David Greek
By Joshua Burd
Let there be no confusion: Circulate NJ is not a lobbying group, as David Greek is quick to point out, but a well-organized, diverse coalition that has assembled to promote the vast economic benefits of New Jersey’s logistics sector.
That message is at the heart of the new public awareness campaign that launched shortly before Thanksgiving, led by a membership that includes not just prominent developers but stakeholders ranging from dock workers and truckers to the likes of Amazon. All of which have a vested interest in promoting their collective industry and, in turn, defusing the hostile rhetoric and misinformation that has derailed a growing number of warehouse projects in recent years.
“We think it’s important to educate local leaders in towns,” said Greek, a managing partner of East Brunswick-based Greek Real Estate Partners. “But the real target audience for this is New Jersey residents, New Jersey consumers — really anyone that interacts with the industrial community, which is practically everyone in the state — and anyone that has any sort of interest in local land use and local development. Which, again, is pretty much everyone in the state. So it’s a really broad audience that we’re looking to tap into.”
Circulate NJ debuted during the heart of the holiday shopping season, a time in which the transportation, logistics and distribution industry is perhaps as critical as ever. It did so while touting key data from the state’s Department of Labor & Workforce Development: TLD companies and facilities support more than 400,000 jobs, employ 12 percent of the state’s private workforce and provide 12.7 percent of New Jersey private-sector wages, while contributing $62.5 billion or 10 percent to the state’s overall GDP.
The stats have already played prominently in a campaign that Greek says will include both digital and traditional media, which will also highlight the sector’s role in cleaning up highly contaminated sites through redevelopment of fallow industrial properties. But he hopes the messages carry additional weight from the support of stakeholders outside the commercial real estate space, who are among the group’s more than 35 members.
“I think one of the benefits of having such a broad member base within so many industries is that our members are really our primary communicators on this,” Greek said. “That is one of the best things about having tenants, trades and developers within this. We each have our own touchpoints within different communities that we believe will help spread this message pretty far and wide pretty quickly … and make sure that the people involved in each community are aware of who we are, what we’re doing and how we can help them if they need assistance with something like this.”
Undoubtedly, the campaign is in its earliest stages, but Circulate NJ has clear goals and a firm commitment from many of the state’s leading businesses and industry groups, as Greek discussed during a recent discussion with Real Estate NJ. Below are excerpts from the interview, edited for space and clarity.
Real Estate NJ: Can you give us some quick background on how Circulate NJ started?
David Greek: The idea for this originated from the development community, I think because … we’re often the ones testifying at planning boards, which is often when we hear a lot of the concerns and a lot of the misinformation that gets spread throughout the community during an application process. And many of my peers have been frustrated for a long time that there has been increasingly organized efforts on a grassroots level to stop warehouse development in certain areas.
And that is normal — people pushing back against development is nothing new. What’s really new is the level of people participating and the type of participation in opposing applications. We have noticed that there are much larger groups getting involved that are actively spreading misinformation on a lot of the applications, whether that be the environmental impacts of the project, degrading the owner of the project to make them look like they are doing something potentially evil where they’re not and, generally, just (putting forth) incorrect sets of information on the projects or what the developer is attempting to do.
RENJ: So part of the idea is to counter that misinformation with campaigns that are similarly organized and centralized, as you describe it, and to educate the public on the benefits of these projects. Where do the other stakeholders come in?
DG: When we started to really flesh that idea out, we reached out to people outside of the development community — specifically, trade groups, tenants — really important components of the industrial industry, and we realized that they had many of the same shared frustrations and thought that this was something that was needed. So we really broadened the coalition from just a few real estate developers to a much broader scope to encompass all of the logistics trades.
And we’re continuing to broaden that scope. Certainly as we have started this campaign, awareness has spread and we’ve received a lot of inquiries from other developers, attorneys, trade groups, truckers, laborers. It’s really the whole gamut of those impacted by industrial development.
RENJ: Understood, but it seems like the skilled developers in this state often manage to get their projects done even when they’re dealing with opposition from residents, abundant regulations and other hurdles. Are you saying it’s the scale and volume of the misinformation that was really the tipping point for you and your peers?
DG: Yes, it’s specifically the fact that misinformation is so pervasive. And, speaking from personal experience, we’ve watched this trend develop over the last 15 years or so.
To be clear, development of any sort always faces some opposition, and that is normal and healthy. This campaign is not at all seeking to stop a dialogue between community residents and developers. It’s meant to clarify that dialogue and bring it back to a point where we’re talking about real problems and real facts rather than a series of concerns that may have really no basis in reality. And throughout a long period of time, we’ve seen that the amount of conversations that we have during a project application and the types of conversations have shifted. Originally, we talked about the specifics within a project with concerned residents. We talked about where truck traffic would go, for example, on public streets. That’s a very common issue to come up during applications and a very healthy conversation for the developer to have with the public, but that has shifted to a large part of those conversations being (about) combating misinformation spread about the project by some of these opposition groups.
And the opposition groups, in some cases, know exactly what they’re doing, and this is a deliberate tactic to slow down a project or to try and stop a project. In some cases it’s just the public peering into a very complicated process and only getting a small slice of that and misinterpreting that slice as something that might be malevolent, where they just don’t have the context of the full project. So those conversations tend to be much more frustrating and much less productive with residents because we spend a lot of time trying to correct misinformation that they came to without us providing it to them, and often that’s just not a productive way to solve a problem within an application. It’s much more productive if the residents know what the developer is doing and understand it, and their opinions aren’t swayed by ‘fake news,’ for lack of a better word.
RENJ: That misinformation often stems from the kinds of environmental cleanups that you and other developers are doing on some of these blighted industrial sites, as you’ve mentioned. Can you elaborate?
DG: As you’re well aware, industrial development often occurs on historically contaminated sites, so it’s often that developers are not only building a building on that site but also performing relatively significant remediation activities either before or during the construction. And environmental science is complicated, it’s very hard, it’s very sophisticated. So the issue is that the public is getting only bits and pieces of information and they’re extrapolating a lot from that information, and often those extrapolations are done without the proper training or context of an environmental scientist, so it almost always comes out to the wrong conclusion.
RENJ: That’s ironic, considering that many of these warehouse projects wouldn’t happen without that remediation or vice versa.
DG: We spend a lot of money during our projects and a lot of time on very sophisticated environmental experts that will navigate one of the most complicated and sophisticated environmental regulatory regimes in the United States here in New Jersey. And that is just a very information-dense and process-driven piece of real estate development here, so that can be some of the more difficult conversations to have with concerned residents. Obviously, when residents have concerns about environmental cleanups, those are legitimate — they’re concerned for their health and safety, the health and safety of their children — so people can get very scared by some of the information they see, without knowledge of who the developer is or their reputation, whether or not they’re looking out for the community’s best interests. Often that information creates a sense of paranoia within the community that is very hard for a developer to overcome once that’s been unleashed, so to speak.
That’s probably the most common example of misinformation that we’ve been dealing with over the last several years, and one of the major components of messaging in this campaign is that there’s major benefits to industrial development … So we feel like, if we can get the public to understand the benefits that we’re bringing to the community through private remediation of contaminated sites, that hopefully that will combat some of the sense of paranoia that we’re not doing it correctly or we’re not following certain rules or protocols laid out by the state. And I can say, as a member of the community, that a huge portion of our budget, a huge portion of the time that we spend on each of these sites is figuring that piece out.
RENJ: What other messaging do you expect to focus on?
DG: I would just highlight how large the logistics industry is within the state and how important it is to our economy. One of the largest employment sectors in the state is logistics, and that includes distribution, it includes home delivery. Trucks are a massive employment sector within the state, but they are often demonized as hazards to the community or thought of as not good jobs to bring to a community. The reality, though, is trucking and logistics are … really important to keeping a lot of people in good employment, as well as for our state government’s financial health. So just pointing out the fact that there’s a large number of our residents that work in the space and rely on this industry to keep their families fed and keep their lights on — and that these are not bad jobs. These are, in some cases, very, very good jobs.
Something we’ve talked about as a coalition before is how one of the bigger political issues of our time is the decline of manufacturing within the U.S. And if we look at what’s happened to the workers that traditionally were employed in U.S. manufacturing, a lot of them, if not the vast majority of them, have transitioned into retail jobs, and the stability and pay scale of a retail job compared to the jobs that are created in industrial facilities is night and day. So in terms of options for workers adapting to a new economy and dealing with some of the fallout of manufacturing falling off in the United States, this is a very good outcome for them to be able to work in one of these facilities and have a similar job security and a similar pay scale to what they would have received in the manufacturing facilities. As compared to what has become the common alternative, which is going into service industry retail-oriented jobs that don’t give the same amount of stability as this sector often does.
