Just Green Enough

Urban Development and Environmental Gentrification

Winifred Curran, Trina Hamilton, Winifred Curran, Trina Hamilton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351859301
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

While global urban development increasingly takes on the mantle of sustainability and "green urbanism, " both the ecological and equity impacts of these developments are often overlooked. One result is what has been called environmental gentrification, a process in which environmental improvements lead to increased property values and the displacement of long-term residents. The specter of environmental gentrification is now at the forefront of urban debates about how to accomplish environmental improvements without massive displacement.

In this context, the editors of this volume identified a strategy called "just green enough" based on field work in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, that uncouples environmental cleanup from high-end residential and commercial development. A "just green enough" strategy focuses explicitly on social justice and environmental goals as defined by local communities, those people who have been most negatively affected by environmental disamenities, with the goal of keeping them in place to enjoy any environmental improvements. It is not about short-changing communities, but about challenging the veneer of green that accompanies many projects with questionable ecological and social justice impacts, and looking for alternative, sometimes surprising, forms of greening such as creating green spaces and ecological regeneration within protected industrial zones.

Just Green Enough is a theoretically rigorous, practical, global, and accessible volume exploring, through varied case studies, the complexities of environmental improvement in an era of gentrification as global urban policy. It is ideal for use as a textbook at both undergraduate and graduate levels in urban planning, urban studies, urban geography, and sustainability programs.

PART I

Just green enough in transition

1

Just green enough: Contesting environmental gentrification in Greenpoint, Brooklyn

Winifred Curran, Trina Hamilton

Introduction

This case study is an examination of the ways in which “actually existing sustainabilities” (Krueger and Agyeman 2005) are constructed in a gentrifying neighborhood. While, as Syngedouw (2007, 20) notes, he has not been able to find anyone against “sustainability,” the process through which urban environments are being remade under the rubric of sustainability are highly contested. As Dale and Newman (2009, 671) conclude, there is an important “differentiation between livability and equity.” A major concern is environmental gentrification, in which environmental improvements result in the displacement of working class residents as cleanup and reuse of undesirable land uses make a neighborhood more attractive and drive up real estate prices (Banzhaf and McCormick 2007; Bunce 2009; Checker 2011; Cowell and Thomas 2002; Dale and Newman 2009; Dooling 2009; Quastel 2009). This concern is heightened in brownfield areas, where environmental cleanup may allow for the realization of the rent gap (Smith 1996), the difference between actual and potential ground rent that makes gentrification so profitable.

The surge in environmental awareness in cities has not been matched with concern for social equity (Quastel 2009). Instead, “sustainability is often conflated with environment or ecology, thereby obscuring the social dimension” (Jonas and While 2007, 125). And yet, sustainable development can potentially provide communities with alternative ways of thinking about economic development, resource use, and social justice (Raco 2005; see also Agyeman et al. 2002). As Raco (2005, 330) argues, “The enhanced focus on the impacts and externalities generated by economic development can challenge neoliberal inspired growth agendas and modes of regulations.” This is especially true when these growth agendas and modes of regulation fail spectacularly, as they did in 2008. The Great Recession has had everyone rethinking how the global economy works and the role governments should play in urban economies. Evans et al. (2009) make the case that the recent financial crisis makes it possible to challenge the dominant political narratives of market-led regeneration.

Such is our hope for the Greenpoint neighborhood in Brooklyn, home of a massive, decades-old underground oil plume that was the subject of a recent settlement between the New York State Attorney General and ExxonMobil, and Newtown Creek, one of the most polluted industrial waterways in the United States and a recently declared Superfund site. Decades of environmental activism by long-term residents and collaboration with more recent in-movers, many of whom are gentrifiers, has resulted in a cleanup process that actively contests the assumed outcome of environmental gentrification. Our goal here is not in any way to depoliticize the process of gentrification, minimize the effect of displacement, or search for positives associated with gentrification (see Slater’s 2006 critique of the literature that does this). We are not concerned with proving how gentrified Greenpoint is or is not. Rather, following Jonas and While (2007, 152), we are looking at the potential for new spaces of politics for sustainability, broadly conceived with social justice as a central tenet, opening up around new strategic territorial and class alliances and divisions. We argue that the conjoined struggle of long-term residents and gentrifiers around environmental cleanup has provided a space for a politics of sustainability that makes room for the working class and industrial uses in the neighborhood (at least in the near term). As an example of the fluidity and hybridity of approaches to sustainability and the contestation of neoliberalism, the Greenpoint example points to the importance of new forms of direct democratic involvement and individual citizenship as well as a demand for an increased role for the state in achieving cleanup (see Raco 2005, 2007).

Overall, we argue that a “just green enough” strategy is emerging in Greenpoint that makes room for continued industrial use and blue-collar work, where cleanup does not automatically or exclusively lead to the “parks, cafes, and a riverwalk” model of a green city. Too often, the cleanup of industrial urban neighborhoods and creation of new green space quite literally “naturalizes” the disappearance of working class communities, as more attractive neighborhoods become ripe for development. The “just green enough” strategy organizes for cleanup and green space aimed at the existing working class population and industrial land users, not at new development. Activists in Greenpoint want to achieve the cleanup of Newtown Creek while maintaining its industrial base, a strategy designed to put a stop to speculative development attracted to a neighborhood experiencing environmental improvements. So ideally, cleanup of the Newtown Creek will be just green enough to improve the health and quality of life of existing residents, but not so literally green as to attract upscale “sustainable” LEED-certified residential developments that drive out working class residents and industrial businesses. The Greenpoint case challenges the perceived inevitability of environmental gentrification and opens an already gentrifying neighborhood to active intervention.

The context

Greenpoint is the northernmost neighborhood in Brooklyn, bounded by Newtown Creek to the north and east, and the East River on the west. While Greenpoint was once referred to as the “garden spot” of the world because of its green pastures and isolation (DeSena 2009), Greenpoint’s waterfront location helped to shape the neighborhood as an industrial powerhouse, a center for shipbuilding and the “five black arts: printing, pottery, petroleum and gas refining, glassmaking, and iron making” (Jackson and Manbeck 1998, 145) in addition to businesses like fat-rendering plants. By 1870, Greenpoint was home to more than 50 oil refining companies. By 1892, the majority of these were consolidated into Standard Oil Trust (later Mobil Oil) (NYS DEC 2011). This industrial history left a toxic legacy for the area’s working class residents, historically Irish and Italian, now overwhelmingly Polish immigrants with a significant Latinx population.

As early as 1887, the New York Times said about the Creek, “On warm or sunny days, a quivering envelope of nauseous fog hangs above the place like a pall of death” (quoted in Newman 2007, B3). In 1894, residents complained to the governor that the Creek was a “public nuisance… whereby the health and comfort of the people of the community are jeopardized and endangered.” A report commissioned by the governor found:

The water of this creek for almost its entire length is dark-colored and offensive, by reason of sewage it contains in suspension and in solutions… A very considerable factor in the present condition of the creek’s bottom has been the discharge for years of the refuse products from the oil works.

(New York Times 1894)

During the 1950s, an estimated 17 to 30 million gallons of oil seeped into the Creek and 55 acres of surrounding land, predominantly from facilities owned by what is now ExxonMobil (EPA 2007). The spill was not discovered until 1978 by the Coast Guard on routine helicopter patrol. While cleanup officially began then, and a consent decree was signed with the state in 1990, very little had actually been done when Riverkeeper, an environmental organization, rediscovered the spill while on a boat patrol in 2002. They subsequently filed a federal lawsuit against ExxonMobil in 2004, followed by a lawsuit by the State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo (now governor) in 2007. While there has yet to be a comprehensive study of the health effects of the underground oil plume, soil tests reveal that the spill has released toxic vapors into the neighborhood (Walker 2007b). Combined sewage outflows (CSOs) also remain a problem, with the city itself remaining one of the largest polluters of the creek. From the late 1950s to today, public policies have led Greenpoint’s eastern sector to become a “dumping ground” for burdensome facilities (NYC DCP 2002). The neighborhood houses both a waste water treatment plant and various waster transfer stations.

Despite this collection of disamenities, Greenpoint has long been a target of gentrification. As early as 1986, the New York Times described Greenpoint, “one of the city’s best-preserved working class areas,” as “feeling the exponential rent increases, housing turnover and influx of young professionals that have characterized gentrification in New York City” (Freedman 1986). DeSena (2009, 35) describes gentrification as having “gone rather smoothly” in Greenpoint, at least in part because of the racial similarities between Polish residents and white gentrifiers.

In part, it was gentrification that exposed the extent of environmental contamination in Greenpoint. Neighborhood residents and activists reported being able to see and smell oil as sites were dug up for new developments. This unpleasant reminder of the Creek’s toxic past led to the politicization of many new residents.

The 2010 declaration of Newtown Creek as a Superfund site and settlement of the lawsuits against ExxonMobil raised hope in the neighborhood that cleanup might actually happen, at the same time that it has increased fears of environmental gentrification. Of particular concern to the broad variety of residents active in the cleanup efforts is the ability of manufacturing and the industrial working class to remain in Greenpoint. Across the spectrum of long-term residents, gentrifiers, business owners, environmental organizations, and local politicians, our interviews and observations at community meetings (conducted from 2008 to 2012) revealed a remarkably cohesive community vision of Greenpoint as just green enough to achieve cleanup, while maintaining working class residents and industrial land uses. We present this case study as an example of how sustainable development processes can foster visions of economic diversity, social justice, and democracy that directly complicate and contest gentrification and neoliberalization.

Methods

Our primary methodology was conducting semi-structured interviews with 24 informants from December 2008 to February 2012, both in person and by phone, if face-to-face interviews were not possible. Informants were drawn from newspaper reports of the events in Greenpoint as well as from the primary author’s experience with community groups and activists in the area. Our informants ranged from long-term resident activists who had lived in the area for decades, to more recent arrivals who were in the area for as little as two years. We also interviewed non-resident environmental activists from groups like Riverkeeper, in addition to elected officials and city policy makers. Some informants were interviewed multiple times as events developed. Since much of this research was conducted as the lawsuits were ongoing, we were unable to get interviews with the Attorney General’s office. State agencies like the Department of Environmental Conservation similarly did not respond to interview requests.

In addition to our interviews, we attended community meetings (such as the Newtown Creek Alliance and Community Board 1) from which we recorded our field notes. We consulted policy documents from the city, state, and federal government related to the spill, cleanup, and environmental and industrial policy. Finally, we conducted extended searches of both traditional and web-based journalism as well as other web-based forums such as blogs.

This paper is entirely shaped by the results of the research. We went into this expecting a classic case of environmental gentrification, but what we found led us to a more nuanced understanding of the vision and spaces for sustainability being constructed in Greenpoint, one that had remarkable consensus among a wide range of constituencies – long-term residents, more recent in-movers, local politicians, business owners, and environmental activists.

Environmental gentrification

Environmental gentrification and displacement are the result of urban environmental policies that have become inextricably linked to economic development and growth. Following Checker (2011, 212), we understand environmental gentrification as:

the convergence of urban redevelopment, ecologically minded initiatives and environmental activism in an era of advanced capitalism. Operating under the seemingly a-political rubric of sustainability, environmental gentrification builds on the material and discursive successes of the urban environmental justice movement and appropriates them to serve high-end redevelopment that displaces low income residents.

This definition refers to the provision of new environmental amenities, as in Checker’s (2011) study of Harlem, where selective sustainability policies threaten to displace low-income residents, as well as to the cleanup of disamenities. Brownfield sites may be particularly vulnerable, for, as While et al. (2004, 565) argue, “the transition to a post-industrial city presupposes a series of ‘light green’ policy actions, quite literally, to clean up the spaces of industrial capitalism.” Desfor, Keil and Ross (2004, 170) describe the evolution of Toronto’s soil pollution policies “as deeply embedded in processes of capital accumulation,” wherein a new wave of redevelopment and investment (likely residential and commercial) is seen as the solution to historical legacies of industrial pollution. The profit potential from environmental improvements, however superficial, has led to the partial “greening” of capital (While et al. 2004), yet this environmental agenda is used to displace and exclude economically vulnerable populations (Checker 2011, Dooling 2009, Jonas and While 2007).

Cleanup makes a neighborhood more attractive and may drive up real estate prices, forcing up rents, and thus displacing the populations who suffered the consequences of industrial development, while richer homeowners capture the gains in their property assets (Banzhaf and McCormick 2007). Essoka (2010) finds a distinct racial aspect to environmental gentrification, concluding that brownfield revitalization leads to a decrease in Black and Latinx populations. Pearsall’s (2009, 2010) work in New York City finds brownfield redevelopment exacerbating the vulnerabilities of certain populations to stressors like geographic displacement. Dale and Newman (2009) argue in their case studies in Vancouver and Toronto that there is an inverse relationship between the “greening” of neighborhoods and affordability in those neighborhoods. While some recent research challenges the direct connection between brownfield redevelopment and gentrification (Eckerd 2011), these concerns present low-income residents and environmental justice activists with what Checker (2011, 211) terms a “pernicious paradox- must they reject environmental amenities in their neighborhood in order to resist gentrification that tends to follow from such amenities?”

In Greenpoint, “a constellation of toxicity” (interview, June 2009) makes cleanup widely considered necessary. One informant, himself a gentrifier now heavily involved in local politics, put it this way: “There are environmental projects and plans and then there are environmental emergencies. This is an emergency” (phone interview, December 2008). Another informant, involved in public heath activism, acknowledged: “A lot of people who have suffered through this scar, this industrial past… they probably won’t be around to see this clean new area, but at the same time I don’t think that means that we shouldn’t clean it up.” She adds, “Across the board people want access, more parks, more green space… to be connected to nature” (interview, June 2009). So while cleanup is widely advocated, gentrification is a recognized danger, even within an already gentrifying neighborhood. The way in which residents and activists in Greenpoint are envisioning cleanup is in part to contest the narrative that gentrification is the inevitable result of “greening” the city that, once established, will consume the entire neighborhood.

Gentrification in crisis?

In a 2011 commentary, Davidson explores a series of crises facing gentrification research, both ontological, in the form of arguments over gentrification’s constitutive properties, and financial, in terms of the Great Recession. He argues that there is an outstanding question in the research of how to think about the status of gentrified neighborhoods. The focus in the gentrification research on finding the next frontier, deciding what is or what is not gentrification, or developing a new terminology of gentrification, leaves the status of neighborhoods experiencing gentrification depoliticized (Davidson 2011). We agree with his c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction
• PART I: Just green enough in transition
• PART II: Green displacements and community identity
• PART III: State-led environmental gentrification
• PART IV: Mobilizing and planning for just, green futures
• Index