The disastrous plan to turn Downtown's dying warehouse district into a aging theme park of low paying jobs is bad enough - but the the lack of any local leadership in attracting the high paying jobs of the future is this city's real crime... as is the LA Times increasingly anti-business business section's failure to examine why this city is turning into an economic backwater.
Read how it's done in a real city with real leadership:
February 21, 2007
Square Feet
Bringing Laboratory Space Back to New York
By ALISON GREGOR
When Eric Kandel, a Nobel laureate at Columbia University, formed a life sciences company, Memory Pharmaceuticals, in 1998, a lack of lab space options in New York City eventually forced the business to Montvale, N.J.
In March, the same real estate developer that built those Montvale laboratories, Alexandria Real Estate Equities, will break ground on New York City’s first substantial campus for the life sciences, called the East River Science Park. The first tenants are expected in 2009.
Upon completion, the $400 million complex will have three buildings encompassing 1.1 million square feet of specialized laboratories and office space. It will occupy 3.5 acres in Manhattan between East 28th and 29th Streets and First Avenue and Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive.
Proponents of the East River Science Park said they hoped it would induce start-up life sciences companies like Memory Pharmaceuticals, which now has 65 employees, to set up operations in the city.
“There is huge investment in basic research in the life sciences through our medical research institutions, but we have failed to commercialize our science in New York City,” said Kathryn Wylde, president and chief executive of the Partnership for New York City, a nonprofit group composed of 200 chief executives from companies in the city.
“There are about 30 bioscience companies a year coming out of New York institutions, and essentially, they’re all going elsewhere.”
To change that, the partnership’s economic arm contributed $10 million toward creating East River Science Park. The group also worked to enlist the cooperation of an array of top scientific institutions, including Columbia University, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Mount Sinai Hospital, Rockefeller University, New York University School of Medicine, the Hospital for Special Surgery and Weill Medical College of Cornell University.
Some of the institutions are within a 50-block corridor on the East Side of Manhattan, creating a natural cluster around the planned East River Science Park campus.
“The reason we think New York City is going to be particularly competitive is most other clusters have one or two institutions,” Ms. Wylde said. “Here, we have seven or eight major institutions, so the critical mass of science and of talent is greater here.”
In the life sciences, private businesses often collaborate with research institutes, medical centers and government agencies. The efforts tend to be clustered in a handful of cities, including Boston and Cambridge, Mass., and San Diego.
Notice Los Angeles... as usual... is not mentioned.
Brady, I think I have to disagree with you. While I certainly would support attracting high paying jobs to Los Angeles, I wonder if preserving low-skill jobs near Downtown may not be an important and necessary step in helping people transition from homelessness to self-sustainment.
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