In “New York for Sale: Community Planning Confronts Global Real Estate”, Thomas Angotti gives a compelling history on community planning in New York. He elaborates on the origins of current community movements as beginning in the 1980s with the emergence of two problems, environmental injustices and gentrification. The two problems went hand in hand. With reasons tied to environmental racism, low income neighborhoods/communities of color consistently received the brunt of planned environmental hazards. Facilities such as sewage treatment plants, landfills, and incinerators are needed to keep a city running, but poorer neighborhoods were filled with disproportionate amounts of local unwanted land uses. The city would rather not heavily contaminate upscale neighborhoods in Manhattan to maintain real estate values. As such, even if outer borough communities could cause the removal of environmental dangers from their neighborhoods, they would now be the victims of gentrification and the displacement that follows it. Community planning was born from the need to stop environmental injustices as well as the need to make communities a part of the city planning process. Organizations wanted Jacobs style community planning over Moses style community destruction.

The importance of knowing the history of community planning is clear as circumstances in the past directly mirror the issues going on today. South Bronx Unite currently has Fresh Direct as the face of environmental injustices in the Bronx. This company was given over $140 million in subsidies to relocate to the South Bronx from Long Island City. Meanwhile in the 1990’s, the Bronx Lebanon Medical Waste Incinerator was given $15 million in subsidies to be developed in the Bronx in lieu of wealthier Rockland County. In both instances, now and then, environmental reports were used to justify developments in chronically over industrialized neighborhoods with abnormally high asthma rates. Within 40 years, not much has changed; the development of one waste facility may be shut down but another will appear, funded by the city government. Private developers will continue to build on public land while hundreds of diesel trucks will continue to lower air quality in the Bronx. This is why community planning is needed and why organizations such as South Bronx Unite are taking transformative steps. Only by being involved in the city planning process and renovating unused public spaces, that developers could potentially industrialize, can a cycle of environmental justice be stopped.