The complex at Concourse Village that houses four schools will be more carefully monitored for contaminants.

Parents and community leaders have won a victory in a long-running debate over environmental hazards in the Mott Haven school campus at Concourse Village near E. 153 Street.

The court ordered the School Construction Authority to conduct a new environmental review of plans to monitor the four new schools in the Mott Haven school campus to insure that toxic chemicals covered up in building the schools and its athletic field will not poison future generations of students. Those plans must be open to public scrutiny.

In the July 7 decision, the Appellate Division of State Supreme Court sided unanimously with a lower court’s 2008 decision that found the city had violated state environmental law by building the Mott Haven complex without including the long-term monitoring plan in its environmental impact statement.

The schools were built on a former rail yard, contaminated with mercury, lead, benzene and tetrachloroethylene, a chemical used to clean metal. Former industrial sites are called “brownfields,” and are cleaned up under a state program, so the city contended that it had followed state guidelines.

A group of parents and local residents comprising the Bronx Committee for Toxic Free Schools filed the lawsuit against the city in 2007 to stop construction of the complex. They argued the cleanup should have been more carefully evaluated. Later that year the City Council unanimously approved the plan to build, but on the condition that a more thorough evaluation be conducted.

While they failed to stop the schools from being built, they hailed the court ruling for establishing a precedent that the city will have to follow in the future.

We are thrilled by this decision,” said Jane Maisel, a public school teacher and member of the committee for toxic free schools, in a statement released by New York Lawyers For The Public Interest, which brought the suit along with the law firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges.

The Department of Education simply cannot approve a contaminated school site without a comprehensive plan to protect children from the contamination,” Maisel continued.

But although parents may be elated that the courts have ruled in their favor for the second time in three years, the city may still decide to appeal the ruling to the state’s highest court.

In an emailed statement, Carrie Noteboom, senior counsel for the city’s law department, said the city will go ahead with the court’s recommendations.

The School Construction Authority “has already completed a thorough cleanup and implemented a state approved monitoring plan,” Noteboom said. “The Court decided that this plan should undergo additional public review, and SCA is prepared to do that.”

La Terraza, a development by Nos Quedamos Community Development Corporation, is part of the state-sponsored brownfield cleanup program.PHOTO BY ALEX GREEN IV

Contaminated vacant lots are cleaned up

An eight-story apartment building rising on the Northeast corner of East 158^th Street and Third Avenue will complete the transformation of the intersection.

Dubbed La Terraza, the building will join two more apartment buildings developed by the Melrose-based non-profit Nos Quedamos in the last decade.

Offering 107 apartments for middle, moderate, and low-income families, along with new stores, La Terraza will occupy one of the last vacant lots in the Melrose Commons urban renewal area. Spills of chemicals from a drycleaner that once occupied part of the site had to be cleaned up before construction could begin.

Two more buildings are rising on another formerly contaminated site, on Courtlandt Avenue between East 160^th and 161^st streets. There, a gas station had polluted the ground.

Called “brownfields,” underutilized and often contaminated sites like these are found throughout urban areas, but are especially numerous in neighborhoods like Mott Haven, Melrose and Hunts Point where crime, poverty and a changing economy have led many businesses to close and many building owners to abandon their property.

“In a place like NYC where land is scarce, we need to develop our brownfields,” said Shira Gidding, the director of environmental planning and development at the South Bronx Overall Development Corporation (SoBRO), which has applied to the state for aid in redeveloping brownfields in Port Morris.

A number of state and city programs aim to encourage developers by offering financial incentives to clean up and rebuild on contaminated sites. La Terazza, which is being developed through the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development’s Cornerstone program, is one of 14 Bronx projects that have benefited from the state Brownfield Cleanup Program.

The program was once criticized for favoring mega-projects and excluding non-profits seeking to develop small lots.  “Big developers were getting into the program and building hotels and luxury apartments that did not serve an impoverished community,” Gidding said.

The Legislature rewrote the law in 2008, making funds available to community development organizations like Nos Quedamos and Phipps Houses, the developer of the Courtland Avenue site.

Nevertheless, some are skeptical of the claim that these buildings will be affordable. Elliott Liu, 27, works at the South Bronx Food Co-Op across the street La Terraza, and has lived in the neighborhood for three years.

“I guess I’m a skeptic because affordable housing means different things to different people,” Liu said. A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, who works part-time at the food co-op and builds computers and designs websites as a hobby, Liu said that he probably could not afford to live in the new building on his $8,000-a-year salary.

He said he hears more about other affordable housing developments in the area, like Boricua Village, but he said that the residents that he encounters have mixed feelings, too. He said some people say, “Oh, that sounds so awesome,”  others fear the rents of newer buildings will be out of reach.

But Yolanda Gonzalez, the executive director of Nos Quedamos, says 10 percent of the apartments in La Terraza are reserved for homeless families and half the tenants, to be chosen by lottery, will be people who currently live in the neighborhood.

The new buildings have certainly attracted notice, said Roberto Rodriguez, a security worker who monitors the site on Courtlandt Avenue. “People must like” the look of the building, he said, “because a woman just asked me about an application.” The complex, which will include two buildings rising  to 10 stories, will offer 320 low-income apartments when it is completed this fall.

Phipps Houses spent $7.6 million to clean it up the site. It will get its investment back by selling tax credits from the Brownfield Cleanup Program equal to the total cost of the development.

Gonzalez, whose organization has been involved in the development of La Casa de Felicidad, La Puerta de Vitalidad, La Terraza and other properties within the Melrose Commons area, contends that the new construction is vital to reestablish a once-vibrant part of the Bronx.

She describes the new housing as a community effort, and said that where land is at a premium, “We need housing for everyone, not just a few.”

A version of the story appeared in the April 2010 issue of the Mott Haven Herald.

The Disconnected Youth Training Program and the Entrepreneurial Development Program, both run by Mott Haven based non-profit SoBRO, each received funding to help economically strapped local residents improve their prospects for earning a living wage.

SoBRO will launch a green jobs training program for 20 unemployed, out-of-school youth between 16 and 24, preparing them for construction jobs with an environmental focus. Participants will be trained in clean up contaminated lots known as “Brownfields,” a growing segment of the city’s construction industry.
 
SoBRO says its program counselors will try to help each participant find employment, but applicants must apply for the program no later than February 15.

The Entrepreneurial Development Program, which SoBRO has been running since the 1990s, aims to help aspiring small business owners with legal and financial advice, and with technical assistance related to financing, management and marketing strategies.

The new funding will enable the program to continue helping local residents who want to start a business but who lack experience. There is no application deadline for participants for this program.

For more information about SoBRO, or about the two training programs listed above, visit its Web site or contact Ayca Ergeneman, SoBRO’s Vice President of Development, at 718-732-7520, or email her at aergeneman@sobro.org.