The Bronx is home to countless universities, hospitals, and cultural institutions—collectively known as anchor institutions—that spend billions of dollars each year on goods and services, yet few of these contracts go to local businesses and the Bronx remains the poorest congressional district in the county. We have numerous, renowned health centers—Montefiore Medical Center, Bronx Lebanon, St. Ba
rnabas Hospital, among others—and yet Bronx County is consistently ranked last in New York State in terms of health outcomes. We have the largest food distribution center in the world—the Hunts Point Food Distribution Center—surrounded by food deserts. Similarly, the Bronx has one of the most powerful bases of grassroots organizations in the United States, and these organizations have only gotten stronger and more sophisticated in their campaigns over the past thirty years. Yet over that same period, residents within the Bronx have seen their incomes and assets decrease, along with their health, educational outcomes, and other quality-of-life indicators. In 2012, the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition and the Kingsbridge Armory Redevelopment Alliance won a progressive, enforceable community benefits agreement (CBA) for the redevelopment of the Kingsbridge Armory, after previously defeating a proposal for a low-wage, big-box shopping mall at the same sight. The future Kingsbridge National Ice Center will now provide living-wage jobs, local hiring, local procurement, community space, and measures for environmental sustainability. While the Kingsbridge CBA is one of the strongest in the country and a landmark achievement for the community, the duration and intensity of the fight also highlighted the limits of reactive economic development strategies—particularly in a borough that has long suffered underinvestment and now faces astoundingly rapid gentrification in others. With support from the MIT Community Innovators Lab, leaders began to study examples of alternative economic development strategies from elsewhere. These include the Mondragón Cooperatives in the Basque region of Spain, which has achieved regional prosperity and equity via a network of worker-owned cooperatives and supportive social infrastructure, and Market Creek Plaza, a twenty-acre retail complex in southern California that is owned in partnership with hundreds of community investors. Drawing on these successful examples and incorporating their local knowledge and relationships, leaders united around the creation of a Community Enterprise Network, comprised of stakeholders and “core infrastructure” that could facilitate sustainable, equitable, and democratic economic development—or economic democracy—in the Bronx.
