Talk Bronx New York

Carter is founder of Sustainable South Bronx

 Majora Carter

“If power plants, waste handling, chemical plants and transport systems were located in wealthy areas as quickly and easily as in poor areas, we would have had a clean, green economy decades ago.” — Majora Carter, Powershift 2007

Majora Carter grew up in the South Bronx at a time when America’s cities were emptying into the suburbs. Many of the buildings in her neighborhood were abandoned by the time she was ten years old.

Landlords were burning their buildings to collect the insurance; light manufacturing industries were moving out of the Bronx; and waste facilities were moving in to take their place. As pollution rose, asthma rates, poor health and unemployment soared. To outsiders, those who were left were branded with the stamp of the ghetto: as Carter says, “If you lived here you were no doubt a pimp, a pusher, or a prostitute.”

As a child, Carter spent much of her time planning her escape. “Education was my way out,” she reveals.

She studied cinema studies and film production at Wesley University then signed up for graduate school at New York University. To save money, she moved home to her parents.

Of that time, she says, “It felt like a defeat but it was also the best thing in the world to happen to me because I got reacquainted with my community.”

Carter saw that her neighborhood — under-served, ignored and literally dumped on — needed to fight a positive campaign to assert itself as a vibrant community.

“People wanted things like clean air, they wanted safe places for their kids to play where they wouldn’t get hit by a truck,” she tells CNN. “They wanted living wage jobs that didn’t degrade the environment or kill them.”

She fought a vociferous campaign against a planned waste facility that would have seen 40 percent of New York’s municipal waste coming to the South Bronx. “We were already handling 40 percent of the city’s commercial waste here,” she says.

In 2001, after the defeat of the scheme, Carter founded the non-profit environmental justice solutions corporation, Sustainable South Bronx. Its central tenet is that people shouldn’t have to move out of their neighborhoods to live in a better one.

While walking her dog one day, Carter stumbled upon a disused stretch of waterfront. That inspired her to write a tenacious $1.25 million Federal Transportation planning grant for the South Bronx Greenway. The 11-mile-long stretch is the first new South Bronx waterfront park in over 60 years and provides alternative transport, recreational space, jobs and environmental enhancements to the local community.

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Health, Jobs, Jails or Energy .. Whats More Important In The Bronx? 

INDIAN WELLS, Calif.–Jails or jobs. Those are the terms of a battle over a plot of land in the South Bronx, according to activist Majora Carter.

The Sustainable South Bronx, a community group focused on cleaning up poor communities, is trying to build a green industrial park on a 25-acre piece of land in a blighted section of the Bronx slated for redevelopment. The idea is to draw in companies that will make solar panels from solar cells and/or “green roofs” (lawns that are put on top of apartment buildings). The development will create jobs in the area, she said, as well as allow the land to be used in a relatively safe, nonpolluting way.

The city of New York, however, has unfurled plans to build a 2,000-bed jail on the site.

“I find it hard to believe that they would consider these 2,000 beds part of an affordable housing scheme,” she said during a presentation at the Clean Tech Investor Summit, taking place here this week.

I have not had a chance to speak to officials from the city to get their view.

Carter spoke at the conference to argue that a connection exists between the growing green industry and some of the problems impacting the inner city. Life in the poor sections of urban America, she said, is awful. In the South Bronx, unemployment has climbed to 25 percent and the percentage of people living in poverty is around 40 percent. The median income is $20,000 a year.

Many of these problems, she argued, can be traced to environmental degradation. A disproportionate percentage of New York’s waste disposal facilities and power plants are located in the South Bronx. That has created health problems–one in four kids has asthma, she said. Learning disabilities occur at a higher rate in areas associated with higher air pollution in several studies, she noted.

The area also has little in the way of greenbelts, which leads to the need for more wastewater facilities (greenbelts suck up water runoff), which leads to more power plants and more pollution.

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Is beep hopeful Joel Rivera aiming for foot on tenants’ bill? 

Has City Council Majority Leader and Bronx BP wannabe Joel Rivera shot himself in the political foot on this one - or even blown it off - by cosponsoring a landlord-backed bill that has tenant groups howling?

While the rest of the Bronx delegation backs Speaker Christine Quinn’s competing bill, tenant advocates charge West Bronx Councilwoman Maria Baez’s bill would muzzle tenants’ rights to complain of harassment while landlords could sue tenants who do complain.

A top Rivera adviser told us Baez’s bill mainly shifts initial complaints from logjammed housing courts to the Department of Housing Preservation and Development.

“It’s not an anti-tenant bill,” argued Rivera’s guy.

We shall see …

One lucky cop

Detective Dan Rivera is the luckiest sonuva-you-know-what in the NYPD.

The Detectives’ Endowment Association’s Bronx delegate wound up with only a graze wound - dead center on his forehead - in a recent gun battle over on Webster Ave.

He was among those honored last week at the Elks annual Police Night at Frankie & Johnny’s Pine Restaurant.

Deputy Chief Terry Monahan, No.2 honcho over “the minions” at Patrol Borough Bronx - and looking more like boss Tom Purtell with that freshly shaved chrome dome - was also honored, along with Lt. Tom Sullivan of the Lieutenants Benevolent Association, Sgt. Ray Brickley of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, Police Officer Mike Morgillo of the PBA and Lt. Cosmo Costa of the New Rochelle PD.

And Danny, thanks (we think) for sharing with us about your “reward” after the shootout …

Eco boss denies Council bid

Majora Carter, who’s built a nationwide eco-rep as head of Sustainable South Bronx over in Hunts Point, denies, denies, denies an item in last week’s Crain’s Insider column that she’s eying Maria del Carmen Arroyo’s City Council seat.

“I’m having too much fun where I am,” sayeth Majora.

Celebrating the Fat Man

That was some 40th-anniversary bash for the Hunts Point Multi-Service Center at Marina del Rey last week, organized by alumnus and Community Board 1 Chair Georgie Rodriguez.

Though founder Ramon (The Fat Man) Velez took a heavy pounding from Mayor Koch as “a poverty pimp” during the War on Poverty years, the center’s still thriving, while a buncha folks affiliated with it have gone on to elective office.

That includes Rep. Jose Serrano; former Bronx BP Freddy Ferrer; former State Sen. Olga Mendez; Assemblywoman Carmen Arroyo; former Assemblyman and current County (and soon-to-be City?) Clerk Hector Diaz and former Assemblyman and Bronx Democratic Boss Roberto Ramirez.

Ramon Jr. told us his dad, now in a local nursing home with Alzheimer’s, “looks well. He’s eating and he’s healthy.”

‘Blue Blood’ goes downtown

You can take Ed Conlon out of the Bronx - to hang out in Manhattan with the literary/showbiz/media crowd - but only after the detective has finished his shift at the gritty 44th Precinct in Highbridge.

The author of the autobiographical, behind-the-badge Times best-seller “Blue Blood” has just seen a new TV pilot based on his book completed and has handed in the first draft of his second book, a novel about - what else? - cops.

Kevin behind the bar at Elaine’s confirms Eddie and the squadmates he drags downtown are regulars there, and we’re told Ed dines with downtown pals over at the next-to-impossible-to-get-into Rao’s in East Harlem.

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Saving the World (Starting With the South Bronx)

By Majora Carter

When people ask me what I do for a living, my short answer is, “I’m working to save the world, starting in the South Bronx.”

Yes, the South Bronx is a poor Latino and Black community in New York City. At first glance, we don’t have much in common with families living in Appalachian coal country, or wealthy women in the suburbs. But when you realize that all of us have suffered from environmental toxins invading our lives, whether it was the deliberate act of regulators allowing toxic facilities in a poor communities because it was the path of least resistance, or that our energy needs must be met at any cost, or that cancer clusters that crop up, you begin to see just how small the world is.

My work in the South Bronx is about transforming its physical landscape to improve our environmental, economic and social quality of life and serve as a symbol of transformation for all people. Because if you can do it there, it can happen anywhere.

People around the world are victims of intentionally bad environmental planning and policies, sometimes people just didn’t know any better. But now we do, and I am a part of a community that changes things. And by community, I don’t mean people in a geographic area or an online group. I mean that community is an activity, the responsibility that you use to make the world safer and happier for all. You should join us.

SOURCE: Huffington Post

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