SoHo, a Manhattan neighborhood full of luxury apartments and a median income of $111,000/year, must accept a new facility that includes a garage for sanitation trucks. Why, and how will it test the city's commitment to infrastructure design?
A core environmental justice fight has long been the fair distribution of necessary nuisance uses throughout a city. Poor neighborhoods tend to be over-burdened with unpleasant parts of public infrastructure like bus depots and sewage plants, with cumulative negative effects on resident health and quality of life.
Often activists in these over-burdened neighborhoods band together to fight the location of yet another of these kinds of facilities, which leads to inevitable labeling of them as just naysayers and exchanges like, "Well where should they go?" "How about the rich neighborhoods take their share?" "Yeah, like that will happen."
In New York City, former Mayor Bloomberg apparently decided to make it happen, roughly, with a solid waste plan that at least declares that each of the city's five boroughs should take adequate responsibility for its own trash. And current Mayor DeBlasio is sticking with the plan.
This means, as CityLab's Aarian Marshall recently reported, that SoHo, a Manhattan neighborhood full of luxury apartment towers and a median income of $111,000/year, has been forced to accept, despite protest from some very wealthy and powerful people, a large building that includes a garage for sanitation trucks.
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