East Village Tour: Energy and Innovation

Village View is a Mitchell-Lama complex. Mitchell-Lama is one of many kinds of affordable housing in New York. People paid an average of $40,000 for their apartments, she says. The monthly charge follows annual income, so it stays affordable. Village View itself is twenty stories, with elevators. Pointing to the blocks around it, she says most buildings there are six stories, because six stories or less needs no elevator. The board has been offered something like $30 million for one of its parking lots. Whether to sell is the argument of the moment. The buildings date from the sixties, have no insulation, and run on systems from that decade. That is why she has been at the rallies for J-51, she says. She got her council member on board.

The SUNNY Act has passed the state legislature and is on the governor's desk. It is plug-in solar. A panel on a balcony feeds a standard outlet and powers what is inside the apartment. The power does not go to the grid. That is what makes it simple. Utah passed the same idea first, ahead of California and New York, which surprised her. Germany already has a million of these systems, she says, and they are supplying a lot of energy.

J-51 is a tax abatement for capital improvements. The reform has passed at the state level, she says. The money is set aside in the state budget. The City Council votes next week, and a victory party is already planned. Her version: a cooperatively owned complex gets $60,000 per unit for the work, as a ten-year tax break. She has just moved into a 1,700-apartment building from 1960. By her arithmetic that is $100 million for the energy transition. Asked which buildings qualify, she says cooperatively owned, small or large, not only Mitchell-Lama.

Outside Jane's Exchange she points at the letter A posted by the entrance. Every building of a certain size has an energy grade now. It has to stay on the front, like a restaurant's grade. Anyone can see whether the building is keeping up. Local Law 97 is the law with teeth. Every building over 25,000 square feet that does not start making its energy mark gets fined, and the fines are big. Jane's building is too small to be covered.

Insulate the building very well, like a refrigerator. Make it airtight so there are no drafts. A tight box would suffocate, so add energy recovery ventilation. That is a simple system that brings in fresh air. It keeps whatever temperature is inside: the cool in summer, the heat in winter. The result is quiet, and the air is filtered. It takes a tiny amount of energy to heat and cool. It is all electric. Heat pumps do a little work for heating, cooling and hot water. Materials are chosen so the walls do not grow mold. Asked whether an existing building can be retrofitted, he says it can, with difficulty. It has been done a number of times. It is often done for affordable housing, because the operating cost drops so much.

Wendy's Pacific Street building could plug a refrigerator straight into its solar when the grid went down. Gross says that idea scales. A community can have its own emergency power, an islanded microgrid. He is working on it at the Brooklyn Marine Terminal, a large site on the water. The city wants to hand half the land to developers for housing. That housing is called affordable and, he says, is not. His group's plan keeps the site public. It builds a community energy network for Red Hook, a flood-prone and disadvantaged neighborhood. The network includes thermal energy, solar, storage and microgrids. Maybe the new mayor will see the light on it, he says.

Her husband and her next-door neighbor found an empty lot on their bikes. The households built a three-family in Brooklyn with their neighbor Paul Castrucci as architect. It took three years, and none of them could afford to live in it. Solar on the roof offset the energy for heating and cooling, which Gross calls the first real net-zero building in New York. A state cash award was the first money in. Chris Benedict had argued to the Bloomberg administration that thick insulation deserved a floor-area bonus. This building was one of the first to get it. A 350-square-foot penthouse above the normal floor area ratio helped pay for the added cost. After Sandy, solar owners learned their systems shut off in an outage. This became one of the first buildings where a refrigerator could plug straight into the panels during an outage.

Around 1980 the neighborhood was full of empty lots. Landlords had torched buildings in the seventies and walked away from the taxes and insurance. The city made a legal offer. Work on an abandoned building for three months and earn the right to buy an apartment for $250. The illegal route was to break in and squat, which is what Andrew Castrucci did. Under Bloomberg the city sold the squats to the people in them for a dollar each. That was thirteen buildings by her count. UHAB helped bring them up to code. That meant paying taxes and capital costs for the first time. Her office is in one of them. HDFCs have an income cap and are self-managed. Residents handle the garbage and collect the rent checks. Search HDFC on Zillow or UHAB, she says, and you will see what is available. Her old building had a 30 percent flip tax. She paid more in flip tax than she paid for the apartment, and calls it worth it.

Gross asks whether Mascot Flats was the building with the windmill. It was not. That squat is on 11th Street, off the route today. In the mid-1970s its residents put a windmill and solar panels on the roof. They were told they could not sell the power to the grid. There was a lawsuit, and the building won. That fight became the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act of 1978. It was the start of the intertie for solar: the right to generate electricity on a roof and sell it to the local grid. The SUNNY Act is the next step, she says. Balcony power stays in the apartment and runs what is there. It is more complicated in practice, but a real step forward.

Many gardens began with a casita. A casita is the little house built by Puerto Rican and Latin American gardeners. One on the way to Avenue C has a roof made from a bigger building's skylight. It has a dozen apple and pear trees. The Harvest Arts Festival is running across the gardens the same ten days as Climate Week. Giuliani, she says, equated community gardens with communism and auctioned every one he could. La Esperanza was destroyed, and that fight protected another 400 gardens. The neighborhood kept 55. La Esperanza moved around the block. Beside it is the Sandy flood line. It is painted out now, but it was once marked on the wall at about her waist. The neighborhood was dark for five or six days. Her Bike Ready film shows how cyclists became the communications and evacuation network.

At La Plaza she opens a map of 1609 with 1867 laid over it. The garden is where Buckminster Fuller once set up a dome. The divots are still in the ground. Underground creeks run through the block. The original shoreline was far inland, and everything east of it is landfill. The Collect Pond was half fresh water, Canal Street had a canal, and Minetta had a spring. The river at 110th Street is now the Harlem Meer. Maps like this, she says, show how much humans change the places they live. Anything in red is a Lenape village, and Corlears Hook was a landing place. She tried to get the new ferry stop named Lenape Landing and was told only the Lenape could do that.

The new solar pavilion is by Pvilion. The company grew out of the solar tent commissioned when she was Designer in Residence at the Cooper Hewitt in 1997. When the crew dug for the pillars they hit flowing water. The underground rivers are still there. The pavilion is a co-working space and powers the films, the spa and whatever else happens on the lawn. An older panel, tilted by hand a couple of times a year, runs the pond pump. Willows fell in Sandy and in Irene the year before, and willows only last thirty or forty years. Food has to go in raised beds by city rule. There were buildings here, so the ground is assumed to hold lead paint and asbestos. Jackie Brookner's giant tongue in the pond was built to clean water with plants. It came to the garden after her death.

On 9th Street she stops at CHARAS/El Bohio. It is the H-shaped school that Chino Garcia and the poet Bimbo Rivas turned into a community center. When she arrived in New York people said: go there for housing, for theater, to write a poem. Giuliani auctioned it for about $3 million. The developer was blocked from making luxury housing. It is back in community hands, sort of, and needs $150 million to reopen. She was on the board of ABC No Rio. It went from needing $800,000 to $8 million to $21 million by groundbreaking. Most of that came from the city. Avenue B is an open street on eight of its fourteen blocks. It was the first community-managed one in the city. She was on the Wednesday barrier crew until it went permanent.

A map of the city's community gardens shows them bunched in the neighborhoods that were poor in the seventies. That means here, the South Bronx and parts of Brooklyn. Landlords deserted their buildings and dealers moved in. The city blocked the windows and doors with cinder blocks, and the dealers broke through. Then the city, broke, tore the buildings down and left the rubble. The rubble was worse than the dealers. Neighbors banded together and built gardens on the debris. 6 & B started in 1982 and 1983 on the site of three buildings across four lots. Now, she says, it is a real asset for the neighborhood, for better or worse.

The most basic thing every garden does, whatever is planted, is offer permeable ground. The neighborhood has a combined sewer. In a heavy storm, rain and sewage share the pipes. The system overflows, and the outlets send sewage into the rivers. Ground that absorbs rain keeps water out of that system, and the gardens collect rainwater on top of it. The plants take up a great deal of water too. A tree's roots spread about as far as its canopy. They pull water up the whole trunk and release it through pores in the leaves. On heat: built surfaces absorb the sun all day and release it at night. The city never cools the way vegetated land does. At her field site, a week's walk from any road, days were hot and nights needed a blanket. On the coast, with roads and cities, she could not have stayed without air conditioning. At Corlears Hook Park she measured the difference a little shade makes with Wendy's heat gun.

Not every gardener loves trees. Trees compete for the sun the plots want. One member wanted a tree cut to save an herb bed. The bed was shaded when she planted it. So Berkov worked out the ecosystem services of the garden's four biggest trees from the city's Tree Map. The Tree Map lists every city tree with the stormwater it holds, the energy it saves and the habitat it makes. Then it gives each a dollar figure. Wendy says the tree outside her office pays about a dollar a day. Asked about the units, Berkov says they are annual dollar values. Both belong to East River Park Action. Four blocks east the city cut a thousand mature trees at the start of COVID. The aim was to raise the park against surge and sea level rise. The recording ends as Wendy begins that story.

On the walk back to Caravan of Dreams, Wendy points out one of the thousand street trees she campaigned for and asks people to look into tree stewardship where they live. The tour passes a reuse shop for records and bikes, and the Brant space, a warehouse turned exhibition space. People in 65 countries make Green Maps with the nonprofit's open source icons, platform and engagement tools, at GreenMap.org.