https://www.thenation.com/article/climate-change-new-york-uprose/
[Part of a series. Note the use of low-tech, low-budget, grass-roots
approaches which focus on people, engagement and participation.]
The Street-by-Street Battle Against Climate Change
While the Trump administration rolls back environmental protections and
flouts science, this neighborhood is actually preparing.
By Audrea Lim
2019.07.17
Adan Palermo’s street, in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park neighborhood, was
always his playground. As a child, the tranquil stretch of row houses,
between the six-lane 4th Avenue thruway and the eternal shadow of the
elevated Gowanus Expressway, was a place for him and his friends to hit
baseballs with plastic bats.
Since 2017, the 26-year-old has also been its “block captain,” a role
that emerged after Superstorm Sandy brought New York City to a week-long
standstill, and the task of identifying neighborhood point-people ahead
of emergencies began to seem more urgent. “We’re already close to the
water,” he said. And the climate crisis promises to bring more extreme
weather disasters to his street, located half a mile from New York Bay,
whose waters inundated the nearby neighborhood of Red Hook after Sandy.
“Our folks are already at a disadvantage. Sunset Park is a low-income
community.”
The “block captain” initiative is part of the Sunset Park Climate
Justice Center, which the community organization UPROSE established by
popular demand at a series of neighborhood meetings following Sandy. The
neighborhood, with its mix of Puerto Rican, Dominican, Ecuadorian,
Mexican, and Chinese residents, is one of New York City’s six
Significant Maritime and Industrial Areas—areas where polluting
industries have historically been clustered, and where the city intends
to continue clustering them. All are located in storm-surge areas. Also,
all are predominantly low-income communities of color.
But since 1966, UPROSE has been organizing the neighborhood
“block-by-block,” as their organizers say, to win lead-paint abatement
legislation, fight an expansion of the Gowanus Expressway (high rates of
asthma cluster in its immediate vicinity), defeat plans for a 520
mega-watt power plant, and initiate a community-led planning effort that
transformed a former illegal dumping ground into a waterfront city park.
And now, the Climate Justice Center intends to build climate adaptation
and resiliency through a similar grassroots strategy.
These plans are in stark contrast to the more technocratic approach
behind more well-publicized climate resiliency efforts in the city, like
the $335 million Big U mega-engineering project—the result of a major
design and architecture competition—to construct a protective barrier
around lower Manhattan. (The first section, the East Side Coastal
Resiliency project, is now undergoing public review, and construction is
slated to begin in 2020.) Climate-mitigation efforts across the rest of
the city include Mayor Bill de Blasio’s $10 billion plan to extend Lower
Manhattan’s coast by up to two city blocks, and the inelegant rows of
supersized sandbags along stretches of Red Hook in Brooklyn and Astoria
in Queens. In partnership with the US Army Corps of Engineers, the city
is building more than $1 billion worth of berms, flood walls, dunes, and
other flood resiliency projects in Staten Island and Queens, and reforms
to zoning and building codes will require new buildings to meet
climate-resiliency guidelines.
Yet for UPROSE, “block-to-block” organizing, aimed at meaningfully
engaging the community on climate adaptation, is necessary in a place
like New York City—and a neighborhood like Sunset Park—where every block
is different from the next: public-housing projects on one, auto
salvaging shops on another, and restaurants or residential property on
the next. And with some estimates projecting up to six feet of sea-level
rise for parts of New York City by early in the next century, the
industrial, waterfront areas of the neighborhood will be completely
inundated.
“This idea that you could create a resiliency plan, and helicopter into
a community and apply it, doesn’t work,” said UPROSE Executive Director
Elizabeth Yeampierre. She mentioned the 90-plus auto shops near the
Sunset Park waterfront, which she says have been targeted for shutdown
by some environmentalists. Auto salvage shops, which disassemble old
cars, can pose environmental and public health risks from chemicals and
heavy metals leaching into the ground or becoming airborne as toxic
dust—concerns that, with many auto salvage shops located in storm-surge
zones, are growing more pressing as the climate crisis intensifies.
This could potentially harm local residents like Palermo and his family.
But Palermo, an UPROSE organizer, does not advocate shutting them down.
“They’re the biggest industry in our community,” he says. His work
involves approaching and speaking, one-by-one, to the auto shop workers,
and from this experience, he understands why climate interventions don’t
rank high in their list of priorities. “Even if you want to save the
world from pollution, these are still real jobs that people need to feed
their families.”
So he talks to them about the risks to their own health. He listens to
their concerns. (The most prevalent and pressing concern, he says, is
about the skyrocketing rents and their risk of being displaced.) He
seeks possible solutions to their problems, like alternatives to the
toxic chemicals they can use, or how best to contain spills and leaks.
And it is starting to work: Shop owners have asked him for more
resources and to run shop-wide trainings to educate all their workers.
It is also precisely what the block captains are doing on their streets:
speaking to neighbors (and landlords) about painting rooftops white
(this can reduce heat buildup in the city), building a stormwater
collection system (to reduce water usage and create a backup in case the
water supply is ever cut off), and testing backyard soil for suitability
for starting small urban farms. The work lacks the grandiosity of the
Big U, but its result is an approach to climate adaptation that
encourages participation by residents and draws on their knowledge and
strengths: construction, growing food, reusing and repurposing—skills
that are abundant among the residents of Sunset Park, according to
Yeampierre.
Over time, these community-wide discussions have also prompted bigger
projects that benefit the entire neighborhood, and help the city shift
toward renewable energy. In November 2018, UPROSE launched New York
City’s first community-owned solar cooperative—Sunset Park Solar,
installed on the roof of the Brooklyn Army Terminal—which will be
collectively owned by all energy users who subscribe, decrease their
electricity costs, and be available to low-income renters, small
businesses and homeowners alike.
Of course, climate-adaptation efforts—which include both local efforts
like UPROSE’s and massive projects like the Big U—can’t tackle the
actual causes of climate change. But at the very least, can such a
hyperlocal, grassroots approach measure up to the scale and severity of
future extreme-weather events?
“The question is not whether it’s scalable, it’s whether it’s
replicable,” said Yeampierre. Each community needs to organize itself,
with neighbors getting to know one another and identifying their own
risks, she explains. “You can’t compare Alaska to New York or Michigan,
or anyplace else. You need to look at the place and what their needs are.”
Yet the fact remains that, at every UPROSE community climate-planning
meeting, residents ask to discuss displacement instead, raising
questions of whether the “block-by-block” climate adaptation approach
can be effective when residents are constantly facing more immediate
threats. Industry City, a major commercial development that arrived on
the Sunset Park waterfront after Sandy, is pushing for the area to be
rezoned, which will likely drive up rents and operating costs for
residents and small businesses. On the issue of scale, it’s worth
mentioning that gentrification and skyrocketing rents are a citywide
problem.
The NYC climate resiliency plan does encourage community organizations
to adopt climate adaptation measures and lead emergency planning
efforts. But for Yeampierre, city planning projects are often led by
outside actors and corporations—“They’re coming in to support a vision
be created by somebody else.” And that is how the issues of climate
resiliency planning and gentrification overlap.
The climate crisis “demands that we start really thinking differently
about economics and how we live,” she said, envisioning a future where
Sunset Park’s economy is reoriented toward climate adaptation. The
neighborhood’s industrial sector could be revitalized by attracting
businesses that retrofit old buildings, manufacture or assemble solar
panel and wind turbine parts, and install and maintain renewable-energy
installations, she suggests. Jobs could go to local people, like the
workers currently in auto shops. And in place of Industry City, the
waterfront could become something like a market or distribution site for
products from upstate farmers.
Whatever the vision, UPROSE is seeking a radical revision in how society
approaches urban development—including developments prompted by the
climate crisis. The city needs to see “the community as a partner in
decision-making and planning on a very hyperlocal level, because they’re
never going to have the resources to address all the impacts that are
heading our way, whether it’s extreme heat, or whether it’s wind, or
whether it’s water,” said Yeampierre. “Every single time there has been
a disaster in New York City, people have stepped up, whether it was the
blackout, whether it was Superstorm Sandy, whether it was September
11th. People have been unbelievably heroic. They fed each other. They’ve
taken care of each other. I think that’s a source of strength that
cities just don’t see.”
And for Palermo, the “For Sale” signs on his block, and the new cafes
selling overpriced coffee, raise the question of what it means to create
climate resilience on his street without his neighbors, or in the
community without the people in the auto shops. “They’re a necessary
part of the community,” he said. “Without the residents, who do we have
to take care of?”
[More climate change headlines and links at the 10n10.ca blog
https://www.10n10.ca/e/CCC-Blog.shtml ;]
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