High poverty rates are a virtual guarantee of finding a high incidence of severe asthma.

High-poverty inner-city neighborhoods are crowded places. In the Hunt’s Point neighborhood of the South Bronx, for example, about 50,000 people make their home in an area of little more than two square miles.¹ Half the population here lives below the poverty line. Hunt’s Point’s congressional district (NY-16) is one of the poorest in the country.²

Another characteristic of poor inner-city neighborhoods is toxic air pollution. Few places are worse off than Hunt’s Point. Each week thousands of heavy trucks roll through Hunt’s Point—60,000 diesel truck trips per week. The Hunt’s Point neighborhood processes 40 percent of New York City’s waste, including all the waste produced by the 1.3 million people who live in the Bronx.³ The neighborhood has some of the lowest air quality in the country. More adults and children from Hunt’s Point are hospitalized each year with asthma attacks than anywhere else in New York.⁴

The chance of finding a power plant or dump in a poor community is at least as good as finding a high-performing school in a wealthy neighborhood. Residents of wealthy communities don’t allow waste processing facilities. People mobilize to fight them. They hire lawyers or let the lawyers among them do the job. Poor communities are not powerless, but they rarely have sufficient resources to fight back effectively.

The decision to dump much of the city’s waste in Hunt’s Point was not made by anyone who lives here. Nor was the decision to build a cement factory across from a 14-story housing project in the Bronx River neighborhood. When windows are open, dust from the factory settles inside apartments and people’s lungs. On scorching summer days, it’s nearly impossible not to leave windows open since it’s simply too expensive to run an air conditioner all day.>

In Hunt’s Point, the polluters are getting a free ride for now. The costs to the environment and public health are not theirs to pay. But the scales could turn in favor of the community once a price is set on the main greenhouse gas contributing to climate change, CO2, which pours from the tailpipes of trucks and the stacks of cement factories.

One of the hardest things about working to change conditions in high-poverty communities is persuading people that change can really happen. “People who live in such communities find it easy to become jaded,” says Flavia DeSouza, an organizer with Bread for the World who has worked in the South Bronx. “And then they don’t believe change is possible, even if they work together.”

In chronically poor communities, whether urban or rural, well-meaning people come from out of town to offer their help, outraged by injustices like those visited upon Hunt’s Point. They come in and repair a roof or plant a garden. To the outsiders, many of the people who live in the neighborhood appear numb or indifferent to the good deeds that are done. It’s not that residents resent the charity being provided, but when the visitors go home, they remain in a poor community. Hunger hasn’t changed, the air is still rank, and the people who live here are no more empowered than before.

Sustaining the South Bronx

Green roofs, like this one, don’t need to be fancy to make buildings more energy efficient.

The local nonprofit Sustainable South Bronx (SSBX) was founded in 2001 in an attempt to re-brand the Hunt’s Point neighborhood from an area known for pollution, poverty, and gang violence to a leader in the fledgling green jobs movement. SSBX trains 60-80 workers per year in trades like weatherization, landscaping, toxic waste cleanup, ecological restoration, and green-roof installation. After decades of neglect and decay, the neighborhood itself can provide all the hands-on instruction needed to produce trained workers in these disciplines.

SSBX built the first green roof demonstration project in the city. Green roofs are covered with soil and plants instead of petroleum-based roofing materials. These roofs absorb heat from the sun to help mitigate what is known as the “urban heat island” effect,⁵ meaning that the closely spaced buildings of urban environments cause surface temperatures to rise, sometimes by several degrees. Green roofs help cool air temperatures. They also absorb water, minimizing storm-water runoff, and provide a natural insulating effect during winter, making buildings more energy efficient.

Eighty-five percent of SSBX training graduates get jobs. These are the kind of jobs they can use to build careers, particularly since green jobs are a growth industry. The best way to reduce CO2 emissions in the short run is to improve the energy efficiency of existing buildings. According to the National Renewable Energy Lab, the major barrier to improving energy efficiency is the lack of skilled workers.⁶

A neighborhood like Hunt’s Point would be the ideal place to direct resources to improve energy efficiency. Block after block of substandard, energy-inefficient building stock is right here. If decisions are based solely on where the greatest CO2 reductions can be made, Hunt’s Point and similar neighborhoods win hands down

But investment decisions are also influenced by the same factor that made these neighborhoods vulnerable to becoming pollution havens in the first place: political influence. It’s very hard for Hunt’s Point to compete for resources against areas with more clout.

Amilcar Laboy, a graduate of the Bronx Environmental Stewardship Program, now works at Sustainable South Bronx.

SSBX training programs are a combination of soft and hard skills. Soft skills include training in areas such as writing resumes, interviewing for jobs, money management skills, and time management. “[Students] are gaining skills that make them employable and also help them retain that employment,” says Miquela Craytor, executive director of SSBX.⁷ All of the SSBX trainees are low-income and come from the South Bronx and neighboring communities. Many are men who have previously been incarcerated and are looking for a second chance. Every year, more than 630,000 people are released from prison across the country,⁸ and most return to urban neighborhoods like Hunt’s Point, where they struggle to rebuild their lives and contribute to their families and communities. In addition to a shortage of marketable skills, they deal with the stigma of having been incarcerated.

“We are trying to create pathways out of poverty,” says Craytor, emphasizing that the training program is just as focused on transforming individual lives as it is on greening communities. She realizes that what SSBX has accomplished is a drop in the bucket compared to the need for job training. But SSBX can’t expand its programs without a significant financial boost to build organizational capacity.

There would seem to be few groups better positioned than SSBX to make the most of workforce development resources to provide green job training. SSBX remains a small operation, and with that comes limits on the types of grants it can qualify for. This is a problem for any group that is working in a disadvantaged community. With more resources, SSBX would be able to hire more staff and expand its area of operation, but it also risks becoming a different kind of organization, not the small grassroots community group founded to serve people in Hunt’s Point.

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