CHANGING THE NARRATIVE: “Building a new generation of African American skilled trade workers for Philly’s Billion-Dollar Construction Industry”

Philadelphia, PA – Philadelphia is The City of Brotherly Love – and major construction projects: $2.5 billion proposed for a mixed-use development at the Navy Yards; at least 6 approved Neighborhood Conservation Overlay Districts – neighborhoods designated for enforced/precise building regulations on new construction (e.g., Strawberry Mansion, Queen Village, Powelton Village, Overbrook Farms, Roxborough and Wissahickon); and nearly 10,000 apartments under construction! Major construction in Philadelphia is a billion-dollar enterprise that employs thousands of people. Absent among this skills trade labor pool are indigenous African Americans who reside in areas where targeted major construction occurs.
Philly is an attractive draw for labor unions and construction companies from all over to build in the city. Unfortunately, those same labor unions and construction companies are notorious for not employing indigenous African American workers from the neighborhoods where construction is robust and creating gentrification of ethnic communities. Richard Allen New Generation (RANG), a designated Registered Community Organization (RCO) in Philly, is working hard to address this issue head-on.
RANG is an official 501(c)3 non-profit and RCO, its office is located at 1100 Fairmount Avenue, Suite One, Philadelphia, PA 19123. According to the RANG’s website, “RCOs have been established by the city of Philadelphia to ensure that neighbors of proposed real estate developments are notified, and have opportunities to make an impact, concerning zoning decisions that may impact them.”
RANG’s board members include A. Bruce Crawley (Chairman), Billy Brown, and Algernon Hopkins – all former residents of the Richard Allen Public Housing Project in North Philadelphia. Crawley, a successful business leader, activist, and CEO/Founder of Millennium 3 Management recalls how he and childhood friend Billy Brown conceived the idea to develop RANG.
Crawley shared how he and Brown often get together with folks from the old neighborhood (Richard Allen Project); they talk to residents about what was going on and organize reunions to keep old and current residents connected. “We started saying, we need to do more. People are wondering about what’s going to happen to them with gentrification, and jobs are not forthcoming.”
In 2020, local news outlet 6ABC/WPVI reported, “Over the last decade, some Philadelphia neighborhoods have experienced some of the most acute gentrifications the city and country have seen. For some business owners, it is practically the land of opportunity, as more white-collar residents, often homeowners with more disposable income, move into the neighborhood.”
Gentrification disproportionately displaces African Americans from the neighborhoods where they grew up. The millions of dollars earned in construction and labor union income go to outliers from New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, etc., that employ mostly white male construction and labor union employees. As a result, income opportunities skip over and push out indigenous minority residents from the gentrified neighborhoods. According to Payscale.com, the average pay for a construction worker in Philadelphia can range from $18.50 to $31.43 hourly. ZipRecruiter.com reports average union labor salaries can range from $48,818 to $100,000+ annually. Livable wages, indeed.
Why is this important? “Construction is a sector of the American economy that has historically been more resistant than most to calls for integration. That is a problem because the industry is a stepping stone to a solid middle-class life,” reports PennLive.com, a statewide news outlet in Pennsylvania.
Inspired by the urging of former Deputy Mayor for Public Engagement Dr. Nina Ahmad, Crawley, Brown, and other officials formed RANG as an official RCO. Then they sought to collaborate with builders/developers to help African American residents from the Richard Allen Project and surrounding community get trained and hired for the lucrative construction jobs that abound in Philadelphia. As an RCO city requirement, RANG had to communicate to city officials their preferred service area of coverage to get city approval.
“We wanted a footprint to go from Girard to Spring Garden (and) from Broad to 8th, which is essentially a neighborhood that has in its center in the (Richard Allen) Projects, but on the radius, it has about a block on each side.” The RANG footprint primarily encompasses the triune neighborhoods within the 19121, 19122, and 19123 zip code communities –predominantly African American residents.
“We also found that the RCO can contract with developers to craft Community Benefits Agreements (CBA). Community Benefits Agreements result from negotiations between the RCO and the developer,” Crawley. CBAs can hold construction developers contractually accountable to such things as local hiring agreements.
Once RANG was made and officially designated an RCO by the city, Crawley approached Post Brothers, a nationally recognized leader in innovative real-estate development. Crawley’s inroads to Post Brothers proved successful. A CBA was proffered to hire residents from RANG’s coverage area for a Post Brothers major construction project at 9th and Poplar Streets, a massive abandoned warehouse, now transformed into an elegant luxury apartment building: The Poplar.
“Over the years, we have interacted with a lot of RCOs and community organizations, and they are all a little bit different. But, the one thing that RANG brought to the table was this energy and the ability to act quickly,” said Sarina Rose, Senior Vice President of Development/Post Brothers. Sarina mentioned that she shared in RANG’s commitment and vision to “hire from zip codes around the project, and to help us penetrate that (indigenous ethnic) demographic.”
Rose was transparent in admitting that her company did not have the depth of access to the indigenous qualified minority candidates that reside in the neighborhoods where her company has major real estate redevelopment projects. Her company had the genuine will and intent to hire locally, but there was a disconnect, and they needed help.
Rose shared, “So, if (indigenous minority candidates) are not in the periphery of construction, then we are not meeting them. So what RANG offered was this unique ability to know them, to know their parents, to know their kids, and to introduce them to us.”
“RANG was open to, not just giving us contractors in the local area -which they also did- but they were on board with our idea that we could make a larger impact, quickly with the tools that we had.”
Attracting residents to participate in RANG’s training and employment endeavor wasn’t a major challenge, the interest in good-paying jobs is always attractive to residents of distressed areas seeking work. But training the minority residents for skilled trades employment remains a challenge. Post Brothers stepped up to the plate to provide full scholarships to RANG’s participants to attend trade skills training at a local technical college.
“RANG has partnered with JEVS (Jewish Education Services), our parent organization at Orleans Technical College, to offer pre-apprenticeship training to individuals from (RANG’s) neighborhood group,” said Christine Bronson, Director of Career Services-Orleans Technical College.
We were enthusiastic about engaging with RANG and Post Brothers on this RCO collaborative. Bronson stated, “We look to introduce minorities into an industry they normally struggle to get into, under apprenticeships and the building trades in the city of Philadelphia.”
“We are training these pre-apprentices in basic electrical wiring, basic carpentry, and plumbing. I am very excited and happy about the outcomes,” Bronson.
Over the last two years, RANG has recruited two cohorts of graduates (almost 50 individuals in total) that have completed their respective 8-10 week training program at Orleans Technical College. RANG graduates were hired to work on the Post Brothers’ Popular Street Apartment construction project, and they did extremely well.
“Bruce and I felt that we could start something meaningful, where people could get jobs,” said Billy Brown, Co-Founder of RANG. Brown is proud of the socio-economic impact RANG is making in the lives of African American men and women that reside in RANG’s coverage area, a swatch of the city where new construction development and gentrification are expanding.
Commenting on RANG’s last two years of its collaboration with the Post Brothers and Orleans Technical College, Brown said “RANG has been very successful, I’m very proud to be the co-founder. At this particular time, in terms of jobs, we were able to bond with the developer (Post Brothers). All our people that got jobs, their training was free. They got (SEPTA transit) transpasses that were free” so that RANG participants could travel to-and-from training and the job site.
RANG also partnered with the Associated Builders Contractors to produce a job fair to introduce RANG graduates to other construction trade contractors for additional construction employment.
It should be noted that RANG’s collaboration with Post Brothers involves non-union skills trade employment opportunities. Philly is a strong union metropolis. During the Poplar Apartments construction, local unions held picket protests outside the construction site. Eventually, the protests faded away. RANG’s partnership with Post Brothers is a successful business model that matches construction developers with indigenous minority and female laborers from the very communities construction development is transforming.
Historically, unions are very homogenous and blatant in their nepotism and hiring practices that have deliberately locked out minorities and women from lucrative construction employment, particularly the lock-out of African Americans. Proof of this is evident at any major construction project in the city. Tour any major construction site in the city, and you’ll quickly notice that most of the construction workers are white males, and many of their vehicles have license plates from other states. This “disparity has roots in Jim Crow laws that came as a backlash to Reconstruction Era policies, and institutionalized discrimination in hiring, training, and access to capital that tended to lock African-Americans out of the field for generations,” Pennlive.com.
Though the RANG/Post Brothers business model for indigenous neighborhood hiring might agitate union construction trade officials, it is a model that has proven successful. Underserved and underrepresented workers are being trained in lucrative skilled trade careers, and they get to participate in the construction redevelopment of distressed sections of the city. RANG presents a win-win for city officials, construction developers, and the minority citizens that have been historically ignored by trade unions. Hopefully, other construction developers (and union officials) will adopt similar partnerships with RCOs like RANG, to broadly scale the employment of qualified indigenous minority skills trade professionals.
To learn more information about RANG and its programs, activism, and services, email: info@rang-rco.org or call: 267-332-7264.