The Waterfront at Camden City

The Waterfront at Camden City
with views overlooking the Delaware River and Philadelphia
(Click to Enlarge)

The goal of The Waterfront project is to connect an underutilized waterfront along the Delaware River with Downtown Camden.  The two are currently separated by 48 acres of surface parking, disconnecting some of the most valuable land from the rest of the city.  The Waterfront will create a safe, walkable residential community, a thriving commercial plaza and a job-creating office cluster.

The Waterfront Presentation Board
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Design Team (left to right): Sharon Williams, Greg Contente, Sean Esrafily

Wood Model of Proposed Camden Developments
Waterfront District seen along the bottom of the photo.

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The Waterfront at Camden City

The Port of Paulsboro

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

In a push to adapt and reposition itself in a global 21^st century economy, the South Jersey Port Corporation and the Gloucester County Improvement Authority are re-outfitting a closed industrial site to create a multimodal port in Southern New Jersey.  This report analyzes existing conditions at the port site and explores how infrastructure improvements contribute to the port’s productive advantage.

Because of contamination at an old oil storage and distribution facility, BP cheaply leased their property to the Borough of Paulsboro as the site to develop a marine port facility.  Benefiting from a strategic location along the Delaware River, the port inherits centuries of accumulated infrastructure surrounding it.  An existing marine channel backbones the site, while Shortline and Class 1 railroads and an interstate highway connect the marine terminal to the American hinterland.

Investments in infrastructure that support freight movement will facilitate port operations and further promote commerce in the region.  Major stimulus begins with remediation of industrial land and the construction of the new marine terminal, but additional improvements enhance the Port of Paulsboro’s connectivity.   Track expansions in Paulsboro and in the region add to the rail network’s reach.  A new Freight as a Good Neighbor access road allows trucks to avoid residential neighborhoods when connecting from the port to the interstate highway.  And the Missing Moves Project seeks to alleviate bottleneck congestion along the regional truck corridor.

With a large tract of land, Paulsboro also offers customizable co-location opportunities that allow for value-added distribution or manufacturing on site.  This becomes especially important since the port is positioned to handle specialty cargo.  Combined with unique multimodal access, this flexibility gives the port a competitive edge in handling and processing heavy steel plates for offshore wind turbines.  Reaping the benefits of these productive advantages, the port expects to create 2,500 jobs, while the offshore wind industry will employ an additional 2,000 workers.  In total, employment multipliers predict the port to support 20,000 direct and indirect jobs.

Other redeveloped brownfield sites at Keystone Industrial Port Complex in Bucks County and the less-than-effective iPort12 distribution center in Carteret further emphasize the requisite formula for developing a new port – it all depends on improving existing freight networks.  Successful brownfield redevelopment projects leverage cheap land with extensive infrastructure networks to create hubs where port functions and value-added industrial services support one another.  Cohabitation provides a productive advantage that attracts new industrial activity and creates jobs.  Following this proven development model, the Port of Paulsboro capitalizes on its inherent advantages as it revives an old industrial hub in South Jersey.

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The Port of Paulsboro

The East Row, Minneapolis

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For the Urban Land Institute's Hines Urban Design Competition, we created The East Row development plan, which would add a live, work, play entertainment district around Minneapolis's new Metrodome.

The East Row, Minneapolis

The Drying of Yemen's Agricultural Economy

Shibam, Yemen
Photo: Yemen Profile, BBC

“No famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy.” 

—  Amartya Sen, Nobel Prize Winning Economist

“[Yemen's] environmental disaster was born in the 1970s when the oil/construction boom exploded in the Persian Gulf, and some two million to three million unskilled Yemeni men left their villages to build Saudi Arabia. “As a result,” said [Abdul Rahman al-Eryani, Yemen’s former minister of water and environment], “the countryside was depopulated of manpower.” Women resorted to cutting trees for fuel and the terraces eroded because of lack of maintenance. That led to widespread erosion of hillsides and the massive silting of the wadis — seasonal riverbeds — whose rich soil used to support three crops a year, including Yemen’s famed coffee. The silting up of the wadis crushed the coffee business and led Yemenis to grow other cash crops that needed less fertile soil. The best was qat, the narcotic leaf to which this country is addicted. But qat requires a lot of water, and that led to overdrafting of groundwater.

“...Qat drank all the water, and the easy oil money seduced the rural manpower into leaving for unskilled jobs. But now that most of the Yemeni workers have been sent home from Saudi Arabia, they are finding a country running out of water, with few jobs, and a broken public school system that teaches more religion than science. As a result, what Yemen needs most — an educated class not tied to an increasingly water-deprived agriculture — it cannot get, not without much better leadership and a new political consensus.”

— Thomas Friedman, NYTimes

The Drying of Yemen's Agricultural Economy

Iranian Presidential Elections

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (left) and Hooshang Amirahmadi (right)

My graduate school advisor and professor of Urban Economics is running for President in Iran.  A revered political and international development consultant to leaders in Washington and in London, Professor Hooshang Amirahmadi always contended that a Western approach to governance could quickly turn around the fortunes of Iran and speedily increase its development.  Below is the economic platform Professor Amirahmadi presents to Iran.

Of all the issues Iranians confront in deciding their next president, the economy is the most imperative. With a high inflation rate, widespread unemployment, sluggish growth, low productivity, plummeting national currency, plunging industrial production, declining income, widening income gap, and growing poverty, hardly anyone in the country is immune from the dismal state of the economy. This is unfortunate since Iran is actually a wealthy country with vast natural resources, a highly-educated workforce, arable land, diverse climates, access to the strategic waterways, and many other favorable attributes.

The economic problems and the mismatch between Iran’s economic achievements and its rich resources are largely rooted in mismanagement and economic sanctions. These and other underlying causes are removable and thus the economic problems entirely solvable if the upcoming presidential election was to produce the right executive leadership. The next president must understand Iran’s economic predicament and its causes, comprehend the world economy, and be able to put an economic development plan for the nation and implement it using a skillful team of economists and international advisors.

As President of Iran, I will turn Iran’s economic plight around by formulating an economic plan based on three principles: economic productivity, export-led industrialization, and labor-market globalization. I will also immediately remove sanctions and mismanagement by resolving the nuclear dispute, normalizing relations with the West, resolving factional infighting and appointing a highly competent economic and international advisory team. These steps will help in opening the global economy to Iran and in establishing a stable economic policy, thus creating a climate of permanency and certainty for productive investments.

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Iranian Presidential Elections