Sunset Park-based Group UPROSE Is Making Brooklyn (and New York) Greener. Here’s How
February 24, 2021
On the chilly morning of January 14, 2021, a group of activists, elected officials, journalists, and residents gathered in front of a black and grey building on 36th Street, in the heart of Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Leaning against the facade, a purple billboard improvised out of cardboard read “Climate Justice” in bright yellow letters. That building is home to UPROSE, a multicultural, intergenerational, women of color-led environmental justice group founded in 1966, which prides itself on being Brooklyn’s oldest Latino community-based organization. Sunset Park, a vibrant mix of Hispanic and Chinese residents, is one of New York City’s six designated Significant Maritime and Industrial Areas — meaning it is one of the most polluted neighborhoods in the city.
But it is slowly getting greener, thanks largely to UPROSE. Those who convened on 36th Street were celebrating a long-awaited outcome of two decades of struggle and advocacy, an effort led by the group and shared by organizations like the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance and New York Renews. The day before, Governor Andrew Cuomo had announced the approval of plans to turn the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal into an offshore wind turbine assembly hub. The Norwegian energy giant Equinor will take on the mission, thanks to generous state subsidies — a project that, according to Cuomo, will create 1,200 new green jobs.
For a relatively small organization like UPROSE, which now counts five full-time staff along with volunteers and youth organizers, the offshore wind project is huge. Ting Ting Fu, a Sunset Park-based organizer in her 20s who joined the group at the age of 13, described the approval as a historic “climate justice victory” for Brooklyn’s industrial waterfront, something for which the organization has been working for years. Governor Cuomo’s push for clean and renewable energy investments and the enactment of the 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act — which requires the state to achieve a net-zero carbon economy by 2050 as well as 70 percent of electricity from renewable sources by 2030 — have opened up new opportunities for the groups that have been advocating for those policies for a long time.
But to be able to seize the moment, UPROSE organizers have been working tirelessly for decades.
“I’ve recently found a flyer in our office that was dated 1998,” Elizabeth Yeampierre, a Puerto Rican attorney who in the late 1990s became the group’s Executive Director, said in a Zoom interview. “It was a community visioning event where people were talking about a green port, bringing container ships, generating green jobs, and revitalizing the industrial waterfront. When I saw it, I thought, oh my goodness, we’ve been doing this for a really long time.”
And, she later added, racking up a string of successes. “We’ve done some pretty cool things. To be honest, it’s hard for me to believe that we’ve done all these things.”
The reasons for that have to do with Yeampierre herself, but also with the group’s grassroots-inspired methods, as well as its willingness to work in coalition with other organizations. UPROSE’s perseverance in rallying support from a new generation of elected officials — those who, as Yeampierre put it, are finally “willing to name things and build the kind of momentum on the ground that we need” — has played a critical role as well.
“We grew based on what the community told us was the priority,” Yeampierre explained.
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When the Puerto Rican attorney came onboard in 1996, the group, at the time a social service organization, had lost all city funding because of what she usually describes as the “big Giuliani hit.” “I came in to save the organization. I listened to what people were saying was important to them. And little by little, we started going into the area of environmental health issues, because no one else was doing it in the neighborhood,” she explained.
Along with the new focus on environmental justice, the second innovation brought by Yeampierre was the commitment to empowering the youth and turning the group into an intergenerational organization. “My feeling was that every movement in the United States and in the world had been led by young people,” she said. “And now they’re integrated into leadership and play an important role in determining what our priorities are.”
To the organizers, the arrival of Yeampierre felt like a breath of fresh air. Since then, UPROSE’s agenda has constantly risen from the bottom-up — from people in a low-income community torn apart by gentrification and displacement and severely impacted by high rates of asthma stemming from air pollution. The elevated roadway Gowanus Expressway, a crumbling legacy of the Robert Moses era, runs above residents’ heads over Third Avenue, pouring out hazardous pollutants. Named after the scenic public park located atop a 164-foot-tall hill, Sunset Park is also home to three power plants, located within a mile of one another. And according to the report “Dirty Energy, Big Money” published by the Peak Coalition — an UPROSE-led network of organizations fighting for the replacement of power plants with renewables and batteries — those peakers spew “harmful emissions into neighborhoods already overburdened by pollution.”
Over the years, Sunset Park’s residents have started to reap the benefits of this bottom-up approach. In the late 1990s, under the helm of Yeampierre, the organization built a broad coalition that eventually defeated the state’s project to expand the Gowanus Expressway. More recently, the group’s proposal to replace the highway with a tunnel — met with resistance due to the high financial and logistic costs — has increasingly gained popularity within the City Council. In the early 2000s, UPROSE successfully spearheaded the efforts to block a pre-application from Sunset Energy Fleet to build a new power plant in Sunset Park. In 2004, the enactment of the paint abatement legislation in New York City came after a town hall meeting organized by UPROSE and aimed at helping parents deal with the harmful effects of lead paint on their children’s health. Eight years later, a campaign led by the group pushed the Department of Transportation to expand the Fourth Avenue median, granting pedestrians more room and safety. And in 2013, Yeampierre’s organization joined the efforts of the “Restore the B37 Bus Coalition,” which led to the reinstatement of the B37 to Park Slope, Bay Ridge, and Sunset Park.
Among its main political achievements, UPROSE also helped pass Article 10, the 2011 New York State law that determines where power plants get sited. “When Bloomberg was in office, we worked with him to identify what the hotspots were so that there would be environmental remediation in the communities that were what we consider ‘sacrifice zones,’” Yeampierre said. The more recent approval of the NYS Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, which now serves as a model for the Biden administration’s environmental justice agenda, has represented the culmination of the group’s efforts.
Organizers describe their approach as “block-by-block, building-by-building,” a localized strategy modeled on residents’ needs, and, at the same time, devised to “engage community residents and local businesses in the public processes” — from land-use planning to infrastructure design. Each block relies on its own young “block captain” — a point person for the neighborhood in case of emergency, who also coordinates the community’s climate resiliency activities. Whether the challenge is to reduce heat buildup, tone down water waste, or educate auto salvage shop owners to come up with alternatives to toxic chemicals, it is the block captain who talks with residents and landlords and takes on the mission.
This method was tried out during one of the hardest times in the history of the local community. In 2012, after Superstorm Sandy devastated the Brooklyn-Queens waterfront, UPROSE started organizing community meetings aimed at empowering residents to find resiliency and climate adaptation solutions for their homes, their blocks, and their neighborhood. After a first meeting held in Sunset Park in December 2012, the group launched the Sunset Park Climate Justice Center, which UPROSE’s website characterizes as “NYC’s first grassroots-led, bottom-up, climate adaptation and community resiliency planning project.”
“Before COVID hit, we would have quite regular events, learning circles, and workshops where dozens of people would come,” said Summer Sandoval, UPROSE’s Energy Democracy Coordinator. Since the pandemic struck, the group’s meetings have migrated online, but the focus on the local community has remained crucial.
As a result of these efforts, in 2019 Yeampierre’s group set up The Green Resilient Industrial District (GRID), a visionary development plan of the Sunset Park waterfront — later submitted to the New York State Energy Research And Development — based on the creation of green jobs and renewable infrastructure manufacturing sites for the local community. Yeampierre sees the new offshore turbine assembly hub as the realization of a critical part of their project.
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Arguably, such “David-vs-Goliath” sorts of outcomes would have been hardly attainable without a continued effort to ensure that the community’s voice is heard by those in power. The biggest problem, as Yeampierre put it, is that elected officials “usually don’t listen.” However, according to the Puerto Rican attorney, something is finally beginning to change, both locally and nationally. “There is now a pivot of leadership that doesn’t see community as a threat — they see us as a resource and they’re starting to work hand in hand with the community so that we can collectively solve problems together,” she said.
Among the officials who, on the morning of January 14, shared the residents’ excitement for Brooklyn’s offshore wind plan was the City Council Member Carlos Menchaca, who in October officially entered the NYC mayoral race. Menchaca proved a critical ally when, in 2019, UPROSE decided to oppose the rezoning plan presented by the owners of Industry City, the 19-century industrial complex converted into a 35-acre “creative hub” of industrial, office, and retail space dominating the waterfront. Since the 2010s, the redevelopment plan has cost $450 million.
Now, the 10-year, $1 billion project would have expanded the complex’s square footage to 6.6 million and built luxury hotels, new retail space, and academic centers. Local activists, including Yeampierre, were concerned that the plan would have exacerbated economic inequality and spurred gentrification, driving up housing costs and pushing low-income Latino and Chinese residents out of the neighborhood — an ongoing trend for at least two decades.
Pressured by local groups including UPROSE, in August 2020 Menchaca announced his official opposition to Industry City’s plan. In September, the owners withdrew their application. “This victory is hard to overstate,” Menchaca said in a statement. “And it happened because organizations like UPROSE built a multiracial coalition of working-class New Yorkers that never compromised its vision.”
According to Yeampierre, the secret of UPROSE’s success lies in its members’ fearlessness and ability to build skills and expertise. “When we don’t know something, we just gather the people who might be able to help us manifest a vision. Just because we haven’t done it before, it doesn’t mean we don’t try to do it,” she said. Such has been the organization’s approach since the very beginning, when, under Yeampierre’s leadership, the group decided for the first time to focus on environmental justice as a way to address the local community’s concerns.
“We went into this not knowing, not being environmentalist, just being people who were concerned about human rights and the right to breathe,” she said.
In the coming months, the organization’s priority is to continue to advocate for innovative solutions on renewable energy, clean water, and food security, and build momentum for a change both on a local level and on a bigger scale. Nationally, Yeampierre is also co-chair of the Climate Justice Alliance, a nationwide collective of frontline communities fighting for a more sustainable, just, and green economy. “We are part of a movement. We’re not like a regular nonprofit. We are a nonprofit that anchors movement work,” she explained.
However, within that movement, UPROSE’s main strength remains its unwavering commitment to addressing the needs of the local community. To Yeampierre, one of the biggest challenges for the group is now represented by “multi-million dollar green organizations” with a “capitalist patriarchal structure” trying to hijack their agenda. “They helicopter into our communities with the solutions. They want to talk about us without us,” Yeampierre said.
But “bigger” doesn’t necessarily mean “more effective.” “If you’ve got an organization that is led by people of color, that is local, and you’ve got this national organization that is led by really privileged white folks, sometimes people think that they know more than we do. The truth is that that’s not true,” she said.
UPROSE’s history is a testament to that. After all, accomplishing big things in small but decisive steps takes time, patience, and dedication. “People think that these victories are won overnight, but they are not. They take years, and they take building community knowledge and listening.”