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Up until the groundbreaking earlier this year, the site of the first phase of downtown

Newark’s redevelopment

had devolved to resemble that classic picture of the hollowed-out

post-industrial city: 91% of the land here was covered in surface

parking lots. Over the previous half-century, buildings in the city’s

historic core had been razed and replaced by parking spaces that were

supposed to lure back shoppers and businesses that had decamped for the

suburbs and even farther away. But, as everyone now knows, those

shoppers and businesses never came back. Developer Ron Beit’s plan to fill all this blank space and

jump-start the downtown’s renewal looks, in the renderings, like a fairly

standard proposal. He’s envisioning low-rise mixed use buildings, with apartments

and restaurants and retail, all of which is supposed to enliven the

long-empty neighborhood at all hours of the day. But Beit is anchoring

the whole thing around a group seldom associated with economic

development (or disposable income, for that matter): This project is

intended for teachers. I remember [Newark] was a vibrant downtown. It didn’t look anything like what it looks like today.–Architect Richard Meier. Over the next year, eight new buildings–five of them designed

by the renowned architect Richard Meier–will start to rise on

three square blocks of the city, at a cost of about $150 million. The development, called Teachers Village, will include affordable housing for

teachers, three charter schools in which some of them will teach, a

day care center, and retail that will feed off of this badly needed

influx of permanent residents and all those families who will have to

now travel in and out of the neighborhood every day. The idea was to

drop all of this onto one quadrant of Newark’s downtown in a single

concentrated infusion. “We needed to change the experience on the street

in one broad stroke,” says Beit, whose RBH Group has bought up 30

properties (many of them dormant parking lots) in downtown Newark for

the area’s full master plan. “You couldn’t just do this

piecemeal,” he says. The city expects the concept–part educational development,

part economic development–to be a win for everyone: Teachers who can’t

afford to live well in Newark finally will be able to (and hopefully

will want to), local schools will benefit from the greater investment of

those teachers in the community (currently, just 17 % of teachers

in the Newark school district live in Newark), and the downtown will

start to come alive again.

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“I love the idea, I think it’s fantastic,” says Michael Duffy,

previously the head of New York City’s charter school office, and now

chair of the board of Great Oaks Charter School, one of the schools

slated to move into Teachers Village in the summer of 2013. “It puts as

the engine of economic development schools, and then the people who work

in those schools at the heart of the equation, as opposed to just a

movie theater, or restaurants or some other kind of economic development

activity.” This arrangement won’t be for everyone. Great Oaks was in fact modeled on a similar premise to what

Beit had in mind for Teachers Village, linking schools with the

residences of the educators who work there. Great Oaks comes with a

cadre of recent college-graduate tutors who supplement the traditional

classroom teaching of its students. Those tutors–aspiring teachers

themselves–are given a small living stipend and housing in an

apartment downtown. Duffy hopes the school’s tutors, in addition to the

school itself, will be able to move into Teachers Village. Great Oaks

itself has already signed a 20-year lease here. This arrangement won’t be for everyone; plenty of teachers may

want more distance between their classrooms and their home lives. But

for the teachers who will rent about 200 apartments here–they’ll run

by size from $700 to $1,400 a month, a bargain in this area–the

thinking is that they’ll benefit from both the proximity to each other

and to the school cluster. A school gymnasium, for instance, will be

open to the community at night. And the apartment buildings will have

communal amenities aimed at teachers, such as classroom-like spaces

where they can share ideas and take continuing-education courses

themselves. All of this, Duffy hopes, will create a community of

interest between the teachers and the children they serve.

“Best-case scenario, they’ll register to vote there, they’ll

get involved civically in the community, they’ll see the success of

Newark as their success,” Duffy says. “There are undeniably class

differences between the kids who are coming in to teach in our school or

to work as tutors and the young children that we serve as a school. So

we have work to do in bridging the gaps between those two groups, and

perhaps Teachers Village could be the place where gaps get

bridged.”

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The housing will be marketed to teachers from any of the city’s

charter, district, and independent schools, not just the three opening

up next door. To guarantee the financing package behind the project,

non-teachers technically could move in, but Beit expects in a city of

6,000 teachers that the development will have no trouble filling these

200 units with his target population. The project has received some

criticism for housing only charter schools, and not the city’s more

traditional ones. The optimistic projection, though, is that the entire

local school eco-system may benefit if good teachers are lured by both

the challenge of working here and the pleasant downtown living (inner

cities that offer only the challenge without the amenities are more

likely, in theory, to suffer from Teach for America

transience). Great Oaks, for example, will be producing every year more

tutors-turned-teachers than one charter school can use. And Duffy hopes

they will stay in Newark and move on to other schools. In an era of stingy budgets, a surprising number of parties have all rallied behind Teachers Village. The project’s funding will come in

part from New Market Tax Credits and private investments by Goldman

Sachs and Berggruen Holdings. Richard Meier, a Pritzker Prize-winning

architect who is better known for international luxury developments and

museum projects like the Getty Center in Los Angeles, is also returning

to his hometown to work on Teachers Village. It’s the first project his

firm has ever done in Newark. “It was not typically a type of project we normally do,” says

Dukho Yeon, the firm’s associate partner-in-charge on Teachers Village.

“This was part of basically everybody including the investors giving

back to the city of Newark.”

Richard Meier facades, Beit concedes, can get pretty pricey on

the exterior of a museum. “We made them the Target line, if you will,”

Beit says. This is one of the ways the project has kept costs down

through design and construction (this is also why Beit is developing a

series of low-rise buildings and not a much more costly downtown tower).

“At that point,” he says, “we knew how much these buildings were going

to cost, we knew what the teachers were making, and we backed into what

we needed to do on the public investment side to make this

work.” As for why so many groups were willing to get involved to make

this possible, Beit talks about a nostalgia for Newark that many people

once connected to the city still feel. He cites a time as far back as

the 1950s, when Newark was the business and entertainment capital of the

state.

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“Newark in many ways back then was the center of this

Northeastern economy, even more so arguably than Manhattan, in terms of

the innovation in technology and manufacturing,” Beit says. “The first

international airport in the New York metro region was in Newark. The

ports were in Newark.”

The project has received some criticism for housing only charter schools.

This is the Newark where Meier grew up. “My memories of it are very different,” Meier says, thinking

back on the site that will become Teachers Village. “When I was young

and we’d go downtown there, I remember it was a vibrant downtown. It

didn’t look anything like what it looks like today.” The hope is that this soon will change. And Teachers Village

may in the process demonstrate a new national model on the old rule that

the vitality of a neighborhood is intimately tied to the quality of its

schools. Follow the conversation on Twitter using the tag #USInnovation.