[CPEO-BIF] Youth Organizing and Brownfields

[Lenny Siegel <lennysiegel@gmail.com>]

[To download this report as a formatted, four-page
1.4 MB PDF file with photos, go to 
http://www.cpeo.org/pubs/YouthOrganizing.pdf.]


Youth Organizing and Brownfields

A CPEO Brownfields Brief by Bob Hersh
July 2007

The dominant language of brownfields policy that reaches its yearly 
crescendo at the national brownfields conference - targets of 
opportunity, fixed priced contracts, the art of the deal - has pushed to 
the margins other "uses" of brownfields. In this policy brief we examine 
how, in low-income and minority neighborhoods, young people are using 
brownfields as a means to organize local residents and to encourage 
youth political engagement.

For example, in New York City's South Bronx, having "access to the 
water" often means opening up fire hydrants in the summer to cool off. A 
local faith-based group, the Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice 
(YMPJ), saw the nearby Bronx River as an opportunity to do more, to 
create much needed water access and parkland for South Bronx residents. 
The problem was that the southern reaches of the river were polluted and 
flowed through abandoned industrial sites and poorly maintained 
properties with few public access points.

To address the issue, YMPJ formed a RIVER Team, comprised of young 
volunteers from the neighborhood. The team began a sustained advocacy 
campaign to clean up the river and to identify shoreline properties - 
old industrial sites - that could be redeveloped as parks. As part of 
its organizing strategy, the RIVER Team secured canoes and began 
paddling local residents and others, including local and state 
politicians, down the river. They thus brought the long neglected Bronx 
River to the attention of federal, state, and local agencies. As the 
result of YMPJ's advocacy and its participation, with other community 
and government stakeholders, a number of improvements were made to the 
river and its shoreline: Stretches of the river were cleaned up; new 
parks were created in the place of old abandoned industrial sites, and 
funding was put in place to build new community facilities, including a 
boat house, along the river.

In Hammond, Indiana, students are taking a closer look at brownfields in 
their neighborhoods as part of an innovative school curriculum project. 
In this project student teams first build an assessment of a local 
brownfield by reviewing local ownership records, aerial photographs, 
city directories, files from local and state regulatory agencies, and 
other sources. They are then are asked to come up with realistic reuse 
plans for the site. To do so, they design and conduct a community 
brownfields survey to gauge neighborhood attitudes toward site cleanup 
and potential future uses of the property.

This information and the connections the students make with local 
residents invariably inform their reuse plans. In the third part of the 
project, students design and then present their reuse plans to community 
members. Throughout this investigation, students continually are asked 
to consider why their neighborhood looks the way it does, to consider 
how zoning, racial segregation, disinvestment and other forces have 
shaped their community. In this way local history is framed through a 
brownfield lens. Student projects have resulted in EPA targeted site 
assessments.

Toxic Soil Busters

In Worcester, Massachusetts, a group of high school students, known as 
the Toxic Soil Busters (TSB), has developed the expertise and resources 
to test soils for lead in backyards and in community gardens. Not only 
are the students helping local residents from the city's poorest 
neighborhoods protect themselves from lead in soils, but they are also 
conducting long-term phytoremediation experiments - that is, using 
plants to clean up pollution - to determine which kinds of plants best 
remove lead from the soil.

TSB is a youth program of a grassroots organization, the Worcester Roots 
Project, which was formed by Worcester residents concerned about lead 
poisoning from soils where children play.

Worcester has one of the highest incidences of childhood lead poisoning 
in the state of Massachusetts. Between 2001 and 2006 some 50 cases of 
childhood lead poisoning were reported, and children living in rental 
housing built before lead paint sale was outlawed in 1978 are most at 
risk. In the South Main and Piedmont neighborhoods of Worcester, where 
the TSB focus their testing and outreach efforts, much of the housing 
consists of older wood-frame triple-deckers, and only 12 percent of the 
housing stock is owner-occupied. Unlike the City of Worcester as a 
whole, where 70 percent of the population is white, between 60 and 75 
percent of the population in the two neighborhoods is Latino, 
African-American, or Asian. More than 40 percent of school-age children 
in the area live below the poverty line.

While exposure to dust from lead paint in the home appears to be the 
biggest source of blood lead in children, lead in soils - from peeling 
outdoor paint, past auto emissions, and industrial sources, particularly 
in inner city neighborhoods - can pose significant health risks. The 
Piedmont and South Main neighborhoods have dense road systems and high 
traffic counts, and although gasoline no longer contains lead, deposits 
from earlier use remain. Flaking paint from the neighborhoods' wooden 
triple-deckers also contributes to high lead levels in soil.

In Worcester, the soil contamination and TSB's soil testing intersects 
with a strong community gardening movement.  Of the 25 community gardens 
operating in Worcester, the TSB have taken soil samples from seven 
sites. The TSB also take samples from potential community garden sites - 
derelict lots - that can be transformed into community-run gardens or 
green space. These samples are sent to labs at the University of 
Massachusetts in Amherst, or to the lab at the Worcester Department of 
Public Health. Supported by grants from local foundations, the TSB offer 
free soil testing to residents and community gardens in the target 
neighborhoods.

The TSB have received training from soil scientists, including faculty 
at local universities and environmental consultants. They have also 
participated in trainings offered by Lead Safe Cambridge to learn 
firsthand acceptable soil sampling protocols.

Once the soil is tested, the TSB help the community gardeners evaluate 
the possibilities of using the site. In areas with a large amount of 
lead in the soil (over 900 ppm), the TSB often encourage gardeners to 
excavate a layer of soil (depending on the extent of contamination) and 
replenish it with clean topsoil. Alternatively, they suggest that 
residents avoid growing leafy vegetable and root crops and give 
preference to fruits or flowers, or use plastic-lined raised beds. They 
have set up a garden demonstration site in the neighborhood and produced 
a variety of outreach materials. They perform skits to inform local 
residents about gardening practices that reduce the possibility of lead 
exposure. And they demonstrate methods, such phytoremediation, for 
removing lead from community gardens and yards.

In phytoremediation, plants remove contaminants from the ground when 
their roots take in water and nutrients from polluted soil. Although 
there are some challenges associated with the phytoremediation of lead - 
it has low solubility and thus in many cases is not readily available 
for plant uptake - phytoremediation is a promising strategy, especially 
in contrast to the cost of alternative cleanup methods, such as 
excavation, that are beyond the means of most community groups gardening 
on urban lots.

The TSB have experimented with different plants - scented geranium, 
pumpkins, Indian mustard - and with different soil additives to lower 
soil pH to increase plant uptake. At certain test sites they have used 
phytoremediation to reduce lead in soils by some 35% over the course of 
a growing season. At other sites, however, they have met with less 
success. The lead-rich plant material is harvested and removed from the 
site without extensive excavation or disposal costs.

TSB currently sends plant material to a high temperature incinerator, a 
means of waste disposal that can be problematic. Even at state of the 
art incinerators, pollution-control equipment can remove some but not 
all heavy metals from stack gases, so some metal will be emitted into 
the air from the smokestacks. For larger projects, TSB is exploring the 
option of sending plant detritus with high lead content to a lined landfill.

The work of the Toxic Soil Busters is remarkable. In the brownfields 
context small infill sites typically have little economic value to 
private sector investors but often have considerable value to 
communities as gardens or green space. These urban infill sites, under 
current brownfields policies, are typically not being assessed or 
cleaned up. The Toxic Soil Busters provide an example of how youth 
organizing and community-based science, helped along by the technical 
knowhow of experts and start-up funding from foundations, can help 
inner-city communities make them useful. The Toxic Soil Busters, as 
unlikely risk managers, have been able to mobilize community resources - 
commitment, emotional allegiance, and acceptance - typically unavailable 
to government officials.

The young people who are part of the Toxic Soil Busters do not see 
themselves as a youth group, but rather as a burgeoning cooperative. To 
put TSB on more secure footing, they are considering offering fees for 
service, selling test kits, contracting as site designers, and 
leveraging funding from grants going to the city to makes yards lead-safe.


--


Lenny Siegel
Director, Center for Public Environmental Oversight
c/o PSC, 278-A Hope St., Mountain View, CA 94041
Voice: 650/961-8918 or 650/969-1545
Fax: 650/961-8918
<lsiegel@cpeo.org>
http://www.cpeo.org


_______________________________________________
Brownfields mailing list
Brownfields@list.cpeo.org
http://www.cpeo.org/mailman/listinfo/brownfields