We’re using the first four days of September to spotlight four big ideas shaping the future of New York’s workforce. Each day, we’ll share a new perspective on what it will take to create good jobs, expand opportunity, and build an economy that works for every New Yorker. Then, right after Labor Day, we’ll release our calendar for the year ahead. Today: an open letter to the new EDC leadership. Stay tuned for more of our workforce ideas throughout the week.
September 1, 2026
Mr. Anthony Shorris and Ms. Lina Khan c/o NYC Economic Development Corporation
Dear President Shorris and Board Chair Khan,
On behalf of the more than 220 members of the New York City Employment and Training Coalition (NYCETC) — including businesses, community-based organizations, institutions of higher education, training providers, labor partners, and other organizations working across New York City’s workforce ecosystem — we offer our warmest congratulations on your recent appointments to lead the NYC Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC).
We are encouraged by the vision you and Mayor Mamdani articulated when your appointments were announced: economic development must advance affordability and build an economy that, in the Mayor’s words, “can and must include the working class.” Today, 46 percent of working-age New York City households do not earn enough to meet the city’s true cost of living. As Mr. Shorris stated, this is “a moment when New York is asking… who [the city’s] economy is for.” The answer must be the New Yorkers who keep this city running but can no longer afford to live here.
That question has a long history in this city. In fact, Mr. Shorris has posed it before. In an October 1990 essay in the New York Times, written shortly after serving as Finance Commissioner under Mayor Ed Koch, he argued that the choices made when a city’s resources are constrained reveal what it actually values. The easy moves, such as raising taxes or cutting services, demand no imagination, while the harder and more important work requires government to make better use of the powers and assets already at its disposal. The essay’s provocative title asked, “What Kind of People Are We?,” urging readers to consider what those choices would say about the city’s collective values.
The constraint today is different in form, but not in character. New York’s K-shaped economy is widening the distance between those building wealth and those struggling simply to afford the city. Increasingly, the binding constraint is affordability, and the tools available to address it include the public assets the city controls, including land, leases, financing, incentives, and procurement.
That makes the underlying question much the same: deal by deal, investment by investment, what does the city’s economic development portfolio tell us about who gets to participate in growth — and, ultimately, who this economy is for?
Answering that question requires looking not only at what city government invests in, but at how it is organized to deliver on those investments.
For NYCEDC, that means starting with government itself: reducing fragmentation, moving away from the inefficient approach that asks every agency and every program to solve every problem, and elevating workforce development as core economic infrastructure — with a clear mandate to connect New Yorkers to opportunity, employers to talent, and economic growth to economic mobility.
What the Record Shows
Start with what NYCEDC was built to do. The agency emerged from two predecessors: the Public Development Corporation and the Financial Services Corporation. Their merger brought together two powerful tools: land and capital. Talent was not part of its remit—an oversight that still haunts us today. NYCEDC is formidable at assembling sites and structuring financing, but its institutional structure was not designed to build the citywide workforce infrastructure needed to help New Yorkers access and advance through the employment opportunities its economic development strategy creates.
To its credit, NYCEDC increasingly recognizes the importance of talent. At the Committee on Economic Development’s Preliminary Budget Hearing in March, Interim President Jeanny Pak described workforce development as one of the agency’s four “strategic pillars.” The instinct is right; the architecture is not. Workforce development should be a pillar of the city’s economic strategy, but that does not mean it should sit within its economic development agency. Land and capital have an institution built to deploy them. Talent requires the same — durable capacity, authority, resources, and accountability — organized as a partner to NYCEDC, not another function layered on top.
Three of the city’s most consequential economic priorities — the green economy, early childhood, and artificial intelligence — show why that distinction matters.
Green infrastructure and the green economy.
The 2024 Green Economy Action Plan may be NYCEDC’s clearest attempt to put talent alongside land and capital. It projected nearly 400,000 green jobs by 2040 and committed to more than 12,000 apprenticeships and pre-apprenticeships and five borough-based workforce training centers. But the June NYC Council Workforce Development and Economic Development Committees oversight hearing on the State of the Green Economy Action Plan exposed the distance between ambition and execution: only one of the five centers was scheduled to open, roughly 375 New Yorkers had been connected to pre-apprenticeships, and the administration could not provide complete placement and employment outcomes or commit to annual reporting against the plan’s targets. Even the headline $600 million workforce commitment largely reflected a broader youth workforce initiative rather than dedicated green-economy spending. Meanwhile, physical development is advancing, including a $100 million climate innovation hub and workforce facility at the Brooklyn Army Terminal. The City has durable machinery for assembling land and deploying capital; it still lacks comparable machinery to turn those investments into talent pipelines, jobs, and advancement.
Early childhood reveals the gap from another angle.
NYCEDC’s Childcare Innovation Lab explicitly reframed child care as an economic development issue, producing research that quantified billions of dollars in economic output and tax revenue lost when caregivers leave the workforce or reduce their hours. Yet, when asked in March how NYCEDC considers child care as a condition of workforce participation, officials agreed that child care “can’t be separated from economic development” but could not identify programs in the portfolio addressing access to safe, reliable, and affordable care. The analysis survived; the capacity to act on it did not.
Artificial intelligence makes the institutional gap especially visible.
NYCEDC helped secure OpenAI’s first East Coast office and establish the AI Nexus, while the workforce component centered largely on internships connecting CUNY students with AI-first startups. Meanwhile, concerns about AI’s impact on workers and young people have fueled calls for moratoriums and restrictions elsewhere in City government — with little visible NYCEDC voice in that debate. The City is simultaneously recruiting a game-changing technology and debating how to contain its effects, without a clear institution responsible for translating that change into skills, career pathways, and economic mobility. That is the missing middle: an economic strategy without an equivalent talent strategy.
Taken together, these examples point to the same structural problem. NYCEDC is increasingly identifying the workforce implications of the economy it helps build. What New York City lacks is a permanent counterpart that can turn those signals into a coordinated talent response. NYCETC’s 2025 analysis of nearly $640 million in annual city workforce spending, Putting Our Dollars to Work, identified no significant NYCEDC funding stream within the citywide workforce system. NYCEDC also does not hold a seat on the NYC Workforce Development Board, which exercises statutory oversight of nearly $90 million annually in workforce spending. A review of Board minutes since early 2023 indicates that NYCEDC has not led a substantive agenda item and has participated only intermittently.
NYCEDC’s real power lies in the tools it uses to shape where the city grows and which industries grow with it. The opportunity now is to use those tools to advance economic mobility for New York City’s working class.
A Shared Mandate, Written Into Every Deal
Your appointments create an opportunity to close these gaps and establish a new model of economic development — one in which workforce strategy is embedded from the beginning of every major investment, rather than added after development decisions have already been made.
The recommendations below follow a governing logic Ms. Khan has described in her own work: begin with a full accounting of the authorities you already hold and ask why some of them have gone unused for years; then prefer clear, administrable rules to elaborate procedural machinery that is hard to enforce and harder for the public to understand. Nothing that follows requires new legislation or new appropriations to begin. All of it requires the agency to use what it already controls.
1. Write job quality standards into the term sheet. NYCEDC’s real leverage is land, leases, bond financing, and tax incentives — tools the agency already controls and deploys every day. Every major deal should include wage floors, benefit requirements, local and community hiring commitments, advancement pathways, and enforceable clawback provisions if promised jobs and hiring outcomes are not delivered. Public subsidy should be proportional to public benefit: the more public value a project receives, the more it should return through quality jobs, opportunities for residents, and long-term economic mobility.
Enforceability is essential. Ms. Khan has been direct about the failure mode here: conditions attached to a transaction, with no clarity about whether anyone will enforce them, leave the public unable to tell what government actually did. Community hiring commitments that exist only as aspirational language in a press release create that same murky picture. Each standard should therefore carry a named trigger, a reporting obligation, and a consequence — so that a New Yorker reading the deal can tell what was promised and what happens if it is not delivered.
2. Put the city’s economic justice commitments on the record. If workforce development is a strategic pillar of the city’s economic development agenda, the city must hold itself accountable for upholding it, including within its own government. An annual Job Quality Report should document the workforce commitments made across publicly supported projects, city contracts, and municipal hiring initiatives, and assess whether those commitments were fulfilled. It should disclose wages at placement and after twelve months, retention rates, and advancement outcomes, disaggregated by project, agency, and demographic group, and be published with the same seriousness as the city’s financial reporting.
This is not a call for disclosure in place of substantive standards. As Ms. Khan has cautioned, policymakers can mistake additional reporting or administrative steps for meaningful change, leaving people’s lives more complicated but no better. The report should instead connect promises to performance: what the city committed to, what its agencies and partners delivered, who benefited, and where results fell short.
3. Build the infrastructure to unite workforce and economic development. A strategic pillar cannot stand on stated intentions alone; it needs an institutional structure that can deliver. If talent is essential to every NYCEDC project, workforce development deserves comparable standing: a corporation with a fiduciary board, the authority to hold and deploy capital, the ability to enter multiyear agreements with employers and training providers, and a seat at the table from the initial term sheet forward.
This would consolidate, not expand, functions and funding now distributed across multiple agencies. Building on the work of the Mayor’s Office of Talent and Workforce Development, a Workforce Development Corporation would clarify responsibilities, strengthen accountability, and better align workforce investments with the city’s economic development priorities.
The approach builds on a principle you have advanced before. In 1990, Mr. Shorris questioned whether the city could “afford to have four separate economic development agencies,” recognizing that the opportunity lay not in austerity but in bringing fragmented functions together to improve productivity. Today, that same logic applies even more urgently to workforce development, where fragmentation creates precisely the costs Ms. Khan has warned against: a Rube Goldberg structure that is difficult to administer, prone to failure, and confusing for the people it is meant to serve.
The 1990 essay ended with a question about solidarity: whether New Yorkers would meet the city’s challenges separately, each protecting a parochial interest, or together as one public. Today, the answer should be reflected in every public investment: who benefits, who gets hired, who has a genuine opportunity to get ahead, and how the city holds itself accountable for delivering on those commitments. NYCETC and its more than 220 members stand ready to help translate that vision into practice, and we look forward to seeing the results.
Sincerely,
New York City Employment and Training Coalition