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November 17, 2010
The struggle with unemployment in Brooklyn
City Beats
by Julia Pyper
It’s after six o’clock on a Friday night when 30-year-old Tracy Gibbs-Brown flips through her notebooks where she’s compiled the names of 140 jobless people.
Come Monday, she has to do check-ins – calling and asking everyone how their job search is going. She also has to assist the more than 25 new and returning individuals who come into her office every day looking for work. It’s nearly seven by the time she heats up the lunch she didn’t get to eat at noon. After a quick break, she gets back to work.
“Our clients are underemployed, under educated, and under experienced. It’s very difficult to find them jobs,” said Gibbs-Brown, a job developer and career counselor for the Brooklyn United For Innovative Local Development (BUILD) office in Downtown Brooklyn.
Brooklyn has the second highest unemployment rate in New York State with 10.8 percent, second only to the Bronx at 13 percent. A large part of BUILD’s mission, since it was created in 2004, is to generate employment and help communities achieve financial self-sufficiency. As of September 2010, a new way BUILD is helping people find work is through their pre-apprenticeship program, which teaches participants hands on construction skills and starts them in the process of becoming labor union members.
But many in the Brooklyn community are outraged that the program is funded by Forest City Ratner, the development company behind the controversial $4.9 billion Atlantic Yards basketball arena and apartment complex project. Atlantic Yards, which will be built in Prospect Heights, has many people in the poorer areas of the borough are furious over what they see as an uneven distribution of development. Those who live by the site are upset over the 10 years of construction that lie ahead.
“But it’s going to create a lot of jobs,” said BUILD pre-apprenticeship professor Gausia Jones, 31. “I’m looking forward to 10 years from now when they say BUILD was at the forefront of it. We got on the project and we put some people to work, which is the most important thing. After that they can go and help their families and help themselves and be productive citizens.”
Construction has not yet begun, but exactly how many jobs the project will generate is unclear. Before BUILD opened its Downtown Brooklyn office in 2007, it already had approximately 7,000 people registered in its database, most having heard through word of mouth that Forest City Ratner was hiring pre-apprenticeship participants. Another 1,000 were processed shortly after the office opened. But of the 8,000 people who ultimately signed up, there was only funding for 30 men and women to take the 15-week program.
NoLandGrab: Residents upset by the prospect of 10 years of construction are going to be really ticked by the 25 years or so that it will actually take.
Posted by eric at November 17, 2010 12:06 PM