Last Tuesday, New York announced $10.6 million in grants to help underserved communities afford solar energy and help address and offset resource barriers that typically prevent the installation of clean energy in low-income neighborhoods, particularly communities of color. The state plans to provide individual grants of up to $200,000 to affordable housing providers, community organizations and technical service providers to install solar and energy storage systems that will benefit entire communities. 

The initiative is the result of New York’s environmental justice legislation, the most ambitious in the country, which promises to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 and 100 percent renewable by 2040, but also to address environmental injustice and invest in underserved communities. 

Rightly seizing on the attention to racial inequity in the US right now, Eddie Bautista, head of the NYC Environmental Justice Alliance said, “in this moment where you have elected officials tripping over each other to claim some portion of the Black Lives Matter mantle, this is the moment where they have to put up or shut up. It’s easy to put out a statement when you’re seeing police brutalizing people, but what do you do when the very air is brutalizing people?”

Of course Bautista is absolutely right. New York City, with much of it at sea-level, is a prime example of the threats that some communities face more than others. Hurricane Sandy, in 2012, showed us that disparity quite well. Sandy flooded nearly 90,000 buildings, caused $19 billion in damage and left nearly two million without power. 

The city developed Build it Back, a post-Sandy assistance program but delays, shoddy construction and bureaucracy caused many applicants to drop out of the program. Meanwhile residents who applied for approved federal assistance under the Federal Emergency Management Agency are still waiting to this day, while flood insurance rates have skyrocketed in some neighborhoods. 

Advocates say, together, this has led to high mortgage delinquencies and foreclosures in Sandy-hit areas, increased the flight of working class homeowners and renters who can’t keep pace with rising rents and costs of living and created a situation ripe for investors who can afford to take on the financial risk in flood-prone areas.

Two neighborhoods in Brooklyn highlight the current challenges felt in many underserved neighborhoods in New York City. In Canarsie, Jamaica Bay surged its banks and with it, destroyed homes and residents' capacities to rebuild, forcing some to abandon hope in the face of slow government response, and return to the Caribbean islands from which they had emigrated. 

Harold Jones is one resident in Canarsie who has tried to stick it out, even founding the Canarsie Community Development nonprofit to help residents prepare for future disasters. He says help is distant but offers from real estate developers eager to buy their dilapidated properties are plentiful with rich buyers who can afford to take the climate risk. 

Canarsie and the surrounding Jamaica Bay neighborhoods were among the last areas of New York City to be developed, and today, are among a few of the last affordable neighborhoods in New York City with lower rents as compared to other parts of Brooklyn, Queens and certainly Manhattan. 

This is also where home ownership is affordable for middle-class families, particularly black families. In 2017, 62 percent of the population identified as black and the homeownership rate was 57 percent, the highest of any neighborhood in Brooklyn.

Red Hook, another Brooklyn neighborhood, was once more affordable than it is today, but residents are seeing an influx of new residents in the wake of Hurricane Sandy who, once again, able to afford the flood risk, are eagerly buying up water-front properties and pricing local residents out of the neighborhood. 

After Sandy, residents who believed their home prices had plummeted were surprised to find they had actually soared. With new developments approved in Red Hook, local residents’ rents shot up, driving many out of the neighborhood and even the city, entirely. 

Local residents tell stories, they describe as predatory, of real estate developers and private equity firms offering billions of dollars for their buildings.  

And herein lies the dilemma we are beginning to see in the United States and likely other developed country contexts. 

As we pointed out in Europe, many impacted residents may not even identify climate change as a contributing factor to their dilemma. Instead, they might point to their displacement as an economic retreat, citing housing affordability, flood insurance costs and gentrification. Indeed they are certainly not wrong and the climate connection is a difficult one to draw but one we would be remiss to not point out. 

For sure climate change is a contributing factor to their eventual displacement whether forcible or not, and it's important to untangle and decipher the economic reasons alongside the climate reasons so we can effectively advocate for meaningful policy and legislation that protects vulnerable communities from the slow onset impacts of climate change and before, during and after climate fueled disasters. If not, we not only risk displacement, but also risk losing the diversity - in all its forms - that makes up the entire fabric of what constitutes New York City. 

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