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Brooklyn's Business Incubator

Marc Tracy bizbox.slate.com

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June 4, 2009

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It is a pleasure to read about various local governments that, realizing that small businesses are every bit as good at promoting economic activity, creating jobs, providing tax revenue, and the rest as well always say they are, go out of their way to encourage their creation and flourishing. We've previously written about Youngstown, Ohio, which wants to be the Silicon Valley of the Rust Belt and to that end hatched thhe nonprofit Youngstown Business Incubator. Today, via MSNBC, here's another business incubator: the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

According to the article, incubators such as this one provide numerous incentives to tenants, which are all manner of small businesses. There are guaranteed long-term leases; there are tax incentives; there's instant networking, as all of a sudden you are situated extremely close to a whole bunch of other businesses, who may just need what you provide (or who provide what you may just need). Indeed, what the incubators do in a sense is fabricate and concentrate the same economic multiplier effects that cities create in general. In a place like Youngstown, that is intended to serve as a spur to the larger economy; in a place like the Brookyn Navy Yard--located in the country's biggest city, staring right across the East River at the Financial District--it's probably more starkly for the benefit of the actual businesses housed there.

Either way, such small-business incubators are an important part of the overall economic ecosystem. We wouldn't be shocked if they become an increasingly prevalent tool for local governments to use as we slowly attempt to climb out of the recession.

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