History
The Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone is one of nine empowerment zones established by the Clinton Administration in 1994 to revitalize distressed communities by using public funds and tax incentives as catalysts for private investment. The initial 10-year designation was accompanied by a federal grant of $100 million. Unique among the empowerment zones, the governor of New York State and the mayor of the City of New York each matched the federal funding commitment, creating a total investment pool of $300 million. Of that pool, $50 million was designated for the Bronx Overall Economic Development Corporation, leaving $250 million for investment in Upper Manhattan.
The Empowerment Zone began operations on February 14, 1995, and made its first round of grants and loans in October 1996. In the years since, the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone has invested $159 million in the neighborhoods north of 96th Street, catalyzing one of the most impressive reinvestment initiatives in urban America and revitalizing Harlem, East Harlem, Washington Heights and Inwood. Of the $159 million invested, $70 million has gone towards loans to small businesses and $89 million in grants have been directed to non-profit organizations. The efforts of the Empowerment Zone have created approximately 8,000 jobs for the Upper Manhattan communities.
Legislation enacted in 2000 extended the Empowerment Zone’s operations through December 2009.
So proudly brought into existence through legislation sponsored by Congressman Charles B. Rangel, signed into law by former President Clinton and supported by the City and State of New York, the Empowerment Zone’s legacy will live on in the substantial investment that it has made in projects across Upper Manhattan. Today Harlem is a community on the rise with a dramatic change to the drug-plagued landscapes of decades ago. In recent years major corporations and residents with higher-levels of disposable incomes have flocked to Harlem. "The zone has awesome potential," says Lloyd Williams, president and CEO of the Greater Harlem Chamber of Commerce, but revolutions don't happen overnight. The zone is a tool. We have to make sure it's not the only tool that we have".
Read more about this topic: Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone Development Corporation
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The myth of independence from the mother is abandoned in mid- life as women learn new routes around the mother—both the mother without and the mother within. A mid-life daughter may reengage with a mother or put new controls on care and set limits to love. But whatever she does, her child’s history is never finished.”
—Terri Apter (20th century)
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“False history gets made all day, any day,
the truth of the new is never on the news
False history gets written every day
...
the lesbian archaeologist watches herself
sifting her own life out from the shards she’s piecing,
asking the clay all questions but her own.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)