Tag: New York City

These Teach for America Graduates Left the Classroom. But They Didn’t Forget About the Kids

Posted on by robbie

Every year since 1990, in what is practically a fall tradition, idealistic college grads arrive in public school classrooms in New York City, Los Angeles and all of Teach for America’s 52 regions in between. Straight from seven to 10 weeks of summer training, these TFA corps members commit to work for two years in unfamiliar schools that desperately need strong educators. After that, they’re free to leave the classroom. While the majority of TFA’s 42,000 alumni do continue teaching, the program’s turnover rate has led some to question its success.
“My argument was: let’s take the resources you’re investing in a corps member — tens of thousands of dollars per year — and put that into professional development for training current staff on campuses,” says Robert Schwartz, a TFA alumnus and advisor at the nonprofit New Teacher Center. “You’ll see teachers that are going to stick around longer and are really invested in the community.” Schwartz’s alternative plan is voiced commonly in education circles, and it’s mild in comparison to some pointed criticism of TFA. Sarah Matsui, author of a book that gives TFA a negative assessment, argues to Jacobin that the program is mere resume fodder for Ivy League students on the way to jobs at well-heeled consulting firms like Deloitte and Boston Consulting Group. In response, TFA’s spokesperson Takirra Winfield points out to NationSwell that 84 percent of alumni continue to work in fields related to education or serving low-income communities.
But perhaps the debate over retention rates misses the point entirely. TFA’s mission statement, after all, doesn’t reference teaching at all. Instead, the organization aims to enlist, develop and mobilize “our nation’s most promising future leaders” in pursuit of a larger movement for educational equity. NationSwell explored how five TFA alums are accomplishing that outside the classroom.

In April, Sekou Biddle welcomes guests to the UNCF Education Summit, held in Atlanta.

Sekou Biddle, United Negro College Fund

A member of the United Negro College Fund’s leadership team, Biddle has always prized service, but as an aspiring management consultant at Morehouse College, a historically black college in Atlanta, he figured giving back was something he’d do as a brief detour on the road to business school. Thinking that TFA sounded like an impactful way to give younger students the same educational opportunities he’d been afforded, Biddle joined the corps in 1993 and stayed in the classroom for a decade.
After, Biddle “wanted to share the things [he] had learned” and transitioned to policymaking as a school board representative and city council appointee in his hometown, Washington, D.C. He says his TFA experience informed his votes and taught him empathy for teachers, who throw themselves into a “180-day marathon grind,” and parents, whom schools too often failed. He keeps in mind one phone call on which a dad told him, “This is the first time someone has ever called to say something good about my child,” Biddle recalls. “I was struck by the power of a relatively simple thing. Just a call certainly had an impact on this parent’s perception on what the relationship with a school and teacher could be.”
In his current role as UNCF’s vice president of advocacy, Biddle engages local leaders and school administrators with the same personal touch. Explaining the achievement gap, he lobbies for more academic and financial support for minority students, ultimately to increase the number of black college graduates. “I thought I was going to do [TFA] for a few years and feel I had done some good in the world, put enough in the bank and be ready to move on,” Biddle says. “I committed to doing two years, and 22 years later, I’m still at it.”

Mike Feinberg of the KIPP Foundation.

Mike Feinberg, KIPP Schools

While working in the classroom, Mike Feinberg, who co-founded KIPP, America’s largest network of charter schools (with 183 and counting), with fellow TFA alum Dave Levin, became “acutely aware that our students were not receiving an education that would set them up for success in college and life,” so late one night he and Levin laid out plans for a new educational model that refused to let children’s “demographics define their destiny.”
As a teacher, Feinberg saw firsthand student accomplishments that were a result of the belief that kids could and would learn. “If we believe there are solutions to problems, we can create a learning environment where we set high expectations for our students and they not only meet them, but surpass them.” Feinberg readily admits that growing up in poverty creates enormous challenges, but he reaffirms the principle that, if given a chance, education can level the playing field for those students. TFA “shaped my understanding of what education and social justice could accomplish,” he says.

Mayor Jonathan Rothschild (orange shirt) and Andrew Greenhill leading a Bike-to-Work Week ride.

Andrew Greenhill, City of Tucson

Now chief of staff for the mayor of Tucson, Ariz., Greenhill entered a career in government after TFA, inspired to take a broader look at how the delivery of public services can be improved. During his time as a teacher, in addition to the regular curriculum, he seemed to be teaching an impromptu course on how to make it in America. “Students looked to me for all kinds of assistance and information. Most were new arrivals in the country,” he recalls of his middle school class. Greenhill took families to free healthcare clinics, to the library to check out books, to Western Union to send money home and even to the supermarket to show them how to ring up groceries. That non-traditional teaching translated well to local government, where Greenhill has “played a role in helping to understand and support and in some cases even streamline the different programs provided by the city and local nonprofits.”
“I think the more people know about how the education system works, the better informed they will be in helping community-wide efforts, whether they’re inside the classroom, an administrator or a citizen participating in the debates that we have at the local and national level about education,” he says. As a city official, Greenhill doesn’t believe he’s given up on his old students; in fact, he’s still trying to take care of their day-to-day needs, so that classroom teachers can stick to teaching.

Olympian Tim Morehouse works with students.

Tim Morehouse, Olympic fencer

A silver medal-winning fencer at the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics, Tim Morehouse has a stellar pedigree to match the perceived elitism of his sport. He attended a rigorous prep school in the Bronx (where tuition today costs $40,660) and Brandeis University, a top-ranked liberal arts college in Massachusetts. It wasn’t until Morehouse signed up for TFA in 2000 that he saw how different his path could have been. Assigned to teach seventh grade at a public school six blocks from where he grew up in upper Manhattan, Morehouse realized how privileged his education had been, compared to the schooling that most children receive.
Because of his TFA experience, Morehouse returned to public schools in Washington Heights and Harlem before the 2012 London Olympic Games to coach fencing, with the hope of giving students an extracurricular to bolster their college applications and a chance at athletic scholarships. His foundation, Fencing in the Schools, last year served 15,000 students in 11 states. Like TFA, Morehouse recruited other Olympic fencers to teach kids the sport and mentor the youngsters in life skills. He says he hopes the foundation will help kids not only get to college, but also succeed there. And who knows? “Maybe they can even go to the Olympics,” he says.

Jessica Stewart welcomes guests to a debate on education issues between Oakland, Calif., mayoral candidates.

Jessica Stewart, Great Oakland Public Schools

A onetime political junkie and head of the College Democrats at Auburn University in Alabama, Stewart moved to Oakland, Calif., to teach sixth-grade math in 2005 and fell head over heels for the Bay Area City. Politics took a backseat to her work in the classroom, but Stewart’s activist streak resurfaced in 2008 when the city’s superintendent threatened to close 17 schools and a budget crisis post-financial crash generated a multi-million dollar budget shortfall.
Great Oakland Public Schools, where Stewart is senior managing director, was founded in the wake of those disasters and went on to become a major voice in city politics. In 2012, the coalition endorsed three people running for seats on the school board. “To support our candidates, we had 300 volunteers do 60,000 phone calls and 12,000 door knocks,” Stewart recalls. “On any given night in October 2012, walking into the office, you’d see people sitting on the floor (because we only had five staff members at the time) talking to voters. It would be a student next to a principal next to a parent next to a teacher. It was so inspiring to see people coming together to fight for equality.” All three candidates won soundly, but Stewart isn’t resting on her laurels, explaining, “There is still so much work to be done in our education system.”
Editors’ note: This story originally stated that Teach for America was founded in 1989. We apologize for the error.

The Future of Housing Is Now. What Sustainable Homes Look Like

Posted on by robbie

Every time your air conditioner or furnace rumbles on, greenhouses gases spew into the air. All those volts —about 10,900 kilowatt-hours per person — used to charge laptops and phones, light rooms, and keep the refrigerator running don’t come without an environmental cost. American electricity generation contributed 2.04 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2014, clouding the earth’s atmosphere with emissions and worsening climate change.
A hot new trend in architecture may offer one of our best hopes for significantly diminishing that pollution. “Passive house” construction — usually built without central heating or cooling systems — can reduce energy usage to net-zero or even net-positive, meaning a building generates more energy than it consumes. Applicable to both commercial and residential properties, passive construction centers on five key design elements: heavily insulated walls (sometimes up to 15 inches thick), an extremely tight envelope, triple-paned windows and doors that are outfitted with high-performance locks, high-tech ventilation and moisture-recovery systems filter the air and solar panels on rooftops.
“There are no drafts in the winter. And in the summer, it stays cool without strong air conditioning blowing on you,” Jane Sanders, a Brooklyn architect, tells the New York Post about her home. “This morning, there was jackhammering two doors down from me, but I could barely hear it. It’s so quiet that I feel like I live in the country.”
Some homeowners will take objection with the boxy design; others will balk at the price tag. But as more passive homes are built, architects are experimenting with chic design and developing cheaper construction methods. NationSwell looked into five of the most interesting passive houses in America today.

Cheap land helped determine the location of the Smith House.

The Smith House, Urbana, Ill.

American designers first pioneered passive construction — then known as “superinsulation” in the early 1970s — after the oil embargo caused wild swings in energy prices. When conservation fell out of fashion during the Reagan years, the idea caught on among Germans in 1988, but it took until 2002, for the idea to return across the Atlantic. Katrin Klingenberg, a young German architect, and her now-deceased husband Nic Smith broke ground on the first American passive house prototype in Urbana, in part, because they could test the house against the harsh Midwestern climate. “I believe that climate crisis is real and that buildings need to do their part of reducing carbon emissions. The good news is that buildings have a lot of potential to do just that,” Klingenberg tells the Chicago Tribune. “We have to work a bit harder to get those reductions and invest a bit more upfront. But the reward is huge with long-lasting payback.”

Window detail, Kiln Apartments.

Kiln Apartments, Portland, Ore.

Portland is undeniably at the center of the American passive house movement, with more than 100 certified buildings in its metro area, according to some counts. The Kiln Apartments, in North Portland, are one of the largest mixed-use buildings — 19 apartments above ground-floor retail — to meet passive house standards.
The Oregon city already has one of the strictest building codes in the nation, but these units save up to 75 percent more energy than equivalent ones. With many south-facing windows, the buildings is heated largely by the sun during the winter. Thick metal sunshades that look like modernist awnings block the sunlight during hotter months, when the summer sun rises higher in the sky. The four-story building does have an elevator, but because everything is about energy efficiency, residents are encouraged to take the stairs.

Dedication ceremony for the Empowerment House, a 2-unit townhouse.

Habitat for Humanity Townhomes, Washington, D.C.

Demonstrating that passive house principles can be readily implemented, volunteers in the nation’s capital are building six townhouses for poor homeowners. Located in Ivy City, a portion of the structure was originally designed for the U.S. Solar Decathlon, a competition for college students to build the most energy-efficient home. Students from The New School and Stevens Institute of Technology put the one-bedroom together on the National Mall for under $230,000. After being moved northeast in 2012, a second story was added and Habitat for Humanity built a copy next door. Now, as the neighborhood gentrifies, the families in the six brick rowhouses have affordable rent and a a minimal utility bill. “I just remember thinking, we did it: a non-profit, affordable house developer can do this, even using volunteers with no construction experience,” Orlando Velez, manager of housing services at Habitat for Humanity’s D.C. chapter, tells ThinkProgress. “I started thinking, what’s everyone else waiting for?”

The north building of the Uptown Lofts.

Uptown Lofts, Pittsburgh, Penn.

This 47-unit housing affordable project, provides greener living spaces to those who can’t afford a market-rate home. Split into two buildings across the street from each other, 18- to 23-year-olds who aged out of the foster care system live in the northern building’s 24 one-bedroom apartments; to the south, 23 affordable units go to people who make less than 60 percent of Pittsburgh’s median income. The $12 million project was also notable for being the first time any state subsidized a passive house with tax benefits.
At the ribbon-cutting ceremony this February, the project was praised for realizing its ambitious goals with limited dollars. “How proud we are to help bring these buildings to reality,” said Stan Salwocki, manager at the Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “This project shows how cutting-edge, state-of-the-art, energy-efficient affordable housing can be done.”

The central utility plant at Cornell Tech is currently under construction.

Cornell Tech, Roosevelt Island, N.Y.

Still in the works, the world’s tallest and largest passive house began construction this June. Rising 26 stories above Roosevelt Island, a sliver of land between the boroughs of Manhattan and Queens, the apartment tower will house about 530 grad students, professors and staff for Cornell University’s new 12-acre applied sciences campus. Since nearly three quarters of the carbon emissions in New York City’s come from heating and cooling its skyscrapers, school administrators hope this project will set a new standard for energy efficiency and gain the attention of engineers and designers across the Queensboro Bridge in midtown.
The construction “is a clear signal that in today’s era of climate change, it’s not enough to simply build tallest. To lead the market, your tall building will need to be a passive house,” Ken Levenson, president of NY Passive House, an advocacy group, tells The New York Times. The $115 million project is expected to open in 2017 and will save 882 tons of carbon dioxide annually — the equivalent of planting 5,300 trees, according to the university.

See the Seeds of Change Grown by One Bronx Woman

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“The first plant that changed my life was a tomato,” says Karen Washington, a black urban farmer in the Bronx. “It was the one fruit that I used to hate.” But after watching one that she’d grown shift in hue from green to yellow to red and taking a bite of it, she was instantly hooked. “When I tasted that tomato, when it was red and it was ripe, and I picked it off the vine, [it]…changed my world because I never tasted anything so good, so sweet. I wanted to grow everything.”

For a quarter century, all manner of trees and flowers, fruits and vegetables, have thrived across abandoned lots in the Bronx because of Washington. Deemed “the queen of urban farming,” she’s an African-American woman who’s dedicated her life to greening New York City’s poorest borough. Since 1985, Washington has assisted dozens of neighborhoods build their own community gardens, taught workshops on farming and promoted racial diversity in agriculture.

Your food “is not from a grocery store, it’s not from a supermarket. It’s grown in the ground,” she says. “You have to understand where your food comes from. It gives you power.”

A lifelong New Yorker, Washington grew up in a public housing project on the Lower East Side. She moved up to the Bronx in 1985 and bought herself a newly built home, which she viewed as, “an opportunity, as a single parent with two children, to live the American dream.” While some gentrification occurred, other parts of the low-income neighborhood looked “like a warzone,” dotted with abandoned buildings. Some of Washington’s windows looked onto an empty lot filled with garbage and rusting cars.

One day, she noticed a man walking by with a shovel and a pick — an unusual sight in Gotham’s concrete jungle. “What are you doing here?” Washington asked. He told her he was thinking about creating a community garden. “I said, ‘Can I help?’”

“I had no idea about gardening. I didn’t have a green thumb,” she recalls. Despite that, a city program that leased undeveloped lots for $1 gave Washington and her neighbors lumber, dirt and seeds, “and we gave them power — muscle power — and hopes and dreams to turn something that was devastating and ugly into something that was beautiful.” Within days, the first seeds of the Garden of Happiness and Washington’s lifelong activism were beginning to sprout.

Ever since, Washington has helped others in the Bronx locate empty neighborhood spaces that are prime real estate for something to blossom and led volunteers through the process of opening a community garden — earning her respect throughout the Big Apple and beyond. She holds positions on almost every board imaginable, including the New York Community Gardening Coalition, Just Food and the New York Botanical Garden. “Can you imagine, a little girl from the projects on the board of the New York Botanical Garden?” she asks in disbelief, her smiling face framed by her dreadlocks.

And then there was the time she met First Lady Michelle Obama. Washington describes feeling, “the elation of the spirits of my ancestors. I just felt them clapping and cheering, because here I was, a black woman, standing in the presence of the First Lady.”
Blooming with daffodils, tulips and hyacinth, the original purpose of Washington’s first community garden — the Garden of Happiness — and others like it was “beautification,” Washington says, “about taking away the garbage” from a disadvantaged minority community. Only later did she start to think about greenery beyond being decoration or as a food source. “When I first started initially in the food movement, I was focused on growing food. It wasn’t until I was in that community garden that I started hearing social issues like low employment, poor health, people who couldn’t afford rents,” Washington says. She learned she had to “feed people’s body and mind.”
To promote equity and fairness, she’s recently been focusing on boosting the number of African Americans in agriculture through BUGs — or Black Urban Growers. The most recent agricultural census figures show 55,346 farmers in the Empire State are white and only 113 are black.
It’s always been a dream of Washington’s to purchase land upstate for a farm, but every time she counted all the zeros in the real estate listings, it seemed impossible. Drawing on her connections, Washington met a businessman interested in launching a farming co-operative in Chester, N.Y. They started growing veggies on three acres of black dirt in January. Located just an hour from the city, Washington hopes the rural-urban relationship will help African-Americans have a better understanding of how food systems work and have a chance to participate.
“Farming’s in our DNA, but [we] never have that conversation, always being pushed to the side as the consumer or the person with their hand out, never the type with their hand in the conversation,” Washington says. “There’s no agriculture without culture, so having people understand that slavery was part of our life, it doesn’t define who we are. … [We’re] trying to have people understand that. Don’t be afraid to put your hands in the soil, don’t be afraid to garden or farm because that’s who you are.”

The Running Program That’s Pulled 1,300 People Out of Homelessness

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At 5:45 a.m., on a recent Friday morning, a group of about 20 homeless guys warmed up in a parking lot across the street from three shelters in East Harlem. In a circle, they did jumping jacks, twisted their torsos and touched their toes. Fifteen minutes later, they huddled up, chanted the Serenity Prayer (“God give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change….”) and took off running. As they criss-crossed the bridges between Manhattan and the Bronx during their four-mile trek, the sun’s strengthening rays — bright but not yet burning — reflected off the windows of nearby towering apartment buildings. The streets were nearly empty, and quiet, a rarity in The City That Never Sleeps.
Ryan [last name omitted] began jogging with the group, known as Back on My Feet, seven months ago. Never a runner, he always wondered what the big deal about it was. Ask him today, however, and he’ll tell you it’s “so natural, almost spiritual.” Moreover, running strengthens him and teaches him consistency. Less than a year after first hitting the pavement, Ryan completed a half-marathon and is studying to be a certified substance abuse counselor. As he looped around 138th Street onto the Madison Avenue Bridge, he thought he’d be ready for the NYC marathon a couple months away.
[ph]
Back on My Feet is a program that uses running to help the homeless get their lives back on track. In addition to connecting participants with housing and jobs, Back on My Feet is founded on the notion that running can change a person’s self-image. Early morning exercise, three days a week, provides an outlet for pent-up emotions and starts to change the way someone thinks about hard work.
If the concept seems hokey or contrived, the program’s numbers show that’s not the case. Back on My Feet’s program has reached 5,200 homeless individuals. They show up voluntarily for four out of every five runs — an 82.8 percent attendance rate. More than 1,900 have obtained employment, and 1,300 have moved into independent housing.
[ph]
Back on My Feet began in Philadelphia in 2007, on one of Anne Mahlum’s morning runs. A 26-year-old social entrepreneur with short bleach-blond hair, Mahlum started running a decade earlier, at age 16, to help cope with her father’s serious gambling addiction. Running as a teen in the City of Brotherly Love, she continually passed by a group of homeless men outside the Sunday Breakfast Rescue Mission, near City Hall’s century-old white tower. In May 2007, she began to develop a friendship with them. By July, they started running with her.
Inspired, Mahlum convinced the Rescue Mission’s staff to let her form an official running club for men in the shelter. At first, nine guys signed up. In exchange, each received a brand-new, donated pair of running shoes, clothes and socks. Mahlum had only one requirement: Each person had to sign a “dedication contract,” committing them to showing up on time for a run every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, respecting themselves and supporting their teammates.
[ph]
The rules were simple, but that was the point. “If we can change the way people see themselves, can we change the direction of their lives?” Mahlum asked. In her mind, running could function as a metaphor for getting one’s life back on track after experiencing homelessness. It takes the fear that someone who’s experienced homelessness feels about words like “housing,” “employment” and “sobriety” and turns that emotion into something manageable. Running teaches that every step forward takes you closer to that finish line, but also that you don’t get to the end unless you cross every mile marker along the route. Waking up so early every morning — whether the thermometer’s bubbling over or when it’s frozen solid — instills discipline and responsibility in the participants. They’re two valuable concepts, but both are hard to teach in the abstract. They need to be lived to be experienced.
After officially obtaining tax-exempt status, Mahlum’s running club grew into a nationwide organization with 50 employees and a $6.5 million operating budget. Today, Back on My Feet has more than 50 chapters in 11 cities. Since the group began recording miles in January 2009, its residential members have run more than 462,000 miles.
[ph]
Jerry, another person who participated in Friday’s outing, used to run with a chapter on the Upper West Side a couple years back and still occasionally runs with the East Harlem group as an alumni member. A few years ago, while receiving assistance from the Fortune Society, a nonprofit focused on supporting successful reentry from prison, he signed up for Back on My Feet’s program. Jerry, who asked that his last name not be used, says he showed up for his first run bitter about his disappointments and distrustful of other people. He didn’t understand why everyone in this group kept trying to hug him or why they kept saying that no one runs alone. The first mile was painful: He felt out of breath, partially because of medication he was taking and partially, he worried, because he was permanently out of shape.
But Jerry stuck with it. Despite a criminal record that meant certain employers never called him back, he landed a job as a doorman and an apartment in Harlem. He credits Back on My Feet with preparing him for success. Today, he’ll tell you that you don’t sprint at the start of a marathon, and you don’t try to win first place either. There’s accomplishment enough, he says, in finishing.
[ph]

This 23-Year-Old Has Figured Out a Way to Make Kids Want to Attend Summer School

Posted on by robbie

Thursday morning, 10 a.m. Seventh-grade boys, all young men of color, are hunched over worksheets on subtracting polynomials. (You remember: (x^3 + 4x^2 + 3x – 8) – (5x^3 – 7x^2 – 3x + 2).) Their teacher, a college student at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, asks if anyone needs extra time. Hands go up and mentors — older high schoolers in white shirts — help those who are stuck.
Across the hall, a student from Northwestern University in Illinois is instructing sixth-grade boys on personal essays. A chatty buzz fills in the room as mentors read over first drafts and point out errors to small groups of eager learners.
[ph]
The multiple “generations” all working in one classroom — a college student delivering a lesson to middle schoolers, coached by a full-time teacher and assisted by high-school-age aides — makes for an unique sight. But it’s even more unusual at I.S. 392, a highly successful middle school that sticks out from the rest of Brownsville, an area that’s long been known as one of Brooklyn’s poorest and most dangerous neighborhoods. Stranger still, it’s summer. These kids have voluntarily shown up for school while their buddies watch TV or play outside in the windless, 84-degree heat.
The classes are organized through Practice Makes Perfect, a New York City-based enrichment program now in its fifth year. The nonprofit’s goal: To close the achievement gap that creeps in when school’s not in session, says its founder and CEO Karim Abouelnaga. Known as the “summer slide,” researchers found lower-income students forget up to two months of schooling while their higher-income peers participate in summer reading, camps and other enrichment — exacerbating a divide that’s already wide during the regular school year. In Brownsville, Jamaica and the South Bronx, the program is helping 325 students, between third and seventh grade, get a head start on the next school year.
“As structured, summer school does not work,” Abouelnaga recently wrote in a letter to The New York Times. “The choice should not be between sending children to a broken summer school program or not. There is a third way: It means redesigning summer school, and making it challenging and engaging for children and teachers. Students need summer programs with individualized instruction, parental involvement and small classes that keep them from falling behind. They need summer programs where they feel welcome and where they want to learn. They need to be inspired to achieve.”
[ph]
The son of Egyptian immigrants, Abouelnaga grew up in Long Island City, Queens. He went to an underperforming high school, where just half of his classmates graduated with a diploma and less than one-fifth were college-ready. He applied to college almost on a whim, sending applications to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (because he’d liked the movie “Good Will Hunting”) and Baruch College, located across the bridge in Manhattan and where he eventually enrolled. Abouelnaga received a 1770 on his SAT, a score that put him in the top percentile for his class in Queens. But when arrived at Baruch, he found that same number placed him in the 70th percentile of his college classmates.
He eventually transferred to Cornell, where with five friends, he decided to start a nonprofit addressing the achievement gap. Nearly two-thirds of the difference between wealthy students and their less well-off counterparts can be tied to summer learning loss. Few nonprofits were working to solve the problem, so Abouelnaga decided to focus his efforts on those crucial months when school’s not in session. He founded the offices for his 12-person team in the neighborhood where he once grew up.
“So many educational initiatives are sympathetic, instead of empathetic,” he says. “I was that kid who sat here, even though I was blessed with an elite education. I bring a unique perspective.”
On a recent site visit to I.S. 392, Abouelnaga is dressed in a navy blue pinstripe suit, purple tie and matching purple pocket square  — business attire that he says sets “an expectation of excellence” for his students. At 23 years old, he projects high ambitions for himself and the growing organization. He wants to completely reform a disciplinary or remedial punishment into an exciting opportunity. He wants kids asking parents to sign them up for summer classes.
“Our brand is relationship-driven. There’s so much emphasis on technology and testing, that we can forget how much relationships matter in education,” he says. “Our mentors are what keeps kids coming back here.”
[ph]
The walls of Practice Makes Perfect classrooms are decorated with posters. In bright marker, there’s the expected motivational phrases and standard ground rules (“Respect your classmates,” “If you want to be heard, RAISE YOUR HANDS”) along with some tougher expectations (“Goals: Must have 80% mastery in ELA” — English Language Arts — “and Math”). Beside that are poems written by the young boys. A representative quatrain sounds like this: “I remember the night when I ran from the bullet. / All I heard was clik-clak POW, it was more than five bullets. / I was running non-stop, hoping I didn’t get hit. / I was sprinting so fast that I almost tripped.” Another: “People think that black men won’t / accomplish anything but / that’s not true. / White men beat slaves till they were / black and blue.”
Rather than avoiding current events, Abouelnaga and his team have made them an essential part of the curriculum. Students read recent articles deemed newsworthy, like about the merits of body cameras for police officers. It’s all part of boosting Common Core test scores, which Practice Makes Perfect tries to measure rigorously. Every Thursday, teachers input students’ scores into a system to track progress and identify those that may be in need of more targeted intervention with the help of the mentors.
Through Practice Makes Perfect’s rigorous and engaging curriculum, students so far have made tangible academic gains. Last year, the middle school math scores improved by three percent, on average, and reading by seven percent; the high school mentors, who study the SAT before and after the youngsters show up, improved their scores on the college admission test by an average of 170 points.
[ph]
But the program is about more than scores; empowerment is one of its core values. Abouelnaga’s summer school creates a permanently visible institution for the surrounding community, instead of empty hallways and classrooms — in Abouelnaga’s words, “unused real estate.” The children spend at least one day on a community service project, which demonstrates they can “make a difference in their neighborhood.” Some kids in Brownsville picked up trash around their school, one group in Bushwick volunteered at a community center and another class in Jamaica did group activities with younger kids.
Practice Makes Perfect is also creating ties between generations, in the hopes that middle-school students eventually come back as mentors in high school and advise everyone else once they’re off to college. It’s part of the reason why Abouelnaga has his college students do home visits before they start teaching — to break and confirm stereotypes and to create ties with the community.
What’s next for the organization? “There’s 1.1 million schoolchildren in New York City,” Abouelnaga says. “We haven’t even scratched the surface.”

Each Day, 731,000 People Are in Jail. How Many Are There Simply Because They Can’t Afford to Make Bail?

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Kalief Browder spent three years in jail despite never being convicted of a crime.
He was arrested for a stealing a backpack in the Bronx — a crime the then 16-year-old maintained he didn’t commit. His mother was unable to put up the $3,000 bail, so he was locked in solitary confinement on Rikers Island, New York City’s central jail, for roughly two years as he awaited trial. Browder tried to commit suicide several times — once with shredded bed sheets hung from a light fixture — and suffered physical abuse from guards and inmates alike, as detailed in The New Yorker.
In 2013, prosecutors dismissed the charges, and he was released. Last month, Browder committed suicide, sparking a wave outrage against the system that had imprisoned a young man for years only on the basis of an accusation. With its “unfortunately-long history of horrible abuses,” Rikers Island became an “example of failing to save jail for people who are convicted, as opposed to people who have just been accused,” Karin Martin, professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, tells NPR. “We’re realizing that we can’t afford, both financially and kind of morally, the horrible impacts of mass incarceration.”
In New York City, the emotional outpouring that resulted from Browder’s premature death recently crystallized into real reform as Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a sweeping, $18 million overhaul of the city’s bail system. Since 2009, the Big Apple had tested alternatives to monetary bail at a jail in Queens, offering “supervised release” through a nonprofit to low-level or nonviolent offenders. The only requirement? That a person had to do was check in regularly. Nearly nine out of 10 defendants — 87 percent — still showed up to court. Similar to programs in Washington, D.C., Chicago, Charlotte and Phoenix and states like Kentucky, Arizona and New Jersey, nonprofits in the Big Apple will be following up with text messages reminders, visits with case managers and other check-ins to ensure that people keep their date with the judge.
“We know that there are thousands of people who are now being held pre-trial in the city’s jails simply because they cannot afford to pay a few hundred dollars in bail. Instead, they are held at great expense in jail and frequently lose their jobs, have to drop out of school and lose daily contact with their children and families,” Michael Jacobson, executive director of the CUNY Institute for State and Local Governance, says in a statement. “Using risk as a standard for pre-trial detention as opposed to how much money someone has will increase public safety, reduce unnecessary and costly detention and make our pre-trial system more fair and just.”
Jails don’t get the same attention as their larger counterparts, state and federal prisons, but the average American is 19 times more likely to be locked up locally than thrown in the slammer. On any given day, 731,000 people are in jail; about 12 million people are admitted in the course of a typical year, according to research by the Vera Institute of Justice. Some are serving out a sentence, but most are simply waiting for their case to be resolved, either through a trial or a plea.
Though the cash bail system is intended to ensure that a person shows up for trial, it’s the most significant reason why some remain locked up and others are released. Put simply, if the accused or his family can’t find the cash for baile fast enough (or at all), he or she will remain behind bars. Most of the time, bail isn’t astronomically expensive. In New York, more than half — 54 percent — of inmates held through the end of their case were behind bars because they couldn’t post bail of $2,500 or less, mostly for misdemeanors.
“There’s no reason to keep people in jail at great costs, when they are no threat to anybody,” says Jonathan Lippman, chief judge of New York State. It “strips our justice system of its credibility and distorts its operation.”
To aid cities and states in determining whether a person is likely to reoffend, the John and Laura Arnold Foundation developed risk assessment tools. Among the key factors that are considered are the person’s age and criminal history, including any prior incarcerations and failures to appear in court, as well as whether the current offense is violent, Anne Milgram, the foundation’s vice president of criminal justice, tells NationSwell. Drug use, employment and other criteria traditionally weighed at arraignment hearings are almost meaningless, she adds.
The judges who used the Arnold Foundation’s criteria have seen notable drops in the jail population and correlated drops in crime. In Charlotte, for example, the number of inmates dropped 20 percent.
“The central challenge of our work has been getting people on board thinking a little differently about how these decisions are made,” says Milgram, a former criminal prosecutor. “There’s a lot of individual discretion for police, prosecutors and courts, but we haven’t used objective data to inform those decisions. We’re not taking away any decision making; we’re providing information that you both need and should want.”
New York will likely develop their own “updated science-driven risk assessment tool” in the near future (Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance called for one), pending an update to state law in Albany.
There’s been some criticism leveled at the latest changes in Gotham by some of bail reform’s biggest promoters. Robin Steinberg, executive director of The Bronx Defenders, a legal aid service, and David Feige, board chair of The Bronx Freedom Fund, which assists those charged with a misdemeanor make bail for $2,000 or less, both called the reforms “long overdue” but stressed that the city must not intrude too far into the lives of defendants. There’s no benefit in being released from jail, they say, if an organization can impose even stricter pretrial requirements, the violation of which could result in reincarceration or other penalties.
“Here’s how it works: A young man arrested for shoplifting might plead guilty and be sentenced to perform one day of community service. But that same defendant who is innocent of the charge might, as a condition of his release, be ordered to attend a one-day drug education program, report to a pretrial-services officer every week, and undergo drug treatment or testing — all because he claimed to be innocent and sought to challenge his arrest,” Steinberg and Feige write in an op-ed for The Marshall Project. “The problem with the pretrial-services model is that these ‘services’ … are often identical to, and sometimes far more onerous than the sentence one would receive for actually being guilty of the crime.”
Natalie Grybauskas, assistant press secretary for the city, tells NationSwell that the only conditions for release will be “whatever check-ins are deemed appropriate by the provider.” Any added services, like a referral to drug education, will be voluntary.
The city expects to select providers from a group of applicants in the fall, she adds.
 

A First-Generation American Became NYC’s Deputy Mayor. Can His Pre-K Push Offer Kids The Same Success?

Posted on by robbie

Richard Buery’s childhood weaved between two very different versions of New York City. The son of Panamanian immigrants — a public school teacher and a lab manager — he was raised in East New York, a section of Brooklyn notorious for its violence and poverty, The local schools have a 13.5 percent dropout rate, and one-third of families live in poverty. “East New York is a community that has not always felt that we had City Hall by our side,” Buery says. Abandoned lots and failing schools were all he knew of Gotham until he was accepted at Stuyvesant High School, one of the city’s nine elite magnet schools.

“It was my first experience meeting people and having friends who weren’t black and Hispanic,” he tells The New York Times. “For the most part, it was my first time meeting folks from wealthier communities and wealthier families. And it really made very real to me the truth about educational equality and the difference between what it means to be a child from a place like East New York and a child in a neighborhood like Park Slope or the Upper East Side.”

Buery (rhymes with “jury”) recognized the opportunities within his reach: Stuyvesant led to Harvard and, later, Yale Law School. In his mid-forties, he’s now the deputy mayor managing strategic initiatives for Bill De Blasio, the progressive Democrat elected mayor in 2013. Buery’s largely focused on implementing the mayor’s push for early childhood education in The Big Apple. The second year of free, full-day pre-kindergarten class is right around the corner, and his office is aiming to have it be “universal,” an accomplishment that would mean there’s a spot for all 70,000 New York City children who want one. That’s a “small city” of bouncing four-year-olds who’d otherwise be with babysitters or private classes, the Times’ editorial board notes. In essence, Buery is responsible for adding an entire grade level to what’s already the nation’s largest school system, New York Magazine adds.

“Our job is to make these two New York Cities one,” Buery said on his arrival in office last year. “It’s been my mission in life to help families work their way up the economic ladder. No agency, no community group can do that alone. It takes sustained and far-reaching coordination to drive that kind of change. This administration won’t let bureaucracy or business-as-usual stand in the way of the progress we’re going to make for children and families.”

After racking up two Ivy League degrees, a clerkship for a federal judge and a post as staff attorney for the Brennan Center for Justice, Buery had a revelation. “I knew that I did not want to be a lawyer,” he admits, “but I did not have a career plan after college other than wanting to continue a commitment to social justice.” During an assignment challenging the construction of petrochemical facilities in low-income minority neighborhoods in Louisiana, Buery realized that he identified more with the community organizers’ struggle than any courtroom proceeding. “It occurred to me that I would rather have their jobs than my own,” he says.

“Anxious to build organizations of my own,” Buery returned home to East New York. He established two nonprofits: iMentor, a program that’s guided 13,000 students through the college application process with in-person and online mentoring, and Groundwork, Inc., an organization that worked with families in Brooklyn’s public housing projects. “What he wants for East New York is what every middle class family wants for their children,” one of Buery’s colleagues at Groundworks, Inc., told a blogger. His success in doing so — math and science scores improved 36 and 41 percent, respectively, in the program’s first five years — drew the attention of larger charities, including one of New York City’s oldest and most respected child welfare organizations, the Children’s Aid Society.

In 2009, at age 37, Buery was appointed the first black leader of Children’s Aid Society, and the youngest since its founding in 1853. From his early experience founding nonprofits, the broad-shouldered Buery honed an entrepreneurial impulse. At Children’s Aid Society, he learned how to manage a colossal agency of 1,100 full-time and 700 part-time staff. He brought a data-driven approach to the charity’s programming, tracking young participants to measure their successes.

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Those skills have come in handy in his new post as deputy mayor, where Buery is coordinating a couple dozen agencies, his staff says. Luckily, the city isn’t building a program from the ground up. Two years ago, figures showed 20,000 pre-K spots — about one-third of the total needed. Buery’s expanding on two fronts: half-day programs are being lengthened into full days, and new classrooms are being added wherever they can fit them, often at community-based organizations like Catholic Charities or Union Settlement Association.

There’s plenty of challenges ahead for New York’s universal pre-K expansion. Too many classrooms, reflecting the neighborhood demographics, appear segregated by race and socio-economics — exaggerating the worst patterns in their surroundings, rather than adding diversity. One of the most vocal critics, Bruce Fuller, a professor of education and public policy at University of California, Berkeley, has argued the expansion does more to benefit middle-class children than the poorer students it’s aimed at.

And then there’s the bruising fight with Gov. Andrew Cuomo that practically came to blows over mayoral control of city schools. (De Blasio, who fought for permanent control, was prepared to settle for three years; instead, Senate Republicans in Albany gave him just one.)

But with September approaching, Buery can tick off a number of successes. State funding — about $340 million a year — is locked in for the program’s first five years, totaling $1.5 billion. Enrollments have also increased for the second year, close to projected totals. In June, De Blasio announced that 57,000 children had been guaranteed a spot in their top three choices, though another 10,000 youngsters were placed in schools that didn’t even appear on the parent’s list of a dozen choices.

Soon, the visions from Buery’s childhood, of separate and unequal cities, may become a detail of the past. If universal pre-K lives up to its “historic and transformative” promise, it will level the playing field in the New York City’s schools and check inequality in the long run. Fifteen years from now, a kid like Buery from East New York, from South Bronx or Central Harlem might look back on this moment as the first step of his own journey to Harvard.

“To those who think that this mayor is too ambitious or moving forward too quickly, I just want to emphasize that if you say that, you really don’t know this city,” Buery says. “There is nothing that we cannot do when we come together.”

Forget South Beach. This Urban Park Is Going to Be Miami’s Top Spot to Get Fresh Air

Posted on by robbie

South Florida will soon have its very own version of New York City’s famed High Line. The southern counterpart’s co-creators are calling their idea “The Underline,” a stretch of urban parkland underneath an elevated train’s railway in Miami.
Led by Meg Daly, a businesswoman who first reimagined the transit corridor’s possibilities after a debilitating accident, The Underline will transform a barren swath of land into safer paths for pedestrians and bicyclists — from the Miami River in the north to the city’s South Station. James Corner Field Operations, the same New York City-based firm behind the High Line, is sketching early blueprints and expects to present plans this September.
The genesis for this huge public works project occurred when Daly was out for a bike ride with her adult daughter. The pair collided, and Daly hit the asphalt elbows first and broke both bones. (The pain was “terrible,” she says, “but I’ve been through childbirth, so whatever.”) For all practical purposes, Daly was incapacitated — unable to drive for three months while both arms healed. So she started traveling on the city’s Metrorail, an elevated train.
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“I took it from one stop to another, and on the final stretch, I’d walk under under the train tracks to grab some shade because June and July in Miami are really hot. It was at that moment I realized there’s so much land here, and there’s really not a whole lot being done with it. This should be like the High Line in New York,” she recalls. “That’s really where the idea came from. It was a crazy idea, and I started telling my friends and family. My background’s in marketing, so I’m used to hearing a lot more ‘no’ than ‘yes,’ but they all agreed it should be a park.”
From end to end, the park will stretch 10 linear miles. Under the tracks, the corridor exceeds 110 feet in width in some spots. (Compare that to 30 feet on the High Line.) One side parallels U.S. Route 1; the other faces building facades.
Today, there’s a crude, narrow path that some frequent, but mostly the space looks how you’d expect a rail yard to appear — utility poles, maintenance ladders, fences (and holes to sneak in) and encroachments from adjacent property owners. “There’s really bad signaling, and it doesn’t have lighting at night. Not a lot of people use it,” says Isabel Castilla, senior associate at James Corner Field Operations.
Although it’s underdeveloped, the passage still radiates potential. Its shade provides a refuge from the Florida humidity, and the patterns of light through the rails roughly three stories above create a dazzling chiaroscuro display — an effect that’s accentuated by pedaling on a bike at a constant rhythm.
This fall, James Corner’s team will present initial renderings for pilot projects downtown and near the University of Miami — two locations where people are “clamoring” for open space, Daly says. At one end of the line, construction of high rises in the central business district is encroaching on limited greenery; at the other, college students can feel disconnected from the town across the train tracks and are actively looking for new recreation opportunities. Neighbors abutting the line are planning out their own use for the space, too. South Miami Hospital, for example, is planning to pull back the pavement on a parking lot and introduce a meditation garden for patients.
Like Gotham’s version, the artery will connect disparate neighborhoods. Designers from James Corner Field Operations will unite the entire passage with native flora and tailor each block to residents’ needs. Columns supporting the tracks above, for example, might become a canvas for local artists in West Grove, a bohemian neighborhood, Castilla says.
But for all its specificity, the most important idea is that the line will be available to everyone, regardless of socioeconomics. “Anyone who lives along a transit line will now be able to come here and walk this, then go back home and never need a car,” Daly says.
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Compared to New York’s undertaking, Miami’s project must also fit more practical needs. “We’re the fourth most dangerous place in the country for pedestrians, and [one of] the most dangerous in the state for bicyclists. We don’t have protected infrastructure,” Daly says. The Underline will function as an “off-road safe haven” running parallel to the region’s busiest highway: U.S. Route 1, she adds. The project’s architects believe the new transit infrastructure won’t only protect pedestrians; they hope the newly landscaped paths, in sight of disgruntled motorists in gridlock, will be a “catalyst” for encouraging alternative modes of transit.
“Everyone hits their head and says, ‘Why didn’t I think of this?’” Daly says. “When I was forced to not drive and walk where I wanted to go, I had this new lens… It’s big, it’s shady. There’s an opportunity here. It’s all because I had never walked underneath it before.”
Many grassroots revitalization efforts have started with an ingenious idea like Daly’s, only to languish in the bureaucracy of City Hall. To the visionary, permits, zoning ordinances and public meetings can be a slow and painful death. A “champion” in Miami-Dade County’s Parks, Recreation and Open Spaces department, Maria Nardi, chief of planning, “a bureaucrat who thinks like an entrepreneur,” propelled the idea forward as the “glue that held future trails together,” Daly says.
No small force to be discounted herself, Daly often talks about bringing private sector speed to government. She sets ambitious goals for The Underline’s construction, but knows she’ll meet them. Overtures made to three municipalities and four nonprofits produced an “unusual collaboration”; altogether, they contributed $500,000 to get planning underway. Again, valuing speed, Friends of the Underline’s planning committee chose James Corner as the lead design team. “The way we’re railroading this thing” — pun intended — “we didn’t have the time to have anybody go through a learning curve. [James Corner] brought that expertise.”
There’s still some practical elements for the firm to work out — designing safe passageways at intersections, getting approval from the Federal Transit Authority, finding the money to make everything possible — but Daly seems positive that the entire line will be completed in six years.
“You know what motivates me? That it can be done; it just isn’t being done. The way the public sector moves needs to be challenged. Development is moving much faster than infrastructure to match it,” Daly says. “The people who live here deserve this. And I want to be sure to use this before I’m in a wheelchair.”
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What Kale and Arugula Have to Do with Reducing Recidivism

Posted on by robbie

It’s mango season in Miami, and James Jiler’s kitchen counter keeps filling with bags and bags of the tropical fruit. The towering mound accumulates nearly faster than he can slice the mangos apart or blend them together in a summer daiquiri.
Tasty as the fresh fruit is already, it’s even sweeter to Jiler because of where it comes from: many of the mangoes were nurtured and picked by at-risk youth, halfway house residents and the formerly incarcerated. As the executive director of Urban Greenworks, Jiler provides green jobs and environmental programs like planting in urban spaces or science education in schools to troubled residents of Miami. Since the organization’s start in 2010, roughly 55 people have been employed by the nonprofit, plus hundreds more have served as volunteers.
“Every time we plant a cluster of native trees, we create a little, cool sanctuary, or a butterfly garden or a natural habitat for the endangered Dade pine that was once there 150 years ago,” Jiler says. “My philosophy is to change one person, one garden, one community at a time.”
Before he arrived on the southeast tip of Florida, Jiler lived in New York’s East Village for more than a decade. He spent his time organizing with his neighbors to protect several community gardens — precious land in dense Lower Manhattan — from the dual threats of gentrification and former mayor Rudy Giuliani. He spent his days heading up the GreenHouse Program, a “jail to street” program at Rikers Island, the city’s central corrections facility, where he taught male and female prisoners “the art of gardening” on two acres of land adjacent to the penitentiary. Schooled in the methods of tending plants from seed to blossom, the formerly incarcerated left “immediately employable,” Jiler says. They could quickly transition to jobs in the city’s parks department or nature conservancies. Some alums even found themselves potting flowerbeds at spacious penthouse terraces, overlooking skyscrapers and the great emerald of Central Park.
“I would say, of close to 700 inmates I worked with over 10 years, I could count on my hands the ones that had a college education and on my hands and feet the ones that graduated high school. The rank and file of incarcerated in our cities are undereducated, underemployed and generally poor,” explains Jiler, who completed a graduate program at Yale University’s School of Forestry. “Using horticulture and gardening and food production, we’d redirect their lives. It’s a way to develop vocational skills and educate. When the real difficulties begin, it’s a way to reduce recidivism.”
Not only did gardening provide the incarcerated with work, its rhythms and routines could soothe tensions and relieve anxiety by troweling the earth. “It’s horticulture as therapy,” Jiler explains. “People’s lives could be transformed having these positive interactions with nature.” If a convict needed to confront the old buddies that once got him into trouble, for example, the rote actions of pruning could be meditative, could prove that small and painful incisions do eventually beautify the whole.
“I like to see beauty. What gets me going is to see a garden made by people in that community who have been marginalized, who are considered unemployable, involved in something productive and meaningful,” Jiler says.
In 2008, Jiler packed up from his New York neighborhood, feeling it had lost its edge, and journeyed south to Miami. He thought his work in the penal system had been effective, but he started to wonder if it was possible to bust what he calls the “cradle-to-prison pipeline” at an earlier stage. In Liberty City, “one of the most neglected inner-city neighborhoods in Miami,” Jiler found the Belafonte TACOLCY Center, a community youth center, and a partner with whom to launch a green initiative. Roger Horne, a naturalist who’d co-founded Youth Bike, a program teaching mechanical skills and safety to inner-city kids, and taught gardening at the center, now heads Urban Greenworks’s community health relations.
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At their newly formed organization, Jiler and Horne created Cerasee Farm. It’s named for a tropical vine in the Caribbean that sprouts wherever the land is disturbed and produces seed pods used in medicinal teas — just the antidote the pair believed Liberty City needed. Over the course of a year, the nonprofit’s employees and volunteers transformed an abandoned tract of land into a huge urban farm. They grow moringas, a tree that sprouts healthy superfood, and mulberries, a tree that shoots up quickly and produces fruit within eight months. Higher up in the canopy, there’s avocados and lychees.
In August 2013, Jiler also established the Mustard Seed Project, creating an urban farm of kale, arugula and cranberry hibiscus at the halfway home Agape House, where women reside post-incarceration. Almost all have a history of substance abuse, and a number have suffered as victims of human trafficking. Women from the facility also run the Edible Wall, 400 square feet of fresh herbs and fruits, like peppermint and spearmint, cilantro, basil, passion fruit and strawberries, that supply downtown’s trendy mixologists and chefs.
“I look forward to each day so much: we get to be outside with nature and get our hands dirty,” one woman says of the program. “I used to hate going outside, but now I love to with all the plants and flowers — so much life.” Another adds, “It’s great to be part of something beautiful for a change.”
It’s said that weeds are nothing more than unloved flowers — a lesson that holds true for gardeners, too. No matter if they’re wild, bent or misshapen, Jiler accepts Liberty City’s inmates, addicts and youth — the people that others would uproot and toss aside. Some may not look rosy today, but with a little care, they’ll be like late-spring blossoms, all the more beautiful for the wait.
READ MORE: The Community Garden That’s Bringing a Forgotten Neighborhood Back from the Brink
SEE MORE: 15 Photographs that Reveal the Beauty of an Inner City Garden
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5 Cities That Are Making Eco-Friendly Living a Reality

Posted on by robbie

Darker winters and blazing heatwaves, higher floods and months without rain. It’s undeniable that our climate is changing. But some American cities are lagging behind; only 59 percent have a mitigation plan, the lowest rate for any global region.
There are are bright spots, however, as some municipalities are adapting with the weather’s fluctuations — and their early efforts are showing results. Last year, for the the first time on record, the global economy grew without an accompanying rise in carbon dioxide emissions. Cleaner energy sources and conservation are proving more effective than even most experts predicted.
Here are several American projects leading the way into a new century of climate consciousness.
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New York City
The largest metropolitan region — the Tri-state Area, which consists of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut and is home to nearly 20.1 million Americans — found itself taken off-guard by Hurricane Sandy in 2012. The devastating, 13.88-foot storm surge flooded the city, shuttering the subways and leaving the New York Stock Exchange, along with most of Lower Manhattan, dark for several days. One hundred and six people died along the East Coast, and thousands were displaced from their homes. Spurred into action, the Big Apple took immediate measures to stave off destruction from another nor’easter. A few days after, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said, “Our climate is changing. And while the increase in extreme weather we have experienced in New York City and around the world may or may not be the result of it, the risk that it may be — given the devastation it is wreaking — should be enough to compel all elected leaders to take immediate action.”
Following suit from Southern cities like Galveston, Texas, and Miami, which have built storm barriers and restored wetlands, The City That Never Sleeps proposed a $20 billion, 430-page plan to protect its coastline. A central aspect involves beautifying neighborhoods with miles of parkland wrapping around the island, placing some buffer between city and sea. Offshore, oyster beds could break the storm surges, an innovation Kate Orff, a Columbia University architecture professor, calls “oyster-tecture” or “living breakwaters.” She was awarded a $60 million grant by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to plant millions of pearl-producers off Staten Island. The artificial reef is bringing biodiversity back to New York’s harbor and using the water as an advantage before the next storm strikes.
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Chicago
From the 1871 inferno that burned 3.3 square miles to the 1979 airline flight that crashed seconds after takeoff from O’Hare International Airport, Chicago has been no stranger to its own tragic disasters. But the Second City is taking proactive measures to prevent the next climate change crisis. As part of the Chicago Climate Action Plan started by Mayor Richard M. Daley in 2008, the city is preparing for hotter heat waves and wetter downpours. Researchers have studied ways to combat the “urban heat island” effect, a phenomenon that can increase temperatures by as much as 10 degrees during already scorching summers. In response, the city council passed ordinances requiring more trees in and around empty parking lots as well as reflective covers on most roofs. And at City Hall, landscapers planted nearly 20,000 plants in a rooftop garden.
When it comes to preventing floods, Chicago is once again at the forefront. Almost all public alleyways (and in some districts, concrete sidewalks) have been replaced with pervious pavement, concrete mixed with fine sand that enables water to flow straight through. Under heavy traffic, this paving deteriorates faster than normal, but it also reduces stormwater runoff into the city sewer system by 80 percent, preventing flooding and pesky potholes. Rain or shine, the Windy City’s ready.
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El Paso, Texas
The pipes in this Southern city were running dry after years of drought, so researchers turned to another source: already-used water. Faced with an arid climate in the mountains along the border, El Paso launched the nation’s largest potable-reuse program. Derided by some critics as “toilet to tap,” the technology can seem icky, but most city residents were more worried about running out of water. “In an area where it doesn’t rain you have to explore every viable option, and that’s a viable option,” one resident said at a recent public meeting. While there are some worries about chemicals being poured down the drain, most experts say it’s completely safe since the water’s sent through a body of water, like a lake or aquifer, and then purified an additional time before being mixed in with the regular drinking water supply. The $82 million technology will be fully functional in 2018.
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Los Angeles
This sprawling metropolis is far from the City of Lights, but it’s trying to emulate its European counterparts. Notorious for smog and light pollution dimming out the night sky across Southern California flatland, L.A. has established itself as the definitive leader in smart street lighting, drastically cutting its carbon emissions. In concert with the Clinton Climate Initiative, the city has replaced 157,000 lampposts, more than two-thirds of the total stock. The lights, which used to emit an orange glow from high-pressure sodium vapor, will now be powered by brighter, white light-emitting diodes, or LEDs.
The city has cut energy costs from lighting by 63.1 percent and is saving $8.3 million annually, according to recent figures. To put it another way, by changing out all the bulbs burning through the night, L.A. cut down 94.3 gigawatt-hours — the equivalent power of four dozen Hoover Dams. “It’s a shining example of how green technology can be both environmentally responsible and cost-effective,” says Ed Ebrahimian, the director of the Street Lighting Bureau. Even better? It’s making streets brighter and safer at night: overnight incidents like vehicle theft, theft and vandalism declined by nine percent.
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Honolulu, Hawaii
Not only are its residents enjoying the constant sunshine, they’re also harnessing it for their electricity. The most populous city in the Hawaiian chain, Honolulu also claims the country’s highest per capita rate of homes outfitted with photovoltaic panels, with solar power being generated on at least 10 percent of rooftops.
Because much of Honolulu’s power currently comes from burning pricey diesel fuel, the savings from launching one’s own power source attracted many customers, so many in fact that the local utility fought to cap the energy customers could sell back to the grid. Lawmakers ensured solar power would continue to thrive by removing any caps. Last month, in a 74 to 2 vote, they approved a long-term plan that will have Hawaii running entirely on renewable energy by 2045.”Our state is spending $3 [billion] to $5 billion annually on importing dirty, fossil fuels, which is not good for the environment, our future sustainability, or our pocket books,” says Sen. Mike Gabbard, the bill’s sponsor. “Our islands are blessed with abundant, renewable energy. We should be using these resources for the benefit of our people.”