In 2020, legislators, public officials and organizers across Western New York told us the same thing: progressive policymaking needed a shared playbook. High Road Policy was our answer, with policy briefs, fact sheets and data tools for building a high road economy.
Then we went quiet. The last issue of the memo series came out in June 2024, and apart from a few short posts, the site has had little new to say since. Here’s where we’ve been, and where we’re going.
Working with partners across ILR
We didn’t stop working. Much of our time went into projects with two of our colleagues at Cornell’s ILR School: the Center for Applied Research on Work (CAROW), which connects research on work with the people who put it to use, and the Worker Institute, which does research and education on labor issues and holds that collective representation and workers’ rights are vital to a fair economy.
- With CAROW and the Worker Institute, we contributed to the 2025 report on the Empire State Poll, ILR’s annual survey of New Yorkers about work. More than two in three respondents (68.3%) named the cost of living as the most important issue facing their household, and two-thirds (65.9%) said they approve of unions.
- With CAROW, we looked back over two decades of the poll in A Portrait of Work in New York State, 2003 to 2024. It traces how the cost of living became New Yorkers’ top concern, and how trust in unions held up better than trust in other institutions when people felt pessimistic about the economy.
- With the Worker Institute, and with support from the Local 1010 Laborers-Employers Cooperation and Education Trust, we assessed whether project labor agreements could benefit New York City’s street tree planting contracts.
Funded projects
We also took on projects for public and philanthropic partners.
- For Erie County and its Commission on the Status of Women, we examined gender inequality in the Erie County labor market. Women there earn $2.74 an hour less than men with similar backgrounds, about $5,700 a year for a full-time worker, and the gap widens with education.
- For the John R. Oishei Foundation, we built an interactive tool on housing affordability in Buffalo and Western New York. It maps gaps in homeownership and the mismatch between what renters can afford and the housing available to them.
More of this work is underway, and its results will come out in 2027.
Tools that needed a rebuild
Meanwhile, our data tools were showing their age. Over the years we built more than a dozen of them, each for a single purpose: maps of living wages and low-wage work, information systems for Buffalo’s and Rochester’s council districts, dashboards on evictions and digital equity, and more. Each had its own website and its own design, most were built in Tableau, and many still draw on older Census data that newer releases have since replaced. Keeping them current one at a time wasn’t sustainable.
One hub, one set of tools
So we’ve been preparing to rebuild all of them on a common foundation. The rebuilt tools share the same interface and the same look, and they all link from one hub: this site. They’re built in Python rather than Tableau, so updating a tool means pointing it at the newest data instead of rebuilding it by hand.
The first two are ready:
- The Wage Atlas shows who earns a living wage in every part of New York, and what a higher minimum wage would change. Meet the new Wage Atlas.
- The NYS Federal Impacts Dashboard tracks how federal policy changes since January 2025 are reaching jobs, federal employment and federal spending in every New York county. Meet the new Federal Impacts Dashboard.
Our other tools still work at their original addresses while we rebuild them. You’ll find all of them on the Data tools page.
A new home
High Road Policy now lives at highroadpolicy.org. Every issue of the memo series can be read and downloaded from Publications, along with the reports, fact sheets and testimony from the project’s first years. Posts from the original blog, 2019 to 2026, are in the archive.
Get involved
We’d value your ideas for what to take on next, and we welcome pitches for briefs: here’s how to pitch. And if our work is useful to you, please consider supporting it.