I wanted to share the following article with you from the Albany Business Review:

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="304"] Michael DeMasi | Albany Business Review | May 15, 2015[/caption]

The latest hope for the riverfront in Rensselaer, New York: A tech complex, complete with views of downtown Albany.

When Hillary Clinton was campaigning for the U.S. Senate, she pledged to bring 200,000 jobs to upstate New York.

Clinton’s promise excited the hopes of upstate and she won her race.

Upstate never got those jobs.

Years later, when pressed to account for the lack of job growth, Clinton said she had been counting on Al Gore to beat George Bush.

Now we have Gov. Andrew Cuomo going around the state claiming to turn upstate New York’s economy around; taking credit for seemingly every job real and imagined.

Cuomo has something that Clinton did not have: Alain Kaloyeros.

Whenever Cuomo wants to create jobs, the governor sends Kaloyeros, a one-of-a-kind, sort-of college president. Kaloyeros went out to Utica with his mystery nanotechnology magic. He has been busy in Syracuse. He has been filling the Kiernan Plaza building in downtown Albany. He has been especially busy out in Buffalo, all the while praising the vision and wisdom of the governor.

Kaloyeros’ mission clearly is to raise hopes that he will duplicate what he accomplished in creating from scratch what is now the standalone SUNY Polytechnic campus. Kaloyeros, with the help of governor after governor as well as former Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno and now-indicted former Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, grew his vision from one building into a massive Star Wars-like campus across Fuller Road from the state University at Albany. For that achievement, Kaloyeros is approaching myth-like status around the state. With his sports cars, outsized state salary and bold personality, he is arguably Albany’s biggest celebrity.

So, when Kaloyeros visited the little city of Rensselaer last week, he got a lot of attention.

Having Kaloyeros come to Rensselaer surely must have people envisioning gleaming white modernistic buildings rising up and inspiring hundreds — no, thousands — of highly educated researchers making six-figure salaries to live and work in the little city across the Hudson from Albany.

Once again, people in a depressed upstate city are expecting better days ahead.

So much of economic development these days seems to be about creating a buzz and moving companies around to fill buildings. And with Cuomo and Kaloyeros, it is a formula leveraging the compounding power of public-private partnerships.

In the 1960s when everyone was abandoning the downtowns for the suburbs, Nelson Rockefeller moved the state university campuses out of the downtowns, out to the suburbs.

Could you imagine the energy and skyline today if Rockefeller had moved the University at Albany campus across the river to Rensselaer rather than out on the outskirts of the city? If those surrealistic white nanotech buildings rose up directly across the Hudson from downtown Albany, Rensselaer would be such a different place today, and so would Albany. (And delete Interstate 787 from the skyline while you are at it. But I digress.)

Rensselaer is a hard luck city. It has missed out on all the good things that have happened all around it. Words and phrases like gritty and working class come to mind when you explore the city. The taunting views of the downtown Albany skyline across the river promise something exciting, though, to people who can see the potential. U.W. Marx Construction Co. had ambitious plans for a marina, a retail complex with apartments and a hotel. The construction company even moved the high school, which was in the way. A decade has passed and nothing has materialized of that vision. The University at Albany’s East Campus carries a Rensselaer mailing address, but it is actually across the city line. Mostly, though, people just drive through Rensselaer on their way to a job somewhere else.

Then came the casino stakes, and Rensselaer overcame setbacks and disappointments to contend to the last with an exciting bid to build a Hard Rock Hotel and Casino. Rensselaer lost again. The casino will be built in Schenectady.

So, now comes Kaloyeros.

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