The Battle for Gotham

The Battle for Gotham Read Online Free PDF

Book: The Battle for Gotham Read Online Free PDF
Author: Roberta Brandes Gratz
Tags: United States, History, 20th Century
organization developing low-income housing in renovated buildings especially for the formerly homeless, exhibits a different creative problem-solving path. Involving future tenants in the design, Roseanne Haggerty has created three thousand units of housing for displaced low-income tenants and the homeless in the fewer than fifteen years since she started Common Ground. Her strategy is to ask potential tenants what they need and build it. Common Ground facilities, mostly restored formerly deteriorated hotels, fit comfortably in their community from West Forty-second Street to Bushwick.
    Challenging standard economic assumptions, Jacobs argued that meaningful economic progress always depends on the continued development of new kinds of work replacing or expanding existing forms. In this vein, a new “green” industry is evolving in small steps in various corners of the city. For instance, Omar Freilla’s expanding recycling operation, ReBuilders Source, in the Hunts Point section of the Bronx, sells used and overstocked building supplies at deep discounts, almost like a Salvation Army model for home improvement, Freilla says. 15 Freilla believes it to be the first worker-owned cooperative for reused building materials. He got the idea of selling salvaged and donated materials while working for Sustainable South Bronx, or SSBx. That grassroots organization, under the formidable leadership of its founder, Majora Carter, pioneered a green roof project with its own newly created for-profit installation company, Smart Roofs, LLC, and started a “green-collar” job-training program.
    In a similar vein, Spec-It-Green is NYIRN’s (New York Industrial Retention Network) effort to get city manufacturers to produce green products and get builders to buy them, thereby infusing the whole supply stream with new made-in-New York green products.
    David Sweeney, with his Greenpoint Manufacturing Development Corporation, is profitably converting underused industrial buildings into incubators of small businesses and light manufacturers, while city planning policies continue to undermine industrial neighborhoods by upzoning policies that escalate real estate values. His waiting list for space only gets longer as the city loses industrial space. Although he started rescuing old factories through this nonprofit organization, he has since continued to preserve industrial space in old buildings with the use of private investment money. Venture capital has recognized what official policy denies, that manufacturing not only has a future in the city but is critical to maintaining diversity in the city economy.
    Assorted community-based development groups spread around the South Bronx led the revival of that borough, starting in the 1970s with the rescue and renovation of abandoned housing, the building of new infill housing, and community-based housing management. 16 But in the 1990s, a new wave of groups—the Point, Sustainable South Bronx, Mothers on the Move, Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice—emerged there and around the city, integrating youth, environment, criminal justice, and antiviolence. They have become the true nurturers of what Jacobs described as “adaptations, ameliorations, and densifications” that add up to enduring, positive change.
    The Bronx River Alliance is a public-private partnership of more than sixty-one grassroots organizations, institutions, and public agencies that first came together as the Bronx River Working Group in the late 1990s in a real example of community-initiated healing of an area torn asunder by urban renewal. The alliance, with the help of the city’s Department of Parks, is working to restore the Bronx River, construct the Bronx River Greenway, build not-so-small parks, initiate boating programs on the river, and use the river for student and community environmental education. Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice, the Point, and Sustainable South Bronx were among the founders of the Bronx
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