You shouldn't have to leave your neighborhood to live in a better one.
If we are going to be part of the solution, we have to engage the problems.
We've got to decide that we want to live in a world that is sane and happy and healthy, and that everyone deserves that.
Environmental justice [means that] no community should be saddled with more environmental burdens and less environmental benefits than any other.
Poor people of all colors are getting poorer and our communities are getting more toxic. There is a misconception that to grow our economy we will have to do business as usual, because cleaning up the environment, mitigating climate change is just too costly. Well, I say the business of poverty is just too expensive a bill for humanity to pay any longer.
Race and class are extremely reliable indicators as to where one might find the good stuff, like parks and trees, and where one might find the bad stuff, like power plants and waste facilities.
As a black person in America, I am twice as likely as a white person to live in an area where air pollution poses the greatest risk to my health. I am five times more likely to live within walking distance of a power plant or chemical facility, which I do.
Build. Transform. Love. These are words I use all the time as we speak about community building and even real estate development because these are the kind of communities, like, we want to show you don't have to move out of your neighborhood to live in a better one. And when people think about living in a neighborhood, they are not thinking about fight - the community of their dreams, they are not fighting in it, they are not struggling in it. It's not, "Oh, I gotta put on my armor." All the time. I don't want to live like that. I don't.
I want to be known as someone who got caught trying. Yup. Trying to make communities that didn't think much of themselves see themselves as fabulous, powerful, beautiful, loving, kind, members of this world. That's what I want people to say about me.
To me, charity often is just about giving, because you’re supposed to, or because it’s what you’ve always done — or it’s about giving until it hurts.
You know, I personally think that gentrification happens long before you start seeing white people in formerly people-of-color neighborhoods. It starts happening when we start telling the young, hard-working, quote-unquote "smart" kids that they need to measure success by how far they get away from our communities.
It's time to stop building the shopping malls, the prisons, the stadiums and other tributes to all of our collective failures. It is time that we start building living monuments to hope and possibility.
I have no interest in arguing with haters, and also, I really don't want to be associated, you know, with a group of people who are only pushing to fight against something and not for something. I do want to be known as different. Period. And I believe in the self-determination of all people and if that's the way people want to define themselves, so be it.
Jane Jacobs work wouldnt have been complete if it hadn't inspired others to carry it on, and evolve Jane's groundbreaking accomplishments so that the essential kernel of thought remains relevant for future generations. The essayists in What We See have built on those essential footholds that people who have never heard of Jane Jacobs will benefit from for decades.
We want to bring enterprise back to blighted urban areas. People there have been told nothing is ever going to change. The policy makers may feel the same way.
Neither the Destruction of the Ninth Ward Nor the South Bronx Was Inevitable
Sustainable South Bronx advocates for environmental justice through sustainable environmental and economic development projects.
