2025 Data Reveals Poverty Wages and Meager Earnings for Local Businesses

The “New Rochelle Model” for development was awarded the 2026 Ivory Prize for policy and regulatory reform last month in Salt Lake City, Utah. The model is a development framework established in 2015 to incentivize developers through form-based zoning and cutting approval times to just 90 days.

Yet, the New Rochelle Model for development continues to produce poverty wage jobs, little opportunity for residents and meager earnings for local businesses, according to recently filed reports by Anchin and Associates and Westhab’s First Source Referral Center, consultants hired to support city efforts to benefit the community and track results.

The reports for 2025 confirm the city continues to fail to live up to its promise of family supporting jobs and business opportunities for local residents in the decade-long redevelopment of the downtown.

In their May report to New Rochelle’s Corporation for Local Development (CLD), whose members are the same as the city’s Industrial Development Agency (IDA), Anchin found that only 6.3% of the construction workers in the downtown are New Rochelle residents and only 6% of the hours worked were done by “Targeted Workers.” A Targeted Worker is defined as a New Rochelle resident who is a “qualified and/or trained worker referred to a Construction Contractor or Employer” by the City’s First Source job referral center.  The city fell far short of its goal of  20% of the hours worked being done by Targeted Workers, 

As much of the downtown development is now shifting to the post-construction phase, Anchin reports that a measly 11% of these jobs went to New Rochelle residents. The city’s goal is for 25% of the pre-and post-construction jobs to be performed by Targeted Workers. 

In an effort to create a pathway to family-supporting careers in union construction, in 2016 the city established a goal of having apprentices do 1,000 hours of work for every 20,000 hours worked building a project. In 2025, developers reported that out of a total of 520,903 hours worked, apprentices only did 1,469 hours of work, meeting only 6% of the city’s stated goal. 

If the city’s goals were met, New Rochelle apprentices would have performed 26,045 hours of work last year, the equivalent of  13 apprentices working full-time. Instead, only one (1) apprentice working full-time worked in the development.

As New RoAR News reported in May, the First Source Referral Center, which provides job training and placement services, reported placing 434 residents in part-time and full-time jobs in 2025 with an average hourly wage of $21.53/hour. 

Of these, 168 residents were placed into construction related jobs that paid poverty wages. 

According to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology living wage calculator a single adult with no children living in Westchester County needs to earn $35.72/hour to avoid poverty. Two working adults with one child would each need to make $31.49/hour to stay out of poverty. 

Construction workers rally at City Hall in March 2026 to demand more family-supporting jobs

Recognizing the city’s decade-long failure to deliver on its promises to New Rochelle residents, the IDA adopted a “Social Equity Program” requiring that 15% of a project’s total costs go to local hire, union labor, or Minority or Women-Owned Business Enterprises (MWBEs) in 2022.  

For the first time, Anchin was able to report on how this program is working at WBLM’s condominium development called 14 LeCount Phase II.

Anchin reported that 23% of the $100 million of total project costs went toward meeting the Social Equity Program, quite a bit more than the 15% requirement. Of that, 1.6% of the $100 million went to “Local business and Local Hire,” 2% went to “Union Business,” and 20% went to “MWBE Business and MWBE Hire.” 

Drilling deeper into this data, women-owned business enterprises (WBE’s), predominantly owned by white women, benefited most from the Social Equity Program. WBE’s secured $11.3 million in contracts while minority-owned businesses (MBE’s) landed just over $5 million. 

To “ensure that city residents and historically underrepresented communities have access to” opportunities “generated by the redevelopment,” in 2016 the City Council unanimously adopted the Economic Opportunity and Non-Discrimination Policy (EONDP). The policy requires only that developers make “best efforts” to meet the city’s goals. So far, “best efforts” have failed to come even close to achieving what city officials say they want. 

If these goals were being met, today there would be hundreds of New Rochelle residents working in the downtown, scores of new union apprentices with lifelong careers in construction, and numerous local businesses with significant contracts for the building and maintenance of the new projects. 

Using jobs, local business opportunities, and affordable housing as measures of success, the New Rochelle Model for development is a huge failure. 

In awarding the New Rochelle Model the Ivory Prize, Clark Ivory, CEO of Utah-based Ivory Homes, said, “New Rochelle is proving that supply-forward local housing policy can help stabilize rents, even in high-growth markets.” New Rochelle community members question whether this is true. 

Ivory is Utah’s biggest homebuilder, it is anti-union and has built only 3,000 apartments, far less than what has already been completed in New Rochelle.