The Kingsbridge Armory presents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to create a new, sustainable economic engine for the Bronx, the city, and our entire region.
NWBCCC brings a 50-year history of organizing and community development in Kingsbridge and the surrounding areas. Our community’s vision is the City’s vision. NWBCCC helped shepherd the NYC Economic Development Corporation a more resilient vision for the Armory that inextricably links commercial viability to community priorities. Our organization is rooted in the residents, businesses, and institutions who have made the Bronx an economic and cultural powerhouse, and a deep desire to create growth and shared wealth while fighting displacement pressures.
It’s Our Armory! What if we owned it?
The kingsbridge Armory Belongs to the people of the Bronx.
In the fall of 2022, the New York City Economic Development Corporation, local elected officials, and community leaders re-launched a visioning process for the redevelopment of the Kingsbridge Armory, Together for Kingsbridge. The Bronx has an unprecedented opportunity to transform it into a place where our people get to work, play and learn—and a community asset that residents co-own and share in the wealth it creates!
At the Kingsbridge Armory, we must set a new precedent.
Our Armory Report presents a current assessment of the Kingsbridge community and an ambitious vision for community-led development that has the potential to transform our borough.
Traditional economic development focuses on what we lack, as the poorest urban county in the country. Instead, we take an asset-based approach, combining feedback from thousands of Bronxites with research from our planning partners—Neighborhoods Now and the Pratt Institute—to understand current challenges and opportunities that can be leveraged to build community wealth and ownership.
This fight started with us!
Since 1997, we have brought together local residents, small businesses and grassroots, faith, and labor institutions to fight for community-driven development at the Armory. Our youth leaders designed the first plan for an educational, recreational, and entrepreneurial center. Since then, we have raised expectations for development in the Bronx and across the country when we:
secured $31 million in renovations to save the Armory from deterioration,
organized the City Council to vote NO on a proposed poverty-wage mall that was backed by Mayor Bloomberg—a historic victory over corporate power in our city,
negotiated a ground-breaking and legally-binding Community Benefits Agreement for living wages, local hire, and shared revenue and space for the community at the Armory. It remains the most progressive CBA of its kind in the country.
We don’t want chump change. We want the keys to the castle.
This time, the Bronx is building its own plan. We want to own and govern the redevelopment of Armory so that our community can share in the wealth generated by the project and make decisions collectively to invest back into our health and well-being. We want to be at the decision-making table to determine our future. And why shouldn’t we? After all these years of organizing, researching, negotiating, and planning—we are the experts that can make this project serve our communities for the long haul. Politicians and developers have come and gone. It’s us—the people of Kingsbridge and the Bronx that are still here.
Our guiding values and principles:
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The project should provide good wages, benefits, and training to local Bronx residents from the pre-construction phase to ongoing building maintenance, supporting the unionization of workers and worker owners.
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Local small businesses should benefit from prioritizing cooperatively owned and minority and women owned businesses.
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The project’s construction, management and operations should promote environmental sustainability and promote community resilience.
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The project should promote resiliency, health and wellness and support the development of building collective ownership and shared wealth.
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The project should include accountability structures that ensures communication and transparency and shared governance with the Bronx community.
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The project should prioritize community and cooperative ownership of the overall development process and ultimate development project.
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The land underneath the Armory should be owned by the Bronx CLT, in a way that acknowledges indigenous people’s collective stewardship of the Lenape land.
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The project should be building shared wealth for local Bronx residents through cooperative ownership, revenue sharing components and providing additional resources to the community.
Small business owners and street vendors are essential to the fabric of our neighborhoods.
They sustain families, build our local economy, and enrich the culture of our community. In partnership with the Kingsbridge Merchants Association, we work with small business owners and street vendors along the Kingsbridge commercial corridor to leverage legal and city-wide resources and community support to defend against harassment and negotiate fair leases that sustain them for the long haul. We organize to ensure redevelopment of the Kingsbridge Armory invests back into local business owners.
Vendors and business owners who have served our community for years deserve to grow and thrive alongside one of our community’s greatest assets.
As part of United for Small Businesses NYC, we work with legal, advocacy, and community groups across the city to turn the tide against displacement of small businesses as landlords aim to make way for higher-paying tenants. We fight to protect the jobs, community spaces, affordable resources, and wealth these small businesses root in our neighborhoods.
Through our coalition’s organizing efforts, we passed the City’s first commercial tenant anti-harassment legislation, enabling small business owners to take legal action to recover property, attorney fees, and damages when landlords harass them.
explore our policy platform to protect local business owners!
Small business displacement is cultural displacement. In order to protect New York’s vibrant culture, we forward a comprehensive platform to safeguard small businesses—including funding for legal services, protection for immigrant business owners and workers, a non-profit commercial development fund, and penalties for landlords who warehouse vacant commercial properties.
As communities across the Bronx face gentrification, we are stronger together.
We can protect our local communities and advance a comprehensive vision to ensure the Bronx is an affordable place to live for all!
Our Bronx-wide Principles for Development Without Displacement were co-created by community organizations across the borough with a long history of organizing residents for justice.
fight forward with us