A Greening-Up Project In Brooklyn: The Prologue

The Pratt Center, a cohort of planners and activists who demonstrate way to develop New York City more fairly, has started a project to inspect homes in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant, find ways they waste energy, and train ex-convicts to make energy fixes.

This is the sort of project that makes self-styled greenies slobber and self-styled free-marketers snort. So I hope we can spend the fall examining how it works- for the people who use it and as a model.

Now, the project has barely started- so far, its work area consists in a  two block zone. But it’s worth tracking. Since I maintain some ties to Pratt, though, I’m seeking questions to put to the project’s managers as it proceeds.

(Disclosure: Pratt provides technical support to the agency where my wife works, in another Brooklyn neighborhood, and plans a comparable energy project there. Its former director has been a voluble source for a lot of my reporting and has helped me find other sources. Its consultant used to edit my work  and graciously agreed to contribute a guest piece here in the next several weeks.)

All of which qualifies me to ask the sharpest questions I can.

It’s hard for me to impugn the business model. The Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, a neighborhood-governed group with a 42-year track record (and, to be fair to the conspiracy theorists, some gold-plated political cred) provides staff members from its Justice Corps project, which aims to re-employ people who have been in prison. The staffers help homeowners find existing federal and state energy-efficiency incentives that any homeowner can tap.

So let’s ask the proper questions. Does Bed-Stuy (or Cypress Hills, where  my wife works and where Pratt plans to retrofit next) exhibit the highest rates of poverty or inefficiency in the city? How must homeowners participate in or otherwise “earn” the retrofits? Could Pratt exert a bigger impact on the economy and on emissions if it worked up financing to tune up multifamily buildings, which waste more aggregate energy?

I hope these are questions I’ll vet with Pratt staff and beneficiaries over the summer. I also expect more cynical questions, about what residents will/should do with the money they save and how these retrofits will influence the city’s overall carbon output or policy. Those questions can help define useful rates of subsidy, investment and training in the work of making cities viable in a low-carbon future.

For now, the project simply seems worth a closer look.