Wiped Out by the “Greenwave”: Environmental Gentrification and the Paradoxical Politics of Urban Sustainability

Environmental Gentrification and Urban Sustainability

Abstract

The essay examines the intersection of environmental justice activism and state-sponsored sustainable urban development. It questions how environmental justice activism is affected by rapid urban development and the language of sustainability.
The author introduces the concept of "environmental gentrification," where the successes of the environmental justice movement are used to benefit high-end development.
Environmental gentrification prioritizes profit over equity while appearing politically neutral.
The essay explores the challenges faced by urban residents in addressing economic and ecological disparities.

Introduction: The GreenX:Change in Harlem

In early January 2010, a public meeting was held at the New York Public Library’s 115th Street branch to discuss improving pedestrian life in Harlem through green initiatives.
The Harlem Community Development Corporation (HCDC) proposed the GreenX:Change, which involved closing off two blocks and expanding triangle parks to create a large green space.
The HCDC claimed the park would improve air quality and provide more breathing room for Harlem's dense population.
Local residents expressed skepticism, noting that the city only responded to park improvements after luxury condos were built nearby.
Some residents questioned who would profit from the project, while others worried about increased congestion and the impact on parking.
One resident suggested the need for an adult park instead of more play areas for children.
Green X:Change planners seemed surprised by the negative reactions.
The area had the lowest per capita green space in the borough and high poverty and asthma rates.
The Green X:Change was part of Mayor Bloomberg’s PlaNYC 2030, which aimed to create 480 new parks.
The project was intended to promote economic development and community revitalization.
Harlem was already experiencing economic development, with apartment sale prices rising significantly.
Long-term Harlemites were skeptical about who the project would benefit.

The Paradox of Sustainable Policies

Low-income residents are challenging sustainable policies that threaten their displacement in cities worldwide.
They face the dilemma of whether to reject environmental amenities to resist gentrification.
The essay examines what happens to environmental justice activism in the context of state-sponsored sustainable urban development.
The research is based on ethnographic research conducted in Harlem from 2007 to 2011.
The essay defines environmental gentrification and explores the challenges facing urban residents in addressing economic and ecological disparities.
It examines what happens to environmental justice activism when it meets state-sponsored sustainable urban development.

Defining Environmental Gentrification

Environmental gentrification is the convergence of urban redevelopment, ecological initiatives, and environmental justice activism in an era of advanced capitalism.
Environmental gentrification uses the language of sustainability to serve high-end redevelopment.
The efforts of environmental justice activists to improve their neighborhoods inadvertently attract affluent residents.
Environmental gentrification adopts a language of sustainability selectively.
The process subordinates equity to profit-minded development.
The author does not argue that environmental justice causes gentrification but examines the unintended consequences of environmental justice activism.
The essay explores how environmental justice activists navigate this paradoxical situation and the implications for urban planning and politics.
Efforts by low-income residents to improve their neighborhoods have been co-opted before, and positive discourses have masked unequal urban development.
Environmental gentrification is a recent iteration of old discourses about urban reform and revitalization, which masked inequitable urban development.
Environmental gentrification operates through a discourse of sustainability, which includes ecologically and socially responsible urban planning, a "green" lifestyle for affluent residents, and a politically neutral approach to solving environmental problems.
This reflects a move towards a "post-political" mode of governance, where policies are set forth by technocrats and compromise is reached in the guise of consensus (Žižek, 1999:198).
This consensus serves a neoliberal order where governments fail to address basic needs and subsidize the financial sector (Swyngedouw, 2007).
Environmental gentrification becomes a mode of “post-political” governance that avoids politics and separates sustainability from justice, disabling resistance.
The essay introduces New York City's sustainability plan, reviews scholarship on contradictions in sustainable urban planning, and examines the historic role of green space in urban redevelopment.
The essay shows how Harlem bore the brunt of Manhattan's toxic waste and how residents fought for environmental justice.
The neighborhood began to change with zoning changes and the rise of sustainability.
The essay examines how activists resisted the paradox of environmental gentrification.
Environmental gentrification moves community groups into a technocratic dialogue.
Sustainability planning becomes part of a post-political project based on technocratic deliberation and consensus, sidelining questions of real political inclusion and justice.

Selective Sustainability and Environmental Justice: An Ethnographic Account

On Earth Day 2007, Mayor Michael Bloomberg launched New York City’s PlaNYC 2030.
Sustainability had become a strategy for rebranding urban centers and attracting investment.
PlaNYC 2030 included 127 initiatives, ranging from affordable housing to park access to reducing citywide carbon emissions by 30 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.
Critics pointed out contradictions between the plan's goals and the city's redevelopment initiatives.
For example, the city planted one million street trees but also approved developments that destroyed existing trees.
The plan promoted biking and transit-oriented development but also encouraged car-based development projects.
New waterfront developments continued despite warnings about sea-level rise.
Rezoning measures resulted in an increase in high-end residential units.
The number of homeless families in New York City shelters reached record levels in 2010.
The plan was written by an independent consulting firm with minimal public input.
Economic and ecological disparities widened while municipal leaders promoted sustainability.
Emerging literature addresses the contradictory relationship of sustainable policies to inequitable urban redevelopment.
Hagerman (2007) found that new green spaces in Portland, Oregon, appealed to elitist visions of “liveability” while displacing low-income housing.
Pearsall and Pierce (2010) examined sustainability plans of 107 US cities and evaluated how many included environmental justice.
Finn and Mccormick (2011) studied climate change plans of three major US cities and found they failed to address equitable economic development and environmental justice.
Sustainability increasingly focuses on climate change and environmental amenities, overshadowing the issue of unequally distributed environmental burdens.
Macroscopic analysts connect critical sustainability studies with scholarship on an era of “post-politics.”
De-politicization characterizes the last few decades, with technocratic management and consensual policy-making disallowing spaces for conflictual politics (Swyngedouw 2009).
Diken and Laustsen (2004: 7) argue that everything is politicized but in a non-committal way.
Contemporary fixes to environmental issues, especially climate change, exemplify the rise of technocracy, managerial governance, and consensual politics.
Swyngedouw (2007:26) explains that sustainability is built on the vision that techno-natural and socio-metabolic interventions are needed to secure the planet's survival.
Debate focuses on technological or managerial fixes for environmental problems, foreclosing more radical visions.
This essay builds on critical studies of urban sustainability.
It pays attention to the connections between sustainability discourses and discourses of urban reform and revitalization.
It examines how the environmental justice movement's agenda might be co-opted to facilitate gentrification.
There are few ethnographic accounts of how the “post politics” of sustainability are lived by environmental justice activists.
The author examined how PlaNYC played out in the lives of low-income and working-class New Yorkers.
Ethnographic methods were used, including participant observation, interviews, and archival research, to learn how residents contest sustainable policies that threaten displacement.
Five neighborhoods were selected: Harlem, North Shore of Staten Island, Williamsburg, Sunset Park, South Bronx.
Harlem was an exemplary case of environmental gentrification.
Until the mid-2000s, Harlem's gentrification had stalled due to its industrial history and toxic sites.
The neighborhood had an active environmental justice organization.
Gentrification had taken off in Harlem due to zoning changes and the economic boom of the early 2000s.
Between 2000 and 2008, the proportion of whites living in Central Harlem more than doubled.
Planyc2030 promised to install green space but made little mention of the area’s toxic burdens.
The gentrification of the neighborhood embodied a curious contradiction.

Sustainable Uplift

The linking of ecological benefits to social uplift goes back to the turn of the 20th century.
Social reformers drew on Enlightenment ideals about the redeeming power of nature.
Reformers viewed nature, including parks, as democratic curatives for social ills.
Social uplift stemmed from creating urban green space.
Reformer John H. Rauch, M.D. wrote in 1869 about the moral influence of parks.
In New York City, ideologies led to the development of Central and Prospect Parks.
New green spaces did not necessarily serve the needs of those most in need of social uplift.
In 1903, the city built Seward Park in the Lower East Side to prevent children from joining youth gangs.
The city razed three blocks of tenements and displaced almost 3,000 residents without re-housing them.
Contradictions between discourses of social reform and practices of exclusion took on new forms during post-1970s economic restructuring.
Cities sought to replace their manufacturing base with service industries, and the redevelopment of affluent neighborhoods became a cornerstone of urban growth strategy.
Displacements were couched in a language of “revitalization” and “renewal.”
Sociologist Stephen Steinberg argues that these discourses provided “an ideological façade for the neoliberal war against the poor” (Steinberg 2010:223).
Neighborhood reinvestment included the provision and/or restoration of environmental amenities.
In the case of Tompkins Square Park in the East Village, the city restored the park and displaced homeless residents as new condominiums were built.
Kenneth Gould and Tammy Lewis find that the 1990s restoration of Brooklyn’s Prospect Park led to increased construction and a decrease in the race and class mix of those areas.
Gould and Lewis (2009:13) conclude that market forces, racism, and urban environmental policy can lead to the “greening” and “whitening” of urban areas.
Harlem’s gentrification fits this pattern of simultaneous greening and whitening.
Beginning in the late 1980s, the city began restoring Harlem’s largest parks as it redeveloped the neighborhood for affluent residents.
Long-term Harlem residents’ reactions to gentrification crystallized in battles over parks.
Sustainability grows out of ideas about the intrinsic social value of nature and legitimates uneven development.
Sustainability emphasizes ecological amenities and greenhouse gas reductions, eliding the issue of toxic waste.

Across 110th Street: Space, Waste, and Activism in Harlem

Prior to 1910, Central Harlem was primarily middle class, including many African Americans.
In the early 20th century, the Great Migration led thousands of new, poor residents to settle in Harlem.
Between 1910 and 1920, the area’s black population grew from approximately 10 percent to 32 percent, and by 1930 it was 70 percent.
Industry in the area consisted mainly of dairies, meatpacking plants, automobile manufacturers, warehouses, and maritime businesses.
Some industries relocated in the 1930s and 40s to make way for the George Washington Bridge and the Henry Hudson Parkway.
As industries and jobs left the area, poverty intensified.
City policies prioritized capital accumulation and the protection of property values, leading to Harlem’s environmental and social decline.
New zoning regulations limited the use and density of certain areas, dividing the city into residential, business, or unrestricted (usually industrial) uses.
Zoning protected property values and reinforced social stratifications.
Poor and working-class areas like Harlem were classified as unrestricted.
By 1961, over half of the city’s inhabitants lived in non-residential districts.
In 1961, city leaders created four new kinds of districts—residential, mixed, commercial, and manufacturing—and classified them according to density.
Harlem was zoned mixed use, with its waterfront zoned M3 for heavy manufacturing.
New regulations allowed industries operating before 1961 to remain in place and did not require buffer zones between manufacturing and residential areas.
Post-industrial restructuring further concentrated the location of noxious facilities.
As the city rezoned some manufacturing areas, it expanded the zoning of its remaining manufacturing areas, especially in “marginal” areas.
Geographer Juliana Maantay (2001) finds a high correlation between those areas slated for increased manufacturing and the number of low-income residents and people of color living there.
The Clean Air and Clean Water Acts exacerbated the situation by setting into motion new mechanisms for community input into environmental siting decisions.
Well-resourced communities resisted the placement of toxic facilities in their neighborhoods, concentrating toxins in less affluent areas.
In the 1980s, residents in downtown Manhattan successfully opposed a city proposal to build a medical waste incinerator, which was instead built in the South Bronx.
As a disposable consumer culture took hold, “Not in My Backyard” (NIMBY) activism shifted environmental burdens onto cities and low-income neighborhoods.
In the early 1960s, the city decided to build a massive plant to treat the sewage needs of most of Manhattan’s west side.
The plant was originally slated for the Upper West Side but was moved to 137th Street in West Harlem.
In 1986, the North River Sewage Treatment Plant (NRSTP) began operations, near the borough’s only 24-hour Marine Transfer Station.
Northern Manhattan neighborhoods treated most of Manhattan’s solid waste.
West and Central Harlem shouldered many of Manhattan’s transportation burdens.
Harlem housed five of Manhattan’s eight diesel bus depots.
Harlem had far fewer environmental amenities than other borough neighborhoods.
Robert Moses excluded northern Manhattan from his effort to pepper Manhattan with playgrounds.
These disparities were not lost on Harlem’s residents.

Fighting for Environmental Improvements

In 1988, Harlem residents and activists formed West Harlem Environmental Action Coalition (WE ACT) to fight against environmental burdens and create environmental amenities.
WE ACT incorporated as a non-profit organization with a wide-ranging mission.
This approach to environmental justice echoed the growing U.S. environmental justice movement.
WE ACT established itself on the forefront of the national environmental justice movement.
Its activities had environmental implications for the entire city.
Building on the success of the NRSTP protest, in 1992, WE ACT sued the Department of Environmental Protection for operating that plant as a public and private nuisance.
After six years of litigation, the city settled the suit and established a 1.1 million fund to address community concerns.
The fund enabled WE ACT to hire three full-time staff members and ensured that the city completed its 55 million renovation of the plant.
In addition to improving operations at the NRSTP, one of WE ACT’s early priorities was to mitigate local air pollution.
In 1988 WE ACT filed a suit to block the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) from constructing a 6th diesel bus depot in Northern Manhattan.
By 1996 they had convinced the EPA to conduct the first assessment of Northern Manhattan’s air quality, which revealed harmful particulates more than 200 percent higher than the air quality standards for Particulate Matter (PM) 2.5.
A year later, WE ACT launched its “Clean Air/Clean Fuel” bus campaign.
This effort played a significant role in convincing “the Governor and key state legislators to mandate that the MTA make hundreds of alternative fuel bus purchases and retrofit diesel depots to compressed natural gas.”
In 2000, the organization again sued the MTA, filing a complaint with the Federal Transportation Authority (FTA).
Four years later, the FTA ruled that the authority had failed to comply with the “required federal environmental impact analysis regulations in constructing, rehabilitating and reconstructing its Northern Manhattan facilities and had failed to ensure the non-discriminatory distribution of service its facilities”
After the ruling WE ACT convened a community advisory board to monitor MTA practices.
In 2006, WE ACT collaborated with experts to design a “green” bus depot.
By this point, WE ACT had a full staff of approximately twelve people and received ongoing funding from a variety of public and private sources.
WE ACT mobilized a campaign to block a proposal to retrofit and expand the 135th Street marine waste station.
Mayor Bloomberg announced that the transfer station would not be reopened.
The mayor asked WE ACT to lead a community-based effort to develop a new use for marine transfer station site.
Winning the battle over the marine transfer station boosted WE ACT’s green space initiatives.
WE ACT had been partnering with Harlem’s Community Board 9 to transform a section of defunct, industrial piers into a 2-acre park.
The park plan had won federal, state and local dollars, and included a carefully constructed community input process.
WE ACT had to fight off private funding proposals including the building of a luxury hotel, luxury housing, a dinner theater and a concert band shell.
WE ACT’s efforts did not cause real estate developers to designate Harlem for gentrification, but they did boost the area’s attractiveness to those developers.