Environmental Goods and "Bads": Understanding Green Infrastructure in NYCHA Public Housing

Abstract

As a result of a long history of racial segregation, discrimination in the housing market, and federal disinvestment in their neighborhoods, tenants of New York City’s largest public housing authority, NYCHA, are faced with both disproportionately high exposure to environmental “bads” and disproportionately low access to environmental goods. NYCHA residences have been shown to experience elevated flood risk and can be subject to a negative outcome of extreme weather known as combined sewer overflow (CSO), which is hazardous to health and degrades the environment. In response to these harms, the City of New York has been increasingly exploring green infrastructure (GI) as a way to remedy these ongoing issues of CSO and flooding. At the same time, green infrastructure acts as an adaptive measure, as the government of New York City tries to prepare for a future of more intense and frequent extreme weather due to worsening climate change. Green infrastructure serves these purposes and even more, thus the city government is seeking to distribute GI where it would be the most helpful, which is commonly in NYCHA communities. The NYC Department of Environmental Protection has been operating the Green Infrastructure Program for more than a decade now, but there is still insufficient understanding of how successful these green infrastructure projects are on NYCHA properties, across a wide variety of metrics—not just controlling CSO. In this study, I seek to better understand (1) the context of NYCHA demographics and flood risk that these green initiatives are built into; (2) the actual level of access NYCHA residents have to green infrastructure; and (3) whether or not the GI has been integrated into the lived experiences of tenants. I examine these questions through the lens of environmental justice (EJ)—a growing movement to address the great disparities in environmental burden and access along socioeconomic lines—as well as spatial inequities, which can be viewed as part of the EJ narrative. For the first goal, I rely heavily on mapping spatial relationships between socioeconomic variables and flood zones. To address the second and third goals, I incorporate a survey of a sample (n = 28) of NYCHA residents from Gowanus Houses in Brooklyn inquiring about their opinions and behavior regarding GI. Brought together, the results from analyzing the maps and survey responses suggest that NYCHA residents are not being successfully engaged in the participatory processes of planning and implementing green infrastructure. The data also indicates that race is an underlying factor in the relationships between NYCHA and GI, and NYCHA and flood risk. Based on these findings, I conclude with a set of policy recommendations to cultivate a more equitable and holistic approach to the NYC Green Infrastructure Program which aims to uplift and center community participation. I suggest these changes will help foster greater community bonds and a sense of ownership over shared green spaces and resources, which is a critical need for underprivileged NYCHA neighborhoods.