The first Community Voices event featured Jaime Stein and Adam Friedman.

Jaime Stein spoke injustices involving waste management. She mentioned Hunts Point, an area in the Bronx, which handles 40% of NYC’s waste and 100% of the waste from the Bronx. Hunts Point is home to a sewage treatment plant, a sewage pelletizing plant, and four electrical power plants. On top of all of this, Hunts Point has over 60,000 trucks traveling through due to the heavy fish, meat, and a produce industries of the area.

Jaime also mentioned the New York Organic Fertilizer Co. (NYOFCO), which is a plant that changes liquid waste to fertilizer to be used in Florida. Although the idea seems very practical and beneficial, the contract for this plant has not been renewed in a very long time. Also, this plant is not regulated in terms of waste and operation, which puts both the area around it and the product fertilizer at risk.

Another topic that Jaime discussed was the Clean-Water Act. She mentioned that this act didn’t really solve any problems, but that it just shifted the burden from the oceans to the communities.

To end her talk, Jaime talked about the South Bronx. Currently, the South Bronx area has a land to person ratio of .5 acres/1000 people. The New York recommended ratio is 2.5acres/1000 people. Also, the South Bronx area has a 25% unemployment rate. To fight these problems, Jaime presented the South Bronx Greenway master plan, which creates green spaces along roads. She also mentioned the Bronx Environmental Stewardship training, which would help provide jobs.

The second speaker was Adam Friedman from the Pratt Center for Community Development. He spoke about building sustainable communities through creating jobs and helping local business grow. Adam mentioned that in order to have productivity in a community, we need both environmentalism and economic development, and he mentioned that sustainability requires economic diversity and behavioral change.

Adam discussed the pros and cons to PlaNYC. He said that its strengths were in raising awareness, dealing with issues involving mass transit, energy, public health, and that it provided economic strategy. However, he mentioned that PlaNYC did not do anything to change economic trends in income disparity because it didn’t deal with direct job creation, zoning and space for green collar jobs, and living wages.

Adam proposed a number of plans to help fill in the gaps of PlaNYC. One of them was the Block by Block program, which had the goal of making neighborhoods more sustainable by changing housing. The changes in housing would reduce energy consumption and costs, while raising affordability and public health.

Another plan that Adam mentioned was the Sustainable Community Development: Houses of Worship. The goal of this project was to promote sustainable neighborhoods by creating jobs, promote sustainable practice, and to strengthen neighborhood institutions. The plan talks about houses of worship, that usually have lots of vacant space during the week, renting their space out to small businesses in order to help local business grow and thrive, while bringing the community together.