When Mayor Bill de Blasio introduced his OneNYC plan to preserve the city’s future on Earth Day last year, he delivered the news from the South Bronx community of Hunts Point. Standing with him was Kellie Terry, the then-executive director of The Point, a Hunts Point-based grassroots organization focused on economic development and environmental justice. Given that the South Bronx is one of the poorest areas in the nation, de Blasio’s venue choice appeared to signal that OneNYC would focus on the city’s historically most neglected neighborhoods.
Addressing Terry, de Blasio said, “You are fighting to make a neighborhood that often got less than its fair share a better neighborhood.”
At the time, Terry served as a co-chair of the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance, a coalition of community-based advocacy groups. It seemed, then, that the progressive mayor was aligning himself with these advocates’ principles. De Blasio’s emphasis on “equity”—defined as an “economy that offers well-paying jobs and opportunities for all New Yorkers to live with dignity and security”—in the OneNYC plan reinforced that notion. Terry got official notification from the mayor’s office that de Blasio was making the announcement from Hunts Point just the day before the event.
[For more of this story, written by Brentin Mock, go to http://www.citylab.com/politic...dress-equity/477852/]
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