices, as well as potential City actions to support jobseekers from underrepresented backgrounds and incentivize companies to invest more deeply in building diverse teams and leadership.