Shelterforce The journal of affordable housing and community building

Summer 2008 » Sustainability » June 24, 2008

The Green New Deal

Majora Carter saw natural beauty and economic empowerment in her South Bronx neighborhood where others saw only a dumping ground. She's changing the urban landscape in a way that's been an eye-opener to people around the globe. By Matthew Hersh

The term “sustainability” now ranks with “organic” on the buzzword index. In recent years, cities, small towns, local communities, and social organizations with finite economic resources have begun to explore the benefits of energy- and cost-saving policies that support the environment. As these initiatives coalesce, the sustainable-development movement could have profound, long-term effects. And if the world is a greener place in a generation or two, we’ll have people like Majora Carter to thank for it.

Carter’s star continues to rise in her field since she founded Sustainable South Bronx, a non-profit environmental justice solutions corporation. She founded the group in 2001 following a community-based effort to defeat a Giuliani proposal to install a municipal waste-handling facility in her native Hunts Point neighborhood in the South Bronx. As then-project director for Community Restoration at the Point CDC, Carter wrote the $1.25-million federal transportation planning grant for planning funds to design the South Bronx Greenway, replete with 11 miles of bike and pedestrian paths, low-impact storm-water management, and recreational space—all providing local economic development.

Once work was underway on the waterfront, Carter, having then founded Sustainable South Bronx, identified a market niche for work in what is now known as the green-collar industry, and created the Bronx Environmental Stewardship Training program (BEST), a 10-week course and one of the nation’s first urban green-collar job-training and placement systems.

A winner of a 2005 MacArthur Fellowship—commonly referred to as the “genius” award—and named one of Newsweek’s “Who’s Next in 2007,” Carter says that a holistic vision of neighborhood improvement could be taken to global scale if both societies and political leaders had the will to persist.

What is the driving philosophy behind Sustainable South Bronx?

First, what we tried to do was look at our environment as a holistic place. I’ll point to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. because this is the 40th anniversary of his death. Dr. King was always preaching in favor of racial justice, but if you look at the evolution of his thinking as he got older, his preaching was also as much about economic justice. You can make a man as free as you want, but if his community is struggling, what does that freedom really mean if he can’t put food on the table for his family or keep his head above water?

The freedom to actually have a livelihood that is not degenerative in any way is an excruciatingly important thing—to actually be able to provide for people everywhere. And so, like Dr. King, we worked really hard on our end to build the kind of capacity in our community to help folks understand how important the environment was, because it was affecting our public health.

And that ties into the work Sustainable South Bronx did with the South Bronx Greenway project.

Yes. Take the work we did for our waterfront, and then to circle back a little bit on that, we got started in this work because we were fighting against a huge waste facility that former Mayor Guiliani and [former New York Gov. George Pataki] wanted to bring to our waterfront.

We discovered that there was an enormous amount of waste that was already handled in the community, and then, later on, we were slated for more power plants. We already had 60,000 truck trips coming through the neighborhood and a huge sewage treatment plant that processed an enormous amount of the city sewage sludge. It just seemed like it would be adding insult to injury if the planned waste facility was ever built.

So, Sustainable South Bronx allowed residents to understand that there were alternatives for the waterfront?

In fighting against that waste facility, we did have to do some work to help the community understand that there were other things they could be hoping for in their own community. Giving people an opportunity to think about what our future could be, especially when they never really thought about it before, was incredibly difficult.

You know, it’s easy to get demoralized when we don’t really think that there are any options. It’s hard to have a vision when all you see is destruction around you. So in developing waterfront parks in the community and realizing that we had a waterfront worth revitalizing, it helped support our community desire, and allowed folks to see themselves differently—and also to force people on the outside to see us as not just communities filled with garbage. That was really incredible.

But the beautiful part was really what happened after that. We were able to apply for a little bit of seed grant money and turn that little dump into the first waterfront park my neighborhood’s had in more than 60 years.

How did this project and projects like it help to fuel the green economy? What happened when people were employed to work on the restoration?

We noticed that, as we worked to restore the waterfront, people were being imported into the community to do this work. It was, after all, restoration work, and obviously involved a good deal of skill, but it was a skill that you can train somebody to do.

And we asked ourselves, “Why aren’t we teaching our young people and adults about how to do this?” That’s when it occurred to us that people from within our community could serve as stewards of their environment—making sure that they have both a personal and a financial stake in it.

We were able to get some initial funding to do a Bronx River restoration job training program that we called River Heroes. The goal was that folks got the training, went through this fast-track program for the project.

Then, what happened was that we realized there’s actually even more opportunities out there. We started thinking about expanding our reach so that we could work to make our students more marketable and to see what other opportunities there are. After doing some market research ourselves, we realized that there were landscaping companies doing things like brownfield remediation. There were folks who needed tree pruners—you name it—any kind of thing that had to do with horticultural infrastructure, there was a need for it.

We realized that we had to tailor our program to make sure that we were training people to do that, and the program has grown since. For instance, we’re working now to move into solar installations and also building retrofits and performing energy audits, because we see an upcoming market, [for which] we want to prepare our students to perform well!

Sustainability is a very sexy term right now, but it probably still doesn’t carry a lot of weight with some people. What are some of the obstacles you’ve hit in getting people to understand what Sustainable South Bronx is trying to achieve?

I’m front-row center for so much of this, it’s like living and working in an environmental-justice community. We’re living in a city that professes to be one of the greenest cities in the world, and it’s just not true when it gets right down to it. When you look at “the shining jewel” of New York City, which is Manhattan, you might see a nice, clean, shining jewel. Yes, it is clean. Yes, it is booming. Yes, it is lovely, you know? But, you have to ask the question: “Does Manhattan handle any of its own waste?”The answer would be “No.” If you ask the question: “Does it deal with any of its own power-generation needs?” The answer would be “No.” If you ask if it’s a place where you can find different people with mixed incomes living in one geographic area? The answer would be “No.”

How is that sustainable, especially for the other communities, when the outer boroughs of New York City are bearing the burdens of Manhattan’s glory? I find that kind of scary, when it gets right down to it.

It’s not just talking about New York City. I’m saying this for all over the country, because what we have in so many of our cities are many, many poor communities of all colors, that are struggling, and they’re being left out of much of these economic booms again. We’re trying to make the link between living and working, from health impacts of global warming and poverty, and even prisons.

You know, when I say something like that, most folks will say, “Well, you need prisons.” And while that’s true, when you’ve got poverty, you’ve got diminished opportunities for employment. It’s easier for people to end up in jail because there are the attractions of the illegal economy. Combine that with lack of greenery, you have higher stress rates. You’ve got higher crime. You’ve got higher cost to government, businesses, and communities.

What we’re trying to do, in terms of green jobs, is link the two ideas of poverty alleviation and environment remediation so that they’re dependent on each other. And it helps to support the environment. The economic fabric of communities needs to be strong if we’re going to have strong communities. Our country is simply a bunch of communities all pushed together and we need them all to be strong.

This goes back to your point about holistic planning. Looking at New York City, how has Sustainable South Bronx gone about working with city and state government to achieve those holistic goals?

It’s difficult, because right now their idea of “holistic” is putting a Band-Aid on a gaping wound. For example, they’ll plant a whole bunch of trees, but many of those trees will die because we haven’t built in stewardship opportunities to support them. And as for quality of neighborhoods, even though we are living in an era of falling crime rates, the city is trying to build a huge 1,500-bed jail in the neighborhood! Up until very recently, they wanted to build it on a site that was a really wonderful place, a unique place in New York City. The area is 28 acres that had both barge and rail access, and it’s where we are actively pushing for an eco-industrial center, which is a collection of businesses that use recycled materials as raw materials.

So, here we are providing both economic development and solid-waste mitigation through what could be a beautiful facility and provide hundreds and hundreds of jobs. Fortunately, the city backed off that particular site, but they’re still hell-bent on building this jail.

We’ve got a really high unemployment rate here. We should be looking at people not as problems. We need to get people to think about quality of life and putting food on the table not in terms of selling a couple of bags of weed, but through opportunity and what’s out there for them. That is something that our city has to take responsibility for. It hasn’t.

So Sustainable South Bronx’s goals can be attained, but the city needs to get on board. That’s basically what you’re saying?

We need large-scale training opportunities. And by that, I mean, large-scale (laughs). I mean, believe me, we do great work in my agency, but it’s small, you know?

We are limited by the private dollars that we raise. However, if the city wants to make some real investments that could pay dividends back to the communities that had been formerly written off, it could invest in training people to do the kind of environmental services that are going to help them mitigate and manage their storm water. For instance, it would cost the city billions to install green roofs [on government buildings]. The city is going to need trained individuals to do energy audits. The communities and the city would be one step ahead of the game, and people would not have to be running around trying to make money in the underground economy.

And then, on top of all of that, you add the cost savings in terms of public health, because, again, if cities are cooler, well, you know the rest. Hotter places are point sources for greenhouse gases—like New York City. The hotter the areas are, the more asthma you have. So, why aren’t we working to cool our cities and making sure that all of those trees live!

I’m more concerned about the fact that there are huge public-health costs, because poor people do not pay for their own care. Somebody else does, whether it’s the city or the state, and we need to recognize the value of investing in people and the environment and at the same time try to recoup the benefits of making people a part of their own city development.

It would seem that, outlined logically as you have been trying to do all around the country, it should make perfect sense to a lot of folks. But are you finding it hard for government to respond enthusiastically in working with poorer neighborhoods?

The biggest obstacle is that investments in people like this are not considered important. We’ve got the commissioner of the Department of Corrections running around talking about how wonderful this jail is going to be. Also, who’s being held accountable for how crappy our schools are? Or figuring out ways that we can actually be supportive of people?

I think, when it comes right down to it, there are some people in our society who place different values on different people. In our communities, we’re not considered particularly valuable. It’s because—I believe—we are poor and because we are of color.

Because of that, certain things are thought about us, and there’s really not much we can do to deal with that other than the approach that we’re trying to do. It’s just the culture that we live in now. But it’s costing us. The social mores that we hold dear are costing us more than they are creating for us.

But I’m hoping that people start to realize that it is costing society as a whole, because these are the kind of things that you just don’t see in wealthier, whiter parts of the city. These are things that are obviously not in our best interest as a society.

So “Greening the Ghetto,” to use the Sustainable South Bronx term, is far more than fixing up waterfronts and creating jobs. It’s a way of life.

Just look at all of the research and the information that’s out there. If you green up cities, then you have healthier places—physically, spiritually, and economically. We need to look at everything that we’re doing in that context, particularly our cities, but everywhere, quite frankly.

But the roots of this country I think run really deep, and I do think the value that’s placed on poor people and poor people of color is really not that high.

You’re saying that you have to look at the big picture, but when you put it like that, there must be some people in the communities you’re working with who are simply overwhelmed by this prospect.

You’re right (laughs). Four hundred years of this and then Majora Carter from the Bronx is going to try to deal with it. It drives me a little crazy sometimes, I’ll admit.

How do you get people to think positively about this?

The same way that we’re trying to get our city and our state and anybody, you know, who’s looking at us to look at us differently. We try to help them see how developing their neighborhoods and being a part of the green economy will benefit them.

Human beings might not be that smart about supporting their own or preserving their species, but we’re pretty cool at understanding how this going to benefit us. And by “us,” I mean “me, myself and I.” And don’t forget that we did a really wonderful thing with the waste facility, when, at first it was just Guiliani telling people that he wants to build another waste facility. Back then, I remember hearing the resignation in people’s voices, people saying “Well, it’s the South Bronx. Clearly you’ve been away for a while, little girl. This is what happens here.”

And maybe I was away for a little while, and didn’t get it. But when we help people understand the links between their kids’ health and the waste facilities that were already here, they were like, “Oh, we’re not gonna let another one get built here,” and then the city got that.

Are you finding that contractors or specialists in the green economies are picking up the workers that you are training?

It’s a daily game, literally. We have to work to talk to potential employers about their needs and what they consider valuable in an employee. We have to work that way and see what they’re doing so we can make sure that we have the best possible person out there for folks.

Describe the job-training program.

It’s a 10-week program that we run three times a year. We can handle up to 20 people per semester, and the students learn skills in a variety of fields from urban forestry management to green roof installation, from wetland and stream-bank restoration to brownfield remediation. Graduating students get two certifications in cleaning up contaminated land safely. They also get a whole bunch of other certifications, everything from first aid and CPR.

It’s a pretty intensive program, but what’s really important is the fact that we try really hard to work on the development of life skills, because so many of the folks that come through our program had actually never worked; many of them were formerly incarcerated. These are not folks with the best job skills out there, and so we have to teach things like getting up on time and so forth.

It’s important for workers to understand that they’re not lone wolves when they go out on a job. We need to be helping people deal with some of the really antisocial behavior that has often become perfectly acceptable in our communities. It’s a really difficult thing, but many people really struggle to make sure that folks realize that they don’t have to be like that. So, the soft skills, or life skills, as we like to call them, are really important for us to learn and teach our young people.

Are employers hesitant to get on board?

No. Everything that we do is seriously all about building relationships. So we have to talk to the employers, because much of the work doesn’t really require a college education, but base-level training. We’re finding that most employers are thrilled to have an employee who will show up on time, understands how to be part of a team, and has a basic knowledge in horticultural infrastructure and stuff like that. And that’s what we know we can give folks, which is really great.

We’re not asking anybody to make amends for our people. We are training our folks to compete and be marketable. We’re not asking for any handouts. We’re not asking for them to accept second best. We can’t do that. We fully expect our people to be able to explore and do really well. We’re expecting them to have aspirations in their thinking and for their own career. Most folks who come to us are adults. This program is not for anybody under 18. As a matter of fact, we find that the best people in our program are in their mid-30s.

Let’s end on a political note. What kind of dialogue would you like to see during the upcoming presidential elections?

I don’t think any of the candidates truly understand what the green economy can mean for our communities. People are still looking at it from more of a mainstream kind of environmental perspective, which doesn’t really include the capacity to develop poor communities and to bring them into this economy. It is much, much more about the elite. And I think even all of the candidates, to some extent, are more influenced by that.

However, I think that the capacity for change is more heightened. I think in Obama there is a willingness to really explore new things. I think he’ll be a much quicker study and won’t be afraid to make the kind of changes that we need on a federal level to support a green economy, because it’s not just going to be groups like Sustainable South Bronx that are doing wonderful green-collar job-training programs.

We need to make sure that there are federal investments. I’m calling it the Green New Deal that actually supports the kind of major investment incentives that support the birth, the maintenance, and the growth of the green economy with results that are from the top down and the bottom up. We are looking to close the gap between rich and poor, and making life green for all—the name of the group that I co-founded along with Van Jones.

This requires the vigorous advocacy and public relations campaigns that both you and Mr. Jones have embarked on.

Yes. It’s a punishing schedule (laughs). But it’s not a pie-in-the-sky kind of thing. This is a really beautiful way to make these things happen.

Published by the National Housing Institute