New York City's Manufacturing Renaissance

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2:24and where to buy. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Tim Stenevek on Bloomberg Radio. On the Brooklyn waterfront, sandwiched between South Williamsburg and Dumbo, bordering Fort Greene, you can find the Brooklyn Navy Yard. It's 300 acres. It's an industrial park. It's home to more than 550 businesses and employs 11 ,000 people. The businesses do. And according to the Navy Yard, it generates more than$2.5 billion per year in economic impact for the city.

3:04Now, before it was home to firms in med tech, green tech, materials, and more, it was a shipbuilding site that built and launched ships, including the USS Maine, USS Arizona, and USS Missouri. It's such a great history, right? It's pretty cool. Yeah. It's really cool. Back with us here in the studio is Lindsay Green. She's president and CEO of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Lindsay, good to see you. Welcome back.

3:24Lindsay Greene:Thank you. You know, you were in here over a year ago. Yeah. I couldn't believe it had been that long, actually. When I was looking at the notes from our producer, Ari, a lot has changed in the narrative around manufacturing in the United States since you were last with us. Just to contextualize this, Joe Biden was running against Donald Trump when you were last in our office. So, you know, so it was a completely different world. The president won the election. He's talked about bringing manufacturing back to the United States. talk about manufacturing in the context of what's happening in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, because you are a big believer that manufacturing needs to happen in cities.

3:59Lindsay Greene:It does. It needs to happen all over the country. And we believe that there's a slice of it that always makes sense to happen in urban settings. And that's what the Navy Yard has been about since the Navy started. And it's really about businesses who capitalize on the talent that is here in New York in particular. And that's both shop floor workers and talented engineers of different types and a proximity to their customer base. That's big corporations that are based here, the eight and a half million consumers. Just being in a big metropolis is a great place to see and feel the applicability of whatever it is that you make.

4:35Lindsay Greene:And so that's what a lot of businesses, that's what they want to be attracted to when they locate at the yard. And we offer them a home base to do that. Remind us about the manufacturing that is at the yard. So the yard is home to a wide variety of manufacturing businesses. They do everything from ingredients for food companies to custom couture and fashion like Lafayette 148 to people making electric motorcycles, medical device companies. We have a still functioning shipyard. They're using the infrastructure that the Navy built. That's GMD shipyard. It kind of pretty much everything you think of short of like mining.

5:13They're not building iPhones and they're not sewing soccer balls and they're not making shoes.

5:18Lindsay Greene:No, it tends to be high value things that require the talent and can candidly justify the expense of operating inside a big city. Or it is things that are directly consumed by the big metropolis that we are all a part of. Is that the reality of manufacturing in the U.S.? It's got to be a higher end manufacturer. I mean, we kind of talk about this when certainly the president stresses bringing manufacturing back to the United States. He wants iPhones built in the U.S. Yes. And can we at some point? Possibly. It requires a lot of runway and investment because that is just a whole set of skills from the types of plants, the type of machinery you use in an iPhone plant, the type of skills that workers in an iPhone plant have.

5:58Lindsay Greene:Why don't we have those skills here? We, I think, just stopped investing in them decades ago all across the country. It changed our education system. It changed the way businesses invested their money. And a lot of that expertise and new manufacturing techniques just located overseas. What are those skills, though? So it's the type of... I think we have like this old... A lot of us. Maybe it's me. Guilty as charged. In terms of what manufacturing is today. So educate us. So it's high tech. You have to be very computer literate, but not really any more computer literate than the rest of us have to be to function in daily life.

6:35Lindsay Greene:But you have to have a familiarity with it because something that you used to do with your hands as a trades craftsman is now done with a machine. And you have to know how the machine is using that same skill set. But it means that a worker's safety risk is much lower because they're not putting their hands or other body parts in tiny places. And they can work much faster. So it allows them to be economically competitive and keep up with the heavily automated factories that might exist elsewhere. So it's principally that you're doing the same thing. You have to have the same mental training because sometimes the machines break.

7:06Lindsay Greene:You have to be able to triage and troubleshoot. But you need to know how to work in both the analog and the new high-tech environment. and it's hard to tell that story. And most manufacturers are so focused day in and day out on producing the thing they make. They're not marketing the sexiness of what it is that they do. They're marketing their thing. And it's hard to expect them to do both. So it's storytelling that we take on at the Navy Yard because it's about our mission and supports what they're doing. On Sunday, Governor Kathy Hochul endorsed Zoran Mondani to be the next mayor of New York City.

7:40I said, we're at interesting times right now compared to when we last spoke with you. I know that Momdani is going out and reaching out to a lot of business leaders and meeting with them. Have you had a chance to speak with him?

7:49Lindsay Greene:I have not, no. I'm aware of his campaign, obviously. I serve at the pleasure of Mayor Adams. And what we do is, I think, a boon for all, everyone in the city. Would your job change? Would it be likely that he would bring somebody new in? It's up to him. I'm in an appointed position, just like most other agency heads. It is city property. And it's about good news for the people of New York. Go ahead. I just wanted to ask about the New York City economy because you have such a good view of it. How would you characterize it right now? I'd say, like most New Yorkers, businesses here are built to grind it out and hustle and get it done.

8:30Lindsay Greene:And that's what you see people doing. The tariffs have an impact, I think, principally on the uncertainty level right now. but they also have had an impact on how people manage their inventory and how they plan. And I think some folks are feeling pinched, but they're getting by. It's painful. I want to talk about the people who feel pinched because we're going to talk about New York housing in just a moment. It's expensive. And we're not even talking about ownership. We're talking about renting. And I'm just curious, so many of the people who work at the Navy Yard who are manufacturing, what kind of jobs are these?

8:59Are they well-paying jobs? Are they jobs that give you an easy life in New York City or you're living outside New York City?

9:06Lindsay Greene:For a true, I think, production employee, it's a really good life-sustaining wage. It is a traditional middle-class job. You can support your family with these wages and there's lots of research. Living in New York City. Living in New York City, yes. You know, not, you don't make as much as you do as a tech worker or someone with degrees, but you can do well here. And that's why we support it and try to make sure that as the jobs get more high tech, they're still super accessible to someone with a high school education. It's why we have the STEAM Center and it's why we connect adults to some of these advanced machinery trainings.

9:39What's vacancy look like there right now?

9:41Lindsay Greene:Vacancy is generally low. We are pretty occupied, but we always have room for new people. Where does it compare with other parts of your tenure? As far as I know, the Navy Yard's always done a pretty good job being occupied. The only time it's been higher, it's because we didn't have a chance to renovate a building the navy had built and it maybe had a tree growing through it tenants who come in they stay yes very much it's it's part of our special sauce that we help tenants grow and you know we call it the the swiss cheese of moving people around between different buildings and different uh different spaces as they grow sometimes we bring them all back together sometimes they have one set of operations in one building and a different set of operations in another it's we make it work for them.

10:24Lindsay Greene:We have an ecosystem. We have a campus. We want them to succeed and run their business and employ New Yorkers, and we do what we can to help them do that. And there's also some good food there. I'll just throw it out there. There's good food. There's good 21-plus beverages also. Lindsay, always good to see you. Thanks so much for joining us here in the studio. Lindsay Green, president and CEO of the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

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