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The New York Times
As Newark Rebuilds,
Help From Beyond City
Limits
By ELIZABETH DWOSKIN,
nytimes.com on the Web, April 26, 2008
NEWARK — William A. Ackman,
the manager of a multibillion-dollar Manhattan hedge fund, has no personal ties
to Newark and has visited the city only a few times. But next week Mr.
Ackman, 41, plans to write checks from his foundation that total around half a
million dollars to buy equipment for the Police Department and to pay for job
fairs, block parties, concerts and outdoor movies and other recreational
activities during the city’s violence-prone summer months.
He is considering spending the rest of the $1 million that the foundation,
Pershing Square, pledged last year to Newark to renovate dilapidated city parks.
(In August, after the schoolyard shootings of four young people, three of whom
died, Mr. Ackman donated $100,000 to cover funeral costs and otherwise assist
the victims’ families.)
For Mr. Ackman, these gifts are a natural follow-up to the thousands of dollars
he has given personally and raised from friends and colleagues for the political
campaigns of Mayor Cory A. Booker, whom he met six years ago and now considers a
friend. He is among a cadre of new benefactors whom Mr. Booker, who turns
39 on Sunday, has aggressively courted to bolster his financially beleaguered
city with private capital, often going beyond traditional philanthropic
parameters to fulfill basic budgetary needs. Many of them seem as
interested in the young mayor’s success as in the urban renaissance on which he
has staked his mayoralty.
“I don’t know what else to say — he inspires me,” said Drew A. Katz, 36, who
owns a billboard company in Cherry Hill, N.J., and who donated $100,000 when Mr.
Booker called after the schoolyard slayings. “He’s got tentacles that
reach throughout the country in ways that very few mayors of cities of this size
have.”
Mr. Katz was among those people Mr. Booker and his aides recruited within two
weeks of the shootings to raise $3.2 million for a high-tech surveillance
system. Since December, they have collected $11 million, much of it
earmarked for initiatives that include a foundation that purchases police
equipment and administers a tip line through which anonymous callers can trade
guns for cash. GreenSpaces, a civic initiative to rehabilitate 11
long-neglected public parks, was unveiled in February.
“You go to these parks in Newark, you see drug needles on the ground,
prophylactics, abandoned furniture,” said Leon G. Cooperman, 65, the founder of
a $3.5 billion Manhattan hedge fund who pledged $5 million in December after
Bari J. Mattes, a senior aide to Mr. Booker, took him on a tour of the city’s
parks. “That’s not a place to feel good about things.”
In addition, the administration last June helped create a spinoff of the
Community Foundation of New Jersey that will devote $21 million to Newark
nonprofit groups, arts programs and scholarships. And on Thursday, four
national foundations — including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — kicked
off a new Newark Charter School Fund with $16 million, saying they were drawn by
Mr. Booker’s longstanding commitment to the schools.
Peter Frumkin, director of the R.G.K. Center for Philanthropy and Community
Service at the University of Texas, said public-private partnerships have become
an increasingly common strategy for cash-strapped local governments like
Newark’s, which narrowly closed last year’s $180 million budget deficit and
faces a gap of more than $160 million this year.
But Mr. Frumkin said the Booker administration’s tack of filling fundamental
needs with projects tailored for particular philanthropists — especially those
well outside the city limits — is rarer. Donors, he said, often cling to
their personal vision, and persuading them to commit to a city where they have
no real personal connection requires a compelling argument.
Ms. Mattes — who headed the board of Harvey Milk High School, a public school
for gay and lesbian students on the Lower East Side of Manhattan before becoming
a fund-raiser for Mr. Booker’s campaign five years ago — said she tells
potential donors that their money will make a more direct difference in Newark,
with its 40,000 schoolchildren, than in a larger city like New York.
But a number of the city’s new benefactors are wealthy individuals who say they
are motivated by the messenger as much as by the message. Mr. Ackman
described his first meeting with Mr. Booker as one of the most inspirational of
his life. Mr. Katz was charmed by him when they met at a Bruce Springsteen
concert six years ago.
“Cory Booker’s charisma allows him to make things happen in a civic community in
a way that someone with a lower profile can’t,” said Frederick M. Hess, an
expert on philanthropy with the American Enterprise Institute.
“It’s the same reason that people will pay more for blue-chip stocks than they
will for a seemingly identical stock that’s not known as a blue chip,” Mr. Hess
added. “If you’ve heard Cory Booker give a speech or seen an interview
with him, or know of other wealthy people who have been inspired by him, that
gives you more confidence that you know what you’re getting.”
But experts warn that projects can shrivel if the giving is tied too firmly to
one person, if a new administration is uninterested in taking on the work of the
previous one, or if the philanthropists themselves change their priorities.
“It’s a fact: Philanthropy doesn’t hang around forever, especially
aggressive, leverage-oriented philanthropy that by its nature is constantly
looking for new projects,” Mr. Frumkin said. “You don’t want to create a
culture of never-ending support.”
Irene Cooper-Basch, director of the Victoria Foundation, which for decades has
provided about $12 million a year for environmental, education and
poverty-fighting projects in Newark, said that in addition to bringing in new
donors, Mr. Booker and his aides have been more likely to invite local
philanthropists to City Hall and to engage them in public-sector projects than
his predecessor, Sharpe James.
Mr. James, who last week was convicted on corruption charges relating to the
sale of city land, focused much of his philanthropic efforts on Newark’s
cultural life, helping raise $67 million for the New Jersey Performing Arts
Center, which opened in 1997, and $7 million for the renovation of the
century-old Newark Museum in 1989. Throughout his terms as mayor, Mr.
James partnered periodically with Raymond G. Chambers, a philanthropist who
donated $20 million in the 1980s and 1990s to pay the college tuition of
hundreds of Newark students.
Mr. Cooperman, a longtime benefactor who gave $5 million to help build the New
Jersey Performing Arts Center, said the new administration has been able to lure
back some donors who may have been reluctant to work closely with a City Hall
they had seen as corrupt.
“I can’t imagine them doing this while Sharpe James controlled the parks
department,” said Boykin Curry, whose family runs a New York investment firm and
donated $1 million to the GreenSpaces initiative. “You’d worry the money
would be mismanaged or looted. And when the city was falling apart around
it, the park wouldn’t have lasted long anyway.”
Philanthropy experts said a crucial question is whether this new flood of
interest can outlast Mr. Booker. It is a particularly salient question for
the city’s 13 charter schools. Mr. Booker, who says he envisions Newark as
“the Silicon Valley of social entrepreneurship,” has long supported the schools
and used his influence to drum up support. He has helped recruit teachers
through personal phone calls, steered city property to the schools, and taken
donors on tours of Team Academy, a middle school in the city’s struggling South
Ward.
At a recent $400,000 fund-raiser for the school, two lunches with Mr. Booker
were auctioned for $20,000 each.
“Cities compete for this kind of support, and Newark, quite frankly, has not
been competitive for the last half-century,” said Clement Alexander Price, a
professor of history at Rutgers University who lives in Newark and has been
researching the city since 1970. “I am hoping that Cory Booker’s personal
magnetism will serve as a seduction, so that when people look at Newark they
will see a city, a very challenged old American city, that predates Cory Booker,
and that will probably outlive Cory Booker.”
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