By: Michelle Holder

Every few years the public discourse once again turns its attention to the issue of raising the minimum wage. This is not surprising, because every few years it becomes clear that the federal minimum wage has not gone up, while costs for everything else have. The recession helped make this painfully aware, when stagnant wages became the norm not only for minimum-wage earners but also for millions of other workers. Exacerbating matters is that during the recovery the industrial sectors responsible for creating jobs have tended to be lower paying.

For those earning the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour there is a sobering fact. The federal poverty threshold for a family of three is approximately $18,000. So if this family has only one earner making minimum wage, household income would be about $15,000, placing that family below the poverty line. Indeed, in the Community Service Society’s recent annual survey of low-income New Yorkers, the “Unheard Third,” our research showed that 78 percent of the full-time working poor experienced at least one hardship such as skipping meals, falling behind in rent or going without health insurance coverage, while 37 percent experienced at least two hardships.

There is something very wrong when someone works full-time year-round and his/her family could still live in poverty.

However, roughly half of the 3.5 million jobs that have been created across the nation during the recovery are in industries that offer lower wages, including retail trade, leisure and hospitality (especially food services), health services and temporary help services. The minimum wage is often the starting point for jobs in retail as well as leisure and hospitality, and the latter sector has the highest percentage of workers of any industrial sector who earn at or below the minimum wage—just over one in five employees in the leisure and hospitality sector earn at or below the minimum wage. These would include “tipped” workers whose employers are only required to pay $2.13 per hour if tips at least bring hourly earnings to $7.25 per hour. In addition, the percent of workers in the U.S. earning $7.25 per hour has nearly tripled since the start of the recession.

Several states have gotten the point and raised their state’s minimum wage (which cannot be lower than the federal minimum wage, with workers entitled to the higher of the two) including Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Montana, Ohio, Oregon, Vermont and Washington. An estimated 1 million workers will be directly affected by these increases.

Speaker Sheldon Silver of the New York State Assembly has been pushing a bill to raise the state’s minimum wage from $7.25 per hour to $8.50 per hour. However, he faces opposition from Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos, who in a recent interview invoked the myth that such an increase would displace teen workers.

In fact, research by the Economic Policy Institute shows that 80 percent of the workers who will benefit from higher wages in eight states that have recently increased their minimum wage are 20 years of age or older. Additional analysis by the Center for Economic Policy Research shows that today’s low-wage worker tends to be older, not younger. Yet New York City mayoral candidate Tom Allon proposes a two-tiered minimum wage structure, with the lower minimum for teenagers. Again, such an approach is based on a flawed perception that most minimum wage earners are teens.

Then there’s the age-old critique that a minimum wage increase results in employment losses and therefore hurts the very people—low-wage, low-skilled workers—it was intended to help. However, research comparing cross-county areas along state borders with differing minimum wages conducted by economist Arindrajit Dube of the University of Massachusetts (Amherst) along with T. William Lester and Michael Reich showed that overall employment in these areas did not decrease with an increase in the minimum wage.

There’s also the charge that only a small fraction of workers earn the minimum wage, so—relatively speaking—not that many people would be affected by a hike. Therefore, why bother? It’s true that in 2006, before the recession, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics just over 2 percent of workers in the U.S. had hourly earnings at or below the minimum wage, but that proportion has now increased to six percent, or 4.4 million people. In New York State alone roughly 100,000 people earn the minimum wage, and at least another 100,000 earn below it.

The minimum wage in New York should not only be raised but also indexed to inflation so that every few years we’re not right back in the same boat. Speaker Silver smartly backs this idea. “Fix it and Forget It” is what Heidi Schierholz of the Economic Policy Institute titled her piece in 2009 about raising and indexing the minimum wage. Let’s not forget those making minimum wage by ensuring that their earnings aren’t “poverty wages” not just this year, but next year and the year after that.

By: Jarrett Murphy

Recycling in Brooklyn

By: Patrick Arden

At the bottom of a hill on 168th Street is the old Morrisania Hospital, an elegant yellow-brick structure surrounded by apartment blocks in the South Bronx. The city abandoned the building during the fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s, and for 20 years the once-grand hospital sat empty and windowless, its interior a ruin open to the elements.

Nancy Biberman, president of the Women’s Housing and Economic Development Corporation, recognized the building’s potential, and a gut rehab produced 132 apartments for low-income and formerly homeless families, with health- and child-care centers, plus a commercial kitchen for small start-up businesses. The 1997 project won accolades, but soon WHEDco faced an unanticipated crisis.

“This building was going to tank the organization,” recalls Biberman, who says tenants routinely opened their windows in the winter to cool down overheated rooms. “We literally saw money blowing out the windows, and it was bleeding us.” Raising rents was out of the question. “But it would be irresponsible to continue to let things go. We would have gone bankrupt.”

The solution was an energy-efficient retrofit of the building, now known as Urban Horizons. But once WHEDco began to realize savings on such measures as low-flow water fixtures, energy-efficient appliances, and compact-fluorescent lightbulbs—and tenants saw their electricity bills decline—the search for green solutions turned into a permanent, evolving process. The organization even hired a sustainability manager.

WHEDco’s experience with Urban Horizons may ultimately be a valuable example in a city with an old housing stock and little available land. It provides one roadmap for existing structures to comply with stricter laws, as the Bloomberg administration implements regulations to make multifamily buildings more energy efficient and to stop the use of the most polluting grades of heating oil. The new rules will reduce energy consumption and bring down costs over the long term, but they also could put a more immediate strain on affordable housing.

New rules for a greener city

The city aims to slash carbon emissions 30 percent by the year 2030, blaming air pollution for 3,000 annual deaths and twice that number of emergency-room visits for asthma. The only way to achieve this goal is by increasing the energy efficiency of buildings, because buildings account for three-quarters of carbon emissions.

About 85 percent of buildings were constructed before the availability of energy-efficient technology, according to the mayor’s Office of Long-term Planning and Sustainability, so the new laws address the process of retrofitting, or the installation of new equipment in older buildings.

Last year, large apartment buildings had to start reporting their annual use of energy and water, forming benchmarks for improvement. Next year they’ll have to pay for energy audits, which will survey buildings and recommend measures to bring down consumption. In July, buildings will begin to eliminate the use of the dirtiest heating oil.   

Though the city claims only 1 percent of buildings burn the dirtiest oil—about 9,000 properties citywide—their boilers are blamed for 86 percent of all soot from buildings. Last summer a report by Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer’s office found 63 percent of the boilers burning dirty oil are in buildings with rent-regulated units.

The city has set a timetable for all apartment buildings to stop burning dirty oil. But the conversion to cleaner fuels is expensive. And soon, tenants may start feeling those costs. The Rent Stabilization Association, which represents 25,000 landlords, has vowed to make the added costs of boiler conversions and compliance with the new laws a major part of its argument for higher rent hikes during this spring’s deliberations of the Rent Guidelines Board.

A roadmap for retrofits

From the day WHEDco opened Urban Horizons, the 70-year-old building was running an operating deficit. “The rents never supported the true costs of building,” says Biberman. “It was an energy guzzler. At the time, we did the best we could, but we were clueless: Green wasn’t in the vocabulary in 1996, other than the color.”

While energy-efficient technology could be found in single-family homes, it remained a rarity in apartment buildings, especially affordable ones, explains Valerie Neng, WHEDco’s sustainability manager. By the time she joined WHEDco in 2007, however, the nonprofit was completing Intervale Green—a brand-new green building in Crotona East. Neneg was drawn by Biderman’s green approach, which not only lowered long-term costs but included nontoxic building materials as well as education and training, all informed by an overriding concern with our relationship to the environment. At Intervale Green, this approach even led to the creation of a rooftop farm, where tenants could grow vegetables.

Money for green technology was readily available for new buildings like Intervale, adding only 2 to 3 percent to the cost of construction, but it was harder to finance the retrofitting of Urban Horizons, says Neng. “We had to cobble together sources.” Funds came from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), the Bronx Borough President, and private foundations, as well as from tapping into the building’s equity. The state’s Weatherization Assistance Program helped with lighting, energy-efficient refrigerators, and low-flow showerheads. Power for Jobs, a program by the New York Power Authority (now called ReCharge New York), provided discounted electricity. Con Edison also gave incentives for equipment upgrades.

“We first picked the low-hanging fruit: Weather stripping, air sealing, lighting, appliances, faucet aerators—the things you can knock out quickly at the lowest cost,” Neng says. Each tenant pays for electricity, and within the first three months, bills declined on average by 6 percent, compared to an 8.3 percent average increase citywide.

Low-hanging fruit also has the shortest payback period, but that doesn’t mean these fixes are all cheap. “Under four years is a good payback period for any building owner,” says Neng. Now WHEDco is looking at longer-term paybacks from more extensive ventilation work, the replacement of 15 old boilers with 4 high-efficiency ones, and the installation of cogeneration equipment for the on-site production of electricity from natural gas.

“Natural gas costs a lot less than electricity,” Neng says. The cogeneration equipment will reduce transmission losses from the power plant and reliance on the grid. “And the electricity’s waste heat is captured and used to heat hot water. We’re going to see huge savings—we’re talking about $100,000 to $150,000 a year. But the investment is close to half a million dollars.”

Finding the green for affordability

Efforts are underway to help more nonprofit housing developers foot that kind of bill.

The Local Initiatives Support Corporation, or LISC, has long financed the rehabilitation of low-income housing and provided grants and technical assistance to community organizations. Now it’s helping affordable-housing groups to make green investments. It recently provided money for the first solar-thermal system at a HUD-subsidized building. That system, on the roof of a six-story apartment building in Bedford-Stuyvestant, will heat the water for 52 units.

Earlier this year, LISC, with Enterprise Community Partners, invested $18 million in the energy-efficient retrofitting of 2,226 affordable apartments in Brooklyn, the Bronx, Manhattan, and Queens. Most of the money came through the state’s Weatherization Assistance Program, which had received federal economic stimulus funds. After work was complete, LISC educated tenants and building superintendents on equipment operation and more basic energy-saving measures, such as unplugging appliances so they stop drawing electricity when not in use.

LISC is now tracking these buildings’ energy and water consumption. It is using an online grading system called EnergyScoreCard, developed by Bright Power, and will provide quarterly updates to the housing groups, encouraging them to use the same system to track energy and water utilization in their other buildings as well.

“We’d like to figure out which retrofit measures have the biggest impact,” says Colleen Flynn, who oversees LISC’s green efforts in New York City. “If in general we see reductions in operation costs over time, we could actually build in retrofits when we’re underwriting affordable housing deals. That way we wouldn’t have to rely on federal grants to do [retrofits].”

Sarah Hovde, the director of policy and research at LISC NYC, notes that Deutsche Bank just released its own study on the benefits of financing energy-efficient retrofits in multifamily buildings. “They’re trying to get at the same thing: Creating more certainty for lenders about what different retrofit measures will produce in the way of savings, and then you can bank that into your financing numbers.”

Landlords complain of costs

While nonprofit housing providers are finding ways to fund green technology, many private building owners express confusion about how best to comply with the new rules.

Jim Buckley, executive director of the nonprofit University Neighborhood Housing Program in the Bronx, says the buildings in his portfolio switched to natural gas long ago. But he’s heard from area coops concerned about how they’ll pay for boiler conversions. “People have known that this is coming for a little bit, but as the deadline is getting closer there are a number of issues that have kept them from finalizing what they want to do.”

One of those biggest issues is that natural gas is unavailable in parts of New York City. “If you’re fortunate enough to be close to a good heating gas supply, the cost could be fairly minimal,” Buckley says. “If you’re farther away, the cost could be substantial.” These owners would have to pick up the cost of installing their own gas line, whereas buildings close to gas supplies get hooked up for free.

Installing a line could cost unlucky building owners hundreds of thousands of dollars, says Frank Ricci, the director of government affairs for the Rent Stabilization Association. “The city should have given buildings more time to plan for this,” he says, noting that the mayor announced the new boiler rule in April 2011. “It would have also allowed Con Ed and National Grid to expand their network. But the city, they’re zealots on this. Even in a building where the hookup to Con Ed is zero, there are a lot of other costs.”

If buildings can convert to natural gas, they might still need to add a lining to their chimneys and install a flue pipe system from the basement to the roof, which could cost of as much as $10,000 per floor. The city has vowed to help owners find financing and to develop investors through Energy Services Agreements. At least one gas provider, Hess Energy Solutions, will take care of the conversion from oil burners if building owners make the company their sole supplier. Hess would then take advantage of government incentives for owners to make the switch as well as a possible rebate from National Grid.

The city hired a private company to guide building owners through the conversion process and to work with utilities on their behalf, but Ricci says, “The feedback we’ve gotten so far is that it’s not been very helpful.” He’d like the city to assist landlords without gas service to form “clusters” with other, neighboring building owners, thereby providing an incentive for natural-gas providers to service the area. In the current circumstances, he believes many of the affected building owners will opt to switch from dirty #6 heating oil to #4 oil, instead of choosing the much-cleaner #2 oil or natural gas, but this is just a stopgap measure. All buildings must convert to the cleanest fuels—#2 oil, biodiesel, natural gas, or steam—by 2030 or when replacing a boiler.

Atone time, #6 oil was much cheaper than #4 oil, but recently the difference has lessened. Owners converting to #4 oil may require only $3,000 to $7,000 for updated equipment. Yet new operating permits will require new inspections of old buildings, and Ricci’s afraid these owners will ultimately be looking at tens of thousands of dollars in additional expenses to come up to code. “That’s no excuse, but the reality is this is a big hit for a lot of buildings to come up with this money, especially if they’re in a neighborhood with low rents,” he says.

Those taking the road of least resistance to #4 oil will have missed an opportunity to save money over years, cautions Jonathan Braman of Bright Power, the developer of the EnergyScoreCard. Last year Bright Power was the city’s leading energy auditor. “The energy hogs really use a lot of energy.”

Small is beautiful

For the last three years, Benny Quezada has lived in Intervale Green with his wife and three daughters. When they came to New York from the Dominican Republican in 2006, they lived in a single room in his mother’s house. Then they moved to a one-bedroom apartment in the Wakefield neighborhood. Now they’re in a new three-bedroom, two-bath apartment for $1,100 a month, and Quezada finally feels at home.

It still required an adjustment, he says. As part of WHEDco’s green programming, tenants can attend classes where they learn how to reduce electricity consumption, operate such equipment as dual-flush toilets, and prepare nontoxic cleaning solutions. “Right away my electric bill went from $200 to $150,” he says. “My last bill was about $80.” Most of the savings, he believes, was due to his putting appliances on power cords and shutting them off when not in use.

“I’m also saving money on cleaning stuff, using vinegar in the kitchen, baking soda in the laundry. My wife uses less bleach and more baking soda. It’s better for the fabric, and better for the planet,” he says.

Quezada missed nature in the big city, but now he and his youngest daughter plant vegetables on the building’s roof. “We grow herbs, beans, lettuce, tomatoes–it’s all really good,” he says. “Each of these things was a small step, but they add up to a beautiful place.”

By: Patrick Arden

At the bottom of a hill on 168th Street is the old Morrisania Hospital, an elegant yellow-brick structure surrounded by apartment blocks in the South Bronx. The city abandoned the building during the fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s, and for 20 years the once-grand hospital sat empty and windowless, its interior a ruin open to the elements.

Nancy Biberman, president of the Women’s Housing and Economic Development Corporation, recognized the building’s potential, and a gut rehab produced 132 apartments for low-income and formerly homeless families, with health- and child-care centers, plus a commercial kitchen for small start-up businesses. The 1997 project won accolades, but soon WHEDco faced an unanticipated crisis.

“This building was going to tank the organization,” recalls Biberman, who says tenants routinely opened their windows in the winter to cool down overheated rooms. “We literally saw money blowing out the windows, and it was bleeding us.” Raising rents was out of the question. “But it would be irresponsible to continue to let things go. We would have gone bankrupt.”

The solution was an energy-efficient retrofit of the building, now known as Urban Horizons. But once WHEDco began to realize savings on such measures as low-flow water fixtures, energy-efficient appliances, and compact-fluorescent lightbulbs—and tenants saw their electricity bills decline—the search for green solutions turned into a permanent, evolving process. The organization even hired a sustainability manager.

WHEDco’s experience with Urban Horizons may ultimately be a valuable example in a city with an old housing stock and little available land. It provides one roadmap for existing structures to comply with stricter laws, as the Bloomberg administration implements regulations to make multifamily buildings more energy efficient and to stop the use of the most polluting grades of heating oil. The new rules will reduce energy consumption and bring down costs over the long term, but they also could put a more immediate strain on affordable housing.

New rules for a greener city

The city aims to slash carbon emissions 30 percent by the year 2030, blaming air pollution for 3,000 annual deaths and twice that number of emergency-room visits for asthma. The only way to achieve this goal is by increasing the energy efficiency of buildings, because buildings account for three-quarters of carbon emissions.

About 85 percent of buildings were constructed before the availability of energy-efficient technology, according to the mayor’s Office of Long-term Planning and Sustainability, so the new laws address the process of retrofitting, or the installation of new equipment in older buildings.

Last year, large apartment buildings had to start reporting their annual use of energy and water, forming benchmarks for improvement. Next year they’ll have to pay for energy audits, which will survey buildings and recommend measures to bring down consumption. In July, buildings will begin to eliminate the use of the dirtiest heating oil.   

Though the city claims only 1 percent of buildings burn the dirtiest oil—about 9,000 properties citywide—their boilers are blamed for 86 percent of all soot from buildings. Last summer a report by Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer’s office found 63 percent of the boilers burning dirty oil are in buildings with rent-regulated units.

The city has set a timetable for all apartment buildings to stop burning dirty oil. But the conversion to cleaner fuels is expensive. And soon, tenants may start feeling those costs. The Rent Stabilization Association, which represents 25,000 landlords, has vowed to make the added costs of boiler conversions and compliance with the new laws a major part of its argument for higher rent hikes during this spring’s deliberations of the Rent Guidelines Board.

A roadmap for retrofits

From the day WHEDco opened Urban Horizons, the 70-year-old building was running an operating deficit. “The rents never supported the true costs of building,” says Biberman. “It was an energy guzzler. At the time, we did the best we could, but we were clueless: Green wasn’t in the vocabulary in 1996, other than the color.”

While energy-efficient technology could be found in single-family homes, it remained a rarity in apartment buildings, especially affordable ones, explains Valerie Neng, WHEDco’s sustainability manager. By the time she joined WHEDco in 2007, however, the nonprofit was completing Intervale Green—a brand-new green building in Crotona East. Neneg was drawn by Biderman’s green approach, which not only lowered long-term costs but included nontoxic building materials as well as education and training, all informed by an overriding concern with our relationship to the environment. At Intervale Green, this approach even led to the creation of a rooftop farm, where tenants could grow vegetables.

Money for green technology was readily available for new buildings like Intervale, adding only 2 to 3 percent to the cost of construction, but it was harder to finance the retrofitting of Urban Horizons, says Neng. “We had to cobble together sources.” Funds came from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), the Bronx Borough President, and private foundations, as well as from tapping into the building’s equity. NYSERDA’s weatherization assistance program helped with lighting, energy-efficient refrigerators, and low-flow showerheads. Power for Jobs, a program by the New York Power Authority (now called ReCharge New York), provided discounted electricity. Con Edison also gave incentives for equipment upgrades.

“We first picked the low-hanging fruit: Weather stripping, air sealing, lighting, appliances, faucet aerators—the things you can knock out quickly at the lowest cost,” Neng says. Each tenant pays for electricity, and within the first three months, bills declined on average by 6 percent, compared to an 8.3 percent average increase citywide.

Low-hanging fruit also has the shortest payback period, but that doesn’t mean these fixes are all cheap. “Under four years is a good payback period for any building owner,” says Neng. Now WHEDco is looking at longer-term paybacks from more extensive ventilation work, the replacement of 15 old boilers with 4 high-efficiency ones, and the installation of cogeneration equipment for the on-site production of electricity from natural gas.

“Natural gas costs a lot less than electricity,” Neng says. The cogeneration equipment will reduce transmission losses from the power plant and reliance on the grid. “And the electricity’s waste heat is captured and used to heat hot water. We’re going to see huge savings—we’re talking about $100,000 to $150,000 a year. But the investment is close to half a million dollars.”

Finding the green for affordability

Efforts are underway to help more nonprofit housing developers foot that kind of bill.

The Local Initiatives Support Corporation, or LISC, has long financed the rehabilitation of low-income housing and provided grants and technical assistance to community organizations. Now it’s helping affordable-housing groups to make green investments. It recently provided money for the first solar-thermal system at a HUD-subsidized building. That system, on the roof of a six-story apartment building in Bedford-Stuyvestant, will heat the water for 52 units.

Earlier this year, LISC, with Enterprise Community Partners, invested $18 million in the energy-efficient retrofitting of 2,226 affordable apartments in Brooklyn, the Bronx, Manhattan, and Queens. Most of the money came through NYSERDA’s weatherization assistance program, which had received federal economic stimulus funds. After work was complete, LISC educated tenants and building superintendants on equipment operation and more basic energy-saving measures, such as unplugging appliances so they stop drawing electricity when not in use.

LISC is now tracking these buildings’ energy and water consumption. It is using an online grading system called EnergyScoreCard, developed by Bright Power, and will provide quarterly updates to the housing groups, encouraging them to use the same system to track energy and water utilization in their other buildings as well.

“We’d like to figure out which retrofit measures have the biggest impact,” says Colleen Flynn, who oversees LISC’s green efforts in New York City. “If in general we see reductions in operation costs over time, we could actually build in retrofits when we’re underwriting affordable housing deals. That way we wouldn’t have to rely on federal grants to do [retrofits].”

Sarah Hovde, the director of policy and research at LISC NYC, notes that Deutsche Bank just released its own study on the benefits of financing energy-efficient retrofits in multifamily buildings. “They’re trying to get at the same thing: Creating more certainty for lenders about what different retrofit measures will produce in the way of savings, and then you can bank that into your financing numbers.”

Landlords complain of costs

While nonprofit housing providers are finding ways to fund green technology, many private building owners express confusion about how best to comply with the new rules.

Jim Buckley, executive director of the nonprofit University Neighborhood Housing Program in the Bronx, says the buildings in his portfolio switched to natural gas long ago. But he’s heard from area coops concerned about how they’ll pay for boiler conversions. “People have known that this is coming for a little bit, but as the deadline is getting closer there are a number of issues that have kept them from finalizing what they want to do.”

One of those biggest issues is that natural gas is unavailable in parts of New York City. “If you’re fortunate enough to be close to a good heating gas supply, the cost could be fairly minimal,” Buckley says. “If you’re farther away, the cost could be substantial.” These owners would have to pick up the cost of installing their own gas line, whereas buildings close to gas supplies get hooked up for free.

Installing a line could cost unlucky building owners hundreds of thousands of dollars, says Frank Ricci, the director of government affairs for the Rent Stabilization Association. “The city should have given buildings more time to plan for this,” he says, noting that the mayor announced the new boiler rule in April 2011. “It would have also allowed Con Ed and National Grid to expand their network. But the city, they’re zealots on this. Even in a building where the hookup to Con Ed is zero, there are a lot of other costs.”

If buildings can convert to natural gas, they might still need to add a lining to their chimneys and install a flue pipe system from the basement to the roof, which could cost of as much as $10,000 per floor. The city has vowed to help owners find financing and to develop investors through Energy Services Agreements. At least one gas provider, Hess Energy Solutions, will take care of the conversion from oil burners if building owners make the company their sole supplier. Hess would then take advantage of government incentives for owners to make the switch as well as a possible rebate from National Grid.

The city hired a private company to guide building owners through the conversion process and to work with utilities on their behalf, but Ricci says, “The feedback we’ve gotten so far is that it’s not been very helpful.” He’d like the city to assist landlords without gas service to form “clusters” with other, neighboring building owners, thereby providing an incentive for natural-gas providers to service the area. In the current circumstances, he believes many of the affected building owners will opt to switch from dirty #6 heating oil to #4 oil, instead of choosing the much-cleaner #2 oil or natural gas, but this is just a stopgap measure. All buildings must convert to the cleanest fuels—#2 oil, biodiesel, natural gas, or steam—by 2030 or when replacing a boiler.

Atone time, #6 oil was much cheaper than #4 oil, but recently the difference has lessened. Owners converting to #4 oil may require only $3,000 to $7,000 for updated equipment. Yet new operating permits will require new inspections of old buildings, and Ricci’s afraid these owners will ultimately be looking at tens of thousands of dollars in additional expenses to come up to code. “That’s no excuse, but the reality is this is a big hit for a lot of buildings to come up with this money, especially if they’re in a neighborhood with low rents,” he says.

Those taking the road of least resistance to #4 oil will have missed an opportunity to save money over years, cautions Jonathan Braman of Bright Power, the developer of the EnergyScoreCard. Last year Bright Power was the city’s leading energy auditor. “The energy hogs really use a lot of energy.”

Small is beautiful

For the last three years, Benny Quezada has lived in Intervale Green with his wife and three daughters. When they came to New York from the Dominican Republican in 2006, they lived in a single room in his mother’s house. Then they moved to a one-bedroom apartment in the Wakefield neighborhood. Now they’re in a new three-bedroom, two-bath apartment for $1,100 a month, and Quezada finally feels at home.

It still required an adjustment, he says. As part of WHEDco’s green programming, tenants can attend classes where they learn how to reduce electricity consumption, operate such equipment as dual-flush toilets, and prepare nontoxic cleaning solutions. “Right away my electric bill went from $200 to $150,” he says. “My last bill was about $80.” Most of the savings, he believes, was due to his putting appliances on power cords and shutting them off when not in use.

“I’m also saving money on cleaning stuff, using vinegar in the kitchen, baking soda in the laundry. My wife uses less bleach and more baking soda. It’s better for the fabric, and better for the planet,” he says.

Quezada missed nature in the big city, but now he and his youngest daughter plant vegetables on the building’s roof. “We grow herbs, beans, lettuce, tomatoes–it’s all really good,” he says. “Each of these things was a small step, but they add up to a beautiful place.”

By: Zach Campbell

Around the same time that Occupy Wall Street protesters were clashing with the the NYPD in Manhattan last month, two dozen activists met in the quiet back room of a church in Sunset Park to find common ground and plan a movement. This was a different kind of occupation.

Where the nationally known OWS movement focused on large-scale economic issues and massive actions, a like-minded general assembly in Sunset Park held community dinners and movie nights. Where one seeks to radically reorganize political and economic systems to empower the disenfranchised, the other has reached for more modest goals that would better serve the neighborhood they call home.

The Sunset Park general assembly started about a month after OWS protesters first took Zuccotti Park last fall. Many of the people who launched the local effort had also been involved with OWS, but expressed interest in starting a movement that would work on a more local level. Many didn’t have the time or the resources to make the grueling six-hour general assemblies or camp out in the increasingly cold weather, and wanted to focus their energy on issues that were closer to home.

They were also seeking a movement that better represented their neighborhood.

“We thought the greater Occupy movement didn’t really reflect the diversity of the city, especially in terms of the involvement of people of color,” explains David Galarza, who helped organize some of the first general assemblies in Sunset Park.

There were also linguistic considerations for Occupy Sunset Park — the neighborhood, one of New York’s most diverse, is home to Brooklyn’s largest Chinese and Spanish-speaking communities. The group has gone to great lengths to translate all printed material into as many languages as possible.

Borrowing from a wider movement

Occupy Sunset Park has adopted some of the larger movement’s tools. “Facilitation,” the moderation of general assemblies that has been the crux of Occupy’s success in carrying a conversation among large groups, has at times been conducted in Sunset Park in at least two languages simultaneously. Meetings have begun with a conscious decision as to which language to use, with bilingual members of the group volunteering to interpret.

All this has led Occupy Sunset Park to carry on its own identity, as they put it, in solidarity with, but distinct from, the larger movement.

“We took on a very separate identity because of the nature of the work were doing in Sunset Park,” Galarza explains, adding that one of the group’s goals has been to involve Sunset Park’s immigrant communities as much as possible, particularly through organizing around the neighborhood’s churches and schools.

The group has concentrated on immigrants’ rights, neighborhood violence and gentrification. “We need to focus on the issues we have in this neighborhood,” Maritza Arrastia, another organizer, says. On a billboard across the street from the church where OSP meets is written, in Spanish, “Jesus, too, was an immigrant.”

One of the largest initiatives for the Sunset Park GA has been around issues of education. They began organizing after a Head Start program was moved out of the area, and have sought to create an independent organization for parents nearby. More recently, the group has sought to prevent funding cuts slated for two Beacon after-school programs in the area, and to generally expand city funding of schools in Sunset Park.

“What’s going on with respect to education in Sunset Park is really crucial. What we’re trying to support is parent organizing,” Arrastia explained. “We’d love to see an independent parent organization so they have their own voice.

At a recent GA, plans were also formed to ramp up protest efforts against the closure of a middle school in the heart of Sunset Park, I.S. 136 Charles O. Dewey. The school and 22 others were voted closed at a February meeting of the Department of Education’s Panel for Educational Policy, a move that drew widespread protest from teachers, students and the greater Occupy movement.

Days later, the Department of Education bowed to public pressure and resolved to keep Dewey open. It’s hard to say what impact the Sunset Park GA had on that decision. Where Occupy Wall Street has organized events drawing thousands and leading to multiple massive NYPD crackdowns, Occupy Sunset Park has taken a much smaller-scale approach. Their events, often involving community meals or movies viewings, have been low-key. Attendees frequently mentioned the advantages of smaller, local meetings that allow participants to have more direct conversations about their community concerns.   Marches, speak-outs and other actions are also organized, but more infrequently.

A local focus

At Unity Day, an event organized by the general assembly to commemorate the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, another idea was proposed to organize the community around the reclamation of a public space. Organizers have since been calling for the conversion of the Sunset Park courthouse, located on 4th Avenue and 42nd Street, into a space that better serves the community. The building currently houses a meeting space for Community Board 7, as well as the NYPD division that selects applicants for jobs in the department. The GA says it’s been contacted by people interested in establishing pro-Bono legal, health, and educational services in the building, modeled after the Bronx nonprofit The Point.

“It’s a public building, on 4th Avenue in the heart of sunset park, that once was entirely in the public service, and now it’s not,” said one attendee of the general assembly, suggesting that the NYPD relocate their operation to a nearby city warehouse.

The general assemblies are held weekly, during two hours on Saturday in the back room of a Lutheran church.

It’s hard to estimate how much support the group has in the neighborhood. Meetings so far have attracted 20-50 people, but organizers—many of whom work for or with existing community organizations—expect attendance to increase as the weather warms. But challenges abound: in a neighborhood of immigrants, some families have little free time, and finding a setting that appeals to all the neighborhood’s groups can be difficult. The current meeting site, a predominantly Puerto Rican church, might not strike Mexican or Chinese residents as welcoming.

At the last meeting, one attendee, Paul, argued the importance of multilingual meetings, and of moving the meetings to Sunset Park, the neighborhood’s namesake, explaining that the it would be a central location more inclusive to the area’s diverse groups.

As the group plans for upcoming May Day events, another person at the GA, Elaine, emphasized the importance of keeping the meetings inclusive and local.

“We’re not trying to change the world,” she said, “but we can make an impact on our little corner of the universe.”

By: Greg David

The Census bureau had a surprise for New Yorkers in late August 1990. Despite the economic boom of the preceding decade and neighborhoods that seemed to be bursting at the seams with new arrivals, the bureau announced that it had counted 7,033,179 New Yorkers, some 40,000 fewer than it had found ten years before.

Mayor David Dinkins called the number “unadulterated nonsense.” Governor Mario Cuomo claimed the Republican administration in Washington was deliberately trying to erode Democratic seats in Congress. Demographer Emanuel Tobier of New York University pointed to a 28 percent increase in births in the city in the last decade. “It is inconceivable to me that this type of increase could take place without an increase in the population,” he said.

Five months later, the Census Bureau admitted that it had failed to do a good job counting people in cities, especially in New York, and revised its figure up to 7,322,564. While city officials continued to insist that some 300,000 people had still been missed, the revision represented a historic milestone. The increase of 3.5 percent closed the chapter on the disastrous decade of the 1970s, when the population had declined by about 800,000 people. The new count also made New York one of the few urban areas in the Northeast or Midwest to see its population grow.

Demographers all pointed to the same reason for the city’s resurgence—immigration was reshaping New York. In 1970, the number of foreign-born New Yorkers had declined to just over 1.4 million, or only 18 percent of the population, the lowest figure in the century. Now more than 2 million residents had been born elsewhere, 28 percent of the total. Without the surge in immigration, New York’s population in the 1980s would have declined by another 9 percent instead of growing. New York would have been on the road to the kind of city Detroit became. “Is there anything wrong with a city of 5 million?” asked Lou Winnick, who had studied the role of immigration for many years. “No. But a city that goes from 8 million to 5 million—there would be cobwebs all over.”

Instead of abandoned blocks, neighborhoods were repopulated by the immigrants, who first crowded into existing housing stock and then invested to improve it. The new arrivals reinvigorated the local economies where they lived. They provided the manpower to bolster the city’s key industries; after all, the primary reason they came was for the economic opportunities the city offered. And while New York became known as an immigrant-friendly city, it achieved that reputation only after a decade of conflict.

New York’s good fortune resulted from the landmark 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which replaced the national quota system imposed in the 1920s. The 1920s law not only limited the number of immigrants, it favored Western European nations where there was little interest in coming to the United States. The 1965 reform eliminated those quotas and opened the country to the rest of the world by creating four pathways: immigrants could be reunited with other family members, they could come to fill the need for specific jobs, they could qualify under a program designed to diversify the countries of origin, or they could claim refugee status.

This dramatically affected the nationalities of the immigrants who flocked to New York. In 1970, Italy was the largest source of foreign- born New Yorkers, followed by Poland, the Soviet Union, Germany, and Ireland. In 1990, the Dominican Republic was by far the largest source of immigrants, followed by China, Jamaica, Italy, and the Soviet Union. Washington Heights in northern Manhattan, where many Dominicans decided to settle, was one of the first areas to show the enormous benefits that immigrants brought to the city.

Named for Fort Washington, constructed by the Continental Army in its vain effort to hold New York during the Revolutionary War, the neighborhood was most well-known for the George Washington Bridge, the busiest motor vehicle span in the world. The neighborhood had long been a destination for new arrivals—the Irish in the 1900s, European Jews in the 1930s and 1940s, and Greeks in the 1950s and 1960s. Dominicans came because conditions on their homeland were so dismal—the average salary in the early 1990s was $40 a month—and often took jobs in the city’s service industries, such as driving livery cabs. Some became business owners and bought out the Puerto Ricans who owned bodegas that supplied food and other necessities to poor neighborhoods. The Dominicans could afford to send somewhere between $300 million and $600 million a year back to their homeland in the early 1990s, second only to tourism in economic impact on the country.

This success story received little attention. Instead, Dominicans soon came to be associated with the crack-cocaine drug epidemic sweeping the city. Part of the problem was the bridge, which allowed suburbanites to easily enter the city, buy drugs, and make a quick getaway. Another problem was corrupt cops, who allowed the activity to flourish so they could rob the dealers and make some sales themselves with the drugs they stole. Violence engulfed the neighborhood. In 1990, the 34th Precinct, which included Washington Heights, accounted for 103 murders, the second highest in the city.

The corrupt police officers were arrested in the early months of the Giuliani administration, and the Bratton tactics eventually made the neighborhood safe again. The stigma faded, and the presence of Dominicans spread throughout New York, fitting for the largest immigrant group in the city.

The impact in Queens was even more pronounced, especially in Flushing, the last stop on the No. 7 subway line, which became known as the International Express. Originating in Times Square, the 7 train’s Queensboro Plaza stop was adjacent to the Greek and Italian communities of Astoria; then it reached Sunnyside, a neighborhood populated by Koreans and Colombians; Jackson Heights followed, a South American enclave led by Colombians; and it ended in Flushing, where Taiwanese Chinese and other Asians created one of the most thriving areas of the city—and sparked resentment for their success.

From Modern New York by Greg David. Copyright © 2012 by the author and reprinted by permission of Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers, Ltd.

By: Greg David

The Census bureau had a surprise for New Yorkers in late August 1990. Despite the economic boom of the preceding decade and neighborhoods that seemed to be bursting at the seams with new arrivals, the bureau announced that it had counted 7,033,179 New Yorkers, some 40,000 fewer than it had found ten years before.

Mayor David Dinkins called the number “unadulterated nonsense.” Governor Mario Cuomo claimed the Republican administration in Washington was deliberately trying to erode Democratic seats in Congress. Demographer Emanuel Tobier of New York University pointed to a 28 percent increase in births in the city in the last decade. “It is inconceivable to me that this type of increase could take place without an increase in the population,” he said.

Five months later, the Census Bureau admitted that it had failed to do a good job counting people in cities, especially in New York, and revised its figure up to 7,322,564. While city officials continued to insist that some 300,000 people had still been missed, the revision represented a historic milestone. The increase of 3.5 percent closed the chapter on the disastrous decade of the 1970s, when the population had declined by about 800,000 people. The new count also made New York one of the few urban areas in the Northeast or Midwest to see its population grow.

Demographers all pointed to the same reason for the city’s resurgence—immigration was reshaping New York. In 1970, the number of foreign-born New Yorkers had declined to just over 1.4 million, or only 18 percent of the population, the lowest figure in the century. Now more than 2 million residents had been born elsewhere, 28 percent of the total. Without the surge in immigration, New York’s population in the 1980s would have declined by another 9 percent instead of growing. New York would have been on the road to the kind of city Detroit became. “Is there anything wrong with a city of 5 million?” asked Lou Winnick, who had studied the role of immigration for many years. “No. But a city that goes from 8 million to 5 million—there would be cobwebs all over.”

Instead of abandoned blocks, neighborhoods were repopulated by the immigrants, who first crowded into existing housing stock and then invested to improve it. The new arrivals reinvigorated the local economies where they lived. They provided the manpower to bolster the city’s key industries; after all, the primary reason they came was for the economic opportunities the city offered. And while New York became known as an immigrant-friendly city, it achieved that reputation only after a decade of conflict.

New York’s good fortune resulted from the landmark 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which replaced the national quota system imposed in the 1920s. The 1920s law not only limited the number of immigrants, it favored Western European nations where there was little interest in coming to the United States. The 1965 reform eliminated those quotas and opened the country to the rest of the world by creating four pathways: immigrants could be reunited with other family members, they could come to fill the need for specific jobs, they could qualify under a program designed to diversify the countries of origin, or they could claim refugee status.

This dramatically affected the nationalities of the immigrants who flocked to New York. In 1970, Italy was the largest source of foreign- born New Yorkers, followed by Poland, the Soviet Union, Germany, and Ireland. In 1990, the Dominican Republic was by far the largest source of immigrants, followed by China, Jamaica, Italy, and the Soviet Union. Washington Heights in northern Manhattan, where many Dominicans decided to settle, was one of the first areas to show the enormous benefits that immigrants brought to the city.

Named for Fort Washington, constructed by the Continental Army in its vain effort to hold New York during the Revolutionary War, the neighborhood was most well-known for the George Washington Bridge, the busiest motor vehicle span in the world. The neighborhood had long been a destination for new arrivals—the Irish in the 1900s, European Jews in the 1930s and 1940s, and Greeks in the 1950s and 1960s. Dominicans came because conditions on their homeland were so dismal—the average salary in the early 1990s was $40 a month—and often took jobs in the city’s service industries, such as driving livery cabs. Some became business owners and bought out the Puerto Ricans who owned bodegas that supplied food and other necessities to poor neighborhoods. The Dominicans could afford to send somewhere between $300 million and $600 million a year back to their homeland in the early 1990s, second only to tourism in economic impact on the country.

This success story received little attention. Instead, Dominicans soon came to be associated with the crack-cocaine drug epidemic sweeping the city. Part of the problem was the bridge, which allowed suburbanites to easily enter the city, buy drugs, and make a quick getaway. Another problem was corrupt cops, who allowed the activity to flourish so they could rob the dealers and make some sales themselves with the drugs they stole. Violence engulfed the neighborhood. In 1990, the 34th Precinct, which included Washington Heights, accounted for 103 murders, the second highest in the city.

The corrupt police officers were arrested in the early months of the Giuliani administration, and the Bratton tactics eventually made the neighborhood safe again. The stigma faded, and the presence of Dominicans spread throughout New York, fitting for the largest immigrant group in the city.

The impact in Queens was even more pronounced, especially in Flushing, the last stop on the No. 7 subway line, which became known as the International Express. Originating in Times Square, the 7 train’s Queensboro Plaza stop was adjacent to the Greek and Italian communities of Astoria; then it reached Sunnyside, a neighborhood populated by Koreans and Colombians; Jackson Heights followed, a South American enclave led by Colombians; and it ended in Flushing, where Taiwanese Chinese and other Asians created one of the most thriving areas of the city—and sparked resentment for their success.

From Modern New York by Greg David. Copyright © 2012 by the author and reprinted by permission of Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers, Ltd.

By: Jake Mooney

This is the second part of a two-part investigation of New York City’s truck problem. To read part one, click here

The Chef’s Choice truck rolled off the Manhattan Bridge onto Canal Street a little before 10 a.m., headed toward its next stop at a coffee shop on Duane Street. As the truck turned left off Canal, waved on by a police officer directing traffic, a delivery man on a bike sped through the intersection coming the opposite way, narrowly missing a collision. After the turn, a pedestrian jumped out to cross Lafayette Street at mid-block.

Joseph, a 56-year-old Haitian with a slow laugh and a gold tooth that glints when he smiles – which is often – seemed unfazed. After dropping a shipment of meat at the coffee shop, he looped around and headed north on Sixth Avenue. For a delivery truck making a lot of stops, he was saying, the frustrations are simple: too many cars, not enough room.

“The worst part is when you come to a stop and you can find nowhere to park,” he said. “That really gets to you. You keep circling around, circling around. You come back, there’s nothing, you go around again. Meanwhile what could take a half hour takes an hour.”

He pulled in behind a van that was leaving a spot on 14th Street, near another Golden Krust, then put money is a Muni Meter and taped the receipt to the inside of the windshield, next to a clump of others like it. A while later, after Tuckett unloaded boxes of plantains, cabbage and squash, a dour-looking police officer walked up, checked the receipt and moved on without a glance or greeting.

“That’s our enemy,” Joseph said with a grin.

A tide of tickets

The roughly $100 million that the city imposes in parking fines against trucks in a given year has mixed results as a deterrent, planners say – mainly because many shippers chalk the fines up, as with the higher tolls that are sometimes imposed during peak usage hours, as the cost of doing business. Tuckett, a wiry 50-year-old Brooklyn native, agreed.

“See, some companies just accept the tickets, you understand?” he said.

“Us, we gotta be looking out,” he added, because the policy at Chef’s Choice is to avoid the extra expense. “Some [companies], they don’t give a damn.” Certain parcel-delivery companies came to mind. “Ooh,” he said. “They be taking like 10, 15 tickets a day.”

It started to rain at 11 a.m., and at 11:05 they left the spot and turned back onto Sixth Avenue, Joseph deftly swerving to avoid a jaywalker and a pothole. (“Big hole. Giant hole. Could lose a tire,” he smiled.)

Ahead was the truck’s most important – and most difficult – delivery, on 33rd Street next to Madison Square Garden. Two Caribbean restaurants there were awaiting shipment of onions, cabbage, carrots, plantains and oxtail. But there were also dozens of other delivery trucks trying to find room to drop their cargo within a few very crowded blocks.

Drawing close to their destination amid crosstown traffic, Joseph noticed there were no double-parked trucks to be seen. It was an encouraging sign that the crowding, for whatever reason, had momentarily eased.

“That means I got a chance,” he said. Tuckett was not so sure. Madison Square Garden would be busy, he said glumly: “The circus is in town.”

Local impact, far-flung industry

The parking spot, in the end, was not a problem. Driving slowly down 33rd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, Joseph spotted another truck, delivering some kind of metal canisters, that seemed to be ready to leave. He pulled up next to it and put his truck in park, idling in the street until the other truck was ready to go. “Got lucky,” he said, as he backed into the parking space.

The trucks that parked on the block to make deliveries during the hour that the Chef’s Choice truck was there – more than a dozen of them, early on a Wednesday afternoon – came from Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Long Island, New Jersey and Upstate New York, delivering water, linens, electrical supplies and a host of other products.

Holguin-Veras, of Rensselaer, says that kind of variety is a hint at how hard managing truck traffic can be. Even if the port is making strides in regulating its trucks, and even if it is the single largest generator of truck trips, he notes, “It’s tiny compared to the restaurants. And then you add retail stores, etcetera, etcetera, and we’re talking about a lot of deliveries.”

Deliveries have increased in the last five to 10 years, Barone says, leading to an increase in truck traffic. It is, he said, partly the result of a higher cost per square foot of commercial space in the city, which leads businesses to devote as much space as possible to revenue-producing activity and relatively less to storage. That approach, in turn, can require daily deliveries, even multiple deliveries per day, when once a week used to be enough.

Reducing the number of deliveries, while theoretically possible, is a tall order. “You could change demand, but that would require changes in behavior,” Holguin-Veras says. “When you order stuff from the Internet, in particular when you order the fastest way of delivery, you’re forcing the shippers to send it to you without consolidating the cargo.”

In other words, reducing truck trips would require asking consumers to forfeit conveniences that they have come to enjoy. Instead, then, planners have focused on making the trucks flow as smoothly as possible.

A choice of routes

One time-tested method, Barone said, would be to limit parking for cars – or at least the amount of new parking that can be constructed – in order to drive down car traffic, thereby freeing up street space for trucks. This was also, in part, the goal of congestion pricing, and of proposals to toll the East River bridges. The cross-harbor tunnel, which has existed in concept for nearly a century and which Rep. Nadler has championed since the 1990s, would remove many of the trucks crossing the Hudson from local roads and bridges.

Other ideas have included creating special delivery zones in the business district – possibly by piggybacking on the creation of designated bus lanes and using the same space for timed truck deliveries. Such a move would also allow the city to institute variable tolls, to encourage deliveries at less busy times of day.

Much of Holguin-Veras’ work has involved scheduling deliveries at night, when there is less congestion and less competition for curb space. In a pilot program in 2009 and 2010, 25 Manhattan businesses and eight trucking companies agreed to schedule deliveries between 10 a.m. and 8 a.m. The results were striking: Participating trucks’ delivery speeds were more than twice as fast overnight as on comparable trips between 10 a.m. and 10 p.m. Parking fines were sharply reduced, and trucks spent, on average, less than one-third as much time at each delivery site.

The city’s Department of Transportation subsequently began work on an expanded, “more ambitions” version of the program, Holguin-Veras says. If nighttime deliveries could ever be standard procedure for city businesses, he said, the savings for merchants and carriers could add up to as much as $200 million a year.

There is, though, one major obstacle: Shippers and receivers who participated in the pilot program were paid to adjust their schedules. Night deliveries make economic sense for trucking companies, even without a subsidy – but typically, it is the companies receiving the shipments who schedule deliveries. On their end, unless there is a secure place for truck crews to drop their shipments unattended, overnight delivery just means someone has to be at work at weird times.

And as Tuckett put it, dismissing the idea with a shrug, “Who the heck is gonna be there?”

Dreams of a helicopter

Truck crews, though, are not in the business of transportation planning; they make their rounds within the system as it exists. As such, at 12:25 Joseph and Tuckett drove from 33rd Street up Eighth Avenue to 39th Street, where they delivered fish, oxtails, vegetables and sacks of rice to another Golden Krust – though they idled outside, holding off on delivery, until the store’s manager paid an overdue bill.

They eased through crawling crosstown traffic on 57th Street, then up Third Avenue, to make the day’s most incongruous stop – at the Neue Galerie, the Upper East Side temple to German and Austrian design; Tuckett unloaded paper towels and garbage bags (the museum’s café has no use for oxtails).

The final stop of the day, just after 2 p.m., was at a jerk chicken place at Park Avenue and 97th Street. This last task took longer than it should have: The owner was out, his brother-in-law was watching the store, and nobody wanted to carry the boxes inside.

Crossing the Triborough Bridge a little before 3 p.m., Joseph and Tuckett could look forward to a long drive back to Central Brooklyn – done before evening rush hour, at least – and another trip to Manhattan two days later. The cab was quiet, and everyone watched the road.

Was there a way, they were asked, if it could all be easier?

“By helicopter,” Tuckett said, his eyes still on the traffic. “That’s the only solution.”

By: Jake Mooney

The first sign of trouble on Pierre Joseph and Curtis Tuckett’s twice-weekly drive into Manhattan came a little before 9 a.m., on Brooklyn’s Fulton Street.

In the eastbound lane, just east of Grand Avenue, a Boar’s Head delivery truck was double-parked in front of a deli, forcing the city buses behind it to cross into the opposite lane to pass. The buses, in turn, blocked traffic heading west – including the 24-foot-long refrigerated delivery truck that Joseph was driving toward a day of deliveries, as Tuckett poked at a Daily News crossword puzzle in the passenger seat.

The green light turned red, then green again, but traffic did not move. It turned red again, a bus inched around the Boar’s Head truck, and the traffic the bus was blocking crept forward in the opposite direction. Finally the light turned green yet again, and Joseph eased his truck past the bottleneck. He coasted for a dozen or so blocks toward his first destination, a Golden Krust Caribbean Bakery by Flatbush Avenue that was due for a shipment of chicken.

“Now is the problem,” he said, looking left and right. “Nowhere to park.”

A problem on wheels

New York is hardly a smoothly functioning city from any angle, but seen from the elevated cockpit of a delivery truck, with views that reach for blocks in all directions, down through fellow drivers’ windshields and across sidewalks full of unpredictable pedestrians, it is at its most chaotic. Obstacles emerge and recede; paths close down and open again. Human behavior – the decision to step or not step into traffic, to press the gas pedal or the brake – is jarringly erratic.

And as planners search for ways to untangle a knot of urban transportation problems, trucks emerge at every turn, an irreducible reality. A 2010 study by professors at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute counted more than 5 million of them within 100 miles of the city, making almost 257,000 deliveries every day in the five boroughs, with more than 40 percent of those stops in Manhattan alone.

The question, for planners, academics and policymakers, is how to deal with the costs of all that freight movement. There is air pollution, to which local car and truck traffic is a major contributor in the city, and congestion – according to the Texas Transportation Institute, the city’s delay per peak automobile commuter was 54 hours over the course of 2010, the last year for which numbers have been released. The total cost of congestion to the city’s economy, the institute found, was $9.8 billion – with $2.2 billion of that resulting from truck congestion.

Moreover, there are more immediately visible costs, including the danger posed by unlucky or just bad truck drivers like the one who killed cyclist Mathieu Lefevre last fall in Williamsburg. Chris Ward, the former head of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, said in a 2011 speech that the city is “bedeviled” by intra-regional truck trips, which have come to constitute “an economic and environmental crisis.”

Economically essential

The problem is that as loud, dirty, dangerous and unwieldy as trucks may be, they are an essential component of life in the city as it works today.

“The trucks that you see in the streets are the physical manifestation of the economy. The flow of freight is the economy in motion,” says professor Jose Holguin-Veras, the Rensselaer study’s lead author. “You want to buy a banana, pineapple, toilet paper, things that you need – these are brought to New York City by truck.”

The question, then, is how to mitigate trucks’ impact on the people around them. Some government solutions – like Mayor Bloomberg’s 2008 congestion pricing plan, which would have imposed fees of $8 per car and $21 per truck entering Manhattan’s business district – stalled amid political opposition. Other, more modest plans are in the works – though their chances of success are uncertain.

What is certain, from where Joseph and Tuckett sit, is that for all its glamour and surface modernity, New York still runs on a diesel engine.

A bad rap

After a long circumnavigation of the block next to the Flatbush Avenue Golden Krust, the truck made its way to another branch of the chain, about a dozen blocks away on Lawrence Street in Downtown Brooklyn.

Joseph and Tuckett work for Chef’s Choice, a food wholesaler on Utica Avenue in East Flatbush., and many of their deliveries are the raw ingredients of Caribbean cooking. Joseph, who co-workers call Joe Pierre, has been driving for the company for 22 years. Tuckett has been riding in the trucks for about 15. At the second Golden Krust, Tuckett brought the shipment of dry goods and vegetables inside while Joseph shut the truck off, stood near it on the curb and watched the one-way traffic, slowed by construction near Borough Hall, edge past. The weather was cold, so the truck’s roof-mounted refrigerator unit was turned off. By late March, he said, it would have to be running throughout the day.

Any effort to improve truck traffic in the city eventually has to come to terms with a central paradox: Trucks are at the heart of a lot of urban problems, but a lot of truck problems are not caused solely, or even mainly, by trucks. It was about 9:30 a.m. and cars were pulling in and out of the drop-off zone for Helen Keller Services for the Blind, around the corner from the Golden Krust on Willoughby Street, where the truck was parked. An ambulette stopped in traffic, without pulling over, to let its passengers out. When Tuckett came back after 20 minutes, Joseph eased the truck back into the street, behind a blue Toyota Camry. Traffic ahead started moving, but the Camry did not – its driver was studying his phone. The light turned red.

As a percentage of vehicles on the road at a given time, trucks are steadily in the single digits, far behind passenger cars. Despite their bad reputation, says Rich Barone, director of transportation programs at the Regional Plan Association, trucks are rarely the cause of congestion.

Which is not to say that truck congestion, wherever it comes from, isn’t a problem. Since trucks contribute disproportionately to air contamination and wear on local roads, they are more destructive than cars, unit for unit, when they do get boxed in or forced to go out of their way. It is, then, in every driver’s interest – not to mention retailers and shippers, who pay for their delays – to get them to their destinations as quickly and directly as possible. Especially since, unlike cars (a luxury in a city with abundant mass transit) trucks are a necessary and inevitable part of the current freight delivery system.

“The trucks are going to keep coming,” says Barone. The planners’ job is to keep them and all the other vehicles out of each other’s way.

Ports of origin

Much of the city’s truck traffic starts and ends at its ports – a vast chain of facilities spread across waterfront areas of the two states that border New York Harbor. The heavy-duty trucks that move shipping containers in and out of these terminals, often to locations where their cargo can be broken up and distributed farther, are called drayage trucks, and in recent years the Port Authority has been working to make them cleaner.

One program, launched in 2010, offered owners of port drayage trucks made before 2004 money toward the purchase of new ones. Starting in 2011, a new rule banned trucks made before 1993 from entering port facilities. And by 2017, only drayage trucks with engines meeting model year 2007 emissions standards – which drastically limit the emission of pollutants like particulate matter, nitrogen oxides and non-methane hydrocarbons – will be allowed.

Beyond the kind of engine drayage trucks use is another issue: the sheer number of trips (10,000 a day) that trucks make in and out of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey’s marine container terminals. More than three-quarters of them start or end at the 2,230-acre Port Newark-Elizabeth Marine Terminal, and reducing them seems unlikely. They could, however, be further consolidated.

In particular, the future of the Red Hook, Brooklyn container terminal, New York City’s only port east of the Hudson River, is in question. Last fall the Port Authority bought out the lease of American Stevedoring, the company that had been operating the terminal, and gave a short-term lease to Phoenix Beverages, a beer distributor that receives cargo through the facility.

The authority has not said, though, what will happen when the Phoenix lease expires late this year. Ward, who now works as an executive at the international construction company Dragados, had called as head of the Port Authority for Red Hook’s container operations to move farther down the Brooklyn shoreline to Sunset Park, arguing in part that that rail access is better in the latter neighborhood, and that it is closer to the hypothetical future site of Rep. Jerrold Nadler’s proposed Cross-Harbor Rail Freight Tunnel.

There goes the neighborhood

One problem for shipping in Red Hook is a reality that is clearly visible from the cab of Joseph and Tuckett’s truck: Freight traffic is not really compatible with the kind of healthy urban street life that makes a neighborhood attractive to residents and pedestrians.

In Red Hook, what many residents might consider quality-of-life improvements—things like the new Brooklyn Bridge Park, the multiplying number of restaurants on Columbia Street and thousands of new people moving to the area—freight planners call encroachment on the port.. As Red Hook’s population has grown, it has become a more difficult place to move trucks through quickly.

“I think Red Hook’s future is sort of in question right now because there’s so much encroachment,” Barone says. “That’s the problem with all the Brooklyn sites. Just so much congestion there, and the area around it is very densely populated.”

The impact on local truck traffic, should Brooklyn’s container facilities go away permanently, is hard to analyze. In that case, all goods coming into the port and headed east of the Hudson would have to be trucked across bridges from New Jersey. But the situation now is just as complex: Without a rail link between the Red Hook port and the rest of the country, for example, cargo arriving in Brooklyn that is to be shipped out by train, must travel, by truck, over the same bridges in the other direction.

Late last year, federal Customs officials announced that the Red Hook facility – which they noted handles just one percent of the overall port’s container traffic – would be losing its inspection station. The result is that goods coming into Red Hook would have to be brought to Staten Island or New Jersey before heading to their final destinations.

They would make that journey, of course, by truck.

Read part two of this article here