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December 16, 2010, 10:17 am
To Attract the Next Google, the City Seeks a New College
By PATRICK MCGEEHAN
Worried that New York City is not spawning enough technology-based start-up companies with the potential to become big employers like Google, city officials are inviting universities around the world to create an engineering campus on city-owned land.
Despite being home to more college students than any other city in the country, New York lacks a top-rated engineering school. Without one, the city has fallen far behind San Francisco, Boston and other metropolitan areas in the competition to attract new technology companies and the jobs they create.
On Thursday morning, Robert K. Steel, the deputy mayor for economic development, announced that the city would seek a “top caliber academic institution” as a partner in building a school for applied science and engineering. The city is willing to consider locating it on one or more of its properties, including the old hospital campuses at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and on Roosevelt Island.
Mr. Steel said that city officials were open to suggestions about other locations for the school and would be willing to make a significant investment in the project, though he did not provide an amount.
He used Google’s offices in Manhattan as a backdrop for the announcement, because that company represents the sort of employer that city officials dream of attracting to diversify the city’s economy. For all their efforts, New York’s fortunes are still closely tied to the ups and downs of Wall Street. Many of the biggest investors in start-up ventures are based in the city, but the companies they back tend to congregate in Silicon Valley and around Cambridge, Mass., which is home to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“New York has had some of the best science in the world for years, and it hasn’t translated into a first-rate center for technology start-ups the way it has elsewhere,” said Jonathan Bowles, director of the Center for an Urban Future. “It’s a mistake to think that any other region can become the next Silicon Valley, but New York can and should develop more of a technology presence than it has now.”
Mr. Steel acknowledged that the engineering initiative was a long-term approach to developing the city’s economy. In the near term, he said, city officials planned to open more job-placement and training centers to try to reduce the unemployment rate.
He pointed out that the city has been adding jobs at more than twice the rate of the rest of the country and that the local housing market has held up relatively well during the recession. Still, he said, the rate of foreclosures remains high in some areas of the city and many residents are suffering.
To Attract the Next Google, the City Seeks a New College
By PATRICK MCGEEHAN
Worried that New York City is not spawning enough technology-based start-up companies with the potential to become big employers like Google, city officials are inviting universities around the world to create an engineering campus on city-owned land.
Despite being home to more college students than any other city in the country, New York lacks a top-rated engineering school. Without one, the city has fallen far behind San Francisco, Boston and other metropolitan areas in the competition to attract new technology companies and the jobs they create.
On Thursday morning, Robert K. Steel, the deputy mayor for economic development, announced that the city would seek a “top caliber academic institution” as a partner in building a school for applied science and engineering. The city is willing to consider locating it on one or more of its properties, including the old hospital campuses at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and on Roosevelt Island.
Mr. Steel said that city officials were open to suggestions about other locations for the school and would be willing to make a significant investment in the project, though he did not provide an amount.
He used Google’s offices in Manhattan as a backdrop for the announcement, because that company represents the sort of employer that city officials dream of attracting to diversify the city’s economy. For all their efforts, New York’s fortunes are still closely tied to the ups and downs of Wall Street. Many of the biggest investors in start-up ventures are based in the city, but the companies they back tend to congregate in Silicon Valley and around Cambridge, Mass., which is home to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“New York has had some of the best science in the world for years, and it hasn’t translated into a first-rate center for technology start-ups the way it has elsewhere,” said Jonathan Bowles, director of the Center for an Urban Future. “It’s a mistake to think that any other region can become the next Silicon Valley, but New York can and should develop more of a technology presence than it has now.”
Mr. Steel acknowledged that the engineering initiative was a long-term approach to developing the city’s economy. In the near term, he said, city officials planned to open more job-placement and training centers to try to reduce the unemployment rate.
He pointed out that the city has been adding jobs at more than twice the rate of the rest of the country and that the local housing market has held up relatively well during the recession. Still, he said, the rate of foreclosures remains high in some areas of the city and many residents are suffering.
