Pratt Center

In this Issue:

• What Banh Mi and Child Care Have in Common
• Elena Conte: Community Action and Citywide Change
• Downtown Brooklyn Reassessed
• Campus Connection: A Sustainable Pratt Institute
• Preservation and Planning: The Next Generation
• Cypress Hills Breaks Ground
• Redefining ReDefining Economic Development
• Change a Light, Change the World
• Save the Date: Pratt Center Gala, February 26, 2008

What Banh Mi and Child Care Have in Common

A message from Pratt Center Director Brad Lander

In a recent article in the New Yorker, Calvin Trillin writes of his trip to Singapore for an official visit to see the remarkable food vendor centers there. Singapore is better known in the U.S. for its ban on chewing gum and other regulatory policies that discourage freedom of personal expression. But its government-established "hawker centers" are an urban planning and community development model worthy of note. The centers offer extraordinary diversity -- from Hainanese chicken rise to Perankan laksa to both Indian and Chinese versions of rojak) -- create tens of thousands of entrepreneurial opportunities, are overseen by public health inspectors, and make outdoor eating both common and delicious.

Trillin imagines what a New York hawker center might look like: "There's a stand selling Italian-sausage sandwiches, of course, and a stand selling Vietnamese banh mi sandwiches. The Mayor has persuaded the dosa man of Washington Square to come into the operation. There are stands run by the vendors from the Red Hook ball fields -- one selling pupusas and one selling ceviche and one selling Honduran tacos. A couple of Belgian French-fry vendors are there ... [and] the legendary Arepa Lady of Jackson Heights ... [and] ... a jerk-chicken stand and two competing falafel stand."

Unfortunately, instead of encouraging and supporting and investing in something like this, New York City's Economic Development Corporation has too often been doing the opposite. EDC is putting the Moore Street Market in East Williamsburg up for auction, to be redeveloped as housing (though hopefully the winning developer will choose to maintain a ground-floor market). And the City nearly decided to displace the vendors at the Red Hook ball fields with an RFP as well.

Inexpensive food for New Yorkers at work or play isn't the only necessity that's threatened by New York's current approach to economic development . Rising real estate prices, and the passion of both developers and the City for residential and commercial development, are jeopardizing many of the places that make our neighborhoods great places to live: child-care and community and senior centers, small businesses, spaces for artists and small cultural organizations.

Mayor Bloomberg deserves great credit for looking to the future physical infrastructure of our city with his visionary PlaNYC 2030. But we need a parallel effort to attend to the City's "social infrastructure." The Department of City Planning projects that NYC's senior population will grow by 44% between 2000 and 2030, from 938.000 to 1.35 million -- and most will be low or moderate income. Are we thinking about where they will live, and go during the day? Can we afford not to?

In the coming months, the Pratt Center will be launching new technical assistance and policy work to help address some of these issues. But as with Singapore's hawker centers, it will take thousands of hands-- and strong leadership from public officials -- to preserve and strengthen the diverse places that make New York City's neighborhoods great.

Equitable Development Policy and Advocacy
Community Action and Citywide Change

Building a bistate coalition to push ahead on the long-awaited Cross Harbor Freight Tunnel, which will take thousands of trucks off city highways and streets. Bringing Queens residents, labor unions, community advocacy groups and elected officials together around a common vision for Willets Point. Connecting environmental justice organizations to find common solutions to transportation needs and problems.

It's all in a day's work for Elena Conte, the Pratt Center's new Organizer for Public Policy Campaigns. Conte's arrival marks an important step forward in our work to connect some of the best experts on neighborhood planning and policy--the people who live and work there--with policymakers and opportunities to win systemic change.

Conte is teaming with Pratt Center Director of Policy and Advocacy Andrea Anderson (see Pratt Center eNews Summer 2007) to create connections between neighborhood advocacy around the city and opportunities to influence city- and statewide policy.

"It's exciting--we're taking a concrete step to connect the policy work the Pratt Center does to the insight communities have working in their own neighborhoods, to achieve goals and implement policies that will impact those neighborhoods," says Conte. "It means they don't have to fight on these issues front by front, fighting the same battles over and over in different parts of the city. It frees up communities to move forward realizing their own visions."

For example, Conte is working with the borough-wide coalition Queens for Affordable Housing to identify opportunities to build low-cost housing opportunities into major new development projects for Queens, such as Hunters Point and Willets Point. She's also helping them advocate at the city and state levels for policies that build and preserve affordable housing, such as inclusionary zoning and home rule on rent regulations. She also helps community-based advocacy groups act on opportunities for influence, such as the new state Commission on Traffic Mitigation that will be examining congestion pricing and other transportation policies.

Conte previously ran campaigns at Sustainable South Bronx. There, she coordinated participation in a citywide coalition, the Organization of Waterfront Neighborhoods, that persuaded the City Council to adopt a solid waste plan that burdens no one neighborhood with an excessive share of garbage-disposal facilities. She says it couldn't have been done without technical assistance from organizations like the Pratt Center. Explains Conte, "I've really witnessed the ways that can augment community power."

Community Planning
Downtown Brooklyn Reassessed

From a forest of new condos rising along Flatbush Avenue Extension to the recent sale and shutdown of the Albee Square Mall, downtown Brooklyn is undergoing a massive transition. The changes were made possible in part by a 2004 rezoning, undertaken to bring more office space to the area. But with luxury housing approaching $1,000 a square foot, developers have found it more lucrative to build condominium towers instead. Meanwhile, businesses that shoppers from the neighborhood and around the borough rely on have been shutting down, especially on the side streets adjoining the Fulton Mall.

The trend prompted great concern for members of Families United for Racial and Economic Equality, a community organizing group with a strong base in the public housing near downtown Brooklyn. FUREE turned to the Pratt Center for an assessment of the impact of new development on the local streetscape, environment and economy. The report reevaluates the Environmental Impact Statement put forth by the Department of City Planning to predict the consequences of new development permitted by the rezoning. The document will serve as an information resource to help FUREE and its members influence public debate about development in Downtown Brooklyn, highlighting the harm to small businesses and displacement of longtime residents.

Sustainability and Environmental Justice
Campus Connection: A Sustainable Pratt Institute

By the end of the decade, the Pratt Center won't just be moving out of our home of the last 20-plus years--we'll also be moving into a paragon of sustainable architecture and design. This fall Pratt Institute announced plans for a new building, housing academic facilities, offices, and retail, on Myrtle Avenue at Grand Avenue, one block from the institute's main campus.

Architects are aiming for LEED Gold certification, one of the highest standards for green building. Technologies being considered include solar panels, a green roof, and a geothermal climate control system that taps into underground water to heat and cool the structure.

The investment in sustainability at the Myrtle Avenue building grew out of a new commitment from Pratt Institute to lead the way in integrating environmental principles into the teaching of art, design and architecture. The Pratt Center will benefit from these efforts as new interdisciplinary research, design studios and classes address the questions and training needs of the Center's constituents in low- and moderate-income communities.

Earlier this year, Pratt Institute President Thomas F. Schutte became an early signatory to the American College and University Presidents' Climate Commitment, which pledges institutions create a plan to achieve carbon neutrality and take other measures to reduce their environmental impact. This new commitment launched a series of changes at Pratt to infuse environmental consciousness into every aspect of the curriculum and the campus

"As a leading school of art, design and architecture, Pratt is uniquely poised to develop creative responses to the major environmental challenges facing our society," said Schutte in a statement. "The professional practices over the next 20 years of those who are now students of design will play a major role in determining whether recent innovations such as carbon-neutral buildings, design for recycling, and fabrication and construction processes that minimize waste and energy consumption become common practice in the United States." In June, Mayor Bloomberg chose Pratt as the site of his announcement that nine institutions of higher education around New York City have pledged to reduce their carbon emissions by 30 percent in ten years, matching the City of New York's own groundbreaking commitment to greenhouse gas reduction as part of its PlaNYC 2030 initiative.

This spring, Pratt Institute created two new positions to advance sustainability in and out of the classroom. As Academic Director of Sustainability and the head of the new Interdisciplinary Center for Sustainable Design, Debera Johnson will work with faculty and students to ensure that every Pratt graduate has the tools and sensibility to practice their chosen profession in a way that is sensitive to environmental issues. She is the director of a new Interdisciplinary Center for Sustainable Design Studies that will over courses and minors that cross more than one field of study. A major new grant from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education, of the U.S. Department of Education, will support the development of these academic initiatives

Meanwhile, Pratt Institute's new Sustainability Coordinator for Facilities and Operations, Tony Gelber, has started on the road to greenhouse gas reduction by conducting Pratt Institute's first-ever carbon audit.

Pratt Institute's deep new commitment to sustainability grew in part from the efforts of Sustainable Pratt, a collaboration of faculty, students and administrators, including staff of the Pratt Center for Community Development, that has worked since the spring of 2005 to bring environmentally sustainable practices into the classroom and operations of Pratt.

Community Planning
Preservation and Planning: the Next Generation

Through its close partnership with Pratt's Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment, the Pratt Center helps educate a new generation of planners, architects and other practitioners working to shape the urban landscape, through classroom projects that assign students to assess needs and opportunities for community development. This past spring, students in Prof. Vicki Weiner and Laura Wolf-Powers' urban planning studio surveyed vacant property in Cypress Hills, Brooklyn -- as part of a project the Center is doing for the Cypress Hills Local Development Corporation -- to evaluate opportunities to build affordable housing while preserving the intimate, low-rise character of the neighborhood.

One of those students, Lacey Tauber, continued to be involved in the Cypress Hills study as a Pratt Center intern. Tauber and fellow Pratt Institute planning alum Justin Kray (now a planner at the Pratt Center), were featured in this fall's Village Voice Education Supplement, in the cover story "The City Is Their Laboratory: Pratt students invent the next New York--for real." The Voice looked at how Tauber and Kray's work brought their training and the Pratt Center's expertise to a community seeking to shape its own growth, and described the Pratt Center as "a nexus of public-interest problem solvers [whose] expertise--drawn from a team of architects, urban planners, preservationists, and policy expert--is sought by communities citywide."

To read more, visit the Village Voice website.

Helping Communities Build
Cypress Hills Breaks Ground

On September 12, a group of Brooklyn elementary school students shoveled sand around in a box. This was no playground: They were heralding the long-awaited start of construction on a permanent home for Cypress Hills Community School, an innovative parent-educator collaboration initiated by the Cypress Hills LDC. Cypress Hills families, working with the Pratt Center, helped design the facility, which is scheduled to open in September 2009.

For more information about the construction of Cypress Hills Community School, visit our Cypress Hills page.

Equitable Development Policy and Advocacy
Redefining Economic Development Grows Into One City/One Future

Since 2005, representatives from more than a hundred policy and community advocacy organizations have participated in ReDefining Economic Development, a project to set a new policy agenda for how New York City invests in its future. As we move closer to completing a Blueprint for Economic Development, we're also moving to make the project speak to all New Yorkers who are looking for alternatives to development policies that are dividing the city. Under the new name One City/One Future: Making Growth Work for All New Yorkers, our work with the Brennan Center for Justice and NY Jobs with Justice to promote equitable economic development will move to its next stage of influence.

Find out more about One City/One Future

Sustainability and Environmental Justice
Change a Light, Change the World

Pratt Center, through our partnership with the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), is participating in the ENERGY STAR® Change a Light, Change the World Campaign. The campaign seeks to save energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by encouraging consumers to switch to ENERGY STAR-qualified lighting products such as compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs). Consumers who make the switch sign a pledge, stating that they have taken steps to save energy in their homes.

NYSERDA has set a goal of obtaining 10,000 pledges by October 23rd. We invite staff of your organization to fill out pledges and want to ask your organization to become a "pledge driver"--that is, recruit others to pledge--to help us in reaching our goal.

A pledge driver hosts a link to the www.GetEnergySmart.org  web site on its own web site. As a pledge driver, you will receive credit for "pledges driven" to the www.GetEnergySmart.org  web site from your web address. Total pledges will be tracked on state and national levels. At www.GetEnergySmart.org  you will find sample blast emails, web site icons for your landing page, and pledge driver tracking information.

Please call Wendy Fleischer at 718-636-3486 extension 6450 if you have questions on becoming a pledge driver.

Thank you for helping New York become a leader in energy efficiency!

Save the Date!

On February 26, 2008, the Pratt Center for Community Development will celebrate 45 years of planning, building and educating for change. Please plan to join us at Gotham Hall in Manhattan, where we'll look back at our accomplishments, celebrate those who make a difference and recognize all that still needs doing to help New York's communities plan for the future.

Contribute

Please support the Pratt Center for Community Development's vital work to help New York City's communities plan and build their own futures. Your gift enables us to continue supporting community organizations in pursuit of their visions, and to link their efforts to opportunities to influence city and state policies. To help us, visit our secure online donation page.