Pratt Center

In This Issue:

• A Message from Director Adam Friedman
• Jackson Heights Green Agenda Sprouts
• Concrete Plant Park Brings the Bronx to its River
• Building Opportunity for Public Housing Residents
• A Second Chance for Houses of Worship
• Options for Seward Park
• Training for Green Jobs, Green Buildings
• Meet the Pratt Center Fellows
• Pratt Center Briefs

Our Community's Footprint
A Message From Director Adam Friedman

It’s December, and even in tough economic times the annual rituals of consumption are in full swing – the shopping, the traveling, the parties. In the back of my mind, I know excesses of consumption can be destructive to our planet and to our individual values, but I don’t want my family or myself to feel deprived because we don’t participate in all the giving and consuming. I want to feel good about sustainable living but I love giving nicely wrapped things.

Perhaps more than any other time of the year, the holidays bring out our conflicting values: material versus spiritual; giving versus receiving; sharing with close family and friends versus recognizing that we are part of many communities varying in size from a zip code to a continent. The desire to consume runs straight into our desire to restore sustainability to our planet.

Perhaps more than any other time of the year, the holidays bring out our conflicting values: material versus spiritual; giving versus receiving; sharing with close family and friends versus recognizing that we are part of many communities varying in size from a zip code to a continent. The desire to consume runs straight into our desire to restore sustainability to our planet.

We are in a period of extraordinary transition as we try to restore sustainability to our planet. The predominant values of our communities have not fully caught up to the imperative to reduce global warming and transition to a low carbon economy.

When I talk about sustainability, I mean both an operating system and a culture that meets today’s material needs without sacrificing the ability of future generations to meet theirs. A sustainable operating system includes such things as good mass transit and a modern electrical grid. But that operating system can accomplish nothing on its own – it’s just a bunch of machinery.

What brings the machinery to life is our culture, the values that reinforce individual and collective behaviors that lead to sustainable prosperity in the future. Some of the individual choices are obvious, such as recycling and minimizing waste, cutting down auto and plane trips, and maybe buying seasonal food.

Our community choices are less obvious, but it’s clear that sustainability is much bigger than our individual consumer choices. It’s also about promoting the material security of others, so that they may be part of the larger transition in values. A sustainable New York also must be a place where workers make living wages, and have opportunities for education and mobility.

Right now too many New Yorkers have far more to worry about than their own environmental choices. They’re struggling to make the rent, and without hope of change they have no reason to invest in the shift in cultural values. People have to have a positive vision of where they’re headed. If a sustainable city offers opportunities, that’s a foundation for a popular movement that will organically make that shift happen, because of individuals’ sense of their stake in the larger whole. A city that is divided, and where economic interests of one group are pitted against another’s, cannot come together to keep itself in robust health.

At the Pratt Center, we’ve been busy fertilizing a cultural shift to sustainability. In Jackson Heights, one of the most diverse neighborhoods in New York City, we’re helping forge a common vision for the future of the local environment. In Bedford Stuyvesant we’re helping residents of two blocks, and congregations of several churches, retrofit their buildings for energy efficiency. They’re not only saving money and helping the environment, but becoming agents of that cultural change.

More than anything, it takes persistence and a long view to see this kind of change through. It’s been a decade since the Pratt Center began working with community groups to envision how a rusty abandoned concrete plant on the fouled Bronx River could become a green oasis. Opened this fall, Concrete Plant Park sends a powerful message to the children who walk through it each day on their way to school: When neighbors come together, visions for a stronger, greener city and world can become reality.

Community Planning
Jackson Heights Green Agenda Sprouts

Jackson Heights is a thriving community that faces a distinct set of environmental challenges. The City Council district that includes Jackson Heights has just 1 acre of park space for every thousand children. Traffic to and from nearby LaGuardia airport pollutes the air and clogs the streets. And Jackson Heights has a larger share of tenants living in severely overcrowded housing than any other neighborhood in New York City.

Making its public debut on November 7 at Renaissance Charter School, the Jackson Heights Green Agenda is responding to the community's distinct set of environmental challenges by embarking on a neighborhood sustainability plan – a road map for how the neighborhood can reduce its environmental impact and promote more livable surroundings. Jackson Heights Green Agenda is a collaboration between Queens Community House and the Jackson Heights Beautification Group/Friends of Travers Park, and follows a successful campaign to close a block of 78th Street adjoining the small park to traffic on Sundays. That park is now closed for renovations over the objections of community residents, intensifying the urgency many feel to address the neighborhood’s environmental challenges.

Jackson Heights Green Agenda launched with a visioning session, at which Pratt Center planners led more than 100 participants through exercises assessing community strengths and weaknesses, top issues of concern, and visions for the future. Air quality, traffic, open space and housing conditions are among the issues participants will be grappling with over the coming six months through a process that will engage hundreds of neighborhood residents and ultimately influence city spending, services and priorities.

"Looking at the mayor's PlaNYC 2030, the big pieces were really well thought out but it didn't explain how it would get down to doing things on the local level,” says Len Maniace, chair of Friends of Travers Park. The Green Agenda, he hopes, will be a forum through which Jackson Heights residents can develop a plan for sustainability that fits the neighborhood's unique profile and needs. "This can be a model for other communities." Jackson Heights is one of New York City's most ethnically and economically diverse neighborhoods.

To get representative input from its many micro-communities, the Pratt Center and Jackson Heights Green Agenda are producing a sustainability workbook and distributing it to community partners to use in a range of settings where neighborhood residents gather, such as schools and community centers, with the help of volunteer facilitators. The input collected from the workbooks will be presented at a final visioning session in February.  "This is a grassroots effort, and we're reaching out to all members of our community across the divides of language, ethnicity, age and income," says Anna Dioguardi, Director of Community Organizing and Development at Queens Community House. "We'd like to reach a consensus plan which encompasses the needs of all of our stakeholders and can be implemented."

Read the report that details the Jackson Heights Green Agenda.

Sustainability and Environmental Justice
Concrete Plant Park Brings the Bronx to its River

On October 30, the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation cut the ribbon on Concrete Plant Park, the product of a collaboration between the Pratt Center and the Bronx River Alliance, a partnership of community and environmental organizations and government agencies, to turn a former industrial site along the Bronx River into a green open space. Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe set the tone by acknowledging that "the Concrete Plant Park shows what can happen when government is smart enough to listen to the community.” A decade after local groups first pressed to turn the abandoned site of the Edgewater Concrete Plant into a waterfront oasis, the plant’s reddish-brown silos stand as sculptural monuments to the site's past identity and present reuse. The riverbank has attracted fishermen, children hunting blue crabs, and cyclists and skaters seeking a refuge from busy streets.

The seven-acre park, located between the Bruckner Expressway and Westchester Avenue, adds a major link to the Bronx River Greenway, which when complete will provide public access to the river from Long Island Sound up to the Westchester border. An interim plan for the site’s transformation emerged in 2001 from a collaboration between community groups, including Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice, the Point CDC and Sustainable South Bronx, with the Pratt Center's assistance. That early plan enabled local groups to press the city to act. It also spawned a collaborative design process between local participants and the city Parks Department, generating features like a circle of large chairs that provides a setting for workshops and meetings. And a visit to reclaimed industrial sites in Germany's Ruhr Valley organized by the Pratt Center inspired community leaders to retain the silos that are now the park’s signature element.

“This park is the culmination of over a decade of community activism to reclaim the river and have access to the Bronx River waterfront,” said Maggie Scott Greenfield, Greenway Director for the Bronx River Alliance. “Community groups developed a vision of what the park should be, a place where people could get to the river and get away from it all.”

YMPJ Executive Director Alexie Torres-Fleming told the crowd at the ribbon-cutting: “This story is about being able to connect and really being able to honor the things that are really, really important: community voice, community legacy, community stories. I’m very moved by the thought that my children are playing here. They didn’t even exist when this happened.”

Concrete Plant Park lies just east of the Sheridan Expressway, a redundant and underutilized road many of the same groups that helped build the park have been campaigning to demolish. The Pratt Center and its partners in the Southern Bronx River Watershed Alliance have developed a plan for the Sheridan site that includes affordable housing, open space, retail services, light industry and neighborhood amenities. Demolition of the Sheridan would provide direct access to Concrete Plant Park and the Bronx River waterfront.

The new park provides more than a space for relaxation – the greenway could become a safe route to and from school for kids who now have to navigate the narrow sidewalks of the neighborhood’s heavily-traveled truck routes. Even before the park officially opened, the end-of-day bells at the four public schools that line those streets, sent a stream of school children into the park for the journey home. The Pratt Center and the Bronx River Alliance are now pressing the New York City Department of Transportation to move quickly to make the low-cost improvements that will safely link those schools to the new park.

Development Policy
Building Opportunity for Public Housing Residents

"Public Housing in New York City: Building Communities of Opportunity," a new report from the Pratt Center and Brooklyn Community Foundation, provides an in-depth look at the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) and the nearly 500,000 New Yorkers who live in its 286 developments. Funded by the Brooklyn Community Foundation, a charitable organization devoted exclusively to support Brooklyn’s nonprofit community, the report outlines strategies that would help create and increase opportunities for public housing residents, nearly half of whom live in poverty. While NYCHA housing provides essential, affordable housing options, it often results in isolated, impoverished communities. Half of New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA)'s households live in poverty; and, while fewer than 5 percent of all New Yorkers live in public housing, it also houses about 14 percent of the City's poor.

The report recommends partnerships between NYCHA and city economic development, transportation, and housing agencies, and by connecting residents with jobs created by the development agencies. The recommended partnerships build on existing city initiatives. The Department of Small Business Services and Economic Development Corporation’s Targeted Hiring and Workforce Development Program links un- and underemployed job-seekers with training and work opportunities tied to development projects in or near their neighborhoods. The planned Department of Transportation and MTA's citywide Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) can connect far-flung public housing developments to centers of employment and education. The existing collaboration between NYCHA and the Department of Housing Preservation and Development to develop NYCHA's vacant land can be tapped as a source of affordable housing, retail services and resident employment.

"Residents of public housing have often been isolated from economic opportunity by their geography, by poor mass transit, and by the concentrated poverty of their neighborhoods which lack networks and access to the business community," said Adam Friedman, Director of the Pratt Center for Community Development. "We're encouraged by NYCHA’s recent moves to improve residents' access to workforce and education services, and are building on that foundation by helping the Authority connect with emerging employment opportunities."

The report—the first of its kind—was made possible by the generous support of the Brooklyn Community Foundation, which recently launched five field of interest funds, among with was the Community Development fund devoted to helping stabilize and enhance neighborhoods and workforce development programs. "Brooklyn has more public housing units than any other borough, and while it represents a major source of affordable housing in New York City, the challenges its residents face in connecting to economic, educational and cultural opportunities are rarely explored,” said Marilyn Gelber, President of the Brooklyn Community Foundation. The Brooklyn Community Foundation asked the Pratt Center to undertake this research and policy analysis in an effort to find ways to enable public housing communities to be in a stronger position to take advantage of the City's economic, educational, and cultural opportunities. We are hopeful that these findings will spur public and private actions to bring about the changes that can lead to a better future for public housing residents," she said.

Helping Communities Build
A Second Chance for Houses of Worship

Bedford Stuyvesant is home to more than a hundred churches and other houses of worship, pillars of social and spiritual support that play a pivotal role in neighborhood life. Ranging from small storefronts to grand landmarks, they all share a common challenge: their aging buildings are big consumers of energy, much of it wasted because of inefficient design, poor insulation, or deferred maintenance. Rising energy costs put enormous strain on congregations' limited resources.

Launched with a $50,000 grant from State Senator Velmanette Montgomery, the Pratt Center’s Religious Institution Sustainability Project is now helping houses of worship in Bedford Stuyvesant equip themselves for energy efficiency. In the project’s initial phase, three churches are receiving a physical survey and/or energy audit to identify needed interventions, followed by recommendations for building modifications. The Pratt Center is helping the churches identify resources they’ll need to get the work done, including financing and job training programs.

By retrofitting their buildings for energy efficiency, the churches do more than save money on energy bills and reduce their carbon footprints. They also become visible leaders in a movement toward an energy-efficient Bedford Stuyvesant that also includes Retrofit Bedford Stuyvesant, a collaboration between the Pratt Center and Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation. And they will provide job and training opportunities for neighborhood residents.

"These churches are becoming beacons for environmental sustainability," said Pratt Center Lead Architect Michael Bogdanffy-Kriegh, who is collaborating with the churches on their retrofit plans. “The retrofits send the message to Bedford Stuyvesant that every building can and should be part of the solution to energy dependence and climate change." Says Sen. Montgomery, "It is a pleasure and an honor to be able to assist this very timely initiative by the Pratt Center. The Religious Institution Sustainability Project and these initial energy audits will act as a necessary checkup to keep the hearts of our community in the best of health. I am very happy to be part of this effort."

Community Planning
Options for Seward Park

What should become of the parking lots that line Delancey Street on the Lower East Side, officially known as the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area and owned by the City of New York? Over the past year, more than 500 residents, members of community organizations and business owners shared their ideas for the future of the site at the heart of the Lower East Side, through public workshops and a questionnaire facilitated by the Pratt Center in partnership with Good Old Lower East Side (GOLES) and CityLore. The partner organizations also conducted oral history interviews of longtime neighborhood residents, adding further depth to the survey and workshop findings.

The findings of this yearlong project, compiled in the report “Community Voices and the Future of the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area,” show participants seeking a balance to the wave of luxury development that has swept the area in recent years. Asked in workshops about how they would distribute a hypothetical budget for site development, they designated the largest share by far – 25 percent – to affordable housing, followed by community facilities such as child care centers, open space, and green buildings.

In a neighborhood where much of the housing is either exclusively subsidized or exclusively market rate, a significant share of survey respondents indicated a desire for mixed-income housing. A large majority also indicated that they would be willing to see market-rate apartments on the site, if that made it feasible to include affordable housing there. Two in five said they’d like to see a mixture of housing for rent and ownership. Respondents also overwhelmingly said that they’d accept larger-scale buildings than might otherwise be constructed if that made it possible to provide good jobs for local residents or affordable housing.

Damaris Reyes, executive director of GOLES, says that the project strives to bridge divides over different visions for the site’s future. “The site has triggered so many negative feelings and fighting at different ends of the community,” says Reyes. “This opportunity is greater than all of us. It’s about housing for the community, retail space local entrepreneurs can take advantage of, open space, and jobs. I hope it all becomes possible.”

Helping Communities Build
Training for Green Jobs, Green Buildings

When Pratt Center Sustainability Project Manager Wendy Fleischer came to speak at a seminar on energy efficiency she had no idea that she was about to help Dion Lewis transform his life. Lewis was an unemployed maintenance worker, a single father who'd done seasonal work for the Battery Park City Conservancy. On that job he'd begun using biodegradable cleaning products, and it opened his eyes to the idea that in his work he could be an agent to create a better environment. He also aspired to work in the building trades. "I'd always wanted to do some kind of construction but just couldn't get in - you had to know someone," says Lewis. Once Lewis heard about the emerging green building industry he made it his business to learn all he could about it, which led him to Fleischer's seminar talk. After he heard her speak about training opportunities in weatherizing homes and apartments for energy efficiency, he sprinted to catch her on the way out the door. Fleischer introduced Lewis to the Building Analyst class, leading to a Building Performance Institute certification. "I felt quite embarrassed that I couldn't afford it at the time,” Lewis recounts. “’Could you find funding for this for someone like me?’ I asked. And she said: keep in contact with me, and we'll see what we can do."

The cost of the training is fully reimbursable upon its completion, but when Lewis couldn't pay tuition in advance, Fleischer located temporary assistance through the Fifth Avenue Committee's Single Stop assistance program. In October, newly certified as a Building Analyst, Lewis was hired by the Community Environmental Center in Long Island City, one of the region's biggest energy efficiency contractors. He conducts energy audits – measuring rooms, conducting blower door tests to measure air leakage, and sealing up problem spots with caulking and insulation.

He's now preparing to enroll in the next level of training, Building Envelope classes that teach contractors best practices for sealing the exterior walls of a home. Lewis is now a member of the Laborers International Union of North America, and he plans to make energy efficiency work his career. "I did a home in Brooklyn for an elderly lady from the South, and it gave me great pleasure to actually go in there. She appreciated the service we rendered and I knew she needed it," he says. "My definition of a 'green-collar job' is that it's ecologically sustainable, economically sustainable and socially sustainable, and this job gives me all three."

As coordinator of NYSERDA's Energy $mart Communities program for Brooklyn and Queens, the Pratt Center has been helping contractors like Lewis find their way to training in the growing field of green-collar jobs. The Association for Energy Affordability and the Center for Sustainability offer training courses for contractors at various locations in the five boroughs, with tuition of $1,245 reimbursed by NYSERDA upon completion. Those courses lead to certification by the Building Performance Institute, which is required for all contractors participating in NYSERDA energy-efficiency programs. "I'm delighted to have been able to introduce Dion to the classes NYSERDA sponsors for contractors," says Fleischer. "Retrofits are a fast-growing field, and those who join now will be at a competitive advantage as it develops."

See Dion Lewis and the Pratt Center's Energy $mart Communities training outreach featured in The New York Times.

Meet the Pratt Center Fellows

This fall, the 2009-'10 class of Pratt Center Fellows has been making its mark on New York City. Whether researching the case for a more equitable transportation infrastructure, helping Brooklyn residents conduct energy audits, supporting local retail retention, or developing a sustainability visioning workbook for Jackson Heights, the Fellows are an invaluable part of the Pratt Center team.

During the school year, the Pratt Center offers Fellowship positions to a select group of incoming students in the Pratt Institute School of Architecture and Programs for Sustainable Planning and Development (PSPD). This year’s group of seven fellows hails from all over the U.S., and bring experience from prior work in government, media, public health and other fields. Fellows play a major role in most of the Pratt Center's projects, from conducting community interviews to producing GIS analysis.

Fellows Jesse Guttierrez and Erica Baptiste are analyzing truck traffic patterns and digging up data on automobile subsidies, in support of the Transportation Equity Project’s advocacy. "I am slowly but surely becoming a transportation geek,” said Guttierrez.  “Anything to do with public transportation, pedestrian access and alternative modes of transportation are beginning to take center stage in my view of the city thanks to the Fellowship program.”

Justin Bland and Dora Blount are working to preserve the character of the Fulton Street Mall as well as conducting a study in Cypress Hills to improve the retail mix and services available to local residents. And Tokumbo Anafalaji is engaging with local religious institutions to make their buildings more energy efficient.

 “When I first got here I said to my mentors, "I want to work in the community,’” commented Alexis Rourk on her experience as a Fellow, working on energy efficiency programs. "I didn't realize that everyone at the Pratt Center works in the community! That's definitely validated why I'm here at Pratt."

Pratt Center Briefs

INDEPENDENT RETAIL *City Comptroller Bill Thompson took on the Pratt Center’s recommendations from the Issue Brief “Saving Independent Retail”  as the basis for his mayoral campaign’s platform for supporting small business… As a city panel moved to approve $20 million in tax-exempt bonds for the completion of the City Point retail and residential project in downtown Brooklyn, the Pratt Center advocated for a set-aside of space for independent merchants… At a hearing on Retail Diversity and Neighborhood Health convened by the New York State Senate, the Pratt Center urged legislators to support improvements to retail districts in low-income communities.

IN THE NEWS * The Village Voice's Tom Robbins has named Pratt Center Director Adam Friedman one of "NYC's Unsung Heroes"....  Friedman discussed “Rezoning New York” on The Brian Lehrer Show, part of the “30 Issues in 30 Days” run-up to the election, and weighed in at Crain’s New York Business on City Hall’s too-little, too-late support for the garment business: “The city has proposed creation of dedicated production space to anchor the fashion industry. This is the right approach but is inadequate for an industry that contributes so much to the economy. It must be scaled up to meet the industry's needs.”

IN THE CITY COUNCIL * Former Pratt Center director Brad Lander will be the next City Council member from the 39^th District, covering parts of Park Slope, Borough Park, Windsor Terrace and Kensington in Brooklyn. We’re extremely proud of Brad, who will be joined at City Hall by several other new members with strong track records in community development.

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From our decade-long involvement in the community efforts to reclaim the Bronx River waterfront to the report on "building opportunities" within New York City public housing to the shaping of the next generation of urban planners, the Pratt Center facilitates neighborhood visions, city policy, and national priorities. We develop creative ways to implement community objectives through advocacy, on-the-ground organizing and technical expertise. This newsletter offers just a sampling of the breadth of work the Pratt Center staff engages in daily. We have big plans for the upcoming year, but we need your help.

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