James Ferrari is a social entrepreneur, investor, filmmaker, artist and activist engaged in a multitude of projects.

James has spent the past two decades operating at the intersection of technology, art, media, politics, journalism and public health.

In the for-profit world, James Ferrari founded Benjamin James Marketing in 1993, one of the leading property developing and marketing firms in New York City. 

As a social entrepreneur, James has advised multinational corporations on matters of political, economic and social import in developing nations. He is interested in projects related to reproductive health, climate change, criminal justice reform, news and media literacy, and democracy.

Since 2014, James has fostered an interest in the fusion of technology, social science and economies. He regularly attends global conferences that share ideas from fields relevant to understanding and designing collective intelligence in its many forms, such as the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, the MIT Media Lab, where James is a regular participant, the MIT Bitcoin Currency Lab, and the Data-Pop Alliance project, a joint initiative to leverage the new ecosystem of big data in order to improve ownership and safety of one’s data. The goal is to empower people in a way that avoids the pitfalls of a new digital divide, de-humanization, de-democratization and privacy.

Ferrari is a perennial early investor and advisor in socially and environmentally conscious businesses. He is also an investor in Simpliphi Power, a company that manufactures clean and affordable energy storage systems by utilizing non-toxic lithium ferro phosphate batteries.

As agriculture and public health are important to James, he also invests in companies at the vanguard of earth, health and food science.

He is an investor in one.bio, a company leading the charge for easy, sustainable fiber consumption, which aims to combat chronic illnesses caused by lack of fiber. BCD’s patented technology converts natural fibers to simple, active fibers and probiotics that are soluble and palatable.

He also invested in Bonumose (a company the Hershey corporation recently invested in) innovating new and rare healthy natural sugars. 

James is also invested in Vestaron, a biological insecticide technology that produces an effective and sustainable alternative to synthetic insecticide. Vestaron’s technology is derived through proprietary peptide expression and designed to be soft on beneficials and honeybees, as well as safe for fish and mammals.

In 2002, James helped facilitate the construction of homes in flood-devastated Mozambique. The project stemmed from James's alliance with the Synergos Institute and its close relationship with the FDC (Foundation for Community Development) and its chairperson Gra§a Machel, the wife of former South African president Nelson Mandela. The project was funded from the revenues of Benjamin James’ successful marketing campaign for the luxury apartment building, 21Chelsea.

That same year, James worked with UNICEF and delegates from 22 different countries in Windhoek, Namibia on the global HIV pandemic affecting orphans and vulnerable children.

In 2005, James was on Mayor Bloomberg and Ambassador Soderberg’s Sister City committee, which promoted cross collaboration between New York City and Johannesburg’s tourism industries and economic markets.

Also in 2005, James founded the online art collective and community Tribal Truth, which incubates partnerships between artists and humanitarian organizations. Both locally and nationally, James continues to be actively involved in political elections by supporting democratic candidates and raising awareness among the philanthropic society.

In 2006, Ferrari Media was born, merging James’s own artistic endeavors with his interest in investment. Ferrari Media develops new media for film, television and short form participatory digital entertainment, claiming a variety of projects spanning over two decades of work.

In 2019 James was a judge for the Letters to Strangers Mental Health Scholarship competition. The nonprofit seeks to destigmatize mental illness and increase access to affordable, quality treatment for youth, while its scholarship awards money to minority youth aged 13-24 (an underrepresented demographic in the mental health field), enabling them to study and pursue a career in the profession.

Also in 2019, James was a participant in Good Pitch Local Philadelphia. Good Pitch Local is a space for community, collaboration and creative change, created to spotlight important stores in the fight for a more open, just and vibrant Philadelphia—and beyond—by artists and organizers on the front lines of social change.

In 2020, James also participated in the one-of-a-kind speaking event TEDxSingSing. TEDxSingSing was primarily organized by a team of six currently incarcerated men inside Sing Sing Correctional Facility. More than half of the featured speakers were chosen from men living at Sing Sing. This event was created by men directly impacted by the criminal justice system with the intent to highlight the voices, stories, and insight of those who are too often overlooked. The theme of this event was “Re-Defining What Matters,” leading to innovative talks from people of all different backgrounds. This included the miraculous talks of people whose lives were transformed because they were able to access education while incarcerated.

That spring, James was invited as a delegate to the For Freedoms Congress in Los Angeles, co-hosted by Sankofa.org. In a series of town halls, artists led delegates from all 50 states, Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico in building a collective artists’ platform for public action to supercharge civic engagement in their communities leading up to the 2020 Presidential Election. Delegates were made up of artistic collaborators, institutional and organizational partners, and funders.

In November 2022, James attended the Boston Global Forum’s 10th Anniversary Conference, where distinguished leaders and thinkers honored the UN Secretary-General’s Envoy on Technology Amandeep Gill with the World Leader in AIWS Award, and engaged in a discussion of how BGF could help foster an Age of Global Enlightenment. At the event, James championed his belief that a regulatory reset must take place among the technology company giants and their usage of big data.

In March and April 2023, he collaborated with the Boston Global Forum at a conference at the Harvard Faculty Club in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he introduced the Global Enlightenment Mountain Program, a revolutionary new initiative aimed at creating a virtual Silicon Valley model for the AI and digital era, and spoke on behalf of the BGF at the United Nations, where he addressed the rise of disinformation and misinformation and the threats AI technology poses to that end at this critical juncture in technology’s rapid evolution.

James’s collaborative investments often involve film and cinema. He is an executive producer on the Ferrari Media-produced “A Mouthful of Air” starring Amanda Seyfried, Paul Giamatti, Amy Irving, Finn Wittrock, and Britt Robertson, released in 2021 by Sony Pictures worldwide. Currently in production is a documentary on the life of photographer, naturalist, and artist Peter Beard. James is working as a producer with Trudie Styler and Celine Rattray of Maven Pictures to produce a film about Rebecca Gromperts. Writer Olivia Hetreed wrote the screenplay and Maggie Betts is slated to direct. The film will tell the true story of Gomperts, the Dutch doctor who recruited a band of women to sail around the world and provide abortions at sea for women who have no legal alternative through the Women On Waves initiative. Film slated for production in 2023.

James Ferrari attended Hunter College, majoring in Political Science, with continuing education in Globalization and its Effect on the 20th Century. He is a supporter of the Foreign Policy Association, the Ubuntu Education Fund, the Public Policy Institute, New York Art Society and Society for the Preservation of Public Space, the Threshold Foundation, The Arena, Synergos, The Creative Resistance, The Accompanied Library, Frameworks Institute, The New York Philharmonic, and the Museum of Modern Art. He is also a visual artist and painter himself.

By James Ferrari

The views from my living room of my first apartment in New York City were of an abandoned elevated railway line covered in garbage and bramble. I worked for a nonprofit and was staying in what was then the General Theological Seminary founded by Clement Clarke Moore and is now The High Line Hotel, a 60-room luxury hotel with a Parisian themed garden on 10th Ave.

My old building has come a long way since the desolate stretch of rail and weeds was transformed into the High Line park, an innovative public space and 1.5 mile greenway with native plants and mesmerizing views that was developed with public input at every step, including an ideas competition to imagine ways the park could be used.

It has become a destination for New Yorkers and visitors alike to enjoy the scenery, art, and food, and has completely transformed the neighborhood. It is now vital to the community that helped determine what it became.

But that may not last. The developer Related Companies and the Wynn Resorts, which was founded by casino magnate Steve Wynn, are determined to build either a casino or a gargantuan convention center in the Western Rail Yards that will materially change and potentially undo the thriving ecosystem that New York has built around a vibrant public space.

Worse, it serves the interests of developers at the expense of city residents who desperately need more affordable housing. This is a story that has played out in many other big cities, and often with disastrous consequences — especially when these decisions are made in boardrooms without the input of the communities they affect.

When you drop a massive, high traffic structure in the middle of an already high density neighborhood in one of the largest cities in the world, the consequences can easily outweigh the benefits.

A convention center, for example, is built for a single purpose. It doesn’t inherently add anything to the surrounding community, or the street-level experience. In-person events have bounced back somewhat since the pandemic but are still at lower levels than before, so demand for conference spaces is lower, and what the city spends on new development may not be offset by revenues for a long time.

A casino would introduce other problems, many of which New York has never had to contend with. We have a robust tourism industry, but no one comes here to gamble, and if they did, their money would be spent gambling, and instead of in local restaurants and stores.

Additionally, most casinos make money from the local populations and with gambling, comes gambling addiction, and what policy makers call “negative externalities,” or side effects that affect the public. These can include increases in crime and lowered productivity. Sports betting in particular has been associated with higher rates of personal bankruptcy, loan defaults, and lower credit scores.

Either of these projects would be detrimental to the High Line, which is one of the most extraordinary public-private parks in the world. It runs in parallel to the Hudson River and gives visitors a unique view of three different West Side neighborhoods — a view that would be partially obstructed by the new developments. For visitors walking the High Line, the northern terminal of the park would be dominated by a structure more at home in Las Vegas than New York.

And all of this is happening in the midst of a housing shortage in New York. The original plans for the development called for a mix of up to 5,700 affordable and market rate apartments, and that has since been shaved down to 1,507 units in the case of a casino and resort, and 2,877 in the case of a conference center.

There are always trade-offs in the negotiations for new developments, but when developers get their way at the expense of local citizens, it makes our cities less livable for people who live there, pay local taxes, and deserve public spaces to enhance their communities.

Potential revenue for a resort company or another big conference center should not be allowed to cannibalize local businesses, disrupt residential neighborhoods, and ruin public projects like the High Line that the city and its residents have invested their time and resources to make a lasting mark on how people live in and experience the urban environment.

The New York skyline will always change but its shape should be determined by the residents of the city itself, not developers with dreams of supertall buildings and tourist revenues.

Ferrari is a real estate investor, broker and filmmaker who lives in SoHo.

Read the article on NY Daily News' Website at: https://www.nydailynews.com/2024/12/29/not-in-my-backyard-it-will-dwarf-the-high-line/