But after dinner the fun truly began – we caught the bus tour with a community development/environmental justice/revitalization group called UPROSE. It was founded in 1964 and “is Brooklyn’s oldest Latino community-based organization” (quoting their mission statement/history hand-out). Sunset Park is a community built up against one of Brooklyn’s piers with an astonishing panoramic view of Manhattan, Liberty Island, and Staten Island – but you’d never know about that because their pier might as well be condemned. It’s directly across from a brown field (a toxic/contaminated area unfit for recreation) and the pier area has been paved for a parking lot and disallows fishing, barbequing, and basically all other community recreational activities imaginable (especially since the police apparently have a troubling proclivity for stopping and randomly searching anyone who decides to indulge in some sort of public recreation whether it be walking or playing basketball). There are signs up which warn against fishing given the extreme contamination of the water but the community population is built of Arabs, Asians, and Latinos (many of which if not most cannot read English), so what good do warning signs in English do for them? This is a dangerous trend that runs through most of their community’s “safety precautions.”
Pier at Sunset Park:
Also, they are home to a Natural Gas plant which equals plenty of pollutants such as Particulate Matter 2.5 which you may breathe in but, unlike other pollutants, you do not breathe or sneeze out – it remains in your lungs and in your brain which causes all sorts of health issues. The majority of Sunset Park’s population, because of pollutants like this and like the exhaust from the above-ground expressway and from the waste hauling trucks and tractors (which tow the waste through neighborhoods since there is no other way to move onto the expressway (which goes directly over some of the neighborhoods anyway)), suffers from asthma. They actually just recently had a person die from an asthma attack there, which many people today, given modern medicine, consider nearly impossible – but most of these people either consider asthma normal or don’t have the money to medicate their condition and so either end up just trying to deal with it or spending thousands of dollars in hospital bills. The canal which runs through the neighborhood has been determined a “super-fund site,” which basically means that it’s so incredibly contaminated and hazardous that funds have been pulled from various major corporations to forcibly clean up some of the contamination (although how quickly or efficiently this is enacted is yet to be seen).
Of course, if you drive just a couple blocks outside of Sunset Park and into Bay Ridge, you’ll encounter a difference so stifling you’ll feel as though you stepped into a Michael Moore film – surely, it can’t be true; the drama is too much.
Just a couple blocks into Bay Ridge, a highly gentrified and much whiter neighborhood, is covered in trees. Everywhere you look is green, green, green. And a step onto their pier reveals crowds of children eating hotdogs and ice cream and middle aged men fishing together with a large sign advertising their water pollution control efforts. A complete shift from the deserted and deadened pier of Sunset Park or its treeless streets. And, I have to say, it beat up my heart to think about the actual systematic racism and environmental racism at hand here in these neighborhoods. We learned about the community charter efforts to create their own effective 197A Plans to revitalize Sunset Park which are continuously trumped and stopped by the greater regional City Planning group which allocates funds and has the general upper-hand in the planning and policy of many Brooklyn communities. This regional racism keeps the obviously minority and lower-income communities (such as Sunset Park) at a huge disadvantage environmentally and economically when compared to other whiter neighborhoods (such as Bay Ridge).
Pier at Bay Ridge (sorry for the poor quality -- these were taken on my cellphone :p):
One of the big campaigns UPROSE has been recently working on is planting trees in neighborhoods to help function as buffers against some of the pollution – the problem is that many people don’t want to sign the petitions to fight for trees because those trees, though they would raise the equity of their homes and help with pollution control, would also raise their rents beyond what they can afford; essentially, even the basic necessity and pleasure of a tree in the front yard is denied them because it would automatically displace the bulk of the community to simply another, possibly worse, treeless neighborhood.
And the more blatantly gentrifying forces are already moving into town with, albeit currently vacant, million dollar condos and the like.
It really does feel hopeless in many ways. However, as we drove through their streets and through their Chinatown (the second largest in NY), and we saw all the different languages and all the different peoples milling about together (everyone from Vietnamese to Malaysian to Salvadorian to Mandarin and so on), it occurred to me that what if all it took was an advertising campaign to run alongside the tree-planting campaign. There are plenty of ethnic restaurants and shops I’m excited to go and explore and which I know many of my friends (both here and at home) would also be excited to explore – so why not go ahead and improve neighborhoods, which would raise rents, but then push outside consumerism of these local businesses (and keep out major chains like Chili’s or Starbucks) and in this way also potentially raise wages to help match these increased costs? I know there are many market forces I’m not taking into account, but I’m just wondering if something like this has been implemented anywhere else and if it’s a viable possibility.
UPROSE Tour Bus (the large dude facing away was our tour guide):
I know many people are against this sort of thing because they view the commodification of culture as detrimental to those cultures – but I find that inherently backward because all things are subjective and affected by us simply by us being aware of them; in other words, these cultures are already commodified by the inherent nature of stores and shops and communities, so what’s wrong with outsiders coming in and enjoying them? – especially if it helps keep those businesses in business. It’s something I’m still thinking about, but wouldn’t it be amazing to get to be a part of a campaign like this one day? It’s expensive, obviously, which is probably why it hasn’t been done yet (along with a slew of other reasons) but I just can’t think of any other way to better these communities from within and without while simultaneously staving off displacement. After all, capitalism necessitates economic disparity, there’s no two ways around that – no matter how hard we work, there will be those richer and poorer always, but this is simply a matter of human decency. No one deserves to live in such a hazardous environment and especially not for reasons so evil as racism.
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