[CPEO-BIF] Kingsbridge Armory, Bronx, New York

[Lenny Siegel <lsiegel@cpeo.org>]

Bronx Community Wins Big on Development Project Committed to Living  
Wages and Local Economy

By Laura Flanders
Yes! Magazine
January 6, 2014

Desiree Pilgrim-Hunter never dreamed she’d become an activist. “I was  
just a mom concerned about school overcrowding,” she says, until a  
neighbor invited her to a meeting of a local community organization,  
the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition (NWBCCC). “I was  
used to people complaining about what was missing in our community,"  
she recalls. "It was at NWBCCC that I first heard people talking  
about how to bring about solutions."

Public schools in the Bronx were overflowing, she learned, because  
the population was growing. And although the shopping options in the  
area were multiplying, investment in public services like schools  
wasn’t keeping up.

When she joined the board of the Coalition in 2005 and discovered  
that the local armory was lying empty, Pilgrim-Hunter found herself  
engaged in a deep public process of imagining what might be brought  
in to fill the building: not another low-wage mall or a big box store  
to benefit some far-off owner, but a project that offered real  
opportunities for her children and her grandchildren; something that  
would lift the spirits and boost the economy of local people.

...

For the entire article, see
http://www.yesmagazine.org/commonomics/kingsbridge-armory-community- 
benefits-agreement

--

Lenny Siegel
Executive Director, Center for Public Environmental Oversight
a project of the Pacific Studies Center
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

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