LISTEN: Elijah Hutchinson on New York City’s push for climate justice

Transcript 

Brian Bienkowski

Elijah, how are you doing today?

Elijah Hutchinson

Hi, I’m doing great. What a good Monday to start the week off.

Brian Bienkowski

Yes. Well, thank you so much for joining us. We’re really excited to have you. So where are you today?

Elijah Hutchinson

I am in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, inside of the apartment building that I grew up in 40 years ago. I’m in a family-owned apartment building where my dad lives downstairs, and my mom lived with me for a little while, up until recently. So it’s still kind of my, my, my, my home for a really long time, and kind of my, my community is all all around here. So calling in from Brooklyn.

Brian Bienkowski

wow, that is so cool. What a cool way to to grow up in the same community, but the same building. I am so far from home, not not too far. I grew up in the Detroit area, and now I’m in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, so… but every time I go home, I always wanted to leave there, and now I feel a really strong pull. So very cool for you to share that with your family. So that brings me to my first question before we get into a lot of the cool work that you’re doing with the city is, how did you get into environmental work in the first place?

Elijah Hutchinson

It’s a big part of that is growing up in this community and growing up in Greenpoint, where we sit on top of not just one Superfund site, but multiple Superfund sites from the legacies of pollution that have occurred from industrial and energy uses that have been happening along our waterfront for generations, and really polluting Newtown Creek. I live next to the Newtown Creek wastewater treatment plant, which is a state-of-the-art facility that got invested into in the late 90s and early 2000s and was really a game changer for the neighborhood in terms of improving quality of life. But Greenpoint was also a place where a lot of our trees were cut down in the 90s because of a beetle infestation that came through our ports, and we had to, you know, replant a lot of trees. Our local pool was closed when I grew up here with McCarran Park, and it’s amazing to see that now 50 pools are open across the city for for swimming, which is really important during these heat times. But living in Greenpoint and experiencing the rapid change of the neighborhood –gentrification, the environmental costs and benefits and burdens that legacies of decisions and policymaking make– really made me shift from being a geneticist, which was what I thought I was going to be when I was in training and in college, I was a biological anthropology major, I was working in mice and fly labs, and I really shifted to the city planning and community development and environmental justice work.

Brian Bienkowski

Excellent, and we are going to get into that. And I want to start with the city’s first comprehensive study on environmental inequality that was released just this past April, which put you and your work on my radar. So what prompted this report, and what were some of the key findings?

Elijah Hutchinson

The prompt for the report was actually some city council legislation that had passed in 2017. Those local laws they were called local law 60 and 64 required us to assess environmental equity issues and develop a plan around incorporating environmental justice into the fabric of city decision making. It was a really interesting charge that meant that for the first time, New York City was going to produce a landmark and historic report about documenting environmental burdens and benefits across a landscape of issues in New York City, and do so in a really comprehensive way, where we brought over 100 different data layers together to try to put all of those compounding effects on one place and in one map, and tell multiple stories and narratives, interviewing people in those communities to get those first person perspectives on what was going on and happening in their community. And so those investigations and all of that data analysis and the Constitution of the Environmental Justice Advisory Board really guided the research and practice and resulted in us putting out the first report this past, this past spring, which is really, really exciting. But what it also comes with, is a mapping tool that is a digital online tool that can be used for research or analysis, but really captures all of the findings of the report, and it includes a next phase of work, which we’re just starting right now, to come up with new policies and programs that are going to address the issues we identified in the first phase of the report.

Brian Bienkowski

So you mentioned some of the historical context right where you are there in Greenpoint, but kind of more broadly, can you talk about the decisions and policies in the past in the city related to housing, zoning and transit that left a lot of low income and communities of color more subject to the environmental ills.

Elijah Hutchinson

Yeah, for sure, one of the biggest factors that we see affecting communities is not one that’s a stranger to these communities, but really redlining and the practice of racially discriminatory real estate practices that were embedded within how mortgages and financing were given to most disproportionately impacting Black and Hispanic communities across New York City. And what we’re finding is that 67% of the total population that lives in historically redlined areas of New York City also live in what we defined for the first time as environmental justice communities that were based off of the state’s disadvantaged community criteria. And once we kind of crunched the numbers and look at these overlaps, you can see that in areas of central Brooklyn and Upper Manhattan, in most of the Bronx, these areas, you really start to see the intersections between the decisions to redline and what it ends up actually meaning for these communities which show up in areas of like deficiencies in housing maintenance, higher levels of pollution and other factors that are that are really persistent because of these decisions of the past.

Brian Bienkowski

So you mentioned pollution. I know the city obviously has a lot of traffic. I think we all know that, even those of us who don’t live there, leaving a lot of people exposed to air pollutants. But what did the report find about air pollution exposure and what is driving up exposure in the city’s environmental justice communities?

Elijah Hutchinson

The report itself examines exposure to polluted air across five issues and indicators. So breaks that down into outdoor air pollution, stationary sources of pollution, mobile sources of pollution, solid waste facilities and indoor air quality. And air quality can be influenced by many things, including geography and regional weather patterns and human activity, but climate change is another variable and factor for air quality because of things like the Canadian wildfires, for instance, which have burned thousands of miles away, yet we know from last summer, and we suspect even this summer, we’re going to experience air quality impacts on those hotter days that are associated with lower air quality, which really bring up the vulnerability. But then on the exposure side, there’s a lot of mobile sources of pollution as well, that comes from cars, trucks and other vehicles. And communities of color are disproportionately exposed to emissions from heavy duty diesel vehicles compared to communities that are mostly white due to location near to arterial highways commercial waste routes, delivery routes, parking facilities for heavy duty vehicles, but really, last-mile facilities have proliferated in the city due to the rapid growth of the e Commerce Industry, and about 68% of these last mile facilities, these are your Amazon distribution centers, for instance, are located in environmental justice communities, and that has an impact on the traffic and the pollution that we’re seeing in those areas. We’re also seeing the stationary sources of pollution, meaning facilities that emit pollutants from a fixed position, like a power plant or a or a wastewater recovery facility or manufacturing facility, are also disproportionately located in environmental justice neighborhoods. And so 13 of the city’s 19 peaker plants that get fired up on days in which we are desperate for energy, those are the days in which we experience higher levels of those stationary sources pollution from being generated in environmental justice neighborhoods.

Brian Bienkowski

So you mentioned climate change, which is kind of the it touches on all of these issues, pollution and of course, heat vulnerability and flooding. So what did the report find out about heat vulnerability and flooding issues? And as we talk, I should say it has been an incredibly hot summer where I’m at and I think the same is true there in the city, and what neighborhoods are most at risk, and what’s driving this risk?

Elijah Hutchinson

You know, heat vulnerability and flood vulnerability are two areas where we can look at the data and we could look at the numbers, but it doesn’t necessarily tell you about impact. And so while it’s really important that we understand exposure, and we know that our environmental justice communities are certainly exposed to more, the impacts of this exposure are also disproportionately high because of the adverse health outcomes related to air pollution and the intersectionality of so many of these issues in environmental justice communities, where you end up seeing high percentage of asthma, you know, 21% of public housing residents having asthma, compared to 11.5% of the rest of the New York City residents. And so it was really important for us to come up with these indicators that take into account the data, but then also other socio economic, demographic, health-related metrics that help us understand and contextualize the issue better. And so for the first time, with the Environmental Justice Report, we released the flood vulnerability index, which has six different maps and data layers to look at different types of flooding that communities will experience, not just from the coast, but also inland flooding and rainstorms and the compounded effect of that with the demographic factors, not just today in the year 2024, which is already a really challenging year, but looks at what these impacts will be in 2050, in 2080, in 2100, and so for the first time, we have the flood vulnerability maps added to the heat vulnerability maps, which is a metric that we’ve had with the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene for a few years now. Now we’ve added this flood vulnerability layer to people to help communicate those risks, so that people can kind of understand in a more simple way how climate is really affecting them from this really huge hazard, which is heat, which is only going to get worse over time, but also now this, this flooding, which you know, whether you’re a property owner, you’re a renter, you’re realizing that you don’t need to live in along the coast of New York City to be impacted by water.

Brian Bienkowski

What’s something about the report that surprised you or that you think might surprise listeners?

Elijah Hutchinson

What’s something that surprised me about the report was just how these issues all relate to one another, and sometimes there are stories or narratives we hear from or coming from within the communities that we work in, but it’s really hard to characterize how All of these issues combined to create a feeling or an effect, and so it was really great to see that we didn’t just stop at the data. We did tons of interviews and met with people and discussed our findings with people to try to understand how these issues show up in their community and what matters to them. Ad what matters to people are the same things that, you know, make it, make it hard for New Yorkers to live in in their communities, sometimes with just wanting to get to work on time, or wanting to find some shade or quiet place, or, you know, wanting to have some vegetation. And so it was good for us to be able to crunch the numbers and kind of validate what we’ve been already hearing and understanding from our communities. But it was also really good to give people that validation, and give them the tools itself, that that they need to to help advocate for their communities and ways that can be supported by by our office, which, which I thought was really exciting. On the data side, it’s the flood vulnerability that people are experiencing, I think has been a real lesson learned for a lot of communities, because they may not necessarily understand their inland flood risk that happens when you have a rainstorm or you have water coming from below. It’s a very different story than living in Coney Island or the Rockaways and kind of expecting water to be an issue. And so I think a lot of what’s been surprising, too, is just being able to communicate and really tell that full story when we are speaking with people, to see how much people feel like they want this information, even though it’s… even though it’s not all good news. You know, it’s not this is, this is very difficult to process in a lot of ways. The the data and the stats are hard to digest. But I think that it’s, it’s been really telling that people want the information, that they can can receive it, they can handle it. And they want to know, you know what’s, what’s the city doing, and what, what can we do to make it better? But it, I have also been struck by a couple of the other data points where we find that, you know, heat’s a big issue, but almost 20 there are some neighborhoods where 25% or a quarter of their residents don’t have access to air conditioning. And I don’t know if people really grapple with that all the time or make assumptions about the cooling capacity of some of these of these neighborhoods, but there are lots of people that are going to be heat vulnerable if that kind of condition continues. And I grew up in New York without air conditioning, and it’s just, you know, a lot harder to do that these days, and it’s not necessarily safe. But then you also see that, you know, housing maintenance deficiencies and lead pain violations are another thing that come out of those historically redlined environmental justice areas, and nine out of the 10 neighborhoods with the highest incidence of three or more housing maintenance deficiencies are renter households in environmental justice neighborhoods. And so those are really powerful findings that can help motivate decision making and policy makers.

Brian Bienkowski

So you mentioned the mapping tool for people to use and to see environmental hazards and risks near them in their neighborhood. So how do you see people using this tool, or, you know, to report and to advocate for themselves as you kind of develop some of the policy around these environmental justice issues?

Elijah Hutchinson

we’ve already seen people using the mapping tool and using the data that we’ve collected for their benefit in a few ways that have been really promising. One is the states and the federal government. Really, really, you know, the Biden administration is making historic investments in environmental justice communities, historic infrastructure investments. And so we need to be ready to take advantage of those investments, and really compete to take advantage of those investments with other jurisdictions. And so providing this data on an open-source platform for anyone to access means that if a community or an organization is applying for funding, they can beef up and make their application more competitive, using the mapping tool and stitch together narratives and stories using the data that’s there to reinforce the grant application that they’re applying for, hopefully driving resources into these communities. But we’ve also seen people use it as a legislative and policy advocacy tool. So whether they’re meeting with their local elected, whether they’re talking to their community board, whether they’re pushing for a certain law to be passed. Using our EJ mapping tool to cull and pull up all of these different data layers to help support that story. And so that’s really promising and really powerful, and I hope that people continue to really find new and creative ways to use the information that we’re sharing.

Brian Bienkowski

So in light of this report, how is the Mayor’s office embedding environmental justice into ongoing and future policies?

Elijah Hutchinson

Environmental Justice itself is for the first time in the title of the climate office of the mayor’s office, and this is a new thing. Before we had separate sustainability offices, resilience offices, environmental remediation offices, and now we’ve all been brought under one umbrella and centered around environmental justice as a climate office, which is pretty powerful, because as a climate office, we already have our ambitious targets in place. We have that we’re going for carbon neutrality by 2050 we have that we are striving for 100% renewables by by 2040 we’re trying to half our transportation emissions by 2030. We have all these goals in place, but we you know, how we get there is really important, and we can’t leave people behind if we’re trying to achieve these really ambitious targets. And so it’s really critical that we use environmental justice and work with our communities to make sure that we’re doing the work in a way that makes sense for the everyday New Yorker who doesn’t want to be left behind in this really critical and transformative transition that this entire city is about to and is experiencing, and so environmental justice itself, what we found from the first phase was that it needed to be… we needed improvements in several different areas, and it’s not just having environmental justice be at the center of decision making, but it’s also climate budgeting and changing our budgeting process so that as we’re making agency spending decisions, we’re considering it not just Our climate targets, but how it impacts our environmental justice communities, and that that evaluation is is happening. It’s about permitting, and when permitting decisions are being made with the state to make sure that we’re we’re we’re that environmental justice communities have a seat at the table as those decisions get made, and there are new permitting processes that are being developed and now for public comment right now on how to exactly do this. It’s about prioritizing resources in environmental justice communities really coming out of Biden’s Justice40 initiative and other funding prioritization targets that the state has, but it’s about improved community engagement as well, which is something that we’re really excited about doing in this next phase of our environmental justice plan. Is working with weact and other organizations who are the co chair for Environmental Justice Advisory Board to, you know, have a lot of conversations with people about what they would like to see in improvements and things we could do better.

Brian Bienkowski

So what are some of the challenges? I mean, I think of, I think of New York City, and I just think of the, you know, from where you are in Greenpoint, up to the Bronx to Harlem. I mean, it’s just such a vast, large city, competing interest and just a big, dense population. What are some of the challenges in addressing climate change and other environmental health hazards given the size, and again, the competing interest and diversity within your city?

Elijah Hutchinson

Yeah, some of the challenges are that there’s been so there’s so many long-standing issues that these communities face, whether it’s been public safety or affordable housing or transportation safety, you know, access to good schools, access to healthy food – New York City has a long advocacy platform that comes out of every one of these neighborhoods. And so now climate and environmental justice is, you know, in essence, a new thing. It’s not a new thing, but it is a new priority, and it’s a very, it can be a very expensive one to try to rebuild a waterfront, or to make our infrastructure more resilient, or to install solar panels in a lot of places. And so what we need to do is help people understand how climate and environmental justice are connected to the issues that they care deeply about, and help them see themselves as environmental justice advocates, because we really do need to broaden the tent and include more people in this movement as a whole, so that we can get more resources to tackle these issues, but but do so in a way that we’re addressing the housing issues by addressing climate, and we’re addressing the transportation issues by addressing climate, and we’re addressing the waterfront or public safety issues by investing in our our built environment and our public spaces and beautifying our waterfront with trees and shade and new infrastructure. So my hope is that we can work with everyone to have a shared platform and a shared agenda, and what we would like to see and define some of these North Stars with with people, so that we can kind of collaborate and work together on the outcomes.

Brian Bienkowski

So a big theme among our fellows and in our program is kind of community engagement and doing so in an intentional and meaningful way, both in developing policy, you know, in the case of folks like you, but also, you know, doing research, gathering data, which it sounds like you guys took that same approach. So you mentioned WeAct. We’ve had folks on this podcast from WeAct. They are a fantastic organization. I’m always in awe of the work that they’re doing. So I was wondering if you could speak to that and kind of more broadly, how the mayor’s office is incorporating and engaging communities in decision and policy making again, given the city’s diversity and size?

Elijah Hutchinson

yeah, there’s, there’s so many different inputs that we have to get people’s perspectives included. One of the things we set up was the Environmental Justice Advisory Board, and so that is actually appointed by the city council and the mayor, but it’s also, you know, not everybody can participate in the Environmental Justice Advisory Board. And so we have to have different kinds of meetings and forums to engage with people even further and go a level deeper. And so we have lots of different task forces and meetings with people to be transparent about the issues that we’re grappling with and all of the trade offs and considerations so that we can kind of share in the concerns of of what we’re seeing are the challenges that we face, and being really honest about the the the barriers and the challenges, while, while presenting the tools and opportunities to people so that we can say, here are, here’s some things we can do that will put us in the right direction. And so I have found that the the as I’ve started here and taking a real focus on environmental justice, that people are really hungry for these conversations and have really celebrated that we’re taking this kind of approach to climate and see this as a much more inclusive way to go about this transformation, and know that we don’t have it all worked out. They know that nobody is exactly figured out. This is, this is the menu of and the ingredients, and this is exactly how you bake the cake, right? Like we know that there’s a lot to figure out here. And so I think people are seeing that we’re listening, but people are seeing also that we are making decisions and there is action. And so building that credibility, and building that momentum to make some decisions, to build credibility within that space, has been very, very effective to making sure that people want to work with us and see that there’s real opportunity here to actually change the things that we’ve been upset about for a really long time. And now it’s really about, how do we do this with limited funding, right? And how do we do this with, like, with long-term political cycles, and how do we do this with, with with our federal and state partners, where there’s also changing politics? And how do we do this when it’s we’re just really complicated to deliver some of these engineering projects because of the just how technical they are and the amount of coordination that they need on the city side, but we get that these things are hard. We have a real good track record of delivering our our infrastructure priorities, and we’re getting better and faster with delivering projects and making policy. So I’m feeling. Being optim somewhat optimistic about the future. I know that that can be feel really challenging at the moment, but I’m, I’m feeling like we are, we are making some steps in the right direction I hope that we we continue to do so.

Brian Bienkowski

So what would you say to somebody in the city who doesn’t feel like they’re being heard? You know, someone who feel is feeling the effects of climate change or pollution, and is feeling left out of this process, or just kind of not feeling hurt in general?

Elijah Hutchinson

Yeah, I hope that they come to you know, one of our one of our meetings or convenings, and talk to us. We have a couple of different processes, like climate strong communities is one program that we do where we set up meetings in with with community members, in partnership with other neighborhood-based organizations to start to get ideas for resilience projects, even before we have any funding or budget to support them. And then we work with those communities to take their project ideas, and apply to the public resources, state and federal resources, and really bring, you know, money and city capacity and decision making to some of their ideas. And that can be and I’ve seen this play out, and it could be really, really fulfilling, but I understand that it is also very frustrating. The state of the world is very frustrating at the moment. And you know, in some ways, I almost wish people were more frustrated with things, with where we are, and I want to be able to take that frustration and channel it into outcomes. And sometimes I look around the room, I’m like, How is everybody not more angry? But we are that we are where we are. So I actually, I welcome that people are frustrated and we I tour the neighborhoods with even Mayor Adams what he does his town halls and and we do get a lot of climate questions, and I’m so often surprised, though, that in every meeting we don’t get climate questions. There’s lots of questions about other things. But you know, whether it’s like cannabis shops or or E-bikes, you know there’s, there’s lots of other pressing neighborhood issues, but I really want to see people speak about climate and every every public meeting that we go to, so that all of the policy makers are hearing it from us loud and clear.

Brian Bienkowski

And as you mentioned, there’s been this kind of merging of advocacy in recent years that we’ve noticed too in the newsroom, which is the folks that are interested in labor rights, housing rights, are starting to see the intersection with climate and climate impacts. So I think hopefully you are going to see increasing frustration, increasing engagement, that will help the work that you all are doing. So you mentioned being optimistic. I was wondering if you could just expand on that. What are you, in general, What are you optimistic about?

Elijah Hutchinson

Yeah, I think the optimism that I feel is coming really from the new the new audience for climate and young people who are really making it a part of their future and how they want to contribute to the world. It’s great to see just how different the state of play is from when I was starting my career in the city of New York. You know, you can 20 years ago, 10 years ago, even five years ago, prior to the pandemic, you know, you could be the only person in the room, sometimes lifting up the data and raising your voice about what’s going on with with climate. And now I see that conversation, and that dialog has really shifted, and there’s a groundswell of interest across many different topics, because there’s a climate impact and a climate angle to literally everything that we do, and so it’s fascinating to see how we’re starting to understand these relationships, whether it’s like AI or or our food systems, or, you know, decisions on where to where to locate renewable energy infrastructure, there’s, there’s all sorts of real estate and economic and legal and other perspectives that I that I see people getting really sophisticated about across sectors, and I think that that’s what we’re going to need, because we’re going to this is an all hands on deck kind of transition that’s going to affect every industry and every part of our lived experience in New York. Yeah.

Brian Bienkowski

Yeah, well, Elijah, thank you so much for filling us in on this report, the work you all are doing, it’s really fascinating, and hopefully it’s a blueprint for other cities who are looking to tackle climate change and pollution in an equitable way. And we will, of course, give readers and listeners links to all these resources so they can go poke around the mapping tool and have fun. And before we get you out of here, one question I like to ask everybody is, what is the last book that you read for fun?

Elijah Hutchinson

Well, I’ll answer this honestly, but it’s, it has a profanity in the title, and it was, it was the the subtle art of not giving a leap, and it’s I, I have for I have to balance out all of my serious reading with just like fun let me, let me not, let me not worry too much kind of reading, because there’s just, there’s so much that you could worry about, but it can be really paralyzing. And so I love a good, you know, drugstore book read on happiness, or or or about just how to, how to, how to live your life with joy, because it’s so critical to keep me, for me to maintain that side of things, so I could keep doing the work that I do. So I not, I don’t necessarily recommend it, because I do want people to give a bleep, but something that I needed at the moment when I was on my last vacation and and was, was, was a good a book to read by the pool.

Brian Bienkowski

Excellent. You know, I’ve seen that book in bookstores, and I have been curious, and I you beat me to it. I was going to make the joke that you are spending your days trying to make people give a bleep, and spending your vacations reading about how to not but, you know, there is, there is lessons in there that we all need to decompress and know when to leave things be. But again, Elijah, thank you so much for your time. I’m really glad we got to connect on this. We will share the resources, and hopefully we can have you on again in the future.

Elijah Hutchinson

Sure, I certainly appreciate it. Thank you so much.