Famed chef Daniel Boulud expects his patrons to drink wine with their dinners. So when he was planning his Restaurant Daniel on East 65th Street, he applied for a liquor license. This apparently inflamed some of his neighbors. They protested that the Upper East Side would be overtaken by alcoholic abandon, as well as double-parked limousines.
Also on the Upper East Side, Woody Allen and his neighbors have been fighting Citibank's plan for a residential tower above its Carnegie Hill branch, saying it would destroy the neighborhood's character - and a prime film set. Testifying before the community board, Allen said, "I've always filmed in Carnegie Hill because it's one of the great small neighborhoods." Citibank has scaled back its plans, but not enough to make it fit in with the filmmaker's next production; Woody Allen testified against the new plan in City Hall.
In Queens these days, it is neither new restaurants nor new residences that have been inspiring the most ire from community groups. It is new schools. Although Queens has the most overcrowded schools in the city, opponents are attacking one proposed new school because it would add to congestion and another because (surprise) it would attract kids.
It is called "Not In My Backyard," or, simply, NIMBY, and it is everywhere in New York. This is a city, says David Lutz, executive director of the Neighborhood Open Space Coalition, where "no good idea goes unopposed." And no bad idea either.
People fight facilities that, they say, should not be anywhere, such as sex-related businesses -- and facilities that they say should be everywhere (except on their block), such as schools. They oppose projects that are generally viewed as needed but undesirable, such as homeless shelters and methadone maintenance centers. But some have been fighting parks. The battles that have been getting the most attention lately are those over new power plants, and over new places for our thousands of tons of daily garbage.
No one would argue that every facility conceived by any developer or politician should be built. But many fear that the balance has tipped too far against change. City Councilman John Sabini, chair of the council's siting subcommittee, says that government officials are reluctant to propose anything new. "We are not rewarded for proposing change in our neighborhoods."
Politicians are caught between demands from competing groups of constituents -- parents clamoring for smaller classes versus homeowners who see teenagers as a threat to their quality of life. Caught in this quandary Queens Borough President Claire Shulman has virtually begged for help.
"I don't mind taking heat from a neighborhood that doesn't want a school," she told community leaders "But please support us, because it is difficult enough as it is."
Some say that NIMBY, as a phrase if not a movement, began throughout America in the 1960's, as communities moved to take mentally ill people out of institutions and place them in small group homes.
"Nobody wanted such a group home in their backyard," writes Brenda McCormick. "They didn't want this population around their children. And NIMBY - not in my backyard - was coined."
High land costs and community opposition have made it so difficult to site schools throughout the country that many districts place them on abandoned landfills and industrial sites or next to other polluting facilities, according to a recent report by a coalition of environmental groups.
Opposition to new development is blamed for shortages of affordable housing in many cities. On the Long Island Expressway, NIMBY objections to a public comfort station force many motorists to drive the 60 miles to Riverhead in discomfort if not distress.
But perhaps the most arresting example comes from North Hollywood, where some residents favor alcohol over academia. A proposed school, property owner Guy Weddington McCreary told the Los Angeles Times would be "a knife in the back of the business district. We won't be allowed to have a liquor license close to a school. That will kill our night life."
Given New York's diversity and lack of space, NIMBY thrives here. According to one article, naysayers gained strength with the development of community boards. Although the boards' votes are merely advisory, they have influence over other government agencies and the city councilmembers who appoint them. Then too, New York's maze of laws helps activists to use lawsuits to delay or block almost anything.
NIMBY is one of those terms people never use to describe themselves. Instead, opponents present altruistic arguments to bolster their positions. A high rise would alter the architectural character of the neighborhood. School children should not have to cross a busy thoroughfare to get to school.
However valid the arguments, the other side tries to shoot them down with an accusation of NIMBYism, which has become a common pejorative:
"This is the usual NIMBY stuff that you face in New York City," Mayor Rudy Giuliani said last year dismissing critics of a proposed minor league baseball stadium in Queens.
At a forum for candidates for Manhattan borough president in 1997, one candidate accused another of appointing a "notorious NIMBY." to a community board.
An organization promoting needle exchange has distributed leaflets telling its supporter "How to deal with NIMBY opposition."
The charge has been raised in a range of recent battles, fairly or not:
Although the city has been adding new classrooms, some 53 percent of the public schools remain overcrowded, according to a survey by the Public Advocate. The crowding is particularly bad in Queens where classes frequently have 35 to 40 students. Officials say solving the problem is a priority, but they face a number of obstacles: money, staff shortages and, sometimes, community opposition.
Last year, residents of Maspeth attempted to block the building of a school, with some going so far as to say they'd rather see a Staples store on the Grand Avenue site. "We have too many schools in the neighborhood," resident Ralph Carbone was quoted as telling a city council subcommittee. "When school gets out, the kids destroy the neighborhood, graffiti, everything."
Sabini, whose subcommittee has to vote on school sitings, has said such problems arise partly because "there are no good sites left in the city. They've been taken."
But observers note that they can also reveal generational and ethnic divides. People whose children are already grown don't want to see an influx of young people, many of whom are the children of immigrants, in their community. In fact, in opposing the Maspeth school, one resident wrote, "We do not wish to become immigration's roadkill."
The Maspeth school is being built, but other controversies continue. One involves Queens College's proposal for a permanent home for a school on its campus focused on math and science for kindergarten through eighth grade. The school currently uses mobile classrooms on the campus
Queens College spokesman Ron Cannava said the college has tried to mollify the naysayers. But, he said, there continues to be "a small group of people finding another reason and another reason to object." Some of these opponents, he thinks, simply "feel very comfortable with the status quo," while others are against "anything in their community that is not exclusively for members of their community." The school would accept youngsters from all over Queens.
Arthur Alex, president of the Kew Garden-North Homeowners Association, has said his group is committed to stopping the school from being built anywhere on the campus. Citing increased traffic from school buses, as well as a need for parking spaces for staff, Alex charges the school could bring "untold environmental problems" to the community.
The closing of Fresh Kills landfill has sent some 13,000 tons of residential garbage a day to 13 waste transfer stations. There the refuse is taken off sanitation trucks, compacted and loaded on to other trucks that will take it to landfills outside New York. Not surprisingly, it's a dirty business, with diesel fumes from the trucks mixing with foul odors from the garbage.
Mark Izeman of the Natural Resource Defense Council, an environmental group, says such facilities "are among the most detested and unwanted land uses in the city." And they are concentrated in a few neighborhoods, largely poor and minority areas of the Bronx and Brooklyn.
Many of these communities are also slated for power plants, leading to charges of environmental racism -- the concentration of polluting facilities in poor and minority communities. Rather, such critics say, neighborhoods throughout the city should receive their fair share of the goods and the bads.
Eddie Bautista, a lawyer representing Williamsburg groups fighting power plants, has said, "It's NIMBY when communities that are not overloaded environmentally don't want a facility that's polluting in their community because of property values. . . .There's a clear difference between that and areas where there is worse air quality and higher asthma rates."
In her article on siting waste facilities in New York, Juliana Maantay, an assistant professor of environmental and urban geography at Lehman College, argues the issue is not only which neighborhood should accept a dirty plant. Instead, she argues, solutions, such as improved technology, should eliminate or reduce "the need for these noxious uses. So, she says, "Not in My Backyard (NIMBY) must become 'Not in Anybody's Back Yard (NIABY).'"
PARKS
"I'm very surprised when people say 'we don't want a park in our neighborhood,'" says David Lutz of the Neighborhood Open Space Coalition. But some people do.
Plans for a new Brooklyn Bridge Park are going ahead but not without drawing opposition from some Brooklyn Height residents who, wrote Julian Barnes, "fear the park will attract hordes of people from outside the neighborhood to the narrow streets of well-preserved brownstones." While some residents say they object to traffic and congestion, their critics argue that the Brooklyn Heights residents really fear less affluent blacks and Hispanics from elsewhere in Brooklyn.
In the Bronx some residents decided not to link to a greenway because says Lutz, "The community to the north is scared of the community to the south."
Proposals for huge retail "superstores" and multiplex theaters have spurred heated battles throughout the city. Toys 'R' Us lost a bid for a store at 80th Street and Third Avenue, Pathmark encountered opposition as it attempted to place a store in Harlem, and people in Brooklyn are already preparing for a showdown over a possible Ikea store near the Gowanus canal.
Tonier development has its opponents too. Soho residents have opposed a new, small hotel on Thompson Street, acting, Deride Shaw observed in the Observer, like "an army of Erin Brockoviches -- except they were lacking any pitiful tale."
Whether power plants or power bistros, toilets or toy stores, homeless shelters or elegant hotels, NIMBY was here.
A man dressed all in black stood beneath the black and white plumes of smoke rising from a power plant. He was wearing a gas mask. Another man carried a blue-faced puppet -- blue for lack of breath -- with an asthma inhaler stuck in its mouth. Other protesters banged on pots and pans and toted signs that read: "Con Ed Let Me Breathe."
They were protesting Con Edison's plan to increase power production at its East River power plant, located on 14th Street between Avenues C and D. Power is being increased there to make up for the energy lost because the company is shutting down completely another plant further uptown, just south of the United Nations. Con Ed sold that plant and some surrounding property last year to private developers, for $680 million.
Since the plant being shut down is in a rich neighborhood, with a large population of white residents, and the plant being expanded is in a poor neighborhood, with a large population of people of color, the shift seems the clearest possible example to the protesters of what they call environmental racism.
Environmental racism is the charge that hangs over a better known power play as well, the effort by the New York Power Authority to build six new temporary power plants in New York City by June 1. Protesters of that effort say that the plants are going up only in low-income and minority neighborhoods, drawing more pollution to areas that already have more than their fair share.
The decision makers reply that none of these decisions have anything to do with environmental racism, and everything to do with efficiently avoiding a crippling energy crisis this summer. Con Edison says that its plan to expand the East River plant will actually reduce pollution overall. State energy officials and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani say the choice of sites for the six new plants had nothing to do with discrimination; they are all in industrial areas that were readily available and had connections to gas and electric lines.
As the weather heats up and the humidity builds, so does the debate over where to place new power plants, what to do with the older, dirtier ones, and how much energy policy should take into account the environment of particular neighborhoods.
HOT IN THE CITY
New York's demand for electricity is at an all-time high. Over the past four years alone, the demand has increased so sharply it is as if the city has suddenly been asked to provide electricity for 700,000 new households.
Everybody agrees that the increased demand is causing a strain, and has to be addressed. Conservationists argue that alternative energy sources like solar and wind power should be tapped, and that steps should be taken to use more efficient technologies in everything from public buildings to streetlights. Most people in authority, however, say that new power plants are the answer.
Private companies are planning to build several large plants in low-income sections of the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens. Each plant will have over 1,000 megawatts capacity, enough to serve one million homes. (One megawatt is enough power to provide electricity to 1,000 homes). But these plants will not be put into use for at least three years.
In the meantime, the New York Power Authority has broken ground on several of six new plants around the city. (A seventh plant is being built in Islip, on Long Island). The plants, which will cost a total of $510 million, will house 11 natural gas turbines in windowless metal buildings. Two plants with two turbines each have been sited within four blocks of each other in the South Bronx. A few other plants will also have two turbines.
The Power Authority's plans have evoked outrage from mayoral candidates, borough presidents, members of Congress, members of the City Council, and community activists of all kinds. Opponents say the agency avoided environmental reviews in an attempt to speed up construction. They did this, the critics charge, in the most blatant of ways: Any generator is subject to environmental review and community comment if it produces 80 megawatts of power; the Power Authority's generators would each generate 79.9 megawatts.
Opponents charge that the siting process also has discriminated against low-income and minority communities. They now point to a report from Governor Pataki's office, leaked to the press last month, which makes clear that the state was aware that new plants are being built exclusively in low income and minority neighborhoods.
IN THE COURTS
Earlier this month, the opponents of the power plants thought they had scored a coup in court. A State Supreme Court judge in Queens ordered the Power Authority to halt construction on one of the plants, intended to house two turbines on the Long Island City waterfront, until a full environmental review is completed. The judge said that the agency needs to take "a hard look" at several environmental issues, including the effect of digging up old pollutants and the impact of the plant on the neighborhood's residents and businesses. The case was brought by local politicians and Silvercup Studios, a film and television production company with plans to build another studio on a parcel next to the new generator.
But last week an appellate court judge ruled that construction should continue while an appellate panel reviews the case. The panel's decision is expected early this week.
And just two days after the judge in Queens issued his ruling, a State Supreme Court judge in Brooklyn ruled against a coalition of neighborhood groups who made similar arguments in challenging the rest of the plants. The judge said the power authority could continue construction, and that it had not violated any environmental laws in choosing the sites.
Mayor Giuliani, an adamant supporter of immediate plant construction, was elated. The Power Authority declared vindication.
The other side was not pleased. "The decision sends a message the process can be manipulated and maneuvered to ram projects through, particularly in low income communities or communities of color," said Gail Suchman, a lawyer with New York Lawyers for the Public Interest who represented the plaintiffs.
Some opponents of the sitings say that the power authority may indeed not have been in violation of the laws, as the Brooklyn judge concluded, but that the laws themselves are riddled with loopholes. The Department of Environmental Conservation is not even required to look at the impact of soot, charges Mathy Stanislaus, vice-chairman at the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance. Soot, or fine particulate matter, causes asthma and other respiratory illnesses. Children and the elderly are particularly susceptible to it. So to Stanislaus, it makes a gruesome kind of logic for the authorities not even to consider how much soot exists in a neighborhood already and how much would be generated from any new plants there. "If you don't look at it, you don't have to deny a permit or modify a project."
FEEDING THE BEAST
Giuliani says New York is facing "a real emergency." He has warned that the city will suffer blackouts and brownouts this summer if the plants are not built.
He is supported by state energy officials. The New York Independent Systems Operator, the agency set up after deregulation to oversee the state's network of electricity lines, says in mid-summer the city could fall short by about 400 megawatts, enough to affect 400,000 homes.
Power plant proponents say the city cannot buy enough energy from outside suppliers to meet peak demand. The city, which already imports about one-quarter of its energy, could potentially look to upstate or other out-of-town generators. But the grid that serves the metropolitan area consists of old, heavily trafficked transmission lines. Bottlenecks make it very difficult to bring in power on especially hot days, when the extra energy is needed most.
Most experts, however, do not believe there will be blackouts if the new plants are not built. What is likely, they say, is a price surge. Indeed, some who oppose the plant sitings contend that the energy crisis stems not from a shortage of supply but from an ineffective deregulation plan that allows generators to overcharge just when demand is highest.
"Last summer, the governor's plan for deregulation did not prevent price-gouging," Mathy Stanislaus says. "Rather than deal with price manipulation, he's dealing with artificially-created excess supply. We went from a highly structured system, where you have to show the need for power, to an open door. We're all asking: 'What's the plan, here?'"
Before deregulation, state energy officials fed surplus power from one area to another area in need. Now, those channels are controlled by private power merchants who sell to the highest bidder. Last summer energy imports clogged up on hot days, and local generators upped their prices. Consumers wound up paying an extra $100 million for air conditioning.
The state and city seem to be improvising their way through New York's transition to a completely deregulated market. The new plants were originally intended to be temporary, and the state environmental agency issued three-year permits for their operation. Yet, the plants may not disappear after their first term, admits Eugene Zeltmann, president of the Power Authority. Zeltmann reported to the state Assembly that the plants might be sold to private owners, who would charge whatever they could get. The Power Authority, on the other hand, says it will charge only enough to recover its costs. Zeltmann also said there may be more small plants on the way next year.
THE TALE OF TWO PLANTS
The fight over Con Ed's plan to shift power production from midtown to the Lower East Side has been getting less attention than that over the new power plants, but in some ways it is a better story.
Con Ed's Waterside plant, the steam station located just south of the United Nations, is a century-old relic from the city's industrial past. As late as 1946, it was surrounded by a visual cesspool of slaughterhouses, meatpackers and cattle pens. But, following a neighborhood regeneration instigated more than 50 years ago by legendary developer William "Big Bill" Zeckendorf -- perhaps best known for negotiating the deal that led to the Rockerfeller family's donation of land to the United Nations -- the old plant is now surrounded by a spate of high-priced highrises, including the 35-story Rivergate, the 44-story Horizon condominiums, and the 57-story Corinthian, which stands catercorner. The developers who purchased the plant -- a team that includes the Fisher family and Morgan Stanley Dean Witter -- intend to demolish the plant and build luxury highrises, hotels and upscale chain stores in its stead.
The East River facility comprises a large brick building with four smokestacks rising more than 350 feet in the air on the north side of 14th Street, and a square block of transistors and large-scale wiring on the south side. Situated on the fringe of the continuously gentrifying but decidedly lowrise East Village, it is surrounded by city housing projects and gut-renovated tenements. The neighborhood comprises about 20 percent low income families, and about 20 percent people of color, and has the second highest rate of asthma in the city. The plant itself has been out of compliance with environmental regulations for five years. The New York Public Interest Research Group has listed it as one of the highest polluting plants in the state.
Under New York's gas-and-electric deregulation scheme, Con Ed, the city's long-time monopoly, has been unloading its power plants on energy companies who want to compete in the new free markets. Waterside is the only plant that has been sold to a private developer.
To make up for steam lost at Waterside, Con Ed wants to install new steam and electricity generators on 14th Street. The repowered plant would produce three million pounds of steam/hour and 360 megawatts of electricity. Waterside currently produces 2.4 million pounds of steam and 163 megawatts of electricity.
The protesters call the move environmental racism because the damages caused by siting the industrial pollution will be suffered disproportionately by poor people or people of color. "You look where air emissions are going to be reduced, where increased, and you look at the consequence of that shift as a whole," Mathy Stanislaus explains.
Susan Steinberg, president of the East River Environmental Coalition, a group created to resist Con Ed's plan, says increasing production on 14th Street without first cleaning up there is an injustice. In a lawsuit before the state Public Service Commission's Siting Board, Steinberg claims the company failed to consider alternative sites for its new generator, as it should have done. She suggests that Con Ed look to an existing plant on 74th Street and a piece of land in Kips Bay to share the load. She says Con Ed should raise its smokestacks, stop using diesel fuel in the old part of the plant and install cleaner technologies before pushing ahead with any expansion.
The company insists East River is the only viable option. It says the 74th Street site is too small, and that the Kips Bay site was sold as part of the real estate deal. The Siting Board has ruled that an investigation of the uptown site is required, and that the sale of the Kips Bay site, which depends on government approval, is not yet a done deal.
The utility has promised to use clean, natural gas technology. Chris Olert, a spokesman, says "the equipment going into East River is state-of-the-art. We're not adding any more smokestacks. This is a super environmentally-friendly project." Con Ed says the city will see a 10 to 25 percent reduction in air pollution from what it was when the two plants were running. In addition, Con Ed maintains that closing Waterside and upping production at the 14th Street plant will result in more office and housing space, more access to the East River for midtown residents, increased tax revenues and rate stability for customers.
Their opponents are unmoved. "In every instance those [other plants] are in areas where people have greater income, and the land values are greater," says Susan Steinberg. "We object to the fact that our neighborhood is being slammed with pollution. We want Con Ed to realize that our community is not going to go away, and we're not going to take this sitting down. We want them to do something about that plant."
Related Links
When the great mountain at the Fresh Kills landfill in Staten Island closed down, the piles of garbage in waste transfer stations started to rise. At the same time, street level traffic around the storage facilities picked up considerably. Some of the stations are located in isolated industrial areas. But others are in residential neighborhoods. The increased truck traffic, residents and community leaders say, is putting people there at risk of serious illness.
The city argues that it has to move its garbage. Fresh Kills, the city's last in-house refuge for refuse, handled 13,000 to 15,000 tons of residential trash everyday. Trucks would carry the stuff to city-owned collection sites on the water, where barges would pick it up and carry it to the landfill. Now, 13 private, land-based stations which formerly contracted only for commercial rubbish are handling the far more personal tonnage, doubling their daily intake. The stations are basically warehouses which serve as motels for garbage on its way to landfills in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia and other points west. The city now exports 100 percent of its trash.
The transfer stations are located in the same communities as the new power plants presently under contruction - the South Bronx, and Williamsburg and Greenpoint in Brooklyn, for example - and there have been similar charges of environmental racism. Congressmembers Jose Serrano of the Bronx and Nydia Velazquez of Brooklyn have both filed civil rights complaints over the high number of waste transfer sites in low-income and minority neighborhoods in their districts.
With the increased number of diesel trucks carrying garbage to and from the stations, people are seeing more and more soot clogging the air. The U.S Environmental Protection Agency has concluded that there is a link between the tiniest particles of soot - those below 2.5 microns in diameter (a human hair is 100 microns) - and thousands of premature deaths nationwide each year. The microscopic bits of soot are the product of emissions from power plants and vehicles. Diesel trucks are among the worst ground-level polluters. The particles lodge deep in the lungs, causing asthma and other respiratory illnesses. Studies have shown both a higher death rate and an increased incidence of children entering hospitals with asthma attacks in areas with high levels of small soot.
The agency has issued a report that reviewed more than 3,000 scientific studies conducted since new national air quality standards were proposed in 1997, and found need for change. The new standards would limit concentrations of particles smaller than 2.5 microns to an average of 15 micrograms per cubic meter measured for three years in a row. The existing standards have limits of particles 10 microns and smaller, but not on the smallest ones. A final report is expected around the end of summer.
Residents in neighborhoods burdened with the stations have more complaints than air pollution. The plants cause severe odor and noise problems as well. Yet, they will stay in action. The city's long-term plan for putting residential garbage back on the water is not expected to kick into gear for up to five years. Until then, it is most likely that all of the city's residential and commercial waste will pass through these stations. And even then, they may start to import trash from Long Island and other areas.
Michael Burger is a freelance writer and native New Yorker. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, The Earth Times, Terrain, Artbyte, and other magazines."