Good afternoon, Chair Schulman and thank you for holding this hearing today. My name is Lacey Tauber and I am Legislative Director for Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso.
While the extreme heat and air quality emergencies our city experienced this summer impacted everyone, the fact is that low-income New Yorkers of color disproportionately experience the impacts of climate change on a daily basis. Rather than focusing on how we can respond to emergencies, we should be focusing on how we can protect vulnerable populations long-term, which will in turn make us more prepared when emergencies happen.
Our office is in the final stages of developing the Comprehensive Plan for Brooklyn, with a focus on the intersection of planning, housing, and public health. A few illustrative maps from our existing conditions research are attached showing air quality and heat impacts in the borough.
You can see that outdoor air quality is worse on average surrounding highway corridors such as the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, which runs through neighborhoods of color such as Sunset Park and Williamsburg’s Southside. The maps also indicate a correlation between asthma rates and indoor air quality issues, as well as associated conditions such as mold and asbestos. Asthma rates and concentration of these complaints are highest in neighborhoods of color in North, Central, and Eastern Brooklyn, such as Brownsville, Flatbush, East New York, and Bushwick. Heat vulnerability data tells a similar story. Per DOHMH’s metric, these are also the communities that are more at risk of dying during and immediately following extreme heat.
The repetition of these patterns is no coincidence; rather, it is a symptom of decades of bad planning and disinvestment from our communities of color and our public housing. The Comprehensive Plan for Brooklyn makes recommendations for how we can begin to right these wrongs through proactive planning for a more equitable borough. Some of the Plan’s recommendations around air quality and heat include:
- Create a new Million Trees program to improve the tree canopy, targeted to areas of high air pollution and heat vulnerability.
- Support the package of indoor air quality bills being heard today from Councilmember Bottcher and Borough President Levine, whom we commend for a creative approach to a difficult issue.
- Advocate for capital repairs and more efficient responses to tenant complaints in public housing.
- Expand access to cooling centers, with a lower threshold for opening.
- Require new development to implement cooling systems, such as air conditioning or more sustainable methods like air source heat pumps, passive house design, and cool or green roofs.
- Improve inter-agency and community coordination.
- Our office is currently convening a Community Advisory Group for the Department of Environmental Protection’s Community Air Monitoring Initiative. This is only one of many efforts to monitor air quality in the borough, and we are encouraging DEC to incorporate past community-scale efforts, and to proactively work with other State and City agencies – especially Departments of Transportation – as we begin to develop mitigation strategies.
- The fact that NYCHA threatened to have tenants evicted if they did not pay for air conditioning provided through a “free” Mayor’s Office program –a program that an academic study showed literally saved lives – is unacceptable. While they have extended their deadline for charging tenants for this program, what happens on October 1st? DOHMH or the Mayor’s Office should once again intervene to ensure that vulnerable residents can maintain free a/c access.
These are just some examples of our recommendations, and we look forward to sharing the full report with the City Council very soon. Thank you again for the opportunity to testify today.
