The Sustainability Myth: An Interview with Melissa Checker

Interviewed by Katie Uva

Today on the blog, Gotham editor Katie Uva speaks to Melissa Checker about her recent book, The Sustainability Myth: Environmental Gentrification and the Politics of Justice. In it, Checker examines and critiques current frameworks of sustainability in New York, where sustainability and economic development are often seen as goals that are mutually supporting. Checker argues that this belief leads to gentrification, deepens economic inequality, and even winds up worsening environmental conditions in some parts of the city.

Your book is an exploration of “the ruptured logics of pairing sustainability with urban redevelopment.” Why are these ideas incompatible in their current form?

The Sustainability Myth: Environmental Gentrification and the Politics of Justice
By Melissa Checker
NYU Press, 2020
280 pages

Right now, sustainability is a vague term that connotes green development but does not necessarily describe it. In particular, New York City has seen dozens of waterfront projects in recent years that encroach on the city’s few remaining natural wetlands. Although many of these projects advertise their sustainable features, it’s difficult to imagine how those features can outweigh the harms caused by paving over a wetland. For one thing, wetlands are important sources of biodiversity, and natural flood protections. Even if a development is built to withstand 100-year floods, it won’t soak up flood waters the way a wetland does. Instead, the building displaces the water, intensifying flooding nearby. Second, construction itself is resource-intense and it generates pollution. And finally, large redevelopment projects increase the population of particular areas, straining the infrastructure. In a neighborhood like Greenpoint, for instance, heavy rains already overflow the sewer system. Add 5,000 new residents, all flushing their toilets and showering during a Nor’easter, and you’re going to have a lot more sewage being discharged into the East River and the Newtown Creek.

You cite many examples of environmental gentrification, and break it down into three subcategories: “green gentrification,” “industrial gentrification,” and “brown gentrification.” Can you briefly explain each of those terms, and perhaps offer an example of somewhere in the city each is occurring?

Green gentrification, which is probably the most written-about form of environmental gentrification, describes the bringing together of eco-friendly improvements with high-end redevelopment. In NYC, we’ve seen it with the Williamsburg waterfront, Brooklyn Bridge Park, the Highline, and soon, the Gowanus Canal. This is not to say that I’m against new green spaces. It’s just that, because these spaces accompany gentrification, the people who are most likely to enjoy them are new, affluent residents rather than the long-term residents, who have spent most of their lives living in a polluted, industrialized neighborhood.  

Industrial gentrification signals the re-creation of former industrial spaces as “maker spaces,” designated for green or clean tech manufacturing, artisanal food production, and other kinds of small-scale manufacturing. In my book, I argue that such spaces — like the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Industry City, and the Brooklyn Army Terminal — comprise a type of eco-amenity that attracts young, hip, urban professionals, and in a sense, represents the gentrification of industry itself.

Brown gentrification involves the remediation and repurposing of contaminated properties, known as “brownfields.” State and municipal funds offer private developers tax abatements and other incentives to redevelop brownfields, especially in low-income neighborhoods suffering from disinvestment. Because the program is tied to the private real estate market, it favors neighborhoods where property values are set to rise. In New York City, the vast majority of completed brownfield projects can be found in central and northeast Brooklyn, especially in Williamsburg and Greenpoint, where property values have skyrocketed in recent years.

All three subtypes of environmental gentrification have another, insidious effect. My research suggests that as gentrifying neighborhoods enjoy new, green amenities, minoritized neighborhoods in out-of-the-way, non-gentrifying areas become prime targets for the siting of heavy industrial facilities. This adds to their already heavy environmental burdens.

I appreciated the way you historicized this problem; it’s common to see sustainability and climate change as a narrowly Bloomberg-era or post-Sandy issue, but you provide many examples of older policies that have shaped this moment. Can you explain some of the ways this history stretches back further than the 2000s? What are some key precedents for the city’s current sustainability discourse?

In many ways, “Green” gentrification, or using green space to drive up property values (often with the consequence of displacing low-income residents), is nothing new. In NYC, I trace this practice back to the creation of Central Park in the mid-1800s, which displaced the residents of Seneca Village, a vibrant community of African American property owners on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Olmstead believed that the park would pay for itself through property taxes, and he kept careful track of rising assessment values on park-adjacent blocks.

“Sustainability” per se, has a shorter history. The term began to gain popularity in the early 1990s after the UN’s World Commission on Environment and Development published a report that brought attention to the environmental-limits to economic growth. In the following years, international development agencies, local governments, grassroots environmental justice activists took up the call to establish development practices that would relieve poverty and generate economic development without compromising the environmental resources in the present as well as the future.

In my book, I show how this early version of sustainability, which emphasized social, economic and ecological sustainability, eventually converged with two important urban trends in the early 21st century. Rising public concerns about global climate change, especially among affluent urban professionals, put pressure on local governments to create plans for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and mitigating the negative effects of environmental hazards. At the same time, urban centers increasingly relied on real estate growth and privatization to drive economic growth. With its broad definition, “sustainability” straddled both of these trends.

However, the concept’s pliability also gave rise to the incompatible situation I described earlier. The parts of sustainability that were about social and economic uplift fell away, and the term came to represent marketable ecological improvements. Ultimately, this dilution perverted the initial ideals behind sustainability. For instance, I show how the same sustainability initiatives originated by grassroots environmental justice activists in Harlem threatened to displace the very populations they represented.

This book talks about many parts of the city but has a special focus on Staten Island. What does this emphasis on Staten Island’s challenges reveal?

To me, Staten Island’s North Shore perfectly captures the contradictions of the sustainable city. It’s a heavily industrialized, out-of-the-way and under-the-radar area that is densely populated with communities of color and low-to-working-class residents. In addition to the New York port, it contains at least eighteen properties with verified contamination, including a site known to have high levels of radiation. All of these are located along a 5.2-mile stretch of waterfront, in a flood plain, and just across a two-lane road from residential properties.

While new residential development is happening in some parts of the north shore, gentrification has never really taken off in a serious way. So, while industrial neighborhoods in Brooklyn, western Queens, and northern Manhattan have been transforming into sustainable urban oases, the North Shore has taken on even more polluting facilities. Meanwhile, the shoreline is eroding, sea levels are rising, and floods are worsening. For residents, this is the farthest thing from sustainable they can imagine. It also makes you question just what city leaders mean by the term.

We’re in a daunting but potentially transformative moment right now, with a new presidential administration and a mayoral race just warming up, and climate change has emerged as an increasingly important issue for voters. How could New York City navigate climate change and respond more equitably going forward?

I think the city has to grow in a much more responsible way. Waterfront development, especially, needs to be carefully examined — are projects like the Hudson Yards really necessary? We have few natural wetlands left in the city. In addition to their ecological ramifications, projects that pave over these wetlands can end up costing millions of dollars in flood damages and protections. Can we at least commit to preserving or restoring our remaining wetlands?

Even better, with so many people having fled the city due to Covid-19, can we not put vacant properties to better use, for the good of all New Yorkers, before constructing any more new buildings? 

Melissa Checker is Associate Professor of Urban Studies at Queens College, CUNY and of Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center. In addition to The Sustainability Myth she is also the author of Polluted Promises: Environmental Racism and the Struggle for Justice in a Southern Town (NYU Press 2005).

Katie Uva is an editor at Gotham.