Shades of Green—
A Guide to Climate Change, Sustainability, and Social & Economic Inequality in NYC

Manhattan, long regarded as a bastion of East Coast Liberalism and “New York values,” is reinventing itself. Since superstorm Sandy, climate change has become prominent in a city already lightly engaged with environmental issues. In September of 2014, the largest-ever climate march filled the streets of Manhattan, with the city’s mayor at the front of the throng. Avaaz, a campaign group involved in organizing the event, advertised it on the subway with the slogan: “What puts bankers and hipsters in the same march?”

As anyone who experienced the hurricane knows, there was no uniform effect of the storm. Rather than being a great leveler, this storm -- turbo-charged by the changing climate -- ripped the city open and displayed its inequalities to the world. For many, the storm was characterized by the iconic image of the Goldman Sachs building, lit up with blazing lights but surrounded by a pitch black lower Manhattan. On the east side of the island, not so far away, elderly NYCHA residents were trapped in their homes without food or medication as the elevators in their building failed to function without electricity. Another chapter in what Bill DiBlasio called “a tale of two cities,” the "green" initiatives of post-Sandy New York demonstrate the substantial inequalities prevalent in New York's imagining of itself as a 21st century metropolis – one staggeringly rich and resilient, the other marginalized and critically exposed.

We conceived this project to get to know the many cities contained in the landscape of a climate-changed Manhattan. But more than just the impacts of unpredictable weather, flooding and blackouts, we wanted to know: what’s the story with “green” initiatives in Manhattan, which are put forward as part of the solution to the climate crisis? Is the new wave of green urban development widely available to people from all kinds of backgrounds? Or is it a boutique premium consumer product for the wealthy, like a half liter of organic Wholefoods aloe water? Who benefits, and who is left in the figurative and literal shade?

The maps and essays we’ve included here cover several issues. The first section, “Whose responsibility?” covers one aspect of energy, without which we can’t possibly understand the environmental landscape of the city. Manhattan, the densely built epicenter of the city that never sleeps, uses a great deal of energy in its high rise buildings, whether they’re office or residential blocks. When we talk about “climate change,” it’s helpful to think about whose lights we’re keeping on when we burn all that coal and gas.

The second section, “Whose impacts?” looks at what climate change might mean to different Manhattanites.

The third section, “Whose green?” takes us back to energy: where the old, fossil fuel infrastructure is, and where the new solar developments are cropping up. This information is crucial to understanding what the shift to renewables is looking like, when it comes to markers like race and class. Who has the capital to invest in solar panels on their apartment rooftops? And who will still be stuck living next to gas fired power stations and refineries, or with diesel-oil heating in their building? It’s also where we look at luxury buildings: the ones that market themselves as “green,” as well as the ones that tower over the city, blocking light for neighbours, flora and fauna alike.

Finally, the last section (“Doing it better?”) highlights a modest hope story, of what a more just Manhattan could look like in a climate-changed world.

With each map, we hope to illustrate the stakes of what the texts we have chosen talk about: what kind of green Manhattan we are building, and for whom are we building it?

1. Whose responsibility?

When we talk about the environment or climate change, it’s easy to think that “we’re all in this together.” But are we really? We’re not all powering penthouses or 24/7 trading desks. And nor are all of us equally responsible for making the decisions about where that power comes from.

Large buildings in New York City, defined as 50,000 square feet and above, make up only 2 percent of the City’s building stock, but use 45 percent of citywide energy. There are about 15,000 such properties in New York City.

2. Whose impacts?

All waterfronts are not created equal. As superstorms and polar vortices become the new normal when it comes to New York’s weather, exposure to flooding, blackouts, gas leaks and toxic mold will spike. New Yorkers should know – are the same protections being extended to NYCHA residents as those who work at Goldman and live in luxury condos? Who will be trapped in flooded buildings with no electricity, and who will have a reinforced backup generator to power their elevators?

With over 400,000 square feet of usable interior space, there are only 104 units for people to live in. 432 Park Avenue is a monument to the epic rise of the global super-wealthy.

“There are only two markets,
ultraluxury and subsidized housing.”
—Rafael Viñoly, architect of 432 Park Avenue

Along a stretch of New York City’s Park Avenue, between 56th and 57th Street, soars a tower so jaw-droppingly altitudinous that King Kong himself would likely think twice before scaling it. Its rooftop, roughly a quarter of a mile high, makes it the tallest building in New York and the highest residential tower in the western hemisphere.

At 96 stories (1,396 feet), it has no company in the space it occupies atop Manhattan’s skyline. The Empire State Building tops out some 150 feet below that. Absent its spire, the newly built World Financial Center—itself a giant—is 28 feet shorter than this new cathedral to uber-wealth. 432 Park Avenue can be seen from all five boroughs of New York City, from inbound Metro-North trains coming in along the Harlem River, from the Meadowlands in New Jersey, and from several vantage points on Long Island. Its lone silhouette dominates the skyline from every angle. It demands your attention in a way that no residential building ever has.

The most remarkable thing about 432 Park, however, is not just its sheer size. It is the fact that, in a building so tall and imposing, with over 400,000 square feet of usable interior space, there are only 104 units for people to live in. 432 Park Avenue is, in short, a monument to the epic rise of the global super-wealthy. It is the house that historic inequality built.

Our story begins in 2009 with a little-known Los Angeles-based private equity firm called CIM. The firm’s three managing partners, a former Drexel Burnham banker and a pair of former Israeli paratroopers, quietly dropped in on Manhattan’s punch drunk post-financial crisis real estate market with money to spend. CIM moved quickly, writing checks to bail out some of the city’s most prestigious real estate families and firms, as projects were stalling and financing had all but dried up. The outsiders became Manhattan power players overnight.

Strong relationships with investment organizations like Blackstone and Calpers put the west coast-based firm in a position to capitalize on a once-in-a-generation opportunity in a city where the incumbents were largely overleveraged from the prior boom. They acted as the bank behind the resurrection of several high-profile distressed properties, and allowed the original developers to stay involved with each deal as their partners.

By 2011, CIM was everywhere. The economy was slowly improving, the financial firmament was beginning to thaw, and institutional investors were cutting checks again. It is in this recovering environment that a project as ambitious as 432 Park Avenue can even be dreamed of, let alone funded.

Harry Macklowe is one of the real estate industry’s most famous and colorful characters, with a massive portfolio of properties and projects to go along with his outsize personality. No stranger to gambles and calculated risks, Macklowe found himself in a bit of a squeeze in 2008, as the seams of the property market began to tear and the bills from New York’s decade of excess came due. A highly leveraged real estate transaction backed by a $5.8 billion loan from Deutsche Bank kept his name in the news, and his stake in several trophy properties, like the General Motors Building, were said to have been in jeopardy.

CIM stepped into the breach, providing financing for several of Macklowe’s troubled projects, and a partnership was born that would lead to the groundbreaking at 432 Park. By August 2011, their incredible plans for the tower—which would occupy the land where the Macklowe-owned Drake Hotel had been demolished—began to leak onto real estate news sites like Curbed and The New York Observer. The idea of a “fifth-act” survivor like Harry Macklowe partnering with a “mysterious” developer from out of town proved to be an irresistible storyline to the chattering classes.

Within a year, we began to get a sense of what 432 Park Avenue would come to represent. First, we learned that the number of condo units built would be closer to 100 than the originally planned 140. Next came details about the building’s sales efforts. Notably, while Macklowe Properties had kept 432 Park Avenue’s units off of popular broker databases like StreetEasy and the Residential Listing Service (RLS), the firm was going full-throttle in its attempt to court the Russian oligarchy. A kind of traveling sales office was set up at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel on Moscow’s Tverskaya Street, where dozens of billionaires pass through the lobby each day.

By May 2013, Macklowe had announced that the top-floor penthouse was already sold for an astonishing $95 million. Half of the building’s apartments were under contract, with projections of $3 billion in total sales. This February, Manhattan realtor Douglas Elliman was brought on as the exclusive co-sales agent to help move the rest of the units.

It is widely believed that the building will only be one-quarter occupied at all times, even though it will be completely sold out. Keep in mind that these are pied-a-terres that begin at $7 million each and include several full-floor parcels in the $75 million range. More than anything else, this speaks to the insatiable appetite of the world’s greatly expanded billionaire class. Middle Eastern oil magnates, Chinese billionaires, Russian oligarchs, and the Latin American aristocracy all have one thing in common: More money than they know what to do with and a desperation to get as much of it out of their home countries as possible. New York real estate works very well as both a facilitator of this as well as a store of value.

As of this writing, there are currently plans for eight more ultra-luxe towers in and around Manhattan, in various stages of development. The explosion of wealth among ultra high net worth (UNHW) individuals around the world has made all of this possible. According to a new study from UBS and Wealth-X, there are 211,275 people in the world who could be considered ultra high net worth, with assets totaling north of $30 million. The approximate amount of wealth controlled by this group is estimated at just under $30 trillion. And while the number of UHNW people grew by 6% since 2013, their assets grew by 7%.

But these figures obscure an even more important trend taking root among the UHNW rankings: People with over a billion dollars in assets (there are 2,325 of them) saw their wealth increase by 12% year over year, while those at the bottom of the group—the 91,000 people with assets between $30 million and $49 million—realized a comparatively smaller 7% bump in wealth. Those at the top of the top are seeing their fortunes grow twice as fast as those at the bottom of the top. And the number of UHNW individuals who fall in the $750 million to $1 billion category saw their ranks swell by 20% this year to over 1,200 people. The bottom line is that the richer you are, the faster you’re getting even richer.

This explains why a city like New York can build dozens of ultra-luxury residential towers and continue to sell out. In New York alone, it is estimated that there are 8,655 full-time residents who would be categorized as ultra-high net worth, the most of any city in the world. Wealth-X finds that the average UHNW individual owns 2.7 properties and that 8% of their wealth is invested in real estate. Logically speaking, as their wealth grows, so too does their capacity to own and invest in an increasing amount of high-end housing.

This coming spring, the few dozen occupants of 432 Park Avenue, North America’s third-tallest building, will begin to move in. They will furnish their palatial apartments against a global backdrop of deflationary fears, central banks in perpetual crisis mode, massive unemployment, and stubbornly stagnating wage growth for 99% of the world’s population. In previous generations, when towers of this scale were erected, they were monuments to working. 432 Park, unlike the Chrysler Building, the World Financial Center, and the Empire State Building, is a monument to owning.

In the Medieval era, towers were erected to separate royalty and feudal overlords from the rest of the population during times of plague and suffering. It was an effective barrier, both physical and symbolic. A 1,400-foot skyscraper, in America’s most populous city, in which fewer than 100 people will reside, is perhaps the perfect present-day parallel to such behavior. The ascendance of 432 Park Avenue to its now-dominant place in the skyline says more about the state of our world than a thousand Thomas Pikettys typing on a thousand keyboards ever could.

INTRODUCTION

When Hurricane Sandy hit New York City on October 29th, 2012, approximately 80,000 people residing in over 400 New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) buildings lost many essential services such as electricity, use of elevators, heat and hot water. This was almost double the amount anticipated by NYCHA, who ordered the evacuation of 45,000 NYCHA residents living in 26 developments in Flood Zone A. Even in those developments where evacuations were ordered, most residents decided to “shelter in place” due to various reasons such as health, lack of mobility, fear and not knowing where to go. In addition, some residents were not aware of evacuation orders because of communication lapses. Those that remained formed what the New York Times called, “a city within a city marked by acute need.” For the next weeks and months, these New Yorkers endured deplorable conditions, living without heat, hot water, electricity, elevators and plumbing.

The City’s response to Hurricane Sandy was slow and communication to residents before, during and after the storm was inadequate. As the New York Times reported, on November 8th, almost two weeks after the storm, residents of Red Hook Houses got notes that said “Since Hurricane Sandy, electricity will be out indefinitely.” More recently, as temporary generators remain the main energy source in many buildings, information about a long-term plan continues to elude residents.

More than a year after Sandy, residents in hard hit areas across New York City still face serious problems related to the storm such as mold, elevator malfunction and rodent infestation. 24 temporary boilers that remain in 16 developments break down easily under extreme temperatures, causing residents to go without heat and hot water. Moreover, the storm exposed other structural problems such as high levels of unemployment and poverty, particularly amongst immigrants and people of color. These problems were uncovered and exacerbated by Sandy but they are not new; policy choices over the last decade have caused NYCHA residents to suffer from lack of repairs, mold, infestation and broken elevators. In fact, in the month before Sandy hit, NYCHA had a backlog of 330,000 repairs. Unable to access much of the Sandy related aid made available to renters and homeowners, NYCHA residents must depend on the overburdened, under–resourced and historically mismanaged Housing Authority for repair services.

Now, over a year after the storm, as an estimated $3.2 billion in federal dollars is allocated to the City for relief and resiliency efforts, several community organizations across the City, in conjunction with the Alliance for a Just Rebuilding, including Community Voices Heard, Good Old Lower East Side, Families United for Racial and Economic Equality, Red Hook Initiative, Faith in NY and NY Communities for Change have come together with research support from the Community Development Project at the Urban Justice Center to assess how NYCHA residents living in storm affected zones are faring and to develop solutions for how NYCHA and the City can address the issues exposed by Sandy.

Overall, our research found:

• 1. Weak government response and poor communication with NYCHA residents created a gap that community groups filled.
• 2. NYCHA apartments, buildings and grounds are desperately in need of repairs. Sandy exacerbated existing repair needs in NYCHA buildings.
• 3. Mold, a serious problem for NYCHA residents prior to Sandy, has gotten worse since the storm and is impacting the health of residents.
• 4. People in NYCHA need jobs. Although Sandy recovery activities provided opportunities for employment and training for public housing residents, NYCHA did not take full advantage of these opportunities.

These findings and the related recommendations come at an opportune moment for public housing residents in New York City. We have a set of promising new leaders including, Mayor Bill de Blasio, the City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, who hails from the district with the highest concentration of public housing in NYC, Shola Olatoye, the Chairperson at the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), and new Chairs of two key City Council Committees, Ritchie Torres for Public Housing and Mark Treyger for Recovery and Resiliency. In addition, NYCHA is in the midst of revising their Hurricane Emergency Procedure, and $308 million in funding for NYCHA, which is part of NYC’s Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery Program funds (CDBG-DR, the main source of federal funds for re-development post-Sandy) is currently under an open comment period. As the new administration inherits the recovery from the Bloomberg Administration, it has the ability to redress longstanding issues and move towards a more inclusive and equitable recovery. This new leadership can set a precedent for combating inequality in NYC by addressing the ongoing problems in NYCHA that were illuminated and exacerbated by Hurricane Sandy. We hope this report can provide a roadmap for the City’s new leaders to use as they assess how to spend Sandy related funds, revise NYCHA’s emergency plans, and consider broader NYCHA reforms.

METHODOLOGY

In order to explore the current conditions facing NYCHA residents that were impacted by Hurricane Sandy, several community-based organizations surveyed residents in NYCHA buildings located in Zone 1 (formerly Zone A) as well as a few heavily impacted buildings that were formerly in Zone B. Researchers collected 597 surveys from the following neighborhoods: Coney Island (191 surveys), Lower East Side (93), Far Rockaway (113), Red Hook (139) and Gowanus (38). Those neighborhoods were chosen because they all have concentrations of public housing developments, were in Hurricane Zones A or B at the time Hurricane Sandy hit, were severely impacted by Sandy, and are areas where the participating community groups are actively working with NYCHA residents. Survey data was supplemented with profiles from each neighborhood as well as interviews with representatives from the Teamsters Local 237 and Laborers Local 78 unions, which both represent NYCHA workers. Researchers also reviewed reports, news coverage and documents from various public meetings about Hurricane Sandy and NYCHA. This is not intended to be a representative sample of public housing residents but rather offers an important snapshot of the public housing communities most impacted by Sandy. Additionally, this report offers a unique, on-the-ground perspective that is missing from many other studies about NYCHA and Hurricane Sandy.

BACKGROUND

Problems with NYCHA long preceded Hurricane Sandy: NYCHA’s structural and financial problems are deep-rooted and long-standing, born out of the original conception and development of public housing and intensified by growing governmental neglect. Much of New York’s public housing was built on flood zones, including those in Coney Island, the Lower East Side, Red Hook and the Rockaways, due to cheap procurement of such low-lying waterfront land. According to a New York Times article by Jonathan Mahler, a combination of factors including “accident, grand vision and political expedience” put a concentration of public housing on the coastline and in harm’s way. The Housing Act of 1949 provided funding for new government subsidized housing and since poor people already lived near the waterfront, Robert Moses, the infamous New York City planner, wanted housing to be built where poor people already were.

A long history of disinvestment in public housing by the federal government made public housing even more vulnerable—steep budget cuts to both operating and capital budgets have led to rampant disrepair and hazardous living conditions. Regularly, the public housing budgets fall short of industry leaders recommendations. For example, the Obama administration’s proposed funding for Fiscal Year 2011 was $706 million short of what the Public Housing Authorities Directors Association deemed sufficient. As a result, NYCHA’s deficit for fiscal year 2012 was $77 million and the price tag for unmet needs close to $6 billion. This year, NYCHA estimates its deficit will be $78 million and unmet capital needs will more than double over the next five years to $13.4 billion. And even with operating and capital funding levels rising slightly for 2014 (8.5% for operating and 5.5% for capital, up from 2013 sequester levels), Public Housing makes up only 19% of the total HUD budget. Even before Sandy wreaked havoc on public housing developments around the city, NYCHA was seeking ways to cut back services as well as raise new revenue - raising rents, imposing fees, cutting employment services, closing dozens of community centers, delaying critical repairs, and proposing the controversial land lease plan.

On top of these budget woes, over the past several years, NYCHA has reportedly mismanaged much of the funding that they do have. In 2013, the Daily News reported that NYCHA had nearly $1 billion in unspent federal dollars meant to rehab aging buildings, nearly half of which had not been touched for at least two years. More recently, it was revealed that NYCHA has $50 million in unspent City Funds that was set aside for projects such as upgrading community centers. In addition, $42 million has been earmarked for security cameras over the last eight years but has not been spent. As a part of former Mayor Bloomberg’s plan to reduce the repair backlog, NYCHA reports to have cut the backlog from 423,000 at the beginning of 2013 down to 106,000 at the beginning of 2014. However, various media reports raised concerns that many post-Sandy work orders were closed without repairs being completed. Residents echo these findings and report that cases are closed without any notice.

This context of disinvestment and mismanagement was the backdrop when Hurricane Sandy hit. Compounding the pre-existing budget gap, NYCHA approximates $1.8 billion in potential Sandy related expenditures, including the cost of making permanent repairs, elevating infrastructure and constructing new utility buildings; mitigation measures, such as providing emergency backup power; and other advanced approaches to restoration, like the use of combined heat and power plants. $895 million is anticipated to be funded through existing programs, which leaves an unmet need of $930 million.

The Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery Program (CDBG-DR), administered by the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), is the main source of federal funds for post-Sandy housing redevelopment. To date, NYC has been allocated $3.219 billion from this program, including an initial allocation of $1.77 billion in May 2013, and a second round of $1.447 billion which is currently under a review period. The City plans to spend its two rounds of CDBG money as follows: $1.695 billion for housing programs, $2.66 billion for business programs, $855 million for infrastructure and other city services, $234 million for resilience, and $169 million for citywide administration and planning.

Of the $1.695 billion of CDBG-DR funds allocated to NYC for housing, NYCHA will get a total of $308 million, a figure that falls far short of the $1.8 billion that they need for Sandy related expenditures. In addition to CDBG-DR funds, NYCHA has received $3.5 million from FEMA and $123.6 million from its commercial and flood insurers and could receive an additional $440 million in insurance proceeds via the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) and commercial insurance policies. This money can only be used to cover the cost of property damage and cannot be used for resiliency and mitigation measures. In addition, insurance cannot be used to pay for boiler replacements, only repairs. While NYCHA is eligible for it, they have not yet received funding from FEMA’s Hazard Mitigation Grant Program, which provides limited funding for mitigation activities to reduce disaster losses and protect life and property from future disaster.

WHAT NYCHA & NYC HAD IN PLACE BEFORE THE STORM

Despite having a Hurricane Emergency Procedure that was updated four days before the storm and an internal protocol established to respond to the storm, NYCHA’s response and communication with residents before and during the storm was, residents report, largely inadequate. In fact, 28% of those surveyed for this report said that NYCHA did not provide them with information related to the storm. And of those that did receive information from NYCHA about the storm, 28% reported that this occurred after the storm had hit. During a City Council hearing on the topic, NYCHA’s general manager Cecil House recognized that there was a “communication gap” with residents before and during the storm.

NEEDS OF RESIDENTS AFTER THE STORM

Following the storm, the needs of public housing residents were acute. Despite evacuation orders, many NYCHA residents decided to “shelter in place” due to various factors including mobility, health concerns, fear and others. NYCHA was not prepared for this alternative and as a result many people suffered for weeks without heat, hot water, electricity or working elevators. In fact, about 30% of survey respondents were without electricity, hot water, heat, or elevators for 3 weeks, with some reporting that they were without those necessities for 12 weeks. Residents reported needing help with food, clothes, clean up support, apartment repairs, money, transportation, utilities and employment. In order to address their needs, 56% of survey respondents applied for government relief (FEMA, 79%; Food Stamps, 36%; Public Assistance 16.2%). However, almost half (47%) did not receive any government relief that they applied for.

The following research findings are a result of almost 600 surveys conducted in NYCHA developments in Zone 1 (formerly Zone A) and a few heavily impacted buildings that were formerly in Zone B. Surveys were conducted in the following neighborhoods: Coney Island, Gowanus, the Lower East Side, Red Hook and Far Rockaway.

In many communities impacted by Hurricane Sandy, there are long-standing, deep relationships with various community based organizations and NYCHA residents. These organizations provide a variety of services as well as community, advocacy and supports systems for and with NYCHA residents. When the storm hit, it was natural that many of these groups would become a part of the response. What these groups did not anticipate, however, is that they would become the primary driver of the relief effort in their communities. Due to the slow and inadequate government response to the needs of public housing residents, community groups were forced to take roles that exceeded their capacity and extended beyond their expertise. While many of these groups did an excellent job, they lacked coordination with government as well as the resources and technical expertise to meet the myriad of residents’ needs.

In his testimony before the City Council, Cecil House, NYCHA’s General Manager said that a major lesson learned from the Hurricane was that partnerships with Community Based Organizations are essential to resident engagement during and after a crisis.63 Furthermore, NYCHA has conducted several presentations to community groups since the storm, proposing improved coordination and communication with Community Based Organizations as well as a plan for using community centers as hubs for communication, staff training, crisis counseling and volunteer and supply coordination.64 However, this recent focus on the importance of community centers is situated in the context of funding cuts and privatization for those centers and for community programming.65 The following data indicates the importance that community groups played during and after the storm and continue to play today.

THE IMPORTANCE OF NYCHA COMMUNITY CENTERS

The Gowanus Community Center once served as a general point of contact for all tenants, providing a broad range of personal development resources and workshops. It also was the primary outlet for strengthening the community through collaboration and celebration with other civic and cultural organizations. But for years, the Community Center has been mostly vacant and closed to the thousands of low-income families in the Gowanus Houses. In the aftermath of Sandy, the community center’s doors were opened and it became an ad-hoc relief hub for public housing residents impacted by the storm after overflow from the Gowanus Canal flooded five large buildings in the development. Residents without electricity, heat and hot water flocked to the Center daily for hot meals, blankets, warm clothes, food, diapers, to charge cell phones, speak with health care and social work professionals and to check in on their neighbors. With very little support from NYCHA and established relief agencies, Families United for Racial & Economic Equality (FUREE) coordinated hundreds of residents and volunteers to take donations, prepare meals, refill prescriptions, and canvas buildings to ensure basic needs were met. Without access to the Center, much of this essential post-Sandy work would have been impossible to do.

CITYWIDE RESEARCH FINDINGS: COMMUNITY RESPONSE

GOWANUS:

While budget cuts have resulted in the closure of many community centers in NYCHA developments across the city, FUREE has been working with tenant leaders to fully re-open the Gowanus Community Center. The center could potentially serve as a well-organized relief hub in the event of another disaster and as a way to support social resiliency with regular after school programming and other services and activities for residents, especially in the most at-risk neighborhoods.

RED HOOK:

On October 30, 2012, Hurricane Sandy left thousands of residents of the NYCHA Red Hook Houses without electricity, heat, or running water, but left the Red Hook Initiative (RHI) center unharmed. RHI staff and participants did what they had done every day for the last 10 years—they organized and took action to respond to the needs of their own community. They were quickly joined in their efforts by a flood of support from thousands of volunteers, community agencies, elected officials, corporations, and donors. The Red Hook Initiative’s doors were open 12 to 14 hours per day for 24 consecutive days. At the peak of the crisis, over 1,200 people came through the Red Hook Initiative doors to charge phones, get a hot meal, pick up supplies, get updated information, receive medical or legal support, and offer to help. Many of these individuals had never been to RHI before the storm, but found a place where they felt cared for and where their needs were met. In the time since the storm, RHI has continued to respond to the changing needs of the community in the wake of the disaster.

Lower East Side Long-Term Recovery Group and Community-Based Disaster Plan: LES READY:

Hurricane Sandy highlighted major gaps in the city’s disaster preparedness and response plans and the critical need for community input into the City’s disaster planning. To address this, Long Term Recovery Groups (LTRG) have been established in affected areas around New York City. One example of a particularly robust LTRG is LES Ready in the Lower East Side. This “coalition of community groups and institutions” has been coordinated in part by the Good Old Lower East Side (GOLES) and has a mission to “cooperatively coordinate our response, resources, and preparedness planning and training in response to Hurricane Sandy and in the event of future disasters.” Working closely with local officials, faith-based institutions and other community-based organizations, GOLES and LES Ready are conducting participatory research and developing a community-based disaster preparedness plan that will ensure that the community is able to handle natural disasters in the future in a more coordinated fashion and with more direct input from community residents.

The urgent need for repairs in NYCHA buildings and apartments is not new. In the month prior to Sandy, there was a backlog of 330,000 repairs. For years, NYCHA residents have complained of malfunctioning elevators, mold and broken appliances. While federal disinvestment has played a role in the slow and inconsistent response to repair needs, it does not tell the whole story. NYCHA reports to have reduced their number of open work orders from 423,000 at the beginning of 2013 down to 106,000 at the beginning of 2014 as a part of former Mayor Bloomberg’s “comprehensive action plan to virtually eliminate the entire backlog by years end (2013).” However, a recent article in the Daily News raised concerns that many post-Sandy work orders have closed without repairs being completed: “NYCHA workers speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of being fired told The News the campaign to eliminate the backlog has been a sham. In an effort to reduce the numbers, they said, repair “tickets” were simply cancelled and counted as closed when the new initiative kicked off at the beginning of the year.” Residents echo these findings and report that cases are closed without any notice.

In the days and weeks following Hurricane Sandy the inequalities at the heart of New York City could scarcely be missed. While hundreds of thousands of public housing residents went without heat, hot water or electricity, Mayor Michael Bloomberg rushed to get the stock exchange up and running within 48 hours—a stark reminder of whose lives and well-being are valued by current administration. In the immediate aftermath of disasters such contrasts lay bare the violence of race and class. Who is able to leave and who is able to return are questions about access to resources, vulnerability, and the existing geographies of economic and social inequality. But it is through the process of reconstruction that existing racial and class iniquities are truly reproduced and deepened. In New York City, as the power has finally come back on for residents and as reconstruction efforts plod along, it is perhaps time for a look at how these dynamics are playing out.

In early November, 2012 I attended a meeting in the Red Hook loft apartment of the self-styled neighborhood power broker, Kirby Desmarais, the purpose of which was to build stronger lines of communication between various groups working on relief efforts in Red Hook. These included Occupy Sandy, the NYPD, the National Guard, a representative from Mayor Bloomberg’s office, and a sizeable group of small business owners in Red Hook: over 30 people in total. The meeting itself was uneventful, the National Guard did not plan to do any more than distribute boxes of freeze dried meals, the Mayor’s Office could not promise anything concrete, and 76th Precinct Police Captain Schiff remained mostly silent. Occupy Sandy would continue to collect and redistribute material donations, provide hot food, and build its databases of residents requiring home-delivered meals and needing medical assistance. Those of us working with Occupy Sandy began to feel uncomfortable as it became increasingly evident that the underlying purpose of the meeting was for the group of small business owners to establish direct lines of access to the various institutions with power over the recovery effort. One particularly disturbing aspect of the meeting was its racial composition. In this predominantly working class Black and Latino neighborhood, the small business coalition who were hosting the meeting had only managed to invite one single long-term black resident, a well-known local organizer, Reg Flowers. Such an exclusion of black community leaders from the table was, as Reg put it, at the very least “problematic and it may even be dangerous.” Sadly, such exclusions are also increasingly common and they bear witness to the important role played by gentrification in shaping the forms of recovery and reconstruction in Red Hook after Hurricane Sandy.

From the outside, Red Hook recovery efforts have been lauded in both the media and in activist circles as a stirring example of “community” self-empowerment and mutual-aid. What is less evident from most of these superficial accounts, however, are the deep social fissures and inequalities that are hidden beneath facile notions of “community.” The emergent pattern of racial and class-based exclusions in Red Hook have historical roots; they are also emblematic of a process that I am calling here disaster gentrification: that is, the use of disasters, such as Hurricane Sandy to initiate or consolidated gentrification projects.

Class and Race in Red Hook

Before Hurricane Sandy hit, Red Hook was already on the cutting edge of Brooklyn gentrification and had been for a few years. Urban homesteaders had moved in, lured by the waterfront, the aura of feeling slightly farther away from the rest of the city, and what the New York Times glibly calls “the pioneer spirit that has brought chicken coops, beehives and funky bars to a once-desolate industrial stretch of Brooklyn.”[1] As some of this growth has come through the reconversion of previously empty warehouses and industrial areas, Red Hook is often presented as benign form of urban regeneration and creative re-use of a post-industrial landscape. But as with the pioneers of old, people lived in Red Hook before the recent influx of entrepreneurs.

Red Hook has long been a working-class neighborhood. Much of the neighborhood’s urban fabric dates back to its 19th century history as a major hub of maritime commerce. Since the construction of its first port in the 1840’s Red Hook has been home to waves of immigrant populations; Irish, German and Italian workers came for employment on its docks. By the 1920s it could claim to be one of the busiest freight ports in the world. The first of the Red Hook Houses were built as part of a Federal Works Program initiative under FDR in 1938 to accommodate the growing number of dockworkers. Administered by the New York Housing Authority (NYCHA), these tall brick structures are still a defining feature of the neighborhood. Home to 8000 people, they remain the largest affordable housing tract in Brooklyn (and the second largest in New York City). The last installment of the Houses were built in 1955. Then, with the advent of containerization in the 1960s, shipping moved to the larger ports of New Jersey and Red Hook’s economic vitality declined.

During the latter half of the century Red Hook followed the pattern of many de-industrializing urban areas in the United States: white flight opened up space for Blacks, Latinos, and one of New York City’s first Puerto Rican communities. Meanwhile, disinvestment and capital flight from Red Hook, as in many other parts of Brooklyn, left the neighborhood derelict and abandoned by government, public services, and landowners alike. As the late great geographer Neil Smith has argued, neighborhoods like Red Hook were “lost” for capitalist profit extraction: practices such as redlining ensured that no new capital would be invested in these enclaves of urban poverty. This set the stage for Red Hook’s more recent history of gentrification. As Smith argues, gentrification is effectively a “back to the city movement for capital,”[2]through which such “lost” urban spaces are re-conquered for the purpose of profit extraction. Of course, the conquest of the “new urban frontier” inevitably entails the displacement of those who once lived there. [3] Thus, as capital began moving back to the city, it spelled a disaster for working class people across Brooklyn: eviction, harassment, highly racialized tough-on-crime policies, the forcible displacement and dismembering of communities.

Census data bears witness to the rapid transformations that have been reshaping neighborhood like Red Hook. Economic indicators show that Red Hook has seen its median monthly rents increase by upwards of 70% along the water front since 2000 (and 101% in the area directly above the Red Hook Houses), on par with the most rapidly changing census tracts in Williamsburg over the same period.[4] The growing economic disparities in the neighborhood are also evident in this rental data: the median rent at the Red Hook Houses is still $369 per month while loft apartments a block away on Delevan street are listed at 1,900$ per month.[5] This “rent-gap” between what working-class residents have been paying for decades and the promise of ever-rising rental incomes from an affluent gentrifying class is what fuels both property speculation and the forced evictions of long-time residents. Such processes are at the heart of Brooklyn’s changing political economy—they have also had dramatic impacts on the changing racial demographics of its neighborhoods.

As a recent Fordham study has shown, Brooklyn is home to four of the country’s most rapidly changing neighborhoods as measured by racial composition. In Bed-Stuy, for example, the white population has grown by over 600% over the past decade. Meanwhile, the Center for Urban Research estimates that Brooklyn lost 50,000 African Americans to economic displacement between 2000 and 2010.[6] Red Hook has lost 17% of its Black population and 14.4% of its Hispanic population over the same period. As people are priced out of the neighborhood, block-by-block census records show that the Black and Brown population of Red Hook has quickly receded away from the main commercial strip of Van Brunt street and is now predominantly concentrated in the Red Hook Houses.[7] The old Puerto Rican community of the waterfront has vanished, displaced by affluence and whiteness.

Similar violent processes of displacement and conquest have led the New Orleans Tribune to describe gentrification as “the new segregation.”[8] Gentrification may be analyzed as economic project which displaces the poor and benefits the affluent, but it also articulates itself as a racial project whose violence is vested on people of color. Where it unfolds in neighborhoods like Red Hook, such processes bear out Stuart Hall’s famous argument, that “race is … the modality in which class is lived.” As Hurricane Sandy swept through Red Hook, its waters swept over a social geography already deeply injured by the racial and class inequities of gentrification. It is thus imperative for reconstruction efforts to take these existing divisions seriously, because to ignore them is to be complicit in reproducing and deepening them.

Recovery Work and Disaster Gentrification

Dynamics of race and class have impacted Post-Sandy recovery work from the start. On the one hand, the sheer urgency relief work during the first few days created an initial atmosphere of solidarity, cooperation, and mutual-aid with residents and incoming activists working, cooking, and canvassing together. I became heavily involved with Occupy Sandy at its inception and helped set up the recovery hub at the Red Hook Initiative on day after the storm where the words “community-powered recovery” were repeated often and proudly. Indeed, it was inspiring and invigorating to see such spontaneous good-hearted, meaningful, and highly effective work being done. However, the lack of analysis around race and class was evident very early on and lead to a number of problems in the day-to-day dynamics of recovery work.

One of the first problems we encountered was the casual racism of charity work. During the first few days after the storm a well-intended Christian group began partnering with the NYPD to distribute supplies using NYCHA housing police. They also asked the police to provide “crowd control” for the lines of predominantly the Black and Latino residents waiting for much needed supplies such as flashlights, pampers and baby formula. This use of the police put an immediate strain on the relationship between local residents and activists and created a scenario in which race and resources separated the two groups: inside—a group of predominantly white volunteers managing resources; outside—people of color waiting in line in the cold for hours, with the police doing “crowd control.” This highly racialized treatment of aid-recipient as potential criminals was symptomatic of the staggeringly different ideologies concerning what recovery and reconstruction should look like: the philanthropic Church group thought of themselves as providing a service (which apparently required security). This was a stark contrast to the collaborative, solidaristic, mutual-aid project that Occupy Sandy had been trying to build over the course of the first weeks. Weekends were difficult for similar reasons. The neighborhood would be inundated with (predominantly middle-class white) volunteers who were dispatched to canvass, cleanup, gut dry walls, and distribute food. Much good work was done, but the racial stratification of volunteers and residents clearly began to reinforce existing oppressions, turning aid-recipients into passive agents in a process they had increasingly less and less control over.

A second and more serious way that existing structures of oppression were reproduced and deepened was through the activity of a group of small business owners in Red Hook. On December 5th, 2012, more than a month after the storm, Mayor Bloomberg finally came down to pay a visit to the storm-ravaged neighborhood. He did not bother to stop at the Red Hook Houses—home to 8000 of Red Hook’s approximately 11,000 residents—where his administration repeatedly failed to come to the assistance of tenants living without heat, electricity, and in some cases without even running water for weeks. Instead Bloomberg’s visit included stops at the upscale Fairway super market on Van Brunt street and a meeting with local NGOs and members of ReStore Red Hook, a coalition of small businesses in the neighborhood. Of course, in the eyes of city government these are the constituents that matter. It is to them that questions are posed about the neighborhood’s recovery needs. It is to them that recovery grants and special low-interest rate reconstruction loans are offered (currently the predominant means of disaster relief offered by the government). Or, as Kirby Desmarais once gleefully put it: “They are prioritizing the businesses in Red Hook because they know that they feed the community so well.”

This is the myth that is often repeated by the entrepreneurs: that “small businesses keep Red Hook alive.” What is quietly elided, however, is the question of who and what is being kept alive? As the figures on economic displacement indicate, it is not the working-class Black and Latino Red Hook which is being “kept alive” by these businesses—and $19 skirt steaks at Home/Made are clearly not priced to provide sustenance for this community. Rather, as small businesses take up the mantle of speaking for “the Red Hook community” they are also putting forward a vision of what such a community should look like. It is telling that the conversation with Bloomberg reportedly focused on “how to attract more shoppers to Red Hook,” re-opening the subway stop at Smith and 9th street, and how to increase foot traffic along Van Brunt street. This vision of recovery and reconstruction is clearly a vision of gentrification-based recovery.

The agenda of the small business coalition was captured succinctly by ReStore Red Hook founder, Monica Byrne, at a community meeting in early November: “we will not stop until every single small business in Red Hook re-opens its doors again.” As a vehicle for fund-raising, grant applications, and political lobbying, ReStore Red Hook has become a pivotal actor in the dynamics of recovery and reconstruction in the neighborhood. The example of a large grant awarded by the Brooklyn Community Foundation in December for Sandy recovery work is symptomatic. Through personal connections with Carlos Menchaca, Christine Quinn’s official liaison in Red Hook, a coalition of five organizations in Red Hook (including NGOs, residents and small businesses) were able to secure a large grant from the Brooklyn Community Foundation. Without any community oversight over how such funds ought to be disbursed, 80% of the funds were ultimately allocated to ReStore Red Hook. In a neighborhood where over 70% of the population lives in public housing, to allocate 80% of incoming resources to small businesses along a gentrifying corridor simply callous. It is also a form of institutional racism reproduced and replicated through everyday practices. By mobilizing cultural, legal, and political capital to control incoming resources and funnel them towards small businesses, this coalition is indirectly working to disempower and displace the working-class Black and Latino community of Red Hook.

As such, ReStore Red Hook represents the consolidation of the gentrification project after Hurricane Sandy. It is the vehicle through which a gentrifying class in-itself has become a gentrifying class for-itself. It is the consolidation of a class project insofar as it actively organizes a small business class around a common interest. But it must also be understood as a consolidation of whiteness. As meetings in loft apartments become conspicuously racially homogenous and resources are syphoned away from the Black and Brown residents of the neighborhood, disaster gentrification is also project that “ReStores” segregation, poverty, and white supremacy.

Towards a Disaster Anti-Capitalism

As the coalition of small-business owners in Red Hook began to control the direction of reconstruction in the neighborhood, they also began to push Occupy Sandy organizers out. Frequently, insider vs. outsider language and appeals to “the community” were used to keep Occupy organizers out of meeting spaces or to question their legitimacy on listservs and in public meetings. Meanwhile, the Occupy Sandy relief hub at the Red Hook Initiative was displaced after its first week of operation when the RHI board of directors decided that they needed to “return to our normal programming.” Contentiously, RHI continued to collect disaster recovery funds even as their own involvement in the recovery efforts scaled back enormously. According to one source who attended a closed meeting with RHI, the non-profit has accumulated over $2 million in Sandy recovery donations. Conspicuously, the eviction of Occupy Sandy from RHI occurred precisely after organizers began to ask questions about how RHI was allocating the recovery funds. A number of us who had originally helped set up the relief hub at RHI after the storm urged them to use a participatory budgeting method for distributing the resources, however the organization has remained completely opaque about how such resources will be used. Indeed, after the initial days of spontaneous good will and solidarity, NGOs and small businesses in Red Hook began jockeying for position and funding to the detriment of pan-neighborhood solidarity, not to mention social justice. In this atmosphere of self-serving political myopia many of us who worked to start a “People’s Recovery” in Red Hook left or were pushed out; some went to other nodes in the Occupy Sandy network, while others withdrew from the recovery efforts completely. In this context, we may draw a number of lessons from the intersections of disaster-recovery and disaster-gentrification in Red Hook.

To begin with, the social justice work of Occupy Sandy organizers in Red Hook was particularly vulnerable to being sidelined, subverted, and evicted due to the fact that they did not have deep roots or strong alliances in the neighborhood. Such alliances and ties would have been pivotal for building more effective resistance to the intense political and economic forces of disater gentrification. By comparison, in neighborhoods such as Sunset Park, where Occupy has been engaged in community organizing and anti-gentrification work for the past year, the post-disaster organizing has been more enduring and robust. In the immediate wake of the storm, Occupy activists organized a number of community assemblies in Red Hook with the aim of building a decision-making body through which direct community oversight of recovery efforts might be achieved (including an ill-fated campaign to demand rent abatement from NYCHA). Such efforts were effectively undercut as the important decisions over resource allocation and negotiations with politicians were happening elsewhere. Without a deep organizing base in the neighborhood, Occupy Sandy’s medium-term projects in Red Hook foundered. Ultimately, in order to resist disaster gentrification it is crucial to have a pre-existing base of anti-gentrification organizing. Such a base would have also provided more susatinable, effective, and meaningful ways for “outside” organizers to plug in. Much good political organizing work was done in the days after the storm, but without strong neighborhood alliances this work was quickly demobilized, coopted, and neutralized.

In the long run, the conversation about a just reconstruction must also find strategic ways to talk to small business owners. Despite the short-term gains that ReStore Red Hook might achieve through back-room deals with state functionaries and donation drives, theirs is a losing strategy in the long run. The true beneficiaries of Hurricane Sandy will not be small businesses, but rather the large banks who provide reconstruction loans, the companies who receive the reconstruction contracts, and the emergent industry of eco-disaster-capitalism which sees social catastrophe as a business opportunity. Loan providers are already projected to make $1 billion in profits annually from these loans.[9] By contrast, as of late January, out of the 1,119 small businesses that had applied for federal loans in Brooklyn, only 89 had been approved.[10] Those “lucky” enough to be approved will be saddled with huge debts for years to come and some will even have to put up their homes as collateral.[11] Such a system individualizes and atomizes the burden of reconstruction; it also tears apart the fabric of our communities, pushing some into narrow and self-serving alliances, leaving others to fall through the cracks entirely. Indeed, the petty battles over the pittance of resources and funding that do come to neighborhoods like Red Hook end up reinforcing racial and class divides and destroying neighborhood solidarity. As Tom Agnotti has pointed out, such divisions leave neighborhoods vulnerable and fractured in the face of large-scale developers who are then able to move into the neighborhood without much (unified) resistance.[12] If recent talk about moving toxic sludge from the Gowanus canal to a site in Red Hook materializes, all of the neighborhoods residents will stand to lose from the effects of environmental racism and broken solidarities.

Ultimately, with the increasing frequency of ecological calamity around the world, social justice activists must begin imagining long-term and pre-emptive strategies for coping with disaster. This means deep neighborhood-based political organizing adequate to the needs of the nascent modality of resistance, something we might call disaster anti-capitalism.

1) Overview

Over the past several years, climate change has begun to exact a disproportionate toll on the poor and working class people of New York City. During Hurricane Sandy, we saw that marginalized communities lost their homes, jobs, financial security and more at a higher rate than others. Yet, to this day, the political and economic dynamics that precipitated the worst of Sandy’s fallout have hardly changed. With an ultimate goal of protecting NYC’s most vulnerable from climate-related impacts, the NMCA promotes environmental policies that also aim to address socioeconomic inequality. The NMCA recognizes that issues of class, race, gender, ethnicity, and age, not simply rising sea levels and temperatures, must be mitigated and ultimately overcome.

The NMCA can only address these issues through increases in democratic activity within and outside government. For its vision to be implemented, we must engage with the legislative process, but also build our own systems of economic exchange and urban development independent of the public sector.

The NMCA is the result of a six month-long planning process led by WE ACT for Environmental Justice, undertaken in partnership with a multitude of stakeholders. The core ideas in this plan were generated during seven workshops held between January and June of 2015, in which hundreds of New Yorkers participated.

The NMCA’s study area encompasses the neighborhoods of Inwood, Washington Heights, West Harlem, Central Harlem, and East Harlem (Figure 1). Over 600,000 people, mostly African American and Latino, reside in these neighborhoods. Over 20% of the area’s residents live in poverty, a rate substantially greater than the rest of Manhattan’s 14% average.

Inequality across NYC is severe and increasing. 20% of all household earners control over 54% of the City’s wealth. Since 1990, the median income of the top 1% of earners grew from $452,415 to $716,625, while the bottom 10% of earners saw their income increase only modestly, from $8,468 to $9,455. This gaping wealth disparity also translates into an advantage in political power and access to resources for the wealthy. For this reason, some NYC residents are dramatically better prepared to absorb the shocks associated with climate change than others.

In terms of the physical impact that climate change will have on Northern Manhattan, it is predicted that by 2100 we could see temperatures climb by up to 8°F, sea levels rise by up to six feet, precipitation increase by 13%, and what are now once-in-100 year floods occur once every eight years. These are “worst-case scenarios,” but even the best-case scenarios represent a grave threat to Northern Manhattan’s people and infrastructure, including utilities and transportation routes critical to function of the entire City. As we invest billions in preparations for climate change, we must leverage our efforts to address other social crises, such as chronic unemployment, poor diets, mass incarceration, and low-quality education, among others. Otherwise, we may prevent climate change from erasing NYC only to watch the slower erosion of gentrification swallow what’s left.

2) Climate Change and Social Equality

The NMCA uses the frameworks of environmental justice, resilience, and social cohesion to guide its recommendations. Resilience, as defined by the NYC Panel on Climate Change, is “the ability of a system and its component parts to anticipate, absorb, accommodate, or recover from the effects of a potentially hazardous event in a timely and efficient manner.”

However, environmental justice work strives to improve upon existing socio-economic conditions, not simply maintain or restore them. Therefore, as is argued in “From Resilience to Resourcefulness,” definitions of resilience must be expanded to avoid privileging “established social structures, which are often shaped by…injustice” and closing off “wider questions of progressive social change, which require transformation of established systems.” When attempting to build resilience, we must ask if the economy should “conform to meet the needs, values, and vision of a democratic society,” or continue to “advance the capitalist system” regardless of its impact on our social fabric.

As Melissa Checker points out in her article “Wiped Out by the “‘Greenwave’,” our overdependence on systems of private investment leads to “environmental gentrification,” which appropriates the “successes of the urban environmental justice movement…to serve highend redevelopment that displaces low income residents.” In other words, “the efforts of environmental justice activists to improve their neighborhoods...now help those neighborhoods attract an influx of affluent residents.”

The NMCA supports the growing movement in NYC to recognize the crucial connection between social equality and response to climate change. By working together, we can empower the masses to remake the city in their own vision, not remain victims of hyper-privatization and environmental degradation.

3) Concept One: Energy Democracy

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, New Yorkers pay the nation’s second highest energy prices. This manifests as a disproportionate cost burden for low-income NYers, which threatens not only their retention of energy services, but also limits access to housing, healthy food, healthcare, and other costly necessities. Therefore, this plan calls for green energy projects that provide direct economic benefits to low-income residents. These may be achieved through investments in neighborhood companies, creation of systems for tenants to lead change within their own communities, and local hiring agreements that apply to efficiency improvements and green energy installations.

One type of energy improvement that aligns with this goal is construction of microgrids, small, networked geographic areas that produce their own energy using renewable resources (wind, solar, geothermal, etc.) and are therefore not dependent on the main grid. Such systems can confer direct economic benefits on low-income residents by creating manufacturing, construction, and maintenance jobs while also providing savings. However, regulations must be passed to ensure that cost savings are passed down to tenants, not absorbed by property owners or middlemen. Green energy cooperatives can help maximize economic benefits for tenants, as they allow stakeholders to pool their resources and manage their own grids, affording them maximum control over generation, consumption, and costs.

In our workshops, people consistently expressed a desire for a more robust, democratic system of tenant associations. Such associations are an essential ingredient in the creation of larger systems of common resource ownership and management, such as cooperatively owned microgrids. The fact that members of tenant associations already share a roof over their heads makes the prospect of “shared solar” that much more attractive.

As a member of the Energy Efficiency for All Coalition, WE ACT has already begun work to connect community members with renewable energy and efficiency improvements and to explore options for microgrids under NY State’s Reforming the Energy Vision process. With the support of other partners, such as Solar One and the City University of New York, Northern Manhattan could see microgrid pilot projects and large-scale investments in renewables in the near future.

But ultimately, as Trade Unions for Energy Democracy recently stated, “the transition to an equitable, sustainable energy system can only occur if there is decisive shift in power towards workers, communities and the public.” In making such a transition, we must confront what the Energy Democracy Initiative recognizes as a fundamental “clash between the priorities of political elites and corporations on one hand, and the needs of the masses of people for a truly socially and environmentally sustainable society on the other.”

4) Concept Two: Emergency Preparedness

As Hurricane Sandy brutally showed, NYC’s residents, government, and infrastructure are extremely unprepared to withstand a severe natural disaster. After Sandy, areas such as the Rockaways experienced “total blackouts” with “no communications to speak of.” Residents had to resort to bullhorns to relay messages, print fliers at home to share information, and physically “[congregate] at local hubs like churches...and schools” to communicate.

For NYC to be ready for the next Sandy, neighborhood-specific preparedness plans must be devised, climate-proof communication systems must be developed, and necessary physical resources, such as flood protection infrastructures and space for storage of food and medicine must be built out. In addition, much of the suffering in Sandy’s aftermath resulted from misappropriation of resources, not from a lack of capacity. Therefore, in any future disaster, opportunities for more community input in resource distribution must be created to ensure that resources (and institutions) are appropriated for the public good.

The central element of the NMCA’s emergency response plan is creation of a locally-managed communication system that operates in analog and digital formats and that can effectively direct vulnerable populations to necessary resources during crises. This communication system will include wayfinding signage, social media plans, physical message boards, means for crowdsourcing, and tools to direct people to cooling centers, energy supplies, medicine, food, and water. In the long-term, this communication system can also be used to foster democratic participation in emergency response decisions.

Building flood protection infrastructure such as coastal barriers, rain gardens, bioswales, and more can ensure that private and public spaces are protected. Involving residents in the creation of green spaces can also, in and of itself, aid in recovery from crises, as allowing people to express their instinctive “affinity for nature” through the “creation of restorative environments may [bolster] resilience.” NYC already provides some financial support for the construction of open space and green infrastructure: the Department of Environmental Protection has committed over $208 million to its Green Infrastructure Program, while the Department of Parks and Recreation’s City Parks Initiative, which carries out park improvements in underserved neighborhoods, is worth $130 million.

The Department of Health and Mental Hygiene is currently exploring the possibility of developing neighborhood health hubs. In addition, it possesses valuable information regarding who is most in need of assistance during heatwaves and other emergencies. However, further advocacy should be carried out to encourage DOHMH and the NY state government to expand the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program to include air conditioning.

Community Emergency Response Teams (CERT) are also integral to planning and recovering from a disaster. Other programs that support this objective include the NYC Citizen Corps and the Office of Emergency Management’s (OEM’s) Ready NY Campaign and NYC Readiness Challenge.

5) Concept Three: Social Hubs

In the immediate future, development of more physical spaces for movement building activities is key. Providing spaces for local activists to organize meetings, produce materials, and incubate projects crucial. Such space could bring diverse groups together and build community cohesion, while also accommodating desires for community gardens, libraries, green energy infrastructure, artists’ workshops, and more.

In the short-term, temporary and/or mobile hubs for social cohesion should be established to serve these functions, with a long-term goal of establishing a permanent, central resilience hub on the site of the abandoned 135th Street Marine Waste Transfer Station, pictured below. Eric Klinenberg’s research demonstrates that during the 1995 Chicago heatwave, while most low-income and minority communities suffered severely, “3 of the 10... neighborhoods with the lowest rates of heat-related deaths were low-income, African American communities.” These three communities proved resilient because they had “high levels of community interaction and organization [and] decreased isolation among residents.” A network of hubs, programmed by the rich composition of people that live locally, could help facilitate similar interactions in Northern Manhattan. Several such ‘hubs,’ such as Word Up Bookstore: Libreria Communitaria, The Brotherhood Sister Sol, and more, are already having a positive impact. Large cities that have recently experienced changes in political power in favor of the working class, such as Madrid and Barcelona, have reported that “social centers” played an important role. While subsisting on small membership fees or income from bars or cafés, many such meeting spaces served as crucial organizing venues for community activists. This resulted in the development of political strategies and actions that have now led to concrete electoral successes.

Residents of Washington Heights have recently been demanding construction of a community gathering space as part of a multi-million dollar Port Authority bus terminal renovation. When they were offered only a meager 250 square feet of space, Councilman Ydanis Rodriguez responded, “our community is left out entirely. Port Authority: we do not want another slumlord in our community, so we demand that you do your part.” Whether or not the Port Authority ultimately heeds the demands of this community, establishment of such spaces is essential and is therefore a central objective of the NMCA.

6) Concept Four: Public Participation

Changing the political dynamics in NYC so that low-income residents are not excluded from policy-making is crucial to the effective implementation of this plan. Without a change in the current distribution of political power, only limited, cosmetic gestures will be made to protect low-income groups from climate change; little will be done to change the fundamental, underlying problems of inequality and poverty.

Organizing deeper participation in existing systems of governance while also creating new, more responsive systems can help shift the balance of power towards the underclass. This initiative should include, but not be limited to, the following activities: increasing political education and mobilization through protests and direct actions, developing partnerships with governmental and non-governmental allies, writing educational curricula, organizing involvement in participatory budgeting, and building participation in the electoral process. Participatory budgeting (PB) has been proven to bolster civic participation. A 2011 study of PB that compared five Brazilian municipalities with PB to five without it found that the effect of participatory budgeting was to “create a space for citizens to voice their demands and to scrutinize what were once highly insulated and discretionary decisionmaking processes,” allowing citizens not only to allocate monies, but also to “bargain from a position of greater strength with municipal authorities” in general. In NYC, PB should be expanded to the 9th City Council district, the only district in Northern Manhattan where it is not currently offered.

Worldwide, there has been a recent resurgence in the belief that democratic participation can bring an end to the negative results of fiscal austerity and neoliberalism. Whether at the 2014 People’s Climate March or a Black Lives Matter demonstration, people are demanding greater control over the policies and institutions that have, up until now, controlled their lives without their input and created an oppressive society in the process. In July of 2015, the Greek people, heeding the Prime Minister’s calls for them to decide to reject the “extortionate” policies that could prevent them from “ever standing on [their] own two feet, socially and financially,” voted against the weight of the global financial system and its thirst for public monies. In Spain, recent municipal elections have shown that including diverse ideas in political platforms can create broad partnerships that cut through historic divisions to unite the people and move them towards a more just future.

7) Next Steps

In order to implement the NMCA, we must (1) Increase democratic participation in the development of City policy and (2) Build grassroots infrastructure that allows communities to control their own responses to climate change.

In order to achieve these goals, we must continue to work with a broad network of NYers to build the critical mass necessary for profound, systemic change. Thus far, it has been an honor to connect with a wide variety of actors from the local and international climate justice communities. The countless presentations, conversations, and correspondences that went into the NMCA have not only created this plan, but also facilitated relationships among community members that help us to better understand our responsibilities as New Yorkers. Strengthening these relationships is imperative if we are to carry out wide-scale action that will change City policy and build systems of participation and mutual aid at the local level. Some of the specific policies the NMCA proposes as targets for its implementation process are listed below.

The primary policy target of the NMCA is OneNYC, the City’s chief policy framework on environmental issues, which is due to be revised in 2019. A few of the many environmental objectives listed in OneNYC are to “invest in emergency shelter sites to accommodate 120,000 New Yorkers with disabilities,” fund “physical assets for emergency response” as well as community-centered education projects, and create green jobs and local hiring plans to benefit those most in need of economic opportunities.

In terms of the City Council, the NMCA targets the chairs of the Environmental Protection, Land Use, Transportation, Waterfronts, Parks and Recreation, Sanitation and Solid Waste Management, and Economic Development Committees to be pressured to take action for climate justice by constituent actions. The Black, Latino, and Asian caucus and the Progressive caucus are natural allies in this campaign. In terms of electoral politics, a voter engagement strategy must be developed for the 2017 elections that identifies key races, registers voters, seeks commitments on climate justice from candidates, and generally increases public participation in the electoral process.

Community Boards 9, 10, 11, and 12 will prove critical in advancing our policy recommendations. In the past, WE ACT has partnered with Community Board 9 to participate in the Department of City Planning’s 197-a program, which supports community-based urban planning. We will continue to build these partnerships around the proposals of the NMCA.

In addition to OneNYC, the One City, Built to Last plan is of great importance. It lays out the City’s plan to reduce its carbon emissions by 80% by 2050 and centers on improving the energy efficiency of NYC’s building stock. A recent report by the Alliance for a Greater New York (ALIGN) stated that efforts associated with One City, Built to Last may require over $5 billion in investments every year and could create 82,000 new jobs annually from now to 2050. In the plan, the City also pledges to support community-shared solar projects and to train and hire community members for green jobs. The plan’s Retrofit Accelerator Program could spur further construction and energy improvements in Northern Manhattan and is connected to DEP’s Clean Heat program, which WE ACT is already involved in implementing.

Besides energy efficiency investments in buildings, we need large investments to improve stormwater management infrastructure, alter the design of our streets and mass transit systems, and protect our coastal areas. The Department of Environmental Protection leads a Green Infrastructure Program that invests millions in mitigating increased flooding and rising temperatures already being observed. Such infrastructure is badly needed in areas of Northern Manhattan that currently have a dearth of green space and that are in floodplains, such as East Harlem. The Department of City Planning is already conducting a Resilient Neighborhoods study that is engaging East Harlem in planning flood protection measures.

Another key component of the NMCA planning process was our ongoing academic partnerships, including those with the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, our research partnerships with the Pratt Institute’s sustainability and urban planning programs, partnerships with City College students and faculty, and work with auxiliary programs such as the Urban Climate Change Research Network, among others. By further pursuing these partnerships and policy goals, we can leverage public investments while also building local capacity to ultimately end the scourges of poverty and inequality.

List of All Articles (to be coded into broswer)

• (link to Article 1, "Meet the House that Inequality Built")
• (link to Article 2, "Weathering the Storm")
• (link to Article 3, “Race, Class, and Disaster Gentrification”)
• (link to Article 4, “THE NORTHERN MANHATTAN CLIMATE ACTION PLAN”)