The Green Gold Development Corporation is based on the precept that most societies are not currently living in full harmony with the natural world. As long as this is the case, communities will confront serious environmental problems. Businesses that offer solutions to those problems will prosper and provide an abundance of jobs, if marketed properly. These "green businesses," and the people they employ, will be doing important work towards realization of a sustainable future.
Buffalo has pledged to become a leader in developing and attracting businesses that offer environmentally sound solutions. In doing so, they hope to transform the local economy and make their community a better place to live. City Council President James W. Pitts spearheaded the formation of Buffalo's Green Gold Development Corporation in 1999. A dynamic Board of Directors includes local environmental business leaders, development officials, and environmentalists.
The "Green Gold Strategy" aims to transform the economic backbone of the city, making Buffalo an international center for businesses whose products and services solve environmental problems. Green Gold is a collaborative, visionary project to recast the image and the reality of the local economy. Pitts says "Green Gold is designed to provide interesting, meaningful, well-paying jobs for Western New Yorkers-the kind of jobs that will keep young people here when they finish their education."
In the long-term, Green Gold is hoping to play a role in the development of long-vacant industrial sites, or brownfields. Their vision is to create an environmental industrial park on the site of the former Buffalo Forge plant. Advocates hope to transform the vacant 14-acre parcel into an incubator for companies that provide environmental products and services. The Green Gold and other mature businesses could serve as an eco-incubator to guide businesses of various stages to stability.
For decades, many industrial plants were in neighborhoods, with nearby residents making up part of their work forces. Green Gold seeks to reinvigorate these industrial buildings, but by attracting production that will not pollute the nearby home environments as many of the old factories did. Former industrial factories that are now boarded up and nonproductive could become the site for an eco-industrial park where tenants cycle their byproducts from one company to another.
The Buffalo Forge is located close to 100 newly constructed houses, but in an area where jobs are hard to come by. Residents of old city neighborhoods will once again be able to walk to their jobs. The former industrial city of Buffalo is in many ways ready to foster new clean businesses. "Right now the environmental technical market is somewhere around $500 million a year," said Gary Robinson, Buffalo Area marketing director of URS Corp. and a Green Gold director. "There is no reason why we cannot make Buffalo the Silicon Valley of the environmental field." Buffalo shows promise for future growth in high-tech industries; the city is the fifth most heavily wired fiber-optic center in the world.
Robinson stated that the highest cost for a start-up business is building a new plant, so it is beneficial to provide the opportunity for three or four small businesses to start out in this recycled and reoccupied industrial plant. They could share the same phone system, laboratory and marketing center. Others believe, however, the renovation work at Buffalo Forge could be so expensive that the building operators would have trouble keeping rents low enough for start-up businesses and other tenants.
As of the fall of 2001, specific conceptual plans have been drawn up for the structure, and a variety of environmental start-up businesses are interested in being a part of this project. See Green Gold's website (below) for the environmental businesses that are already a part of the city of Buffalo.
For more information:
Contact:
James W. Pitts
City Council President
(716) 851-5120
Green Gold Development Corporation, Inc.
1315 City Hall
Buffalo, NY 14202
(716) 851-4361
E-mail: greengold@city-buffalo.com