Creating Sustainable Cities: San Francisco and New York Are Leading the Way

Angela Greene has a tough job: she and her workcrew scale the rooftops of Richmond, California to run wires, lay racks, and bend metal piping. Yet in the end, when she unfurls a gleaming solar panel over her community, it feels easy to save the planet.

After being laid off from her former job at a printing business, Greene went through a vocational training program and then joined Solar Richmond, an organization that is bringing sustainable energy along with new jobs to the heavily black and Latino port city.

To the 47 year-old single mom, her new work as a project manager means more than a steady income. "I'm actually helping my community--showing people in the community that there are things here for us to do," Greene says. "There's good things happening here."

Those good things place Richmond at a new forefront in the environmental movement, far from the embattled rainforests and melting polar ice caps that dominate the news. Many cities have spawned "greening" initiatives to test new concepts of sustainable development, and the political momentum behind them is growing.

New York City recently launched a multi-year plan to ramp up energy efficiency, reduce pollution and cut emissions. And across California, local governments have mapped out eco-friendly development policies that complement new state legislation to control greenhouse-gas emissions.

But amid the political green rush, grassroots groups want to ensure that the plans engage marginal communities, where both people and the environment suffer systemic exploitation and neglect. From downtown Oakland to the South Bronx, activists are trying to align environmental solutions with goals of equity and inclusion.

Nwamaka Agbo with the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, a San Francisco Bay Area activist organization, says the future of the burgeoning movement around climate change hinges on how far it reaches outside the environmentalist in-crowd.

"If the top ten percent are doing everything that's hot and sexy--with the solar panels and the hybrids and biodiesel--but don't invest in these other communities that don't have as much money or don't have as pretty of a reputation," she says, "then all the efforts will be undone."

Rethinking Green

Activists are wary that the green solutions pitched by policymakers and the largely white, mainstream environmental movement may perpetuate, or even deepen, economic and racial stratification. They point to a common trajectory of other urban "development" efforts over the past generation: an infusion of business-friendly capital spurs a wave of gentrification, rents rise, and low-income households are pushed out to make way for a new privileged class.

An ironic dimension to the politics of greening is that the poor and people of color are often hit hardest by the consequences of industrial and human activity--from hurricanes to toxic brownfields.

So what happens when shutting down a smog-churning power plant cleans up the air but wipes out local jobs, or idyllic "green space" is generated by razing low-income housing?

"Very often, efforts to improve environmental quality, especially at local level, have functioned unintentionally--and sometimes intentionally--to gentrify neighborhoods and displace poor people," says Raquel Pinderhughes, a professor of urban planning at San Francisco State University.

New York City environmentalists view Mayor Michael Bloomberg's greening initiative, PlaNYC, with cautious optimism. While it includes progressive initiatives like cleaning up water systems and retrofitting buildings for energy efficiency, the plan gives little insight on how to ensure that green benefits span equitably across the city's uneven social landscape; the New York metro area leads the nation in income inequality.