A new project is about to help New York City make strides toward environmental equity. Working in partnership with the NYC Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice, the engineering and consulting firm Buro Happold is teaming up with urban planning nonprofit Hester Street to develop an environmental justice report and online data portal, aiming for an early 2023 release date.
Photos courtesy of Buro Happold
“The hope is this will be a foundational report,” said Chris Rhie, associate principal at Buro Happold. It will, for the first time, “take a comprehensive look at all the ways environmental justice has played out in New York City.”
The City Council’s passage of Local Laws 60 and 64, signed into law by former Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2017, mandated the launch of these publicly available resources. At the same time, growing cultural awareness of environmental inequities has also fueled the initiative.
Currently, Buro Happold is gathering data from a variety of sources, including government agencies. “The exercise now is diving through a number of the existing reports and analyses, and uncovering where there may be additional data sets that may inform our plan, looking at cumulative impacts on different neighborhoods throughout New York City, and ways we might dive in further than what’s been made publicly available,” Rhie noted.
“We are not making discrete recommendations as part of this report, it’s purely a fact-finding endeavor,” he added. But the next phase will be for the city to use the documentation to create an environmental justice plan. “That plan is going to come up with specific recommendations to directly address environmental justice issues and make reparative efforts where there are really some egregious disparities.”
Buro Happold has previously worked with the city on a number of environmental projects, including the 1.5 ° Plan and NYC’s Roadmap to 80 x 50, both designed to help the city take action on climate change, as well as a study of residential energy efficiency plans. “So we have had a track record of working on citywide environmental initiatives with the Mayor’s Office,” Rhie said. When the city’s request for proposals came out, Buro Happold not only responded, but reached out right away to Hester Street.
Image courtesy of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
Previously the company worked with Hester Street on Where We Live NYC, which involved a deep investigation into fair housing issues across the five boroughs. “Hester Street led the public engagement effort, partnering with organizations to hold community conversations,” he said, and learning from people with lived experiences of housing discrimination, among other issues.
Hester Street’s relationships with community-based organizations across the city, its civic data resources, and the expertise it brings to creating the data portal will complement the research and analysis conducted by Buro Happold, Rhie said. He expects the data portal to attract different audiences, such as community organizers, government departments and their staff, and members of the general public.
While the impetus for the environmental justice report was a legal one, a cultural shift has led the way. “I think that there has been an awakening in the public consciousness about racial justice issues, which are inseparable from environmental justice,” he said, and these issues have strong ties to the city’s programs and policies, and how it does business. “For example, a lot of disparities in neighborhoods that have to do with the number of parks and open spaces they have, or the number of sources of pollution that they have, can be tied to discrimination in housing and other public policy—things like redlining, which dictated where people could live based on the color of their skin. That continues to have a legacy today, on how much pollution exposure people experience.”
Photo courtesy of the Los Angeles County Chief Executive Office
Rhie added, “So I think that part of the larger culture reckoning with racial justice is definitely a part of this … and climate change is only going to worsen the ways that people experience these issues. Rising temperatures are going to make air quality worse, increase the formation of ozone, and exacerbate respiratory issues, so the disparities are only going to widen with the impacts of climate change.”
While commercial offices are not a primary focus, Rhie said that indoor air quality and exposure to hazardous materials will be part of the study, which will also look into working conditions in outdoor, warehouse, and industrial settings. In addition, it will consider neighborhood businesses, such as dry cleaners, and other settings that working people encounter in their day-to-day lives.
“I think that a lot of environmental injustices are sometimes not top of mind,” Rhie noted, “but they have real impacts on health and well-being.” While his team’s phase of the project won’t involve recommendations, “when we identify disparities, things that you can change that are inherently unfair, to the extent that there is power in city government to address it, we can reasonably expect that city government will want to address it.”
Karen Hudes is a writer and editor based in Brooklyn, New York.