New York politicians who believe that jacking up the minimum wage will help workers might want to take a look at the latest crisis at Kingsbridge Armory.
Plans are to transform the long-vacant Bronx facility into an ice-skating center by 2017. But a new report says the project is now stalled, again. Who knows when — or if — it will ever be completed?
The tragedy is that a shopping mall was set to go up there five years ago. It would have created 1,200 jobs, nearly five times as many as at the planned ice center. But led by Bronx beep Ruben Diaz Jr., pols nixed that deal by insisting on a “living wage.”
Diaz famously said he preferred no jobs to those paying “merely” market rate.
“The notion that any job is better than no job no longer applies,” he huffed. And no jobs is just what he got. Plans for the mall died, and The Bronx has led the state in joblessness ever since.
Far from fazed, our City Council passed a citywide living-wage law, whose provisions Mayor de Blasio now hopes to expand, and a similar “prevailing-wage” law. In the meantime, the city has now dropped the Bloomberg-era legal challenges to both laws.
Meanwhile, Gov. Cuomo wants to hike the state’s minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, and he would let cities set rates 30 percent above that. Here in Gotham, pols are talking about using that authority to set minimums at $13, and even pushing on to $15.
In this light, the Kingsbridge Armory is a lesson about what happens when pols second-guess markets. All these years later, Bronx residents are still without the higher-paying jobs Diaz talked up when he helped kill the mall.
Then again, what do New York’s pols think will happen when they make it even more expensive to hire workers?