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Opinion

Earth Day Expectations for Mayor De Blasio


de blasio queens silver presser

photo: Ed Reed/Mayor's Office


The foundation of our city is strong neighborhoods. We’re unified by common values and impacted by similar trends, from the affordability crisis to a changing climate. But each part of the city is its own living, breathing organism with a unique history, and its own set of needs.

Mayor de Blasio has visionary goals to create a stronger, more just city neighborhood by neighborhood, but he also knows these goals won’t come easy or cheap. As the mayor gears up to release his first progress report on his ambitious blueprint to reduce our city’s carbon emissions, here are five things he can do right now that will go a long way toward sustainability and livability:

Cut commute times for New Yorkers with the longest journeys to work. As a candidate, Mayor de Blasio promised 20 new select bus service routes by 2017. So far we have achieved nine, and of those six were operational by the time he took office. In parts of the outer boroughs, transit deserts make commuting via public transportation a huge challenge. A robust SBS network will take cars off the road and improve quality of life for transit-starved New Yorkers.

Ensure that every New Yorker can walk to a well-maintained neighborhood park. Local parks are an essential part of the fabric of our community. Not only do they boost resiliency, but they improve public health by encouraging people to get outside for recreation. Increasing the parks budget from 0.5 percent of city’s overall budget to its historic funding level of 1 percent would mean capital projects get done sooner, and that we have the necessary workers to maintain these spaces.

Expand access to healthy produce in low-income neighborhoods. New York creates a bounty of fresh produce from apples to potatoes to yogurt. The problem is, many of these fresh, local foods do not make it to low-income neighborhoods. An expansion of the NYC Green Carts initiative would help small farmers stay in business, reduce emissions from transporting food, and create healthier communities.

Make green installation easier for homeowners. Permits and regulations for green technologies can be complex and overwhelming. A one-stop-shop permitting process within the Department of Buildings should handle all alternative energy applications: solar thermal, solar photovoltaic, or geothermal and green infrastructure such as green roofs or other water retention design.

Reduce single-use throw-away litter. The carry-out bag legislation being considered by the City Council can make a significant difference in reducing consumption and consequently litter from single-use bags. Getting them out of the environment means fewer clogged storm drains and polluted waterways, and cleaner streets and parks.

Goalposts such as reducing emissions 80 percent by 2050 or getting to zero waste to landfills by 2030 can seem daunting because they’re so big and so far away. The only way to reach these goals is to break them down into incremental milestones. These are five things the city can do right now. They don’t need to be studied and they’re not reliant on technologies that haven’t reached scalability.

New York City is the place of the possible. If we engage and empower New Yorkers to pitch in and work together toward our common goals, we know we can stay on the right track to take them from vision to reality.

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Marcia Bystryn is president of The New York League of Conservation Voters. On Twitter: @nylcv.

Making New York Public Housing Sustainable


nycha presser photo

(photo: Demetrius Freeman/Mayor's Office)


The New York City Housing Authority is the nation’s largest residential landlord, providing permanently affordable housing to more than 400,000 low-income New Yorkers, many of whom would be homeless without public housing.

Like many public housing authorities around the country, NYCHA has its critics. Stories of poor living conditions, safety concerns, and health hazards often grab headlines, and rightly so. That’s why housing authority leaders must respond with real, innovative solutions to maintain a decent standard of living.

That’s exactly what the housing authority is doing on Earth Day with the release of the NextGeneration NYCHA Sustainability Agenda. It’s high time that NYCHA take full advantage of—and residents benefit from—the cost savings, health improvements and climate change protections associated with sustainable buildings. This is a bold plan to make that happen.

It comes at a pivotal time for New Yorkers who live in public housing. Years of federal and state funding cuts have left the housing authority with a backlog of needed repairs totaling more than $17 billion. NYCHA is continually forced to stretch its limited resources across a vast and aging portfolio, struggling to make even the most essential repairs in 2,550 buildings throughout the five boroughs. The threat of losing apartments and whole developments to decay is real.

Making sure public housing in New York doesn’t shrink or disappear as it has in other cities will require that NYCHA take advantage of every tool at its disposal. The Sustainability Agenda represents big-picture thinking on a range of new programs, from deep energy retrofits and distributed energy systems to improved staff training and resident-owned business opportunities.

We have evidence that it is possible to bring the health, environmental, and economic benefits of environmentally sustainable building to low-income communities through affordable housing.

Since 2004, Enterprise Community Partners, a national affordable housing nonprofit with a longstanding presence in New York City, has led the charge in making affordable housing environmentally sustainable, healthy, and resilient through its Enterprise Green Communities Criteria, the first national framework for creating and preserving green affordable housing.

The New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) requires all city-subsidized affordable housing that is either newly built or undergoing substantial rehabilitation to meet these criteria. Importantly, NYCHA’s Sustainability Agenda will bring this same standard to public housing developments in New York.

As part of the Sustainability Agenda, NYCHA has taken a targeted approach to identify and incorporate the most effective strategies for creating healthy environments for its residents. For example, investments in roof repairs and modernizing ventilation will eliminate a substantial cause of mold, greatly improving resident health. Children with asthma will experience fewer attacks and missed school days, improving education outcomes and helping them graduate on time. According to new research from Enterprise and the Center for Outcomes Research and Education (CORE), healthy affordable housing also improves health care access and quality while reducing costs.

Through investments in environmentally sustainable infrastructure, NYCHA will also help protect residents from the impacts of climate change. By 2025, it anticipates a 27 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from its buildings. And all of this will come with an eye toward creating quality green jobs for residents, while helping the city achieve its overall climate goals at the same time.

To be sure, achieving these goals will require additional funding upfront, though analysis of the Enterprise Green Communities Criteria has shown that sustainable buildings save money in the long run, both in building operating costs and in health improvements for residents.

The Sustainability Agenda will bring an entirely new set of private resources and community-based partnerships to the Housing Authority, but will also require support from all levels of government. Repairing the well-known decay in our public housing properties could be financed with help from New York State. That’s why a group of affordable housing and tenant advocates have called on Albany lawmakers to step up to the plate. Public housing should also be a major topic in the presidential election.

The benefits of the Sustainability Agenda—to the housing authority, its residents and the city as a whole—far outweigh the costs. As a part of the larger NextGeneration NYCHA plan, it will help preserve public housing, set the authority on the path to financial solvency and improve NYCHA’s ability to be an effective landlord.

Public housing in New York must be preserved. Although positive change in public housing doesn’t get as much attention as its struggles, NYCHA is making great strides to ensure that children who live in public housing have a safe, healthy place to grow up and the opportunity to thrive.

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Judi Kende is vice president and New York market leader at Enterprise Community Partners, Inc., a national organization that creates, preserves and advocates for affordable housing linked to good schools, jobs, transit and health care. On Twitter @JudiKende and @Enterprise_NYC.

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New York Must Invest in a More Inclusive Citi Bike Expansion


citi bike photo empty

photo via @CitiBikeNYC


Spring is upon us, and with the warmer weather come more bike commuters. Luckily, Citi Bike completed Phase I of its expansion plan this winter, meaning residents of Williamsburg, Greenpoint, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Long Island City will be able to zip around town on two wheels. By 2017, Phase II of the expansion will be complete, and residents of Astoria, Harlem, and the neighborhoods around Prospect Park in Brooklyn will be able to join the cycling revolution.

With this expansion, Citi Bike claims to diversify its user base. However, in looking at Citi Bike’s expansion plan, a clear pattern emerges – Citi Bike’s growth follows the migration trends of the young, affluent, and (mostly) white in the city.

Take Bed-Stuy, for example, where Citi Bike added 26 new docking stations in September 2015. In 2000, Bed-Stuy was only 1.4% white, but by 2010 the population was 10.9% white.As of 2014, the neighborhood jumped to 18.7% white. On the other hand, in the South Bronx, where Citi Bike has no current plans to expand, the population is only 1.6% white.

Rather than expanding to underserved neighborhoods throughout the city, Citi Bike is following the population flow of the upwardly mobile. Its expansion plan excludes huge swaths of the city, especially people of color living in the outer boroughs, people who would arguably benefit most from more transportation alternatives.

Mayor de Blasio has heralded Citi Bike as an extension of the city’s public transportation system, ostensibly providing New Yorkers with more options to meet their daily transit needs. But, if the city were truly to incorporate Citi Bike as part of a broader, more equitable transportation system, docking stations would be placed strategically throughout the city to better connect all residents - of all income levels and racial and ethnic demographics. For example, the expansion plan would include efforts to spread Citi Bike to Flushing, a neighborhood of mainly low-income Asian immigrants, served by a single subway stop. Instead, the bikes are concentrated in wealthier areas already with great public transportation coverage.

Bike sharing has many benefits. It is a convenient alternative when subways are running late or there are construction closings of lines or stations. It can serve as “last mile” transportation for people who live beyond the reach of subway or bus service. Carbon-free and heart-healthy, it is good for both people and the environment. It can introduce the otherwise-sedentary to a physically active lifestyle.

For all these reasons, bike sharing could be a huge boon to people in low-income neighborhoods with few public transportation options. However, Citi Bike has chosen not to put docking stations in these areas, and residents do not reap the benefits. Citi Bike cannot be used as a “last mile” alternative because there are no docking stations located at or beyond the end of any subway lines in the outer boroughs, where transit options are scarce.

Low-income residents cannot ride home when their trains are not running because there are no docking stations in their neighborhoods. When the L-train inevitably closes for repairs, people in Williamsburg will be able to hop on a Citi Bike, but residents of neighborhoods at the far Brooklyn end of the subway line, in East New York and Brownsville, will have no such option to make up for this transit shortfall.

Citi Bike’s pricing and marketing also send signals that it is only meant for certain groups of people (read: white, affluent). Citi Bike – owned and operated by Motivate, a private, for-profit company, and sponsored by Citi Bank, MasterCard, and Goldman Sachs – implicitly excludes low-income residents and people of color.

In order to buy a Citi Bike membership, users must have access to a credit card, which many low-income residents do not. Even if users do have access to credit, an annual membership costs $155, making it prohibitively expensive for many New Yorkers. There are reduced annual memberships at $60 for NYCHA residents and members of select Community Development Credit Unions, but this is still a difficult fee for people struggling to pay their rent and other bills. Citi Bikes are plastered with ads for Citi Bank and MasterCard, which screams, “These bikes are only for people who can afford these brands!”

Despite what Mayor de Blasio and Citi Bike’s owners say, neither Motivate nor the city government are trying very hard to provide Citi Bike access to all New Yorkers.

If Mayor de Blasio is going to use Citi Bike as a tool to achieve his vision of one New York City for all, the government must invest public funds in Citi Bike equity. Investing in Citi Bike will give the city more control over the system’s expansion, ensuring that all five boroughs are included. The government must sway the marketing strategy and pricing structure, making Citi Bike more inviting to people of color and the city’s low-income residents. Only when the city exercises more control over where and how Citi Bike grows can we celebrate it as an extension of our public transportation system.

If the city does not make a financial investment in Citi Bike and exert more decision-making power over the system’s expansion, it will continue to only follow the money. Instead of seeing a line cook cycling home from the end of the A-train in a couple of years, we’ll see another twenty-something riding to a new bar in “up-and-coming” Crown Heights.

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Elizabeth Johnson is a Master of Public Administration candidate, studying Urban and Social Policy at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.

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