Clean Neighborhoods: WE ACT for Environmental Justice

Charles T. Brown:
In the 1980s, people in New York City’s West Harlem were struggling to breathe. The neighborhood had the highest concentration of bus depots in the entire city. Diesel fumes hung in the air and asthma rates were through the roof. To make matters worse, the city opened a sewage treatment plant along the river. It had originally been planned for a wealthier, whiter community, but planners decided to divert it to this predominantly Black and Latino neighborhood. West Harlem fought back the nonprofit WE ACT for Environmental Justice was founded to organize community members. They shut down the West Side Highway, filed lawsuits, and eventually won a $55 million settlement. Today, WE ACT continues to advocate for environmental justice in northern Manhattan and beyond. By centering community outreach, they’ve managed to include residents into the processes that determine their neighborhood’s health. My name is Charles T. Brown, and this is Arrested Mobility.

My guest today is Lonnie Portis, Director of Policy and Legislative Affairs At WE ACT. Lonnie discovered the concept of environmental justice while he was working in public policy in New York. He had long been interested in social determinants of health and health disparities along racial lines, but he hadn’t considered a career in environmental policy until a consulting project at the grad school opened his eyes.

Lonnie Portis:
I used to always say, and this was always a funny thing, I would always say in grad school, “I would never get into environmental policy.” That was, I used to say, I was like, “I don’t get what the politicians don’t get. At the basics, it’s clean air, clean water. There’s nothing to debate here. What are we debating?” And I did a consulting project after grad school with a council member in Brooklyn at the time who was looking into the possibilities of what to do with Rikers Island after it’s closed. So Rikers Island, for those who might not know, is a big penal colony island where there’s a bunch of jails there that is riddled with a whole lot of issues and problem, which is now closing down due to a law. But then at the time, I was looking at like, what do you do with this space and this land that you have?

And looking into sustainability, renewable energy, urban farming was kind of like what I was tasked with. And as I was doing that research, I kind of came across the term environmental justice for the first time. And I’ve talked to a few people about environmental justice and what that looks like and how when you’re thinking through what to do with space and land use and thinking about sustainability, how are we thinking about how are we righting wrongs that have happened to folks, particularly people of color and low income communities? How do you rectify some of those wrongs that have been made in the past? And especially if you’re giving an opportunity to look at somewhere like Rikers Island as a fresh start for some of this work. And then fast-forward a few years, I was looking for a jobs and I actually came across a job listing for, I think at the time was an environmental policy coordinator.

And I applied because it was everything that I wanted to be, everything that I wanted to do. So it was a lot of intersectionality in the work, and I think that’s what I was really, really enjoying is, like, the environmental health aspect. So I’m getting that health piece there, but I’m also getting the justice aspect of the work that I wanted to do thinking about marginalized communities, there are communities that have been left behind, communities that have faced systemic and structural racism through policymaking. And so, here we are now and four years later, and now I’ve gone from being an environmental policy coordinator to now I’m the director of policy at WE ACT.

Charles T. Brown:
Lonnie, you’ve clearly risen through the ranks of the organization. Tell me more about WE ACT and its mission.

Lonnie Portis:
Our mission statement is to build healthy communities by ensuring that people of color and/or low income residents participate meaningfully in the creation of sound and fair environmental health and protection policies and practices. It’s so direct and straightforward, and I think the communities that we serve, primarily WE ACT is what we call Northern Manhattan here in New York City, so East and West Harlem, Washington Heights, Inwood, Marble Hill. So our roots come from doing political action within West Harlem itself and it has grown to cater more to Northern Manhattan, but we also do city wide work and also state wide work. And we have an office in DC as well doing federal policy work. So we’ve grown obviously over the last, well, I think about 37 years of WE ACT’s existence. We’ve grown quite a bit. But in practice what this all means is identifying environmental injustices. We educate our communities and we do a lot of knowledge sharing.

So it’s not just about us telling people what’s wrong or assuming that they don’t know any of the issues. It’s also understanding and listening to them and saying, “Well, what are you seeing as problems in your community?” Or, “How are you experiencing these environmental injustices?” And coming up with that strategic plan and goals for how we actually want to make change in our new communities and neighborhoods and mobilizing those impacted folks to help make those change. And depending on the issues, there are many versions and ways to mobilize people, but the key is to have multiple levels of engagement. And the struggle can sometimes be that these communities are already overburdened in many different ways, so they’re not just environmentally burdened by health hazards and things like that. But there’s also a lot of people who are trying to figure out whether they should pay their electric bill or they should buy groceries for the week. Those are the kind of decisions that they have to make.

So sometimes it can feel like it’s hard to go in and say, “Let’s talk about extreme heat in your neighborhood, in your community,” when someone’s trying to think about those other things. So we know that bandwidth is limited for some of our communities and when it comes to how to engage. And so that’s where WE ACT kind of comes in and to provide a little bit more bandwidth and to amplify these community voices.

Charles T. Brown:
Great. So the historical event that birthed WE ACT was the community to the Northridge Sewage Treatment Plant in the late eighties. Tell me about that history.

Lonnie Portis:
Yeah, I think the foundation of where WE ACT actually originated in the campaign that started there was we took on the North River Sewage Treatment Plant that was supposed to be originally planned for Midtown Manhattan, which is a wealthier, whiter community, but instead it was constructed in West Harlem, which is predominantly Black and Latino neighborhood. And it really kind of illustrates the environmental racism since community of colors are already disproportionately burdened by pollution and harmful infrastructure. And that neighborhood that they put in already had the highest concentration of bus depots throughout the entire city. There was an asthma problem among the community members as well. And so, putting that there was a choice that was made by decision makers, and that choice was there because it was the path of least resistance. And it created a sacrifice zone in West Harlem by just saying, like, we can just dump everything here because another group of wealthier whiter community members decided that they didn’t want it in their neighborhood.

They could mobilize a little bit better, and they’re a little more afraid of the political backlash from those communities, but they don’t think that much about any political backlash from communities of color. And so, years of community activism led to local leaders suing the City because of the placement of the sewage treatment plant, which was giving all of this just toxic fumes and smells, and it was open, and it was a horrible situation for anyone living near it. And so, they ended up with, I think it was a $55 million settlement to address kind of the plant design flaws and kind of reduce some of the odors and mitigate some of the environmental impacts and beyond just resistance in shutting down the west side highway to demonstrate the power that the community can have when they come together to make changes.

It created a West Harlem Environmental Benefits Fund, and that funding went towards urban gardens and internships and the construction of the River State Bank Park, which is now on top of the actual waste treatment plan, and also provided some seed money to start WE ACT. And so, I think that foundational campaign is where it started, the roots, and that’s where we try to make sure in all of our campaigns going forward, is how are we making sure we’re bringing community to the problem and making sure that we show that our strength that we have as community when we are involved and when we’re engaged in that work.

So another campaign that they worked on, another early campaign for WE ACT was the Dirty Diesel campaign. And basically, all of the buses that were uptown, well, all throughout the city were that the old school diesel bus, when you see a city bus go down the street or a school bus or anything like that, and you saw that those fumes that come out the back, that was the kind of buses that we had. But for now in New York City, we have more of a hybrid buses, so you don’t see that the same way. And the reason why there are hybrid buses on the road right now throughout New York City is because of WE ACT. That was an early campaign that started that basically pulled together a lot of the different community members that rallied around the idea that there was a disproportionate number of bus depots within Northern Manhattan in this neighborhood.

And one of those depots was situated right around an entire community. Literally, you step outside and there’s that bus depot there, one of the busiest bus depots, and you had non-stop buses coming out. So you think about all the exhaust and the fumes, the idling that might go on. Literally if someone were to open their door, they can’t really breathe any type of fresh air because there’s non-stop fumes coming from the buses. And so, they went through a lengthy process of really community organizing, getting those community members together to take action, and it led to a series of meetings and getting together and creating a plan, like I mentioned before, the actual mobilizing of folks in the community and educating them on the reason why these were harms and why this was placed there and creating that action plan. What it resulted in is working with the Metropolitan Transit Authority, so the MTA, which manages our transit system here in New York City, and got them to make changes to that bus depot to basically close it down and to rebuild it.

And it was the first ever lead certified bus depot to ever exist. And so, all of that community power in action moved an entire agency that I think feels like might be unheard of to do nowadays, but it’s huge to say that you got them to make those kind of changes. And then further that along by saying you can no longer purchase diesel buses. There needs to be a better way. There needs to be buses that are reduced emissions. And so, that’s how we ended up with a lot of the hyper buses that we have now. And now our push now is to move electric buses, taking those hyper buses and going one step further and saying, we need to ramp up our electric buses in the depots that we have. I think it also illustrates, again, the power of community when people can come together and gather and understand and educate how something’s harming them.

Because everyone always recognizes that from the beginning. You know something’s wrong, you know something’s not quite right, but you don’t understand why that harm is where it is or how it got there. But when you start to educate people on that particular topic, it gets people ready and willing to just like, oh, I can stand up and we can do something against this. We can fight against this and we can work together with decision makers, agencies to make something to correct the wrong. And that’s what happened. And I think that’s such a great example of how WE ACT thinks about the work that we do when it comes to always including our community’s voices and members into the decision making process, which goes back to our mission statement.

Charles T. Brown:
Community outreach is such a central part of your work. How do you earn people’s trust and communicate with them? And what is the impact of gentrification and displacement on the community’s perception of your work?

Lonnie Portis:
We think about the displacement, gentrification question all the time, and it’s become a lot more of a concern, especially with affordability, thinking about cities like New York City and where it’s just getting more and more expensive to live. Every aspect of our lives have gotten more expensive across the board, and so we already know that. Low income residents are feeling it the worst as well. And it should never be a situation where you’re just improving a community and that somehow causes people to be displaced or culture erasure at all. That just shouldn’t happen. The whole point of improving a community is so that the people who are there who have been historically been there can enjoy the benefits of that improved neighborhood or that quality, whether it be air quality, whether it be traffic or streets or more parks or more healthcare facilities, whatever that improvement is, it shouldn’t be like, well, now that it’s a better neighborhood, you can’t live here anymore.

And so, the first thing we do with that trust conversation is we’re honest about this, right? We’re honest about the potential that some of the builds and things that we want to see and priority to can possibly have on this. And if there’s a lot of other circumstances that we can’t control necessarily, but we make sure we’re always thinking about any potential downside to anything that we may think moves forward the larger climate or environmental justice movement. And I think that that key is there right now, first to start with the honesty of it, but then also letting them know we’re also working multiple simultaneous efforts to prevent displacement. So it’s not just us who are also thinking about this, but there are actual housing justice and folks working on gentrification that we also work with as well to make sure that their movement is going further as well.

So we’re all trying to interconnect as different community organizations to make sure that as we improve these communities, that no one is displaced. And so, it can be a complex situation just because there is a lot of things that come down to housing policy. Also, there is the kind of natural and enforced gentrification as well. There’s just a gentrification of this is a relatively affordable neighborhood right now because there’s maybe some… There’s all these different issues or environmental health hazards or things like that, so people may not want to be in this neighborhood, but as you improve those, you have landlords and now we have more investor owned properties that people are renting out to. And so, they start to see a neighborhood improve and they say, “Hey, well this apartment charged $500 more, so I’m going to start charging $500 more.” And then it kind of happens there and you start attracting people because people are still paying for it, and they’re like, “Hey, this is still relatively cheaper than the neighborhood that’s been nice from before, so we’re going to come here.”

So there’s also those factors as well that take place in being really aware and cognizant of changes in the neighborhood and being sensitive to understanding like, oh wait, something might be changing in a direction that we may not want to see those changes and are causing that displacement or the gentrification itself. And there’s also just making sure that there are not policies that are pushing gentrification in lots of ways. So we talk a lot about, sometimes we work with folks who talk about things like zoning and zoning changes and what that can do, and thinking about the communities and making sure that communities are educated and they know who’s on the ballot and who they’re voting for and some of their positions for certain things so that way they can make the decisions on some of these decision makers who have a lot of power to make some of these changes.

So I think that’s where the knowledge sharing comes in, too, of understanding what people are experiencing themselves and saying, “Oh, you’re experiencing this. We didn’t recognize this. We didn’t realize this.” And so maybe there’s an impact of the way that we can avoid that. And sometimes you can alter policy stances or bring those concerns to legislators or decision-makers as early as possible and saying like, “Hey, we read through this bill as a policy analyst.” I can read this bill and say like, “Well, where’s the environmental justice aspect to this policy that sounds like it’s good on paper.” But then also saying like, “Well, if we do this, how are we making sure that a landlord can’t raise someone’s rents?” Right? We’re want to have a green space there, but we want to make sure that everyone can access this green space. We don’t want it to be some privatized park or green space where not everyone has access to or it’s closed at a certain time or things like that. So I think it’s definitely something that we think about and we look into all the time.

And also thinking about how bad actors might come into a neighborhood in green wash. Developers might say something green, sustainable, this or that, and we have to really scrutinize are those things actually true, is always the first thing, too. Is that true, but then also, how are you providing some type of benefits for the community that keep the community that’s there in their homes?

Charles T. Brown:
What are you optimistic about in environmental justice in New York City and beyond?

Lonnie Portis:
Yeah, I think one of the big things that we’re working on right now is there’s a process for piece of legislation that we got passed called the EJ or Environmental Justice Citing Law, and it was referred to as cumulative impacts law. So in New York State, permitting had been done on a case-by-case basis. So examining the pollution that’s emitted from a facility in question, whether that be a factory, a power plant, a bus depot, sewage plant, garbage dumps, transportation, all of those… Trucking centers even, and it’s the pollution from other sources in the community would never take into consideration as well. So even though you were going to get permitted to put your pursuing facility somewhere, it was saying like, “Well, what is your impact solely?” And only looking at that one facility that’s being built or being permitted, not thinking about that there’s maybe several other of these impacts as well.

And that’s that combined total is called cumulative impacts, thinking about all of the sources of pollution, both in the community and adjacent to the communities that they’re putting or trying to cite things in. And New York State’s Environmental Justice Citing law, it ensures that cumulative impacts is taken into consideration in the State’s environmental permitting process when potentially polluting facilities seek a permit in disadvantaged communities particularly. And so, I think that’s something that we’ve been working on as they roll out the kind of rule-making process throughout the state, which is intense and takes a lot of expertise, a lot of diving into provide comments, we’re making sure we’re working with other organizations to make sure community members understand what’s going on in this process and trying to get feedback and submitting those comments to make sure that the rule-making is as strong as possible for this law to implement it so it can take effect properly.

And so, that’s something that Briana Carbajal, our state legislative manager is leading that work here at WE ACT, but it’s really important to say if we can just stop the siting of more polluting facilities and communities that are already considered sacrifice zone, that’s already a huge step to make sure that we’re mitigating and we’re stopping now, and so we don’t continue to harm communities over and over again. And I think that’s one of the big things that’s on the horizon that we’re really looking forward to seeing take effect and seeing tape shape. New Jersey was the first to have a law that was similar, and so they were kind of the pioneers. And so, we’ve been working with those advocates in New Jersey as well, who already have this law in effect, and really learning from what’s going on and lessons learned from their law .and our law is slightly stronger, right? That’s the joy of being someone who’s next, is you can say, like, “All right. Well, what did they do? How do we make ours a little stronger?”

So New York law is a little stronger, but we’re definitely moving on with helping pioneering cumulative impacts law and hopefully inspiring other states like New Jersey inspired New York, and we can inspire other states to have these kind of cumulative impact laws.

I think right now we’re in a very interesting time politically, right? There’s a lot of things going on if you haven’t heard. So a lot of having more, what I would say, hostile federal administration when it comes to things like solar, renewable energy, anything talking about justice or writing wrongs or talking about racism, it seems like we’re in a space where it’s being attacked all around and people can feel like this is already a big thing or a big problem when you’re talking about climate and environmental issues. And it feels like it’s so big and heavy and it’s a global problem, and some people are thinking about what’s going on, the extreme heat going on in India, and you’ve got the waste that comes up on the shores all over Western Africa of waste and things like that. So one thing I always tell people like a call to action is you can keep it really simple.

It’s just find your local, whether it be environmental justice or climate organization, and just get involved. Just start there. And being involved doesn’t mean that you have to be full-time volunteer, doing the most. You can just start by simply what do they have going on, signing up for their newsletter? What’s happening in my neighborhood? And that’s a really good way to understand what’s going on environmentally, is just finding the local organizations who are doing that work because you can absolutely make a difference on your block and in your neighborhood, and I think that’s important for people to understand is that you can contribute to the larger thing by simply just signing up for a day to think about cleaning up your park or finding an advocacy, or maybe it’s signing a letter, or maybe it’s calling your council member.

These are very simple actions that sometimes they only take 10, 15 minutes at the most when everyone’s doing a lot of the small actions. It makes a huge impact on the larger goal is to make our communities healthier, safer, and equitable in terms of how we get to experience our lives and our environment.

Charles T. Brown:
Although WE ACT mainly focuses on neighborhoods in Northern Manhattan, the work they do can serve as a precedent and an example for other organizations seeking to achieve environmental justice for their communities. Remember, this group began as a collective of neighbors who refused to be complacent when the health of their home was in jeopardy. I want to thank my guest, Lonnie Portis, for taking the time to speak with us for this podcast. If you don’t already follow the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast, head over and tap the follow button. This podcast is a production of Equitable Cities with support from Puddle Creative.