Dive Brief:
- New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has earmarked $384 million to upgrade city-owned office buildings and schools as part of a 10-year, $89.4 billion capital spending plan, according to the Commercial Observer.
- The city owns more than 900 properties totaling 184 million square feet, but the majority of the funds will be spent in outer boroughs rather than in Manhattan.
- De Blasio said he wanted to focus on the city's infrastructure given the "uncertainty" surrounding President Donald Trump's and Congress' infrastructure plans.
Dive Insight:
The New York Building Congress reported in November that both public and private institutional construction starts in the city totaled $4.6 billion in 2015, the largest figure since 2009. Schools represented $13.7 billion (53%) of that total. In June, another NYBC report found that there were $3 billion worth of school construction starts and renovations in 2015, an 83% increase from the previous year. De Blasio's plan is in line with the NYBC assertion that the city's preference is to modernize existing buildings rather than build new ones.
Trump's current infrastructure strategy focuses on revenue-generating projects that are already significantly engineered and nearing "shovel-ready" status. These projects include airports, bridges and port facilities and lend themselves to private investment through some system of toll or user-fee collection.
The potential for private sector involvement in the financing and operation of these projects has irked Democrats, who favor direct federal spending. A major argument against a program of public-private partnerships (P3s) has been the concern that investors will only be interested in working on projects with profit potential, ignoring the many public assets that don't generate revenue. However, this contradicts Republicans' desire to avoid adding to the debt by spending taxpayer dollars on infrastructure projects.
