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Melissa Checker Queens College, CUNY Department of Urban Studies
DRAFT: PLEASE DO NOT REPRODUCE, CIRCULATE OR DISTRIBUTE WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION!
Dirty Deeds Done Dirty Cheap: Environmental Gentrification, Organized Crime & the Political Ecology of Fiscal Crisis in Staten Island, New York
University of California Berkeley, Berkeley Workshop on Environmental Politics October 15, 2010
[Author’s Note: I am extremely grateful and honored by the invitation to participate in the Workshop on Environmental Politics. I have taken advantage of the Workshop’s goal of providing feedback on works in progress and am providing a work that is, indeed, very much in progress. That said, I had intended to bring this paper to a more polished state but recent unforeseen circumstances interfered with my schedule substantially. Out of respect for the seminar’s schedule, I am apologetically submitting this paper while it is still in need of both copyediting and citations (which I can provide upon request). I do very much look forward to discussing is potential and possibilities with the Workshop later this month.]
Beryl Thurman, the president of Staten Island’s North Shore Waterfront Conservancy
(NSWC), likens her neighborhood to an industrial “Girls Gone Wild Video.” Thurman lives on a
5.2-acre stretch of Staten Island known as “the North Shore,” which houses approximately 21
toxic facilities, including (among other things) two private waste transfer stations, a Department
of Sanitation garage, a Con Edison plant, a New York City Department of Environmental
Protection sewer treatment plant, an industrial salt factory, several bus depots, a former lead
paint factory (now a Superfund site), and a radioactive site that was part of the Manhattan
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Project. All of them reside 70 feet or less from residential streets. Staten Island, nicknamed New
York City’s “forgotten borough,” has historically received far more attention for housing another
noxious neighbor – the legendary Fresh Kills, once the world’s largest landfill. Far fewer New
Yorkers are aware that just a few miles from Fresh Kills, the North Shore teems with toxic waste
and its residents must struggle mightily to have their voices heard by elected officials and
environmental regulators. Not coincidentally, the North Shore also houses the borough’s lowest
income families and its highest numbers of African American and immigrant families.
In January, 2010, North Shore residents believed they won a significant victory when,
thanks in large part to Thurman’s tireless efforts, the EPA named the North Shore one of its ten
“Environmental Justice Showcase Communities.” Despite its peppy nomenclature, the EPA gave
this designation to ten neighborhoods across the country singled out for containing “multiple,
disproportionate environmental health burdens, population vulnerability, and limits to effective
participation in decisions with environmental and health consequences”.1 The Environmental
Justice Showcase Community program is a new initiative, launched by EPA Administrator Lisa
Jackson, the agency’s first African American administrator. The EPA website announces that the
Showcase Community program focuses on bringing together governmental and non-
governmental organizations to achieve “real” results. In the ten months since granting the
designation, EPA officials have visited each of the North Shore’s 21 toxic sites at least once,
noting and following up on some regulatory violations. They have also convened a number of
meetings that bring together local, state and federal regulators with local businesses and some
NSWC members. Along with the New York Lawyers for the Public Interest (a local advocacy
organization with a strong environmental justice track record), some North Shore residents have
also begun to organize a new coalition of community organizations and individual residents.
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With the express purpose of leveraging the resources animated by the EPA designation, the
coalition plans to make diesel exhaust, air pollution and lead contamination its priority issues.
However, some NSWC activists are frustrated and continue to view their environmental
justice battle as an uphill one, for a few reasons. First, many sites have not been, and are not
currently scheduled for, remediation. Second, a number of new projects (some of which I
describe below) which threaten to worsen their environmental situation are seeking permits and
are likely to receive them. Third, members are extremely concerned about sea level rise and find
that regulators are doing little to guard against the effects of future flooding. Finally, Thurman
has said on many occasions that the main outcome of the designation was to generate a lot of
meetings that “suck up [her] time.”
In this paper, I discuss the many competing and powerful interests that hamstring
environmental justice activities on the North Shore. In particular, city initiatives to bring New
York City out of fiscal crisis ignore, and sometimes worsen the North Shore’s toxic problems,
despite the fact that they often come dressed in bright, “green” wrapping. Drawing on
ethnographic research on Staten Island, I aim to pinpoint some of the specific contradictions
inherent in discourses of sustainable development in New York City. This research is part of a
larger ethnographic project that explores the dynamic relationship between environmental justice
activism, sustainable development and gentrification in New York City’s current climate of fiscal
and environmental crisis. I have found a disturbing pattern I refer to as “environmental
gentrification”, a process which works on both material and discursive levels. Materially, I find
that the successes of environmental justice activists have unintentionally paved the way for the
displacement of their constituents. Discursively, the simultaneous ubiquity and ambiguity of
“sustainability” becomes a greenwash that disguises the inequalities and inconsistencies
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embedded in profit-driven urban development strategies. By reconfiguring historic inequalities
through an appropriative process, environmental gentrification also works to disable meaningful
resistance. This continual tension between action and co-option, I argue, leaves activists and
residents in a particularly paradoxical and sometimes perverse situation.
The case of Staten Island diverges somewhat from this pattern, as sustainable
development here is taking two tracks, which do not always run on parallel courses. On one
hand, city planners promise to install bike lanes, waterfront parks, farmers markets and other
amenities designed to attract today’s class of gentrifiers – middle-to-upper-class, eco-conscious
consumers. But on the other hand, they are well aware of the North Shore’s strategic geographic
position on the New York Harbor, between New Jersey, Manhattan and Brooklyn.
Indeed, this position makes the North Shore’s ports some of the busiest in the New York area,
and it could play a pivotal role in bringing New York City out of economic decline. Although it
is pursuing both strategies simultaneously, thus far the city has devoted more funding to the
development of “green” maritime business. I find that, as it capitalizes on the urgency of the dual
economic and environmental crisis, the city also circumvents meaningful public participation.
Moreover, green development on the North Shore actually threatens to create more
environmental harm than it does good, belying the integrity of the city’s commitment to
sustainability as well as to eco-friendly residential development. At the same time, both
strategies – gentrification and maritime industrial development -- elide any substantive efforts to
address the environmental and social problems of long-term North Shore residents. In a far more
unusual twist, I explore another obstacle to environmental justice -- the presence of organized
crime on the North Shore. Here, I argue that organized crime plays an often overlooked but
important role in both the political economy and ecology of Staten Island.
5
Background
One of Staten Island’s oldest and densest neighborhoods, the North Shore began as a
resort town that relieved early New York’s hoi polloi from the crowds and stress of the growing
city. But as the industrial revolution overtook the area, Staten Island's waterways became
integral to the city's growing economy, and industries proliferated along the North Shore. By the
turn of the 20th century, the area had become Staten Island's most densely populated in terms of
industry and people. It was not until the passing of zoning laws in 1961 that the city undertook a
serious effort to limit the degree to which industries and residences could cohabitate. At that
time, the city zoned almost half of Staten Island's waterfront, including all of the North Shore,
for mixed industrial use. While new residences now had to be built behind a buffer that protected
them from industries, the city permitted all existing industrial properties and residences to remain
as they were. Throughout the latter half of the 20th century, factories and industries came and
went – often new polluting facilities replaced old ones. Thus, successive noxious industries
create layers of ground and water contamination. For instance, the Atlantic Salt company, which
provides road salt for the New York/New Jersey area, recently expanded after it bought and
demolished an old gypsum plant (NSWC 2008). Importantly, the trucks serving these industries
tend to use the neighborhood’s old narrow, residential streets such that a coalition of residents
recently identified diesel fumes and asthma as their number one concern.
The water, itself (a ½-mile wide tidal straight known as the Kill Van Kull that connects
the Upper New York Bay with Newark Bay, and which runs between Bayonne, N.J., and Staten
Island) is zoned for industrial use. It continues to provide the principal access for hundreds
ocean-going container ships to Port Newark-Elizabeth Marine Terminal, the busiest port facility
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in the eastern United States. A recent study by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration found that commercial vessels - freighters, tankers and cruise ships - generate
enough air pollution to pose "a significant health concern for coastal communities" and a follow-
up study in Britain showed that just 15 of the world's biggest ships may now emit as much
pollution as all the world's 760m cars (see Vidal 2009). Fuel lines also run under the Kull, and
some experts estimate that over 300 oil spills occur in the Kull every year from the fuel lines,
and from ship transfers (Checker 2009). Portions of the Kull are also part of a Superfund Site,
which includes the lower Passaic River and parts of the Newark Bay. According to the EPA,
these bodies of water contain dioxin, PCBs, mercury, DDT, pesticides and heavy metals from
various companies that once manufactured pesticides along the Newark Shore (EPA.gov).
Finally, the North Shore’s sewer treatment plant currently uses 56-year old boilers to
decontaminate its waste before discharge, and its capacity is woefully inadequate – millions of
gallons of storm overrun are discharged into the Kull each year, where some people also fish.
In 2007, NSWC received a grant from the state Department of Environmental
Conservation to research the history of all of the North Shore sites they believed were
contaminated. The result is a 44-page booklet, mainly created by Thurman, which, after
concerted effort drew the attention of the EPA. Once the agency began conducting some
investigations on the North Shore, they began to exercise some of their regulatory power. in
spring 2008 the EPA announced that it found lead levels up to 10 times higher than acceptable
on the site of a former Sedutto's ice cream factory, just steps away from several homes. In 1980,
this history made the site a candidate for the federal Superfund program, which was enacted to
clean up toxic sites. However, the government team sent to inspect the area had an incorrect
address. Unable to find the property, the agency closed the case until 2007, when Thurman
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started bugging the EPA and local officials to reopen the investigation (NSWC 2008). The EPA
completed site cleanup in 2010.
In another and even stranger case, the EPA recently stepped in to generate cleanup of a
site that played a role in the Manhattan Project. Briefly, from 1939 to 1942, Archer Daniels
Midlands Co. agreed to use a portion of their linseed oil manufacturing property on Staten Island
to store 1,200 tons of high-grade uranium ore mined in what was then the Belgian Congo. The
uranium was to be used in building the atomic bomb. However, at some point (either during
initial delivery or eventual shipment), the uranium spilled on the waterfront property. The DOE
knew about the spill and conducted a limited study of the area in 1980, and the DEC conducted
another study in 1992 and then another one in 2003. All found radiation many levels higher than
acceptable standards, but nothing was ever done. In fact the DOE determined that the site was
ineligible for their remediation program because they never owned the uranium. Currently, the
site is owned by Dolan Transportation Services, and is a deteriorating paved parking lot and
storage area for trucks and other large vehicles. It is surrounded by an eight-foot high chain link
fence on three sides and the fourth borders the Kill Van Kull. According to the Environmental
Protection Agency, “ardent” trespassers, boaters on the shipping channel and site workers could
potentially access the site. Yet, today, the signage around the site consists only of some “No
trespassing” signs posted on the fence. “I call [the site] ‘You too can glow in the dark,’” said one
member of NSWC.
Indeed, all this time, residents have suspected that the site was radioactive. For
generations, parents have told their children not to go near it. They also say that at some point,
some people from Hiroshima made some kind of pilgrimage to it. And there are other stories of
businesses that started up on the site but suddenly discontinued. For instance, residents say that
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once a company tried to build a warehouse nearby, but stopped; that ConEd was doing work
around there and stopped. One woman told me that a former head of the bus driver’s union said
the MTA used to store buses near the site, but the drivers were getting sick so they stopped. One
woman who lives behind the site said that when the overgrowth is low she can see the wetlands
and that the water has “a peculiar greenish color and something that looks like a oil slick on top
of it.” When Thurman was compiling her booklet, she found some documentation of the site’s
history. She and her group then started pressuring the state Department of Environmental
Conservation to pressure the EPA to re-evaluate the site.
In 2008, the EPA conducted its own study, which revealed levels of radium and uranium
contamination nearly 10 times higher than allowable standards in some places. Because the site
is also located within a 100-year flood plain, the EPA stated that, in the event of a flood, there
would be “a high tendency” for the material to migrate into the adjacent Kill Van Kull and
Newark Bay. Moreover, the agency’s report states that although the area is currently fenced,
trespassers coming either by land or water, and site workers could “receive an unacceptable
cancer risk under a conservative hypothetical risk assessment scenario.” After their study, the
EPA wrote to the DOE asking them to reconsider cleaning up the site. The two agencies tossed
responsibility back and forth a few times until last spring when the EPA announced that the
Army Corps of Engineers would develop a plan to remediate the site, starting in 2011. However,
in August, one of the local activists I work with drove by one day and found that the site had
been leased to a construction company. The owner, who knew nothing of the contamination
claimed that two weeks earlier, a Japanese film crew had been there shooting a documentary.
Earlier in the summer, a French documentary filmmaker also contacted Thurman because she,
too, had heard about the site and wanted to make a film about it.
9
Heightening residents’ fears around all of these issues, the North Shore is a low lying
area and it floods, creating a double jeopardy -- the heavily contaminated Kull washes onto the
shoreline and contaminants from the land along the shoreline wash into the Kull. According to
Thurman, as floods worsen each year, residents “put their stuff on higher and higher shelves in
the basement.” Thus, NSWC is increasingly concerned about climate change. Thurman sits on
the New York State commission on sea level rise and frequently speaks about climate change
and climate justice. However, she and other NSWC members often complain that their neighbors
do not connect increased flooding to sea level rise. Thus, a significant part of their mission is
climate change education, an area into which many environmental justice groups are now
moving.
The North Shore is also like other environmental justice communities in terms of its
constituency. According to recent U.S. Census data, Staten Island is the borough with the city’s
fastest growing number of immigrants. Most of them gravitate towards the North Shore. In 2008,
48 percent of North Shore households were African American or Latino, although recent years
have also seen a large influx of African residents (US Census Bureau 2008). Not coincidentally,
the area also has the borough’s lowest incomes and highest rates of unemployment. NSWC,
members, themselves, are middle to low income white and African American men and women,
with one or two Hispanic members. Their membership numbers change from year to year,
depending on which issues are prominent on the Island. Typically, a core group of five or six
men and women do most of the organizing.
Environmental Gentrification & Selective Sustainability
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Several years ago, city planners began to take new notice of the North Shore’s unique
political ecology. Maritime industry held the potential to be a heavy lifter in pulling the city out
of the recession. In addition, residential decline and disinvestment along the waterfront, parts of
which include panoramic vistas of the harbor, made the area ripe for residential redevelopment.
New York City’s Economic Development Corporation (EDC) conducted a study to investigate
long-term economic development options in the area. Last winter, I attended a “Visioning
Workshop”, where the EDC presented the results of that study and to solicited community input
into the next phase of the plan. About 40 men and women sat around 8 folding tables munching
on assorted Italian pastries (ubiquitous as large public Staten Island meetings) and sipping
coffee. An EDC staffer stood up and greeted us. According to her, a major purpose of the study
was to identify ways to boost economic activity on the North Shore, while protecting its
environment. She also told us that as part of the study, they had conducted a series of “listening
sessions” and had gotten the message that people were “planned out and they wanted action.”
After about 45 minutes of presentations on the various options the EDC envisioned for
revitalizing the North Shore and its waterfront, we were going to play a game called “the budget
game.” Each table was now a team. My team, the Blue team, more or less represented other
meeting goers which means it included a couple of 20-something artists, a burgeoning population
in the St. George area, right around the ferry landing, some long-term residents, both blue and
white collar, and one lone community activist, representing the North Shore. Each team got to
divide a pot of money between various categories the EDC had identified, such as revitalizing
commercial centers, improving mobility around the island and to other boroughs, restoring and
providing open space and green space, creating and retaining jobs, and supporting maritime
expansion. These choices not only prefigured the range of possibilities for development on the
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North Shore, but they also presented a hopeful vision of concurrent industrial and residential
development. At the same time, they ignored the area’s urgent toxic problems. As Beryl
Thurman commented, “Oh didn't you hear EDC is from another solar system and planet? They
are completely out of touch with the mundane things like toxins that surround and impact the
lives of mortals.”
The 20-somethings on my team, who were members of various art and bike collectives,
excitedly voiced their support for initiatives like bike lanes, food coops and farmer’s markets.
Meanwhile, the old timers grumbled skeptically, pointing out the numerous half-finished projects
throughout the island. They were very annoyed that fast ferries were not listed as an option, even
though at previous listening sessions, they had enthusiastically agreed that they needed a fast
ferry system to connect to other parts of Staten Island, New Jersey and Manhattan. The divergent
perspectives at the meeting, and the degree to which one was privileged over another, reflects a
pattern that I am finding in several New York City neighborhoods that have historically fought
for environmental justice, such as Manhattan’s Harlem and Brooklyn’s Williamsburg, and
Sunset Park. Although their toxic problems have traditionally discouraged residential
redevelopment in these areas, in the last decade, reinvestment has taken root (Angotti 2008).
Today, they have each seen varying rates of redevelopment and the depletion of low income
housing stock.
Elsewhere, I argue that these neighborhoods’ gentrification is tied to the successful
efforts of environmental justice activists to “green” their neighborhoods. For instance, in Harlem,
a long-standing environmental justice group successfully blocked the expansion of a waste
transfer station and over the course of a decade, transformed the site into a waterfront park.
During that same decade, property values in Harlem skyrocketed and the city instituted several
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rezoning initiatives to pave the way for high-end development (Checker, ND). This unfolding of
events follows an historic and well-established pattern of the relationship between the greening
of urban neighborhoods and upscale urban redevelopment (see Angotti 2008; Rosenzweig and
Blackmar 1992, Low et al. 2005; Zukin 1995; see also Page 2001). In Harlem, environmental
justice successes thus facilitated redevelopment plans already in the works, with the unintended
consequence of displacing low income residents in the process (see Checker ND). Similarly, the
creation of green amenities on Staten Island was key to the city’s strategy for making the area
attractive to more affluent residents.
Today, green gentrification takes on a new twist, as it coincides with the now ubiquitous
trend of rebranding major urban centers as “sustainable” and “green,” Such branding plays an
increasingly important role as metropolitan centers compete to attract investment, commerce and
tourism (see Goldsmith and Blakely 2010; McDonogh N.D.; Tretter N.D.). In New York City,
in the early years of his administration, Mayor Michael Bloomberg drew fire for lagging behind
cities like London and Paris that were viewed as being on the cutting-edge of sustainability
planning. In 2007, Bloomberg released PlaNYC 2030 (also known as “PlaNYC: A Greener,
Greater New York”) Bloomberg repositioned himself as a top contender in the sustainable city
race. With 127 separate initiatives, the plan lays out sweeping and lofty goals for New York
City, including increasing affordable housing as well as access to parks, playgrounds and open
spaces, reclaiming brownfields, enhancing the city’s water and energy infrastructure, and
reducing its citywide carbon emissions by 30% below 2005 levels by the year 2030.2 But critics
point out important contradictions between the plan’s stated goals and city-supported
redevelopment initiatives. For instance, while the plan promotes biking and transit-oriented
development, the mayor’s office has also encouraged certain car-based development projects
13
(such as Ikea in Brooklyn and East Harlem’s new East River Plaza). Moreover, new waterfront
developments proliferate along New York City’s coasts, regardless of the plan’s warnings about
sea level rise (Checker 2008). Indeed, an unprecedented number of rezoning measures, like those
in Harlem, characterized Bloomberg’s mayoral tenure, resulting in a massive increase in
residential units, most of them targeted towards high-end renters and buyers (Furman Center
2009).
In keeping with the city’s stated priorities, the EDC’s plans for redevelopment thus
emphasized sustainability. In so doing they also appealed to a trend among affluent urbanites,
who exercise their environmental concerns through consumerism. Scholars link this kind of
consumerism to a crisis over the risks associated with modernity, which individuals salve in part
through their consumptive choices (see Beck 1992; Giddens 1990, 1999). Such choices include
buying green products, organic food, using less energy, recycling, etc. (Ishenhour 2010).
Ironically, of course, in their attempts to appeal to the eco-consumers, city planners glossed over
the very risks that were most pressing on the North Shore. In other words, it ignored the area’s
pernicious and urgent toxic problems.
In its superficial and ultimately staged treatment of environmental concerns, the “budget
game” mirrors a second urban trend, which has also gained popularity in recent decades. Since
the civil rights-era and in the midst of neoliberal policies, responsibility for poverty relief has
shifted from local and state governments to private entities like churches and non-profits. At the
same time, the selective appropriation of civil rights era political discourses about
enfranchisement, equality and participation serve to mask this shift (Maskovsky N.D., 2006; see
also Davis 1986; di Leonardo 1998; Kelly 1998; Reed 1999; Steinberg 1996; Taylor and Gutman
1994). In this case, under the guise of participation, city developers offered participants a
14
preselected set of options that adhered to their goals of economic redevelopment. Moreover, in
catering to the viewpoints and activities of affluent white residents, these priorities trumped the
needs of less affluent people of color and they overrode any of their concerns about toxic
remediation. Thus, in the end, just as discourses that promote public participation actually
subvert it, the language of sustainable development erases a history of environmental injustice
and structural inequality.
Best of Both Worlds
After the meeting, the EDC tallied the results of the game and reported that participants
voted to spend 31% of their budgets on restoring and providing open space, but only 11% on
creating and retaining jobs, including maritime expansion. Yet, the EDC and the mayor’s office
continually call for the building and support of maritime industry on Staten Island. According to
city press materials, “A top priority for the Bloomberg administration is to identify opportunities
for sustained and increased maritime activity. With the Port Authority, NYCEDC is working
hard to develop strategies that will optimize these sites as engines for economic growth.” For,
real estate alone may not cement New York City’s relevance in the global economy. Rather, to
stay competitive, it must support the development of maritime industry. Perhaps most critically,
by 2014, if all goes according to plan, the Panama Canal will be enlarged in order to
accommodate container ships up to 2.5 times larger than it does today, known as “post-panamax
vessels” (Dominowski 2009). However, the ships will not clear the Bayonne Bridge, even at low
tide. Accordingly, this summer the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey issued a Request
for Proposals from engineering and consulting companies to develop a plan for either raising the
bridge or dredging deeply into the channel underneath it (Leach 2010).
15
Residents near the bridge well remember a seven-year Army Corps of Engineers
dredging project that finished in 2007. Residents and local businesses complained of cracked
foundations, broken windows and falling household items during blasting sessions that occurred
three times a day, six days a week. Insurance companies denied responsibility for covering
claims associated with the dredging. Although they filed complaints with the Army Corps and
their elected officials, most residents never received compensation as they were unable to
document adequately the damage to their homes (NSWC 2008). Indeed, several of NSWC’s
current members frequently brought up the dredging and said that it radicalized them and led
them to the organization. To be sure, they oppose further bridge construction and consider it an
environmental justice issue.
North Shore businesses, on the other hand, stand to profit significantly from the dredging
project. For example, for several years, New York Container Terminal, the largest cargo facility
in the New York Harbor, has been trying to get permits to expand to accommodate larger
container ships. The Terminal promises to create 300 construction jobs and 3,218 indirect jobs.
But, the expansion builds into 17 acres of Arlington Marsh, the last of the tidal wetland areas on
the North Shore that has not been filled in by industry. Activists, and the state’s Department of
Environmental Conservation, worry that the expansion will compromise the wetlands, which
provide a natural buffer to prevent flooding as well as release even more toxins into the waters
around the North Shore. Moreover, opponents argue that the jobs created by the project will most
likely go to union members. Despite their opposition, local politicians are reluctant to resist the
project; in particular, the EDC has been strongly in favor of it. In a private conversation with an
EDC staffer, when I inquired about the controversy over the Terminal project, she shook her
head and said, “This local business has been trying for years to get permits to move forward.
16
What business would be that patient? I can’t believe the state is standing in the way of this.” This
quote highlights the contradictions between the city’s attitude towards environmental regulations
that impede economic development and its rhetoric about sustainability. As the fiscal crisis
descended in the late 2000s, these contradictions became even more apparent.
For instance, in perhaps the most glaring example of inconsistency, in November, 2009,
the city awarded its biggest chunk of stimulus money in the form of $28M worth of tax-free
bonds to Staten Island Terminal, LLC. For two years, this company had been amassing the
financing to develop the state's largest cement importation and distribution terminal on the North
Shore. After contributing $8 m of his own funding, the company’s owner claimed that he was
unable to secure the necessary construction loans to finish the project, due to the financial
meltdown. The plant will receive cement shipped in from South America and distribute it, by
truck, to construction sites around the New York area. Somewhat strikingly, the project is being
promoted as “eco-friendly.” Its website claims that it will also use only environmentally friendly
equipment and, by receiving materials by ship, it will greatly reduce truck traffic in the area. As I
mentioned earlier, a recent study finds that container ships emit can emit almost the same amount
of cancer and asthma-causing material chemicals as up to 50 million cars (Vidal 2009). Thus,
this project again calls attention to the contradictions and ambiguities inherent in “sustainable”
development, and it demonstrates the ways in which the city favors economic over ecological
sustainability. Ultimately, it illustrates the lack of substance behind large-scale projects labeled
“green.”
Connecting Organized Crime and the Environment
Perhaps the most curious part of my evening with the EDC arose during the discussion of
17
one subcategory of the open space category -- an initiative to replace fencing around maritime
businesses. “Right now,” said an EDC staff person, “businesses use opaque fencing which blocks
the view. We’re not sure why, but we want to replace those fences.” I argue that, probably
unbeknownst to the staff person, the reason for the fencing had much to do with another of the
EDC’s strategies. In its list of budget game priorities, under “maritime expansion,” the EDC
listed “limiting or excepting certain state environmental regulations.” In fact, during the
presentation, EDC consultants had spent several minutes explaining how getting permits from
the state was hamstringing business investment and they wanted to correct that issue. These
comments echo those of the person I quote earlier, who was dismayed that state environmental
regulators were impeding the Container Terminal expansion. Many of the businesses behind the
fencing had accomplished just the kind of skirting of environmental regulations that the EDC
called for.
A few weeks earlier, at an NSWC meeting, one woman offered an explanation for the
opaque fencing. She reminded me that regulators require environmental reviews only for projects
that receive governmental or bank financing, or which are seeking a new permit, or to change an
existing one. Financed projects are also far more likely to undergo a due diligence process than
projects not financed with cash. Her point as that many of the North Shore’s waterfront
properties are bought and sold with cash. She also implied that cash transfers are enabled through
organized crime. In fact, some NWSC activists related stories about finding guns or drugs during
their periodic waterfront cleanups. These people believe that city officials are aware of certain
illegal waterfront activities, but are reluctant to intervene in them.3 Such perspectives stem from
Staten Island’s long and continued history as a hub for organized crime. For instance, less than a
year ago, the state attorney general’s office and the NYC police department arrested twenty-two
18
people, including reputed members of organized crime families and a New York State court
officer, on loan sharking and gambling charges in early-morning raids on Staten Island (AP
2009). Among those arrested was a deputy chief at the city’s Department of Sanitation. A year
earlier, police raided several Staten Island properties, including a recycling company and a
cement company, allegedly connected to organized crime (Balsami 2008). Moreover, scholars
have documented the historic involvement of organized crime in maritime businesses, including
waste transfer, cement manufacturing and container shipping (Schneider and Schneider 2003.
1999; Sze 2007).
Even so, in depth analyses of the role of organized crime in urban political economies is a
relatively under-studied academic subject. One exception is the work of Jane and Peter
Schneider, who explore the intricate and symbiotic connections between the construction and
real estate industries, municipal authorities and organized crime. Operating in a liminal space
between consent and coercion, the Schneiders argue that organized crime plays a critical part in
sustaining the city’s political economy (2003, 1999). I extend these findings by suggesting that
the mob also plays a vital role in NYC’s political ecology in two ways. First, they occupy an
interstitial space that allows business to flourish in an unregulated atmosphere. That ability to
skirt regulation benefits the city by generating jobs and, more importantly, allowing it to compete
in the global maritime economy. At the same time, it adds to local pollution. Thus, while mafia-
related businesses are not entirely responsible for, but have helped to enable the uneven
environmental circumstances that plague North Shore residents.
Second, the mafia is especially imbricated in New York City’s waste management
businesses. As urban scholar, Julie Sze documents, before 1993, New York City’s private waste
market was dominated by small businesses with heavy mafia influence. In 1995, Manhattan
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district attorney Robert Morgenthau indicted thirty-three garbage firms and four trade
associations for conspiring to fix costs. He also charged that organized crime controlled the
commercial waste sector (Sze 2007; 120; see also Lentz 1995). A year later, Giuliani announced
the closing of Fresh Kills. Today, multinational companies handle much of the city’s commercial
waste. But, as far back as 1990, organized crime families had begun moving into the business of
recycling, especially as disposal costs in the New York area for nonhazardous waste rose to $60
to $80 a ton. Recyclable materials could be cheaply removed at waste transfer stations and then
sold, an added way to make a profit. For instance, in New Jersey, the owners of a garbage-
brokering business who had been charged with bribery, racketeering and illegal dumping,
founded a new company in Newark known as Hub Recycling Inc. (Egan 1990). The closing of
Fresh Kills and the crackdown on mafia-related waste management companies only reinforced
the appeal of shifting to recycling businesses. These examples not only clarify the role of the
mafia in waste-related industries, but they also clearly reflect its oft-discussed opportunistic
nature and ability to adapt to changing circumstances.
Recently, this opportunism has included further expansions into the international green
economy. For instance, in September 2010, Slate Magazine reported:
Italian officials confiscated more than $1.9 billion worth of mafia assets tied up in alternative energy—"the largest seizure ever made," Interior Minister Roberto Maroni asserted. The money was placed in more than forty companies and luxury holdings, but the majority of the investigation focused on Vito Nicastri, a Sicilian businessman dubbed "Lord of the Wind" for his investments in wind farms and solar energy panels. "This is the proof of the fact that the Mafia is dynamic and able to interpret the new needs of our society," parliamentarian Francesco Forgione said, adding that the mob is trying to move away from traditional rackets like drugs and weapons, and into the lucrative "new economy" of green energy. "It's no surprise that the Sicilian mafia was infiltrating profitable areas like wind and solar energy," Palermo magistrate Francesco Messineo agreed. Over the past
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fourteen months, authorities have seized more than 19 billion dollars from the mafia (Pullella 2010).
While the mafia’s intrusion into New York City’s new green economy is undocumented, it is
certainly possible that it will expand on its foothold in both recycling and maritime industries in
the coming years. Thus, its impact on the city’s past and future environmental conditions warrant
further exploration.
Conclusions:
The potential for the opportunistic appropriation of green capitalism by organized crime
provides an extreme example of the contradictions of market-based sustainable initiatives. As the
case of the North Shore also shows, balancing economic growth and environmental sustainability
often prove to be mutually exclusive. In an era of dual economic and environmental crisis, the
privileging of economic priorities is masked by the ambiguity of sustainability discourses. Beryl
Thurman recently told me that she believes that with its grand plans for the North Shore, the city
is looking at the area “through rose colored glasses.” She added that this view allows the city to
avoid accountability. For her, the city’s rosy perspective enables it to ignore the role of organized
crime in sustaining maritime business, in part by avoiding environmental regulations. As well,
this perspective creates a certain kind of myopia which includes promoting development on the
North Shore while ignoring its toxic problems. All the while, by privileging economic priorities,
superficially sustainable projects exacerbate the long-standing problems of environmental justice
communities. As NSWC activists challenge some of this new development, among other things,
they like to argue that it puts new, affluent residents at risk, as well as long-standing low income
residents. Indeed, as pseudo-sustainable projects perpetuate environmental injustice and
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endanger the social and environmental well-being of low income communities, so do they
endanger the health and well being of all urban residents.
1 See http://www.epa.gov/compliance/ej/grants/ej-showcase.html
2 See (http://www.nyc.gov/html/planyc2030).
3 I reiterate that these are unverified allegations and beliefs. I include them here as it an indication of some North Shore residents’ perspectives on the role of organized crime in environmental activities and activism.
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