Environmental Gentrification Notes

Environmental Gentrification and Urban Sustainability

Abstract

The essay examines the intersection of environmental justice activism and state-sponsored sustainable urban development.
It explores how environmental justice activism is enabled or disabled in the context of rapid urban development, consensual politics, and the seemingly a-political language of sustainability.
Utilizing ethnographic research in Harlem, New York City, the author defines "environmental gentrification."
Environmental gentrification leverages the successes of the environmental justice movement to serve high-end development.
It appears politically neutral but subordinates equity to profit-driven development.
The process highlights the paradoxes facing urban residents as they challenge economic and ecological disparities.
Keywords: Environmental gentrification, environmental justice, just sustainability, New York City

Introduction: Green X:Change Meeting

In January 2010, a public meeting was held at the New York Public Library in Harlem to discuss improving pedestrian life through green initiatives.
The Harlem Community Development Corporation (HCDC) proposed closing two blocks to expand triangle parks into a larger green space called "GreenX:Change."
The goal was to improve air quality and provide more green space for the dense population.
Local residents expressed skepticism, noting the timing of the project with the arrival of luxury condos.
Concerns were raised about who would profit from the project and whether it would worsen air quality due to congestion.
Some residents questioned the need for more parks, suggesting an adult-oriented space instead.
The 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 project was part of Mayor Bloomberg’s PlaNYC 2030, aiming to create 480 new parks.
The HCDC aimed to promote sustainable economic development and community revitalization.
However, Harlem was already experiencing economic development, with apartment sale prices rising significantly.
The residents questioned whether the project was truly for them.

The Paradox of Environmental Amenities

The Green X:Change scenario is being repeated in cities worldwide.
Low-income residents are challenging sustainable policies that could displace them.
A paradox exists: should residents reject environmental amenities to resist gentrification?
The essay explores the impact of state-sponsored sustainable urban development on environmental justice activism.
The research is based on ethnographic studies in Harlem from 2007–2011.
The author defines "environmental gentrification" by combining urban redevelopment, sustainability, and environmental justice.
The aim is to understand the paradoxes facing urban residents as they challenge economic and ecological disparities.

Defining Environmental Gentrification

Environmental gentrification is the convergence of urban redevelopment, ecologically-minded initiatives, and environmental justice activism.
It operates under the guise of sustainability.
It builds on the successes of the environmental justice movement but uses them for high-end redevelopment.
Environmental justice efforts to improve neighborhoods inadvertently attract affluent residents.
The language of sustainability is selectively adopted, prioritizing profit over equity.
The essay does not claim environmental justice causes gentrification.
Instead, it examines the unintended consequences of environmental justice activism and its role in gentrification.
The goal is to understand how environmental justice activists navigate this paradoxical situation.
Environmental gentrification is not entirely new, echoing past discourses of urban reform and renewal.
However, it's unique to the current historical moment because it operates through sustainability.
Sustainability simultaneously represents:
- Ecologically and socially responsible urban planning.
- A "green" lifestyle appealing to affluent residents.
- A politically neutral approach to environmental problems.

Post-Political Governance

Environmental gentrification reflects a move towards "post-political" governance.
Drawing from Žižek, this involves policies set by technocrats through negotiation and compromise, masking underlying conflicts.
Swyngedouw argues this consensus serves a neoliberal order, prioritizing financial interests over citizens' needs.
Environmental gentrification emulates this pattern, detaching sustainability from justice and disabling resistance.
The essay introduces New York City’s sustainability plan and critiques its contradictions.
It addresses the absence of environmental justice principles in sustainable urban planning.
The author notes the historical role of green space in urban redevelopment and the discourses legitimizing uneven development.
The essay examines how Harlem, historically burdened by Manhattan’s waste, experienced environmental justice activism.
Zoning changes and sustainability initiatives coincided with gentrification, presenting a dilemma for activists.
Environmental gentrification moves community groups into a technocratic dialogue, sidelining political inclusion and justice.

Selective Sustainability and Environmental Justice: An Ethnographic Account

On Earth Day 2007, Mayor Bloomberg launched PlaNYC 2030, a long-range sustainability plan for New York City.
The plan aimed to rebrand New York as a competitive, sustainable city.
PlaNYC 2030 included 127 initiatives, such as increasing affordable housing, park access, and reducing carbon emissions by $30$ percent by 2030.
However, critics identified contradictions between the plan’s goals and redevelopment projects.
For example, the city planned to plant one million trees while approving developments that destroyed existing trees.
The plan promoted biking and transit but also encouraged car-based developments.
Waterfront developments continued despite warnings about sea level rise.
Rezoning measures led to an increase in high-end residential units, while homelessness reached record levels.
The plan was developed by a consulting firm with minimal public input.
Similar contradictions exist in cities worldwide, as economic and ecological disparities increase alongside sustainability efforts.
Emerging literature addresses the contradictory relationship between sustainable policies and inequitable urban redevelopment.

Examples of Contradictory Policies

Hagerman (2007) found that green spaces in Portland, Oregon, catered to elitist visions of liveability, displacing low-income housing.
Pearsall and Pierce (2010) found that many US city sustainability plans didn't include environmental justice.
Finn and Mccormick (2011) studied climate change plans in major US cities and found that they failed to address equitable economic development and environmental justice.
Sustainability frameworks increasingly focus on climate change and environmental amenities, overshadowing the unequal distribution of environmental burdens.
Macroscopic analysts connect critical sustainability studies with the era of "post-politics."
This era is characterized by de-politicization, technocratic management, and consensual policy-making, limiting space for conflictual politics.
Diken and Laustsen (2004) argue that everything is discussed in a non-committal, non-conflictual way, avoiding divisive decisions.
Contemporary environmental fixes, especially for climate change, exemplify technocracy, managerial governance, and consensual politics.
Swyngedouw (2007) explains that sustainability relies on techno-natural and socio-metabolic interventions to secure the planet's survival.
Problems are addressed through compromise, technical arrangements, and consensus.
Those who disagree with the need for sustainability are marginalized.
Debate focuses on technological or managerial fixes, foreclosing alternative visions.

Contributions of the Essay

This essay builds on critical studies of urban sustainability.
It makes three main contributions:
- It connects sustainability discourses to historical discourses of urban reform, renewal, and revitalization.
- It examines how the environmental justice movement's agenda is co-opted to facilitate gentrification.
- It provides ethnographic accounts of how the "post politics" of sustainability are experienced by environmental justice activists.
The author examined PlaNYC's impact on low-income and working-class New Yorkers.
Ethnographic methods were used to study how residents contest sustainable policies that threaten displacement.
Five neighborhoods with long-standing environmental justice organizations in varying stages of gentrification were selected.
Participant observation, interviews, and archival research were conducted.
Harlem was found to be a prime example of environmental gentrification.
Until the mid-2000s, Harlem's gentrification was slow due to industrial sites and the legacy of Robert Moses.
The area had an active environmental justice organization with a track record of success.
Zoning changes and the economic boom of the early 2000s accelerated gentrification in Harlem.
Between 2000 and 2008, the proportion of white residents in Central Harlem more than doubled.
In 2008, $22$ percent of Harlem’s white households had moved in within the previous year, compared to $7$ percent of black households.
In 2009, average household income was still $27,515$ , compared to $50,033$ in New York City as a whole.
PlaNYC 2030 focused on green space but neglected toxic burdens, except for brownfield redevelopment.
The gentrification of Harlem involved boosting environmental benefits while ignoring lingering environmental burdens.

Sustainable Uplift: Historical Context

The linking of ecological benefits to social uplift dates back to the turn of the 20th century.
Social reformers drew on Enlightenment ideals about the redeeming power of nature.
Parks were seen as democratic curatives for social ills caused by urban growth and industrialization.
This spurred both suburbanization and the creation of urban green spaces.
Reformer John H. Rauch (1869) wrote about the moral influence of parks, bringing people in contact with nature.
In New York City, this led to the development of Central and Prospect Parks.
However, these green spaces did not always serve those most in need of social uplift.
In 1903, Seward Park was built in the Lower East Side to prevent children from joining gangs.
To build the park, the city razed three blocks of tenements, displacing almost 3,000 residents without re-housing them.
Contradictions between social reform discourses and exclusionary practices continued in the post-1970s economic restructuring.
Cities sought to replace manufacturing with service industries, making redevelopment of attractive neighborhoods a key strategy.
Displacements were framed as "revitalization" and "renewal."
Sociologist Stephen Steinberg argues that these discourses provided an ideological façade for neoliberal policies against the poor.
Neighborhood reinvestment included the provision or restoration of environmental amenities to attract affluent residents.

Greening as Whitening

In Tompkins Square Park, the city restored the park and displaced homeless residents as new condominiums were built.
Kenneth Gould and Tammy Lewis found that the restoration of Brooklyn’s Prospect Park led to increased construction and a decrease in the race and class mix.
They concluded that the combination of market forces, racism, and urban environmental policy can lead to the "greening" of urban areas becoming code for the "whitening" of urban areas.
Harlem's gentrification follows this pattern.
Beginning in the late 1980s, the city restored Harlem’s largest parks while redeveloping the neighborhood for affluent residents.
Long-term residents' reactions to gentrification crystallized in battles over parks.
Sustainability grows out of ideas about the social value of nature but operates as a new version of historical discourses that legitimated uneven development.
By emphasizing ecological amenities and greenhouse gas reductions, sustainability tends to overlook the issue of toxic waste.

Space, Waste, and Activism in Harlem

Before 1910, Central Harlem was primarily middle class with many African Americans.
The Great Migration in the early 20th century brought thousands of new, poor residents to Harlem.
Between 1910 and 1920, the black population grew from approximately $10$ percent to $32$ percent, and by 1930 it was $70$ percent.
Industry in the area included dairies, meatpacking plants, automobile manufacturers, and warehouses.
Some industries relocated in the 1930s and 40s for the George Washington Bridge and the Henry Hudson Parkway.
As industries and jobs left, poverty increased.
City policies prioritized capital accumulation and property values, contributing to Harlem's decline.
Zoning regulations limited land use and density, dividing the city into residential, business, and unrestricted areas.
Poor and working-class areas like Harlem were often classified as unrestricted, housing both industries and residents.
By 1961, over half of the city’s inhabitants lived in non-residential districts.

Zoning Changes and Environmental Burdens

In 1961, new zoning laws created four districts based on density: residential, mixed, commercial, and manufacturing.
Harlem was zoned mixed use, with the waterfront zoned for heavy manufacturing.
New regulations allowed pre-1961 industries to remain and did not require buffer zones.
Post-industrial restructuring concentrated noxious facilities in "marginal" areas.
Geographer Juliana Maantay (2001) found a correlation between areas slated for increased manufacturing and the number of low-income residents and people of color.
The Clean Air and Clean Water Acts in the 1970s inadvertently exacerbated the situation.
They enabled well-resourced communities to resist toxic facilities, further concentrating toxins in less affluent areas.
In the 1980s, residents in downtown Manhattan successfully opposed a medical waste incinerator, which was instead built in the South Bronx.
As consumer culture grew and generated more waste, "Not in My Backyard" (NIMBY) activism shifted environmental burdens onto cities, particularly low-income neighborhoods.
In the early 1960s, a sewage treatment plant was slated for the Upper West Side but was relocated to West Harlem due to political and economic factors.

Environmental Injustices in Harlem

In 1986, the North River Sewage Treatment Plant (NRSTP) began operations near the 24-hour Marine Transfer Station, concentrating Manhattan’s waste treatment in northern Manhattan.
West and Central Harlem also bore transportation burdens, including truck routes, a diesel-fueled Amtrak rail line, and a large NY/NJ Port Authority bus station.
Harlem housed five of Manhattan’s eight diesel bus depots, which idled for hours, worsening air quality.
Harlem had fewer environmental amenities than other neighborhoods.
Robert Moses excluded northern Manhattan from his playground construction efforts.
He improved Riverside Park but stopped at 125th Street in West Harlem.
These disparities were evident to Harlem’s residents.

Fighting for Environmental Improvements: WE ACT

In 1988, Harlem residents and activists protested the sewage treatment plant, leading to the formation of West Harlem Environmental Action Coalition (WE ACT).
WE ACT is a grassroots organization that fights against environmental burdens and works to create environmental amenities.
WE ACT incorporated as a non-profit with a mission that included community-based research and advocacy, indoor pollution outreach campaigns, lobbying, and national outreach.
This approach aligned with the growing U.S. environmental justice movement.
Within a few years, WE ACT became a leading force in the environmental justice movement.

WE ACT's Accomplishments

In 1992, WE ACT sued the Department of Environmental Protection for operating the NRSTP as a public and private nuisance.
The city settled the suit after six years and established a $1.1$ million fund to address community concerns.
The fund enabled WE ACT to hire three full-time staff members and ensure the city completed its $55$ million renovation of the plant.
WE ACT also focused on mitigating local air pollution by addressing the issue of bus depots located near schools and hospitals.
In 1988, WE ACT filed a suit to block the construction of a 6th diesel bus depot in Northern Manhattan.
By 1996, they 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.
WE ACT launched its "Clean Air/Clean Fuel" bus campaign, influencing state legislators to mandate alternative fuel bus purchases and retrofit diesel depots to compressed natural gas.
In 2000, the organization sued the MTA, charging the authority with disproportionately siting diesel bus depots in minority neighborhoods.
In 2004, the FTA ruled that the authority had failed to comply with federal environmental impact analysis regulations.
WE ACT convened a community advisory board to monitor MTA practices.
In 2006, WE ACT collaborated with experts to design a "green" bus depot with a green roof, energy-efficient infrastructure, and recycled building materials.

Continued Advocacy and Successes

WE ACT had a full staff and received funding from public and private sources.
The organization allied with other community-based organizations focused on housing, health, and poverty issues.
WE ACT mobilized a campaign to block the expansion of 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 the marine transfer station site.
Winning the battle over the marine transfer station boosted WE ACT’s green space initiatives.
WE ACT partnered with Harlem’s Community Board 9 to transform industrial piers into a 2-acre park with public walkways and seating areas.
The park plan won federal, state, and local funding.
WE ACT had to fight off private funding proposals, including luxury hotels, housing, a dinner theater, and a concert band shell.
WE ACT’s efforts improved the area’s attractiveness to developers.

Greening Harlem: Gentrification Takes Hold

Harlem’s gentrification has become as iconic as its cultural status.
Harlem was one of the last neighborhoods in Manhattan to gentrify due to public housing and toxic sites.
In 1979, the Department of Housing and Urban Development designated Central Harlem a "Neighborhood Strategy Area."
In 1982, Mayor Koch commissioned a "Harlem Task Force" to generate market-rate development.
Municipal investment stalled due to a recession in 1989 but picked up again in the mid-1990s.
In 1993, Mayor David Dinkins designated Harlem as an Empowerment Zone, attracting federal, state, and city loans.
Businesses moved onto 125th Street, the neighborhood’s main commercial corridor.
Until 2000, most gentrifiers were middle and upper class African Americans.
After the 2000 opening of HarlemUSA, large-scale developers entered the neighborhood.
HarlemUSA anchored new chain stores on 125th Street.
Former President Clinton moved into an office on that shopping corridor.

Rezoning and Contradictions with Sustainability

Harlem's gentrification remained slow due to public housing projects.
The city passed two controversial rezoning decisions in the late 2000s:
- Rezoning 125th Street for high-rise office towers and 2,100 market-rate condominiums.
- Rezoning a 35-acre swath of West Harlem for Columbia University to expand its campus.
These decisions coincided with the release of PlaNYC 2030 and starkly contrasted with its sustainable goals.
The 125th Street rezoning endangered air quality and strained waste infrastructure.
The Columbia expansion involved constructing a seven-story underground structure near the Hudson River, raising concerns about sea level rise and flooding.
The expansion came close to WE ACT’s newly opened West Harlem Piers Park.
WE ACT campaigned for measures to soften the potential blows of both zoning decisions.

Challenging Selective Sustainability

WE ACT incorporated sustainable development into its goals through its "Sustainable Development Program."
WE ACT empowers residents to address irresponsible development through community-based planning.
In 2007, WE ACT hired an Environmental Policy and Advocacy Coordinator for Food Justice/Sustainable Public Spaces.
Sustainability means maximal community participation, responsible development, and public space.
This vision aligns with the global climate justice movement.
A coalition of environmental justice groups formed the Environmental Justice Climate Change Initiative in 1998.
WE ACT joined an international working group to address climate change globally.
WE ACT staff members argue that social justice movements propelled sustainability onto urban planning agendas.
WE ACT’s sustainable development initiatives predated Bloomberg’s.
WE ACT began working on local climate change adaptation and developed a green jobs training program.
The director of the mayor’s Office of Sustainability and Long Range Planning asked WE ACT’s director, Peggy Shepard, to sit on its Sustainability Advisory Board.
Shepard found that the mayor’s office did not share WE ACT’s vision of sustainability.

Limiting Community Input

The city’s version of sustainable planning emphasized metrics, outcomes, and evaluation, limiting democratic planning processes.
The final plan relied more on input from a consulting firm than from its advisory board.
WE ACT staffers had to ensure that the plan included their constituents.
For example, WE ACT convinced the mayor’s office to incentivize livery owners to convert to hybrids.
PlaNYC 2030 called for energy efficiency changes in buildings of 50,000 square feet or more but failed to prevent landlords from passing the cost onto tenants.
WE ACT worked to fund programs that would help landlords in northern Manhattan retrofit their boilers and use cleaner energy sources.
WE ACT worked with the city to make its climate change adaptation program in East Harlem more locally relevant.
The city’s sustainability plan thus presented opportunities and challenges for WE ACT and other environmental justice organizations.
The city was able to pick and choose which initiatives to implement.
By operating through a discourse borrowed from WE ACT’s rubric of sustainability, the city moved them into a shared, technocratic dialogue that left out questions of justice.
WE ACT remained on the defensive, working to develop compromises.

Whose Green? Contesting Eco-Elitism

In 2007, Al Gore won an Academy Award for An Inconvenient Truth, sparking concern for the environment.
New books told consumers how to adopt greener lifestyles, and corporations adopted environmentally-friendly practices.
Being eco-friendly came to mean having enough disposable income to buy more expensive, "green" products.
Harlem continued to house industrial burdens, but new condominiums advertised eco-friendly materials and energy-saving equipment.
In 2008, Harlem was the site of New York City’s first silver LEED-certified townhouse.
An advertisement for that townhouse read, "You don’t have to pretend to be environmentally friendly anymore; with ownership of this trophy landmark you are entitled."
Green amenities commanded a $35$ percent higher price than a comparable non-green townhouse.
Greening facilitated Harlem’s new elitism.
Green amenities became battlefields where struggles over class position and privilege were fought.

Park Disputes and Exclusion

Marcus Garvey Park provides a dramatic example.
In 1969, Mount Morris Park (renamed Marcus Garvey Park in 1973) was the site of the Harlem Cultural Festival (“Black Woodstock”).
The event started the drum circle tradition.
For four decades, drummers played in the park until 10 p.m. every summer Saturday.
During the 1970s and 80s, musicians would drum up to ten hours to provide a safe space for children to play.
In 1998, the City began renovations to the park.
In 2006, the first luxury high-rise opened on the park.
In 2008, Mayor Bloomberg allocated $4$ million to renovate the amphitheater.
Residents of the new high rise began complaining about noise from the drum circle.
The police got involved and ordered the drummers to relocate twice.
Racist online debates and threats ensued.
The New Black Panther Party led a march in support of the drummers.
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Directly across Central Harlem from Marcus Garvey Park sits venerable Morningside Park.
In the late 1960s, Columbia University overtook a section of this park to construct a new gym.
Community members and students protested, leading to arrests and building occupations.
Black power leaders led black Harlemites onto campus to join the occupation.
Columbia moved its gym elsewhere, but Morningside declined and became a drug-selling hub.
In the late 1980s, the city began to renovate Morningside.
The restoration brought strict rules that catered to particular kinds of park consumption while excluding others.
Residents claimed that police had always ignored the park, but now they were removing benches, fining people, and cracking down on other rules.
In 2006, residents crowded a town hall meeting where one angry resident told park officials, “we have been barbequing for years… and now they want to stop us from doing it… we are the community.”
Enforcement of park rules privileged the needs of Harlem’s newer, affluent community while disallowing the recreative customs of its old-timers.
Reactions to Morningside and Marcus Garvey Parks indicate the high value that all residents placed on green spaces.
Residents questioned whether green spaces would become exclusive enclaves that suppressed certain kinds of cultural expression.
For whom did such spaces make the neighborhood sustainable?
The Green X:Change project met skepticism.
One woman asked, “Is this going to be like Morningside? Now you need permission to get into play there.”
Sustainability arrived in Harlem just as gentrification accelerated.
Sustainability was anything but politically neutral.

Conclusions: How Sustainable is Sustainability?

Long-term Harlem residents expressed concern over what would happen to the "winos" and homeless people who currently inhabited the triangle parks at the Green X:Change meeting.
A community garden board member wanted to know whether the space could be used to house a large greenhouse for growing heirloom vegetables that neighborhood residents (including the homeless population) could sell for profit.
City planners responded that they wanted to keep the space open and free of enclosed structures.
A WE ACT representative suggested compromise—planners could reduce the size of the parks in exchange for residents’ support of the project.
He reminded everyone that the purpose of the meeting was for community members to provide their input.
Attendants appeared to reject any planning for a new park.
A staff person from the Department of Transportation said, “If the community wants parking over taking back space, then we will go to other communities with this project.”
Harlem residents and WE ACT activists ran headlong into the paradox of sustainability.
WE ACT leaders’ ability to take a critical stance was limited.
Residents were encouraged to accommodate a technocratic compromise that shunned politics.
Technocratic issues, such as where to put green space, could be delinked from the questions of social justice to which they were once attached.
Sustainability becomes part of a post-political project that sidelines questions of real political inclusion and justice.
By resisting the Green X:Change, residents attempted to retain a claim on the political itself, to insist on the deeply political nature of the production and construction of urban space, to demand political solutions to environmental crises and to assert everyone’s right to a sustainable urban future.