text:
Water & Politics: The Rollback
The Trump administration has openly questioned climate science, but there are more reasons to be concerned about the president's budget proposal
by Jared Brey
Three years ago, after decades of waiting and pestering city officials to do something, residents of Bridesburg, a riverside community in Philadelphia between Frankford and the great Northeast, met at a catering hall to start planning for the future of three big gashes of possibly polluted, formerly industrial land in their neighborhood. In Eastwick, on the other end of town, officials are finally starting to reckon with decades of neglect. They're beginning the work of cleaning up the area around two former landfills aside Darby Creek, which have been listed since the early 2000s as contaminated Superfund sites, designated for priority cleanup due to the risks they pose to human health. A few miles north of there, on the banks of the Schuylkill, the University of Pennsylvania recently cut ribbon on the Pennovation Center, where it hopes to incubate the next generation of health and tech pioneers. And all around the city, the Philadelphia Water Department is working to build out neighborhoods with green stormwater infrastructure to keep pollutants from flowing into our waterways.
What do these efforts have in common?
None of them would be happening without some kind of support from the Environmental Protection Agency.
Since Donald Trump was elected president, advocates have been reading the tea leaves, trying to predict how sharply Trump plans to depart from the modest environmental progress made under the Obama administration. The indications so far have been grim. In February, the Senate confirmed Scott Pruitt, a former Oklahoma attorney general who'd made a career of battling federal environmental regulations, as the new EPA administrator. Then in March, the Trump administration released a preliminary budget proposal calling for 3,200 layoffs and a 31 percent reduction to the agency's funding.
But the budget isn't set in stone, and many advocates quietly doubt Congress will approve such deep cuts to the agency. The real negotiations won't start until later in the year. In the meantime, residents and state and local governments are left to wonder how much leaner the EPA can get before we start paying for it in the quality of our air and waterways.
"Are we going to feel it immediately? I'm not sure," said Maurice Sampson, the Eastern Pennsylvania director for Clean Water Action, a group that formed around the push to adopt the Clean Water Act in 1972. "What we've built over the last 40 years to protect the environment, which we know has had a positive impact—what happens when you start untangling that?"
Shifting responsibility to states and cities
Donald Trump, who tends to reveal his governing philosophies via Twitter, once famously claimed that climate change was a hoax invented by the Chinese to make American industry less competitive. That such a belief could be held by the president of the United States is cause for alarm among climate scientists, who agree in virtual unanimity that global warming is real, and a threat to life on earth. But advocates say that even people who reject the science of climate change may find something to worry about in Trump's developing environmental policy.
Of all the government agencies whose budgets are slated to shrink to make room for a $54 billion increase in military spending, the Environmental Protection Agency would be hit the hardest. In addition to the funding and staffing cuts, Trump has targeted a broad range of programs and grants to be reduced or eliminated in the budget. If the cuts go through as is, according to a detailed but "confidential and pre-decisional" budget memo published by The Washington Post, there will be less money for Superfund site cleanups, for brownfields planning, for oil-spill prevention and even for childhood lead safety programs.
Pruitt has said his approach to the administration of the EPA is guided by a belief that states should take on more of the responsibility for protecting the environment, and the EPA shouldn't get involved in anything beyond its core mission. But the state Department of Environmental Protection relies on federal funding to implement many environmental protection programs, as Acting Secretary Patrick McDonnell said in a letter to Pruitt in March. The proposed cuts would have an "immediate and devastating effect" on the state's ability to protect the safety of its air and water by reducing funding for local water system inspections. In addition, by paring down brownfields planning, the budget would stifle job creation and economic growth, McDonnell wrote.
J.J. Abbott, press secretary for Gov. Tom Wolf, noted that the federal cuts would harm the DEP's ability to do its job without touching its responsibility for the environment, putting it in an impossible spot.
Later in March, Philadelphia's Office of Sustainability published an action guide, outlining the potential consequences of Trump's budget proposal for the city's environmental health, encouraging Philadelphians to mobilize in opposition to the cuts. In a press release, Mayor Jim Kenney said the Trump administration's proposal is "irresponsible" in light of climate change threats. "Additionally," he said, "the proposed Trump budget would have immediate and drastic effects on many programs that Philadelphians rely on, such as those that support local air pollution prevention efforts, or that help residents save money on energy."
The EPA, for its part, has been quiet. Regional representatives did not respond to three requests for an interview.
Advocates do have some reasons to hope. Others have pointed out that back in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan was elected president, he also began his term by making industry-friendly appointments and proposing substantial budget cuts. But the Reagan administration wasn't able to completely dismantle the agency; congressional investigations enforced some senior appointees to resign, and, while environmentalists still see the 1980s as a damaging time for environmental policy, their worst fears were never realized.
"The whole budget is clearly a farce," said Joseph Minott, executive director of the Clean Air Council. "It is unimaginable that one of the largest public-health protection organizations would be gutted by any administration. It just does not make any sense. Clearly, this is sort of a political document and not a serious budget, and I hope and pray that Congress will see it as such."
In Philadelphia, at least in the short term, cuts to the EPA are unlikely to affect the quality of the drinking water. Joanne Dahme, general manager of public affairs for the Philadelphia Water Department, said that all of the department's work is funded locally, by ratepayers. And that even includes the massive, forward-looking Green City, Clean Waters program. Sources said, too, that EPA funds that have already been granted for local brownfields planning and Superfund cleanups are not likely in jeopardy. And Christine Knapp, director of the city's Office of Sustainability, said in a November 2016 interview with Grid that Greenworks, the local sustainability plan, won't be affected by the federal budget or policies.
Trump's approach to environmental regulation does, of course, have some supporters. Rachel Gleason, executive director of Pennsylvania Coal Alliance, said her group applauds the Trump administration's decision to reconsider Barack Obama's climate and environment policies. And Kevin Sunday, who works on energy and environment issues for the Pennsylvania Chamber of Commerce, said that every government program could use some "thoughtful cutting." The Chamber of Commerce only hopes that budget cuts don't affect permit-review timelines.
Not all business leaders are in favor of the proposed cuts. In a recent op-ed in The New York Times, Michael Bloomberg argued that businesses will continue to pursue the aims of the Clean Power Plan even if the regulations are undone. And Jon Jensen, a technical consultant at MaGrann Associates and co-chair of the Delaware Valley Green Building Council, said local builders are demonstrating a voluntary commitment to more sustainable construction practices because it benefits their bottom line as well as the environment.
But major reductions in funding could mean fewer state inspections of local water systems. And bold programs such as Green City, Clean Waters may never have gotten started without buy-in from the EPA. There's also the question of progress. After all, it's not as though the environment is perfectly safe and healthy right now. Environmental quality needs constant improvement, and most advocates say the EPA has never been as robust as it should be.
A 'massive void' for communities of color
Perhaps most concerning of all for cities like Philadelphia, where a majority of citizens are people of color and a quarter of the population is poor, is the Trump administration's push to eliminate the EPA's Office of Environmental Justice, which was created in the early 1990s and is charged with ensuring that all communities receive equal protection from environmental harms. Historically, that hasn't been the case. Studies have found that poor people and communities of color are likelier to live in areas with lower air and water quality and in closer proximity to toxic waste sites. Last year, a report by PennEnvironment and ACTION United revealed that areas within the potential blast zone of oil trains running through the city are populated mostly by people of color, while areas outside the blast zones are two-thirds white.
Jacqueline Patterson, director of the NAACP's Environmental and Climate Justice Program, said the Office of Environmental Justice has been a crucial watchdog for marginalized communities.
"The office has done a lot..." Patterson said. "I think a lot of people, especially communities that aren't necessarily seeing relief, would be concerned about what hasn't been done. But with the constraints that they have, of being a relatively small office with a relatively small budget and varying degrees of political embrace of what they're doing, I think they've done a lot."
The Office of Environmental Justice has been able to move resources into communities that are "suffering under environmental-justice challenges," she said, as well as provide technical assistance to those communities and improve their level of civic engagement. Moreover, the office provides an environmental-justice lens that informs the work of the entire EPA, as well as other federal agencies, she said.
It's also the case that communities of color and poor communities, often one and the same, are more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, according to the NAACP. Coupled with the other budget cuts proposed for the EPA, Patterson said, the elimination of the Office of Environmental Justice could leave a "massive void" for marginalized communities.
"Seventy-one percent of African-Americans live in violation of our existing air quality standards, and so if we have fewer standards and less monitoring and enforcement, how is that number going to be affected? Is it going to be 100 percent now?" Patterson said.
Diane Sicotte, an environmental sociologist at Drexel University and author of "From Workshop to Waste Magnet: Environmental Inequality in the Philadelphia Region," said areas around Philadelphia such as Camden and Chester could be particularly threatened by further degradation of air quality standards.
"When you have poor populations, there are so many things that can impact and degrade their health," Sicotte said. "And the health problems that people get from pollution are so common—heart disease, lung disease, asthma, lung cancer, all of that stuff—they're so common, how can you tease out that this is from the incinerator, and that's from stress, and that's from automotive pollution? But there's a cumulative burden on people's health, particularly people who are poor."
What would be the result of a diminished EPA?
"More people will die of lung cancer, more people will die of heart disease, because air pollution kills people," she said. "It's really that simple. Whether you die of an asthma attack or heart disease, it kills you. Water pollution kills people. It gives people cancer. It gives people kidney disease. It does all kinds of things that happen slowly and almost, sometimes, invisibly... But, people just will die. It's really that simple. And that's not even thinking about what it does to the ecosystem."
From an imperfect ally to a clear adversary
The relationship between the EPA and environmental advocacy groups is a complicated one. On the one hand, environmentalists say, the EPA has always been underfunded, and only adopts regulations that industry can tolerate. On the other, since its creation in 1970, the EPA has been the only official lever of power at the movement's disposal.
Under the Obama administration, the environmental movement, which encompasses a vast array of focused causes, had an imperfect ally. In 2015, the administration announced the Clean Power Plan, its signature effort to combat climate change by setting a range of targets for reduced greenhouse-gas emissions in states across the country. Later that year, the U.S. signed on to the Paris Agreement, aimed at reducing carbon emissions worldwide.
Advocates say both plans were important foundations for future action on climate change, even if they fall short of setting standards that scientists say are necessary to keep the globe from warming too much. Both plans also face uncertain futures under the Trump administration.
Sam Bernhardt, the senior Pennsylvania organizer for Food & Water Watch, said his group has been saying for years that the EPA hasn't been doing its job, and is now in the somewhat awkward position of rallying to save it. But in some ways, he said, it's easier to deal with a clear adversary than an imperfect ally.
"Obama was not going to get us to the place where we need to be on climate change," Bernhardt said. "Hillary Clinton wasn't going to, either. And so in some sense, this is an opportunity for us to set the right course. Instead of fighting against the Clean Power Plan, which is an awful thing to have to fight against—they named it very well, they didn't name it the Let's Build Fracked-Gas Power Plants Plan—we now have Trump and Scott Pruitt. And we need to seize on that."
Tags Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, Department of Environmental Protection, DEP, Office of Sustainability, Philadelphia, Philly, Jim Kenney, Mayor Kenney, Clean Air Council, Green City Clean Waters, Greenworks, NAACP Environmental and Climate Justice Program, NAACP, Scott Pruitt, Donald Trump, Issue #97
Copyright City of Philadelphia. Photo by Samantha Madera
The Kenney administration sets its sights on social impact
The People's Mayor?
by Alex Vuocolo
At a campaign event in November 2015, then-mayoral-candidate Jim Kenney spoke to a packed room of Latino families and restaurant industry veterans about the importance of welcoming immigrants into the city. He stressed that newcomers were not "illegal immigrants" and condemned xenophobic and racist politics. The crowd was impressed.
On the sidewalk outside the event, Grid asked the candidate how he would protect vulnerable city residents from pollution in light of proposals to develop the city as an "energy hub" that would move fossil fuels from the western part of the state into the global market. So-called "fenceline" communities that surround Philadelphia's current fossil fuel industry are predominantly poor people of color.
"Right now, there's no plan. I can't comment or criticize a 'no plan,' and when there is a plan, we'll look at it and see what we can do to make it safe," Kenney said.
For the usually blunt Kenney, the answer was cautious and a reflection of the tangled politics of energy and environmental health in a city desperate for jobs but keenly aware of the risks.
The idea that immigration, the economy and environmental issues overlap is not a new one. Indeed, the environment is increasingly seen as a factor in issues such as public health, the economy and even housing quality.
This concept, sometimes called intersectionality, has informed some of the Kenney administration's key policy decisions in its first year, which has seen a number of initiatives aimed at tackling multiple social woes at once.
By almost any measure, the administration's biggest achievement so far has been Rebuild. The $500 million initiative, funded in part by the contentious soda tax, will invest in early education, parks and recreation centers, and the creation of community schools, which double as hubs for social services. The city will also actively hire minority contractors for the initiatives and various capital projects, according to a recent report from Philadelphia Inquirer.
The Office of Sustainability's Greenworks plan, a Nutter-era framework for tackling sustainability goals, has also shifted toward an intersectional approach. Though the office is still working to develop comprehensive citywide goals, the overall approach to sustainability work includes an Equity Index that will use data to identify areas of the city not yet benefiting from investments such as tree cover or access to healthful, local food. The administration will then work with city agencies, nonprofit organizations and community members to design projects targeted specifically at those areas.
A similar awareness of social equity has taken root at the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority (PRA). Developers of city-owned land must now explain their "social impact" in their requests for proposal. Their answers will help determine whether the city chooses that developer.
"When I started in this job in April, the idea of using the public sector as a willing partner to promote social impact real estate was something that was at the front of my mind," said Greg Heller, director of PRA. "And one way that I felt and others in the administration felt was a good way to start doing that was to use social impact as one of the ways we score project proposals."
Heller explained that he has experienced nothing but encouragement for these kinds of ideas since joining the administration.
"This was not something that took a lot of convincing," Heller said.
As for the energy hub idea and its connection to immigration, poverty or any social justice matter, the Kenney administration still has not taken a strong stance, partly because plans remain on the drawing board.
"There hasn't been a significant amount of development as far as the energy hub is concerned," said Lauren Hitt, communication director for the Mayor's Office.
There have been some signs, however, that the concept is losing steam. The Philadelphia Regional Port Authority recently suspended bids for the development of a 195-acre section of the Delaware River waterfront. The project, known as Southport, was crucial to plans for an energy hub. Energy hub architect and Philadelphia Energy Solutions CEO Phil Rinaldi, who was one of the bidders on the project, has just announced his retirement.
Meanwhile, the state announced a $300 million capital investment in existing ports, including Packer Avenue Marine Terminal in South Philadelphia and the Tioga Marine Terminal in Port Richmond—funds that were initially planned for Southport. Jeff Theobald, executive director and CEO of the Philadelphia Regional Port Authority, says that a diversity outreach plan will help ensure that contractors and subcontractors include firms owned by women, minorities, veterans and other "traditionally underutilized groups."
If the plan for an energy hub does move forward, it remains to be seen whether Kenney will stand up for the fenceline communities in Philadelphia with the same resolve that he's showing to protect immigrants and other vulnerable populations.
Even as President-elect Donald Trump and Sen. Pat Toomey have proposed cutting funding to cities that protect undocumented immigrants, Kenney remains stalwart that Philadelphia will continue to be a "sanctuary city"—one that limits cooperation with federal immigration authorities.
"I am hopeful, but cautious," Kenney said in a speech in early December. "I want everyone to understand that cities, including Philadelphia, have been the bastion of protection for minorities, LGBT people, for immigrants—and we're not walking this back."
Tags Issue #93, politics, Jim Kenney, Rebuild, Rebuilding Community Infrastructure, Office of Sustainability, Greenworks, Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority
Photo by Kriston Bethel
A quarter of Philadelphians are food insecure. What are we doing about it?
by Alex Jones
On a blustery, sunny Friday she's taken off of work, Melanie Hudson waits in line for food.
"I have a lot more month than money," says Hudson, 46, who works with autistic teens at Upper Darby High School. Her 17-year-old daughter Veronica is an honors student at the school and plans to join the Air Force when she graduates.
In 2009, Hudson's husband passed away after a brain aneurysm and left her a single parent. She lost a job she'd held for 15 years. And, during what was already a time of great hardship, Hudson suffered significant damage to her eyesight due to glaucoma.
These challenges meant that Hudson, who radiates a confidence and positivity that belies her past troubles, had to seek help to ensure that her and her daughter's basic needs were met. "I was trying to figure out how to feed my family," she says.
She sought out assistance from Philabundance and began patronizing its Fresh For All program, a sort of traveling farmers market that distributes fresh produce and other perishable foods like milk, bread and even meats at no cost to anyone who shows up during the one-hour distribution window. This morning, Philabundance volunteers and staff in green sweatshirts and orange safety vests keep trays and boxes of fresh vegetables stocked while clients fill shopping bags, totes and carts with portions of each item.
Hudson greets fellow clients she hasn't seen in a while after loading up her bags with cabbage, cauliflower, bananas, peppers, bread and milk. During the school year, her work schedule conflicts with the food distribution schedule, but during summer break, and days like today when she's taken off work, she still lines up with a few hundred other Philabundance clients Friday mornings at Christ Lutheran in her Upper Darby neighborhood.
"When you come through the Philabundance line, it helps you get to know the members of your community," says Hudson. "[You build] a type of network or friendship with the people that you stand in line with for about an hour [each week]."
The cold wind keeps the morning from feeling festive, but the sun is warm, people are chatty and the line moves relatively quickly. A boombox plays classic rock while a line of bundled-up clients stretches out of the parking lot and around the block. Clients from around 200 households who self-identify as in need of assistance will collect food at the day's distribution, some lining up for the 9:30 start time at 7 a.m. The clientele is diverse: black, white, Asian, Latino, seniors, single men, teens, women with and without kids—everyone is represented.
Whether we know it when we see them or not, these are the faces of hunger in Philadelphia.
'Radical hospitality'
A patched-together network of food pantries, soup kitchens, churches, grassroots organizations, regional nonprofits and other groups across the city do what they can to keep hungry Philadelphians fed as best they can. The Philly Food Finder, a web tool developed by the Greater Philadelphia Coalition Against Hunger (GPCAH), provides a single online portal that people can use to find myriad food resources near them. But the need far outweighs these essential yet short-term solutions.
Nationwide and across Pennsylvania, poverty levels have inched down in recent years. But here in Philadelphia, the problem has grown. One in four citizens are food insecure—running out of food and money to pay for it before the end of the month. That's nearly twice the national and state average.
Hudson's story helps to shatter myths some hold about the food insecure. Many are working people, single parents, and others are trying to make it as best they can in a city and country where, more than ever, the system seems designed to work against them.
But the problem also extends to unstable populations such as the homeless and people suffering from drug addiction or mental illness, which many people find more difficult to relate to than someone like Hudson. But these populations aren't any less hungry, and new programs are also promoting the idea that they aren't any less deserving of help—or respect.
When Philadelphians in need of a meal walk into Broad Street Ministry, they get something more than a full belly.
"Broad Street Ministry practices an approach we like to call radical hospitality," says Executive Director Mike Dahl. "Our role, as we see it, is to serve as a wide-open front door for the most vulnerable populations in the city."
Tablecloths, silverware and fine china top round tables spread throughout the sanctuary of the cathedral-like Chambers-Wylie Memorial Presbyterian Church building on the Avenue of the Arts. There are no plastic trays or chow lines. Meals are made exclusively with fresh ingredients—nothing frozen or canned. Wait staff take orders and serve meals to patrons as they would in a fine dining restaurant.
Broad Street Hospitality Collaborative, a program of Broad Street Ministry, estimates it will serve 80,000 meals to around 7,400 unique individuals in 2016. Many of these clients are among the city's most vulnerable, living with addiction or mental health issues or attempting to re-enter society after being released from prison.
The food wouldn't be out of place at one of the high-end restaurants on this tony downtown strip. Dinner at one of these Breaking Bread meals might be vegetable ratatouille served with polenta and balsamic reduction, for example. When he came on four years ago, Executive Chef Steven Seibel revamped the culinary program, making a point to design menus with quality, flavor and nutrition in mind. Service frequency also increased from one to seven meals per week.
"We wanted to be the one place where [guests] could come and get a meal that's freshly made, that's made with love—something that they don't get much [elsewhere]," Seibel said.
The program takes a trauma-informed approach to serving its constituents, centering the experiences and perspectives of clients and avoiding coercive interventions or triggers—including excessive security or practices that pathologize clients—that may lead to re-traumatization. Offering a top-quality dining experience, well-trained and sensitive staff and volunteers, and a host of other essential services on-site, can help clients reclaim feelings of personhood and a sense of stability after experiencing traumatic or challenging events in their lives.
Depending on the weather and the week—attendance spikes toward the end of the month when benefit checks have run out—Seibel and his team serve anywhere from 150 to 500 patrons per meal. In addition to conventional purveyors, he also sources from local, sustainable food sources when possible; the program receives regular donations of organic produce from Carversville Farm Foundation in Bucks County and has sourced grass-fed beef and tallow through whole-animal butcher Primal Supply Meats.
"We're trying to put our purchasing power behind sustainable food operations, but we also know that we're bringing in the best possible produce, the best possible protein for people that truly deserve it," Seibel says.
While Breaking Bread meals are the primary entry point for patrons, Broad Street Ministries and its partner organizations provide "stabilizing services," like distributing clothing and personal care items, offering health screenings and assistance signing up for benefits, and another unique service: a mailing address. Having an address can be the first step for patrons to re-establish their lives, as it's often required to apply for an ID card, benefits, housing and jobs, and it provides a way for clients to reconnect with family and friends.
"We're trying to provide a place that offers a sense of community, a sense of belonging, a place where [clients] can restore their self-value," says Dahl. "Put simply, they're going to be treated with respect and dignity."
In West Philadelphia, another food service model that's helping to feed those in need takes a community approach, bringing those who can afford to eat and those who can't to the same table.
Many Philadelphians take for granted that they can walk into a restaurant and order a meal where they're attended to by a team of professional servers and cooks—some of whom may be food insecure themselves. At EAT (Everyone at the Table) Café, divisions between those who can pay and those who cannot are removed.
It's the city's first not-for-profit, pay-what-you-can restaurant, offering tasty, wholesome meals to all in the community.
Diners can select one of two rotating three-course meals from a streamlined menu—caprese-inspired chopped salad, flavorful lemon roast chicken with pasta, sorbet with fruit for dessert and a hot cup of tea, for example—but when the check comes, diners decide what they can pay: the suggested price of $15, or more, or less, or nothing at all.
EAT Café wasn't just conceived as a place where those unable to buy food might be able to get a healthy meal. The concept offers the same experience for everyone, combining a welcoming, community-driven ethos with touches that echo trends that diners might see at the city's cutting-edge BYOs and fast-casual restaurants, like a menu that's updated every week based on what's in season and a no-tipping policy, since all staff are paid a higher than average hourly wage.
The café is the culmination of a years-long collaboration of Drexel University's Center for Hunger-Free Communities, the university's Center for Hospitality and Sport Management, Vetri Community Partnership and the greater West Philly community.
"The idea is to minimize hunger," said April Thompson-Harris, a Powelton Village resident and a member of the project's Community Advisory Committee. "You have those who can afford [to eat] and those that can't. If you're able to pay the suggested price, that's great. If you're economically unable to, it's perfectly fine. They designed [the restaurant] in this way for comfort, ease and community, and [so we can] grow together."
The service, the food and even the end-of-meal transaction that usually occurs are designed to be the same for all diners, paying and nonpaying. In this way, EAT Café offers an experience that creates community by encouraging diners who can pay full price (or more) to do so to support the concept, while diners who can only pay less than full price or not at all can enjoy a healthy meal in a beautiful space side by side with other diners.
General Manager Donnell Jones-Craven, a food industry veteran whose culinary career has included fine dining, specialty catering and upscale hotels, joined the project in 2014 and has worked with project partners to bring EAT Café from an idea to a brick-and-mortar space to open for business.
"I'm really excited about getting open and working with my staff and just making our hospitality and our customer service stand out—then the food comes after that," Jones-Craven said just before the café's opening in late October.
The food that EAT Café serves comes from a combination of donations from grocers, bakeries and other food businesses as well as purchases from purveyors. It's important to Jones-Craven to build relationships with mission-aligned organizations and businesses, and to source food produced within 200 miles of Philadelphia, including urban growers, whenever possible.
"We'll be utilizing purveyors that are sensitive and passionate about what we're doing, who want to join our cause, as well as local community gardens [and] local grocery stores," says Jones-Craven. They've received donations from businesses like Giant supermarket in Wynnewood and Metropolitan Bakery's Rittenhouse location, among others.
EAT Café's menu, which is posted online each week, will change seasonally and based on which ingredients have been donated. While selections are limited—initial menus included two appetizer and dessert choices and three entrée options—the kitchen is able to accommodate for dietary restrictions and food allergies.
Waste not, want not
Even as a large percentage of our country goes hungry, we're still throwing out an awful lot of food. That's why Megha Kulshreshtha set out to reduce food waste and feed hungry people. Food Connect, the program she's been developing since 2014, does both.
As the Indian-American child of immigrants growing up in a New Jersey home where food was never wasted and resources were sometimes scarce, it felt natural to Kulshreshtha, who is now a real estate investor, to find a way to give back. In her case, that meant working nights and weekends to develop a solution to food waste and food insecurity: a way to connect excess prepared food with those who could most use it in a manner that's timely, convenient and safe.
Food waste is a big problem—and not just because unused food could be used to feed those who don't have enough. Food waste uses other resources on a large scale: According to ReFED, an alliance of advocates, funders and government agencies dedicated to reducing food waste and its negative impacts, the $218 billion worth of U.S. food wasted each year consumes 21 percent of all fresh water, 19 percent of all fertilizer, 21 percent of landfill volume and 18 percent of cropland.
In response, some supermarket chains have started marketing "ugly" produce, like misshapen carrots, that would otherwise go to waste. Other programs, like Hungry Harvest, which recently began serving the Philadelphia market, aggregate this produce into affordable, CSA-style subscription boxes priced at 20 to 30 percent less than supermarket produce and delivered straight to customers' homes.
Food Connect intervenes at the food service level, rescuing uneaten but perfectly good food from the waste stream. Restaurants, dining halls and other food service operations with excess food—say, trays of lasagna from a college cafeteria or unserved bowls of salad from a catered wedding—can use Food Connect's app to schedule pickups. Volunteer drivers are dispatched to pick up donations and bring them straight to the food pantries, shelters and other institutions that distribute food to those who need it.
In its first 30 months, Food Connect donated 6,000 meals—not bad for an all-volunteer organization recording transactions by hand on paper.
"I didn't want to build [technology] until I knew exactly where the pain point was," says Kulshreshtha, who has so far funded the all-volunteer program out of pocket. Logistics—how the food would get from donor to recipient promptly—was a big one.
"We addressed that [bottleneck] by leveraging existing resources and efforts in our city," Kulshreshtha says. "That's where that Philly spirit comes in, and we really saw that play out during the DNC."
Food Connect had the technology, but it didn't have the resources to rescue food at the 50,000-person event in July. Partnering with other hunger relief programs, which already have vehicles and drivers on the road, was key to increasing the program's capacity in time for the convention. Working with mission-aligned organizations, Kulshreshtha was able to dispatch, say, a Philabundance truck to pick up and deliver a big donation, while a small army of volunteers from around the city helped ferry pickups from smaller-scale businesses.
"What you saw happening was a coming together of all of these different efforts," she said. "We were able to do this really fast because we didn't have to do it all ourselves. It really was a team effort."
That scaling up made possible by the app has made a big difference in Food Connect's impact. Since the convention, approximately 50,000 meals have been rescued and donated to organizations feeding Philadelphians in need. And the event inspired some big players in Philly food service such as Garces Group Catering, Starr Catering and Temple University's dining halls to sign up and use the service to donate surplus.
Food Connect's next phase, Kulshreshtha hopes, is to raise funds to secure the program in Philadelphia; other cities have also expressed interest in a similar model. "Now that we see that there's real demand for all of this, [our goal] is keeping up with that demand," she said. "[Donors] are really excited to have this option in a safe and efficient way."
A growing problem, with threats looming
These programs give cause for hope, but their efficacy is limited by the sheer scale of the problem of food poverty and food insecurity. In the background of rising numbers on both fronts, the specter of federal funding cuts looms, particularly given the results of the presidential election and conservative sentiment about entitlement programs.
"In Philadelphia, if you look at the number of young kids in poverty, that number actually went up [in 2016]," says Kate Scully, policy director at Drexel University's Center for Hunger-Free Communities, which focuses on studying and mitigating the impact of hunger on very young children. The problem of hunger is nested within the problem of poverty—not making enough money to meet your and your family's basic needs.
"Hunger doesn't happen in a vacuum," Scully said. "When kids are food insecure, they're often energy insecure, housing insecure."
This increase is echoed in poverty levels in the city overall. "Even with the household income increasing slightly, the poverty level [in our city] remains around 26 percent," says Tom Mahon, communications director at GPCAH.
One in four Philadelphians live at or below the poverty line, which the federal government defines as an annual income of $24,300 for a family of four—far below a living wage just about anywhere, let alone in a major metropolitan area.
Twelve percent of the city's population—that's around 183,000 people, according to 2013 census data—live in deep poverty, defined as income at 50 percent of the poverty level or less. That's $12,150 to provide food, clothing and housing for a family of four.
What's more, hunger affects vulnerable and minority populations disproportionately. Thirty-six percent of children and 6 percent of seniors in Philadelphia fit the United States Department of Agriculture's definition of "food insecure," according to data from GPCAH.
Hunger affects black (18 percent) and Latino (25 percent) populations more than whites (14 percent), and food insecure people are 30 percent more likely to be hospitalized and twice as likely to require mental health services than those who have enough to eat, GPCAH data show. And because of the lack of access to fresh food in many low-income neighborhoods, food insecure people are at higher risk of obesity-related health issues.
While the city has struggled with poverty and food insecurity for the past several decades, the recent recession made things much worse.
"There are plenty of people above the poverty line who still struggle," said Kathy Fisher, policy director at GPCAH. "Even as unemployment has dropped, there are a lot of jobs that don't pay very well and don't provide full-time hours. There are plenty of people who would love to be working full time, but they're scheduled for 20 or 25 hours a week." And low-paying jobs in the service industry, for example, often have schedules that change frequently, which can make securing a second job or other paying work impossible.
An increase in the minimum wage, Fisher says, would be a huge step toward ending hunger and poverty in Philadelphia; similar initiatives in other states have been effective in reducing poverty.
To put all these numbers in perspective, it helps to see what the situation looks like on the ground to organizations fighting food insecurity.
Share Food Program distributes emergency food to food pantries; in 2015, more than 500 volunteer-led food pantries in Philadelphia County alone received emergency food donations from Share totaling nearly 25 million pounds of food. The organization also partners with community groups such as churches and senior centers to provide families and individuals with monthly food packages, which include such items as fresh fruit, frozen poultry or fish, eggs, packaged foods and canned vegetables. They are offered at a low cost, and Share requires that recipients put in two hours of volunteer time in exchange for the package.
Despite Share's significant service area and impact—in addition to its home base of Philadelphia, Share offers distribution points in Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey and metro New York—the number of families seeking the organization's services just keeps growing.
Share saw a 31.4 percent increase in the number of low-income individuals its programs serve each month between 2011 and 2015. An average of 150 families patronize the food cupboards that Share supports during distributions, often overwhelming programs that are run out of small neighborhood churches or community hubs.
"The biggest challenge is having enough resources to provide food to the ever increasing number of food cupboards and the people they serve," says Steveanna Wynn, the organization's executive director.
The specter of further cuts to the social safety net and other policies that negatively affect low-income and marginalized populations would put further strain on resources already spread thin.
Wynn says it's too soon to say how the impending Trump administration's policies might affect the ability of local and state governments and advocacy organizations to support those who are food insecure.
"Everyone in the community will need to be part of the solution in making sure people have food to eat," Wynn says. "It is a basic right, and in 2016, it is a shame we are still having this discussion." Wynn and her fellow advocates "plan to be vigilant on the legislative front and increase advocacy and education to legislators and families as needed."
At the same time, she says, "We are trying not to react to what we do not know. So much depends on the reauthorization of the Farm Bill [which includes SNAP legislation] and child nutrition program."
SNAP, or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, is the new name for what many know as "food stamps," and advocates maintain that it's a critical piece.
"SNAP is the number one defense against hunger in America," says Fisher. One in seven Americans receives benefits, with that ratio even higher in poorer states.
Streamlining the application process for SNAP and making it easier for those in need to keep their benefits would also help; the city has set up BenePhilly centers to offer this kind of support.
Even with organizations like GPCAH helping approximately 5,000 individuals each year to navigate the arduous process of applying for SNAP, the program has less power to mitigate the effects of poverty than it used to. According to a 2016 report from the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, recent budget cuts have reduced benefits for many recipients, and seniors have been hardest hit. Time limits implemented at the federal level have reduced or eliminated benefits for able-bodied, low-income adults without children, many of whom do not qualify for other forms of assistance.
According to the Office of Sustainability's 2016 Greenworks report, one in three Philadelphians receives SNAP benefits, but one out of every 10 Philadelphians qualifies for benefits and does not receive them—only 73 percent of eligible households in the city are currently enrolled in the program.
"There's still quite a bit of stigma, especially among seniors, [around] participation in the SNAP program," Fisher said. Getting the word out about existing programs like free school breakfasts, which have a high rate of use at some schools with food insecure students but not others, she said, will have a positive impact.
'It's OK to ask for a little help'
According to GPCAH's Mahon, a lot of the challenges around mitigating the effects of hunger on Philadelphians in need are due to a stigma that still exists around seeking assistance, whether from a neighborhood food pantry or through SNAP.
"This is a problem that affects so many people," Mahon said. "Almost 500,000 in Philadelphia alone receive SNAP benefits. I think people, when they are in this situation, get the sense that they're all alone, and we're trying to reach out to them and say, listen: There are countless other people that are facing similar issues, and we're here to provide resources and let you know that you're not in this alone."
That's why Melanie Hudson is spreading the word that everyone goes through challenges, and there should be no shame attached if you need support.
"Sometimes I look back, when you weigh it out, it's more hard times than good," Hudson said. "But my attitude is really good about it, because what's the alternative to living life and trying to get through it?"
After looking to Philabundance for support during her hardest times, Hudson says she's grateful for the opportunity to give back to the organization and her community by working with the organization's public relations department, which seeks out clients who'd like to share how its support has affected them.
"I was like, 'What's the big thing about me standing in line getting food?'" said Hudson of the first time the organization approached her about sharing her story. "Now I see that it's bigger than that. Philabundance is more than food."
In this role, Hudson is able to act as an ambassador to those who might be in need but afraid to ask for help, and also as an example of a person served by the program who shows funders and the public what food insecurity really looks like.
"It's OK to ask for a little help," she said. "We all need it sometimes. It's OK."
Tags Issue #92, Philabundance, Share Food Program, Coalition Against Hunger, EAT Cafe, Greenworks, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, SNAP
Photo by Margo Reed
Reaching out to new communities is top priority for city's sustainability office
by Heather Shayne Blakeslee
The new approach to Greenworks will be disorienting and disappointing for anyone who was looking for a big reveal on Mayor Kenney's sustainability priorities. The new version, released in its printed form November 2016 by the Office of Sustainability (OOS), is emblematic of some big shifts in approach.
Gone are the 14 targets with baselines, metrics and goals; in their place are eight aspirational visions, such as "All Philadelphians waste less and keep our neighborhoods clean" and "All Philadelphians are prepared for climate change and reduce carbon pollution."
But there is still a lot packed into the report. Given the sheer amount of work going on, as well as the number of departments involved, it was a struggle to list initiatives in order of importance, says Christine Knapp, who will lead OOS during the Kenney administration.
"There's no weighting system we could come up with that we thought was fair," Knapp says.
The result is a sometimes confusing mashup of task forces, advisory councils, plans and goals listed alphabetically by department underneath each vision. Knapp said she understands that the new format could be frustrating for the policy-and-metrics set, and that OOS is going to continue to work on how to best communicate with multiple audiences now that the printed version of Greenworks has evolved from a policy document to a communications piece directed at the general public. Knapp's message to people uncomfortable with that shift? Be patient.
Dialing in to new numbers
In the same 2014 election that propelled Mayor Jim Kenney into office, Philadelphia voters passed 2-1 a ballot measure that made OOS permanent, essentially protecting its existence from the political whims of different mayoral administrations. However, like all city offices, the mayor still has wide latitude when it comes to how it's staffed, whether budget resources are allocated and how aggressively a sustainability agenda will be pursued. Furthermore, the city's original Greenworks plan, created under Mayor Michael Nutter, was set to expire at the end of his administration.
So there was widespread approval in the sustainability community when Kenney appointed Knapp, a long-time environmental advocate. (Full disclosure: Knapp is also a personal friend of mine.) There was a further collective sigh of relief when the office was funded at Nutter administration levels.
But the question remained: What would Kenney's plan be moving forward? How committed is he compared with the Nutter administration?
The original Greenworks plan was created whole cloth under the leadership of inaugural director Mark Alan Hughes and then largely implemented by his successor, Katherine Gajewski; it was a metric-laden piece intended to set and accomplish goals within the time frame of the Nutter administration.
Knapp told an audience at Drexel University in November that some of the numbers in the first plan were too easily achievable, while others were a stretch, and that developing new metrics will be key, even if some of them take decades to accomplish.
She told Grid that OOS hopes to focus on "quality not quantity when it comes to the numbers."
Part of that approach speaks to another big change in the plan, which is that equity indicators are baked into each of the eight visions instead of existing as a stand alone goal as it did the in the first version of Greenworks, alongside energy, environment, economy and engagement; a Greenworks Equity Index will guide their work. As an example, Knapp points to tree coverage goals and investments in parks.
"We do want to work with Parks and Recreation on figuring out what the appropriate goal is for new tree planting, but to be smarter about it and not just have a blanket number. If we only planted 50,000 trees, but they were in the neighborhoods that needed them the most, wouldn't that be more effective for our overall strategy than just saying we were able to plant a lot and then have a bunch of them turn around and die? We're really trying to be a little bit smarter about the approach that we're taking, and not just trying to meet numbers for numbers' sake."
Another major part of the new strategy is moving the numbers online and keeping them updated regularly.
"We have a new Greenworks dashboard on our website that we only have part of up right now. We're going to be adding to it over time so that we can update data more frequently... certain information we get regularly, [and now] we don't have to wait for the annual report to put that information out," Knapp says.
She also explains that a big structural change in how OOS relates to the rest of the city will help as they work closely with each department to develop goals and benchmarks.
"We're now part of the Managing Director's Office, rather than in the Mayor's Office," Knapp says. "This has been a really helpful position for us because we're now among all of the other operating departments and have a common boss and common goals that we work on together. That's really helped to break down some barriers and give us more access to those departments and to help them figure out what's in the way—Is it budgetary? Is it information?—and help them overcome those barriers toward implementing the work."
New audiences
Knapp says the change to moving metrics online and simplifying the printed report was based on community input.
"We heard from a lot of folks when we did our public feedback sessions that the previous Greenworks report was very complicated to the average person," says Knapp, who is a veteran of soliciting and responding to community input; she led the Next Great City program at PennFuture and coordinated efforts at the Consortium for Building Energy Innovation at the Navy Yard. She also took a turn at the Philadelphia Water Department, where she was deputy chief of staff for the director of government affairs.
If you're a community member, this report will give you a much better idea of which city departments are doing work toward these visions and what you can do to help.
"This is our first concerted effort to really have an external-facing engagement," she says. "We've never had that in this office before, in part because the priority of the work was really getting it infused into city government and institutionalizing it here."
As part of that outward-facing shift, Greenworks offers what may seem like remedial tidbits to hardcore advocates (like kicking your bottled water habit), but Knapp wants to get to the large portion of the city's population who haven't yet been engaged, rather than continuing to preach to the choir. The real meat of how to change your own behavior or become a better advocate is now online. A new program, Greenworks on the Ground, offers downloadable ideas and resources for each of the eight vision areas, organized by whether you are an individual, community group or institution, along with supportive resources.
Finally, Knapp also wants to be reassuring when it comes to the recent election results, which she says won't affect the city's plans.
"We can really do this work ourselves," she says. "It does not rely on having that higher-level support. It would be great if we had higher-level policies that would help to drive change. What's in our control is what's in our plan, and what we can do ourselves, we are going to continue to do."
There is a lot going on, and the focus on equity across visions is heartening. Advocates will have to wait for further serious plans and more metrics. Some reports are out, such as the climate-resilience-focused Growing Stronger plan and the water department's internationally lauded Green City, Clean Waters effort. But other big-impact initiatives are forthcoming, such as the Energy Master Plan and the Transportation Master Plan. Following are Knapp's picks for pieces of Greenworks that will have a big impact on our future as a sustainable city.
Greenworks 2016 Highlights
"All Philadelphians have access to healthy, affordable, and sustainable food and drinking water."
First metric
The Greenworks report highlights the massive problem of food insecurity in Philadelphia, and its first metric is to track the number of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamp) participants who buy food at farmers markets.
A Shared Food Metric developed with the Philadelphia Food Policy Advisory Council and others that will better track whether more Philadelphians are getting access to healthful food. The city itself is also a big purchaser of goods, and plans are in the works to increase procurement of "healthy, fair, sustainably sourced food from locally owned businesses."
"All Philadelphians waste less and keep our neighborhoods clean."
Although population has increased, as has construction—notorious for creating the bulk of waste in landfills—our overall waste production is down, and the city wants to track that trend.
The approach here seems to be to take seriously the concept that "reduce" comes before "recycle," and that litter is a perennial problem in the city that ranks high on neighborhood-level quality-of-life surveys. The city will create a Solid Waste Plan and a Zero Waste Plan and Task Force.
"All Philadelphians have access to safe, affordable, and low carbon transportation."
A majority of Philadelphians drive themselves to work, but an increasing number are walking, biking and using public transit, and the city wants to see that number continue to trend upward.
A cross-departmental Transportation Master Plan that takes into account effects of climate change, community health and racial equity in access to transportation is the keystone of this piece of Greenworks. Also listed in the report are an expansion of the Indego bike share program, investments in the trail system and an update to SEPTA's sustainability plan.
"All Philadelphians breathe healthy air inside and outside."
Outperforming the Environmental Protection Agency's Air Quality Index standard for cities.
The air inside our homes can be terrible: Before we add mold, cigarette fumes and toxic releases from everything from new furniture to cleaning products, the air we take in from outside is already compromised. We'll be finding out just how bad it is with an official street-level Air Monitoring Survey and developing ways to cut down on emissions from city vehicles through an alternative fuel vehicle study.
"All Philadelphians efficiently use clean energy that they can afford."
The city is tracking energy use in relation to weather to ensure that there is actually a downward trend even during warm winters.
Efficiency standards will be built into one of Mayor Kenney's signature programs, Rebuild, which will invest heavily across all neighborhoods in rebuilding parks, rec centers and libraries. Also in the works is an Energy Master Plan, which will analyze the myriad social, economic and environmental benefits of citywide energy policies, a project that dovetails with the Philadelphia Energy Authority's Philadelphia Energy Campaign, which expects to spur $1 billion in investments over 10 years in energy efficiency projects and solar installation.
"All Philadelphians are prepared for climate change and reduce carbon pollution."
The trend is downward when it comes to the city's greenhouse gas emissions, and Mayor Kenney has set a goal of reducing carbon pollution 80 percent by 2050.
We'll be moving into the implementation phase of the report, Growing Stronger: Toward a Climate Ready Philadelphia, which outlines the risks of climate change as they relate to major city departments such as Public Property, Public Health and the Office of Emergency Management.
"All Philadelphians benefit from parks, trees, stormwater management and healthy waterways."
Continuing to track tree cover, important for stormwater management and reducing how hot our neighborhoods are, will be the first metric here; where those trees are planted will become an even more important part of how the city uses this metric as it develops its Greenworks Equity Index, also a key part of the plan across its visions.
Continued implementation of the city's lauded green infrastructure and stormwater management plan, Green City, Clean Waters, and development of a Clean Water Act Task Force, which will help move the plan along by studying opportunities and barriers to its implementation.
"All Philadelphians benefit from sustainability education, employment and business opportunities."
The number of Philadelphians engaged in sustainability-related programs, including PowerCorps PHL, Waste Watchers, TreePhilly, Greenworks updates and the Philly Spring Cleanup.
A Workforce Development Pipeline project that will study how to create pathways to employment in clean economy jobs, and implementation of the GreenFutures report, the school district's first sustainability plan.
Tags Issue #92, Greenworks, Office of Sustainability, Jim Kenney, Michael Nutter, Green City Clean Waters, TreePhilly, GreenFutures
Climate change projections show a hotter, wetter Philadelphia—prone to major storm events. Are we ready?
by Justin Klugh
Nestled between 42nd and 43rd streets in Sea Isle, within earshot of the Atlantic, there was a house built in an odd place.
"We were in someone else's backyard, basically," explains Dan Gallagher, whose father owns the property. "We always said, 'If there's ever going to be anything bad, it's gonna be the people in front of us who are gonna get hit first!'"
Constructed in 1910, the house survived in its unique location for almost nine decades before Gallagher's parents came upon it in 1999. On the hunt for a reasonably priced bungalow to share big family summers, they saw immediate appeal.
With no driveway or street access, reaching the front door meant walking through the properties of the adjacent, more modernized, three- and four-story beach houses. Minus the addition put on by the previous owners, the whole place took up about 650 square feet. But like any piece of real estate, especially one on a barrier island like Sea Isle, the investment came with a risk.
"The particular part of the island where we lived was flood-prone," Dan says forebodingly. "On every stop sign you can see the lateral posts that say, 'Warning: Flood Zone,' or 'Flood Area.' At high tide... that street would get some extra water."
In October 2012, the Gallaghers watched a tropical depression twist into existence off the coast of Nicaragua. By Oct. 29, Hurricane Sandy had New Jersey in its crosshairs.
With a 115 mph maelstrom bearing down on their investment, Dan's father made a call to an uncle who lived at the beach year-round to make the somewhat meager request that he secure the deck furniture.
Sandy pounded the eastern seaboard, flooding, crippling and wiping out structures and services that affected 50 million people. The U.S. death toll was reported at 109.
Dan's uncle headed over to the hundred-year-old house between 42nd and 43rd streets with a tape measure. "He waited until the water had subsided, because that street stayed flooded for a very, very long time, even after the storm had passed," Dan says.
His father received images of 2 feet of water sinking his house, which destroyed the flooring, outlets, appliances and furniture. After arriving on the scene in November, he found parts of the floor swallowed up by the ground and the structure stripped down to its bones.
The surrounding homes on stilts, however, suffered only minimal damage.
"It was pretty devastating." The moment registered with Dan. "It was just… silence. How do you react to that? How do you respond to that?"
The neighbors' house in front of them—"If there's ever going to be anything bad, it's gonna be the people in front of us who are gonna get hit first!"—appeared untouched by Sandy's fury, the lesson painfully obvious: Severe destruction is not something to which you can easily respond. It's something you have to prepare to avoid.
"There's six grandkids in my family now, with no spot really to go," Dan says. "That was probably the biggest hurdle, emotionally. My dad… this year, you could just see it. He says, 'I worked my whole life for something like this, I never would have imagined it would be this difficult to get back up.'"
Four years later, the house is unbuilt, and fallout from the devastation of Sandy remains.
The Worst Case Scenario
Largely ignored by nature's worst wraths, Philadelphia has some geographical advantages. But being 90 miles inland won't be enough to stop the uptick in heat, flooding and severe, Sandy-like weather scientists predict for the decades ahead.
Philadelphia's residents currently suffer through at times unpleasant, but rarely cataclysmic, weather. For Sarah Wu, deputy director for planning at Philadelphia's Office of Sustainability in Center City, it's part of her job to look at the data and imagine just these climate-change-related scenarios, all in an effort to avoid them.
"If we continue to emit carbon the way we're emitting, or decide we're going to maniacally emit even more carbon than we're currently emitting," she explains, "it makes it hotter, it makes it wetter and it makes the sea level rise. We're planning for the worst case scenario."
The Office of Sustainability commissioned four different companies to provide climate modeling for the city, three of which are the basis for the hotter, wetter scenario described by Wu. As for the overall carbon emissions, ICF International, a consulting firm that worked with the Office of Sustainability on an August 2014 report entitled "Useful Climate Information for Philadelphia: Past and Future," reported that we're on track for the kinds of global emissions that would affect us locally.
"Philadelphia is expected to face a warmer and wetter future across all scenarios for the near-term and mid-century time periods compared to historical observations," the report states.
ICF ran four sets of numbers, factoring in climate models from 2007 and 2013 of both low and high projected emission scenarios. Wu and the Office of Sustainability cited the ICF findings in their November 2015 GreenWorks report.
"By the end of the century, we're going to have way more days of 95-degrees and above," Wu says. "Up to 56 days potentially, in high emission scenarios—21 of which could be in a row. Between 2000 and 2016, we're seeing these projections are already coming true."
From 1950–1999, there was an average of zero annual days over 100 degrees in this area; from 2081–2099, ICF projects there being up to 16 a year. "Obviously, that's not good," she concludes. "That's going to
be unpleasant."
"Unpleasant" is a word you hear a lot in Wu's office, though it is delivered with her trademark pleasantness. It seems to have become a blanket term for her description of what awaits us in a future after the effects of climate change are even more apparent in Philadelphia.
"Extreme weather is going to get more extreme," Wu continues. "So I do have more bad news."
Warmer summers aren't the only thing that Philadelphians should expect as the overall temperature rises. The winters will be worse, too, due to increased precipitation.
"It's only a handful of inches of more precipitation," Wu says, "but 3 to 4 of those inches are projected for the winter. One inch of winter precipitation can equal up to 14 inches of snow, depending on how it falls... so, ironically, global warming is in fact causing worse winters in Philadelphia."
The ambiguity of predicting weather can cause even further issues. What happens, for example, if the budget for snowplows is lowered based on the previous winter's scant snowfall, resulting in a depleted fleet facing what very well may be a monstrous cold season the following year? Wu assures us that the streets will always be plowed, but advanced planning could include reserves for extreme weather, so that reallocating budgets isn't as difficult.
An even more common threat will be flooding, with Philadelphia already experiencing 81 floods since 1996. Wu unfolds a map of the city included in her department's 2015 report on preparing and adapting for the threats of climate change. The illustration shows the sections of Philadelphia most at risk from the rise of the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers, and unsurprisingly, it's the waterfront neighborhoods that can expect to take the biggest hit as sea levels increase by 2 feet in 2050 and 4 feet in 2100.
"This is what would be inundated in the worst, worst case scenario," Wu says. "We're not New York; we don't need to wall ourselves off. But there's significant portions of the city that are [in this case] permanently inundated, so you have to deal with that. The real issue for us with sea level rise is: If this is permanent inundation, and then a storm hits…"
Wu flips the image over, and an ominous map on the other side has marked areas surrounding the Philadelphia International Airport, the Sports Complex, FDR Park and other landmarks as—at least temporary—swamps.
"This is part of the city that doesn't flood now—ever," Wu says. "These people don't think of themselves as being near the river. So that's the worst case scenario: We have 6 feet of sea level rise, and then we have multiple big storms a year because the weather gets more extreme."
Wu leans back in her chair. "It's not that it's permanently uninhabitable," she says. "It's just that it's... not as pleasant."
A Complacent Public
A common trait among Philadelphia's emergency management personnel is the delightful way in which they explain horrible things. But too few people are listening.
On the third floor of the city library's Fishtown branch in late September, two members of the city's Office of Emergency Management (OEM), Laura Duff and Lynn Fisher, cheerfully hold court at a community meeting on disaster preparedness. Duff and Fisher's job is to break down the sort of disasters commonly and uncommonly faced by Philadelphians, from earthquakes and extreme cold, to dam failure and hazardous train derailments. Their goal is also to instruct attendees on the best methods to prepare and react to such situations. According to an OEM survey, only 34 percent of city residents have three days' worth of supplies on hand, and just under 49 percent have emergency plans for their homes. Unfortunately, with fewer than 10 people in the room, far fewer than 1 percent of Philadelphians were on hand to hear Duff and Fisher's research.
Hotter summers, more severe winters and increased flooding from storms will affect everyone in Philadelphia. But while the city can move power stations to higher ground and budget for more snowfall, when a disaster hits, what you have in your own home may be what saves you.
Fisher had been hoping for a bigger turnout, as, presumably, she would prefer to deliver this information now, rather than through a bullhorn to a panicking crowd on doomsday. Regardless, Fisher explains staples of emergency management, such as having an evacuation plan for your home and what to keep in your "go bag"—bottled water, a flashlight with batteries, extra car and house keys, cash, a first aid kit, and important documents like a housing lease and medical information.
"A will?" she's asked.
"Probably not," she says. "We're going to hope for the best."
At the back of the room lurks OEM's equally congenial deputy director for public affairs, Noelle Foizen. Even though she knows what she's preparing the city for, Foizen isn't put off by the sparse attendance of the meeting.
"I don't know if it's the wonky title of these meetings that's turning people off, or if they're not really understanding how mitigation [works for] them," she wonders. "That's a word that many people don't understand."
Mitigation, the term used to describe preparations in place for Philadelphia to withstand a natural disaster, could be a very lucrative word. According to the OEM, every dollar spent on mitigation efforts equals four dollars saved of recovery costs.
Mitigation includes many facets, including families building stay-in-shelter kits in case of being kept in their homes for extended periods. The OEM advises people to maintain a gallon of drinking water per person per day, canned food, extra batteries, hygiene products, tools, a battery-powered AM/FM radio, a whistle to signal for help and iodine tablets with bleach—their website includes instructions on how to disinfect water with bleach. They encourage people to stay diligent about the viability of all of their supplies throughout the year.
The scope of the disasters projected by Sarah Wu's office could potentially lead to large scale evacuations, as well. That's why OEM conducts exercises such as the 10-shelter drill they ran in September.
"That was a fantastic drill that we did," Foizen says. "We're really confident in our ability to do one shelter, and we're really confident in our ability to do three shelters, because we've done it recently for Sandy and Irene, and it's just something that's easily manageable."
A broader radius of affected areas is where things get trickier, Foizen says.
"When you get to 10 shelters… our office is small. We're only 30 people. If you think about all the moving pieces going on in an incident [for which] we're setting up 10 shelters, there's probably some sort of emergency that we're managing, as well."
An emergency requiring 10 shelters is uncommon, for now, but a natural disaster of that caliber is within the realm of possibility, according to Fisher. "Large utility outages in extreme temperatures, or a hazardous materials incident, may also set our Mass Care and Sheltering Plan into motion, thus the possibility of 10 shelters," she explains. A direct hit from Sandy would have certainly greenlit the operation.
The exercise allowed OEM to fully test all the processes and systems in place; not just the people, but the equipment, logistics and transportation, as well as going through the process of registering the people in the shelters (all of which are schools) and making sure all of the services are available.
"We learned a lot about things in our plan that will be addressed at our table talk in December," Foizen says. "We'll just talk through those issues and see how we can problem-solve as a city and move the plan forward."
Another of the OEM's plans—which is up for revision in 2017—is the citywide evacuation blueprint. Eight years ago, all of Philadelphia was mapped out in case of a full withdrawal from the city. Through this process, the OEM determined the clearest routes for both people fleeing and for rescue workers coming in, as well as other aspects, such as which public transit lines will remain open to aid with evacuation.
"Philadelphia's fortunate because there are very few incidents that would require the entire city to be evacuated," Foizen explains. Plans are scalable to function as well for a city block as they would for the entire city, as developing neighborhood-by-neighborhood evacuations is far more manageable than trying to determine how to get 1.6 million people out of the area in a timely fashion. "That type of evacuation would be a multiday process," Foizen notes.
There are better turnouts for some of OEM's other events, including a presentation on their READYHome Personal and Family Preparedness Workshops, which is important, as there is always more to learn about a city's emergency management; for instance, bringing pets to shelters is not only permitted, but encouraged, and there exists a program called Red Paw to keep them safe. Foizen is adamant about residents filling out the hazard mitigation survey available on OEM's website, as well as signing up for her office's emergency alert system, ReadyPhiladelphia, to stay on the ball.
Becoming a Disaster Area
Should things get really out of hand, Philadelphia, like all regions, is supposed to be able to rely on federal aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)
"The way federal disaster assistance works is extremely convoluted," Wu laments. She says there are strict guidelines to the meticulous cataloging of resources used during funding for which a city is trying to be reimbursed in the aftermath, from destroyed structures to office supplies.
According to FEMA's Region III office (Region III covers Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Washington D.C., Virginia and West Virginia), recovery funds for cities are split into two categories: one for rebuilding structures exactly as they were, and another for rebuilding with future emergencies in mind.
"FEMA has both Public Assistance (PA) and Hazard Mitigation Grant Program (HMGP) programs to assist with disaster recovery," a FEMA spokesperson said in an email. He explains that HMGP funds can be used to rebuild to specifications that might "mitigate the effects of future disasters."
It takes a governor of an affected state to request FEMA assistance from the president during a disaster, but in more obvious cases, a joint federal and state Preliminary Damage Assessment Team will be assigned. Their job is to determine the depth of the damage incurred by inhabitants and facilities in order to calculate the level of assistance required. Working in tandem with state personnel, FEMA would set up a phone line to serve as guidance for affected locals as well as disaster relief centers.
In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, New York City was categorized as a major disaster area, the designation of which qualified businesses and citizens for disaster assistance. As the government explained at the time, funds included "home and property loans, help with finding and paying for temporary housing, and business loans."
FEMA, says the spokesperson, has its workers on their toes training alongside state and local programs for responses to hurricanes, floods and other disasters common to our region. The vigilance will be handy in the future, Wu says, as the effects of climate change potentially spread out the resources available to FEMA, as well as those at the disposal of her department. Perhaps the threshold for federal assistance shifts in the wake of an influx of storms.
"The projections show that extreme weather will be more frequent," she says. "[If] extreme weather gets more common, are we going to get to this point where the federal government can't intervene on all of them?"
That could mean that cities, and their residents, would start to shoulder more of the costs of storms. Some people are already wondering why we use taxpayer money, for instance, to rebuild private homes that will be in another hurricane or flood's path. Every city or location has different vulnerabilities.
Having been pummeled during Hurricane Sandy, New York's responses to further storm threats have been on a higher tier than those in Philadelphia, which was largely spared. An oceanography professor out of Stony Brook University on Long Island, Malcolm Bowman, has become a vocal advocate for a $35 billion sea barrier system that he says is "well worth" the cost, because they'll be "saving New York City for another 100 years."
Philadelphia is a different city, with different issues. But we're still looking to others for guidance and best practices. Wu explains, "By 2012, Sandy happened, Irene had happened; all of the cities were like, 'We're left holding the bag on this. We should probably think about it. We all at the same time sort of started to figure out how to adapt, but we don't know what that means and it's a new realm of work for us, so we all tried to figure it out together."
The collaborative efforts with New York and other cities have paid off. She credits her office's "stealing and tweaking" of a system from Portland, Oregon, that more accurately projects carbon emissions based on a customizable input. Government departments are pillaged as well; Wu and her office got their hands on a tool that the Federal Highway Administration had developed to do downscaling of climate models that allowed the Office of Sustainability to get localized projections.
The Urban Sustainability Directors Network, of which Philadelphia is a part, features a directory and a web portal for offices across the country to connect, allowing them to post questions and documents to help each other out.
Wu says the resource serves as the starting point for most projects: "Anytime we're starting anything new, we're like, 'Who's done this elsewhere?' This is sort of a nascent community of practice."
OEM has a similar network called Big City Emergency Managers that has a quarterly meeting of program directors from major metropolitan areas—New York, Chicago, Houston, Dallas, Boston, D.C., Miami, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego and Seattle all send representation. Here, strategies are picked apart based on training scenario results, and practices are shared to improve logistics nationwide.
The Neighbor Factor
While we can look to other cities for best practices, part of the responsibility for emergency preparedness trickles down to where the situation is most dire: on the neighborhood level. "There's very little that people outside of Philadelphia can do to help Philadelphia adapt," says Wu.
Wu cites a story that took place during a heat wave in Chicago, in which two bordering neighborhoods saw dramatic discrepancies in their death tolls despite similar populations and layouts. The difference was that in one neighborhood people were checking up on each other, making sure those who were more vulnerable were taken care of as the temperature climbed.
Her point is a shared one—"checking on neighbors" was a bullet point in every one of the disaster scenarios presented by Duff and Fisher at the OEM meeting, as well. Generating plans for individual neighborhoods is more productive with the knowledge of what—and who—is there.
"If there's a bunch of elderly folks there, you're going to have to be more sensitive. If you have a bunch of day cares or hospitals, you're going to be more sensitive," Wu explains. "I think the best neighborhood-level adaptation plans will be responsive to local conditions on the ground...Hyperlocal neighborhood conditions."
Poverty is an aspect to consider when designing a plan to assist or escape. The more that is known, recorded and consistently updated, the more informed decisions—during drills or the real thing—become.
"The question is, A) How do you do fund all this work?; and B) How do you figure out if what you're doing is actually effective?" Wu asks. "Because the best adaptation measure is a measure that you never notice that you did, because nothing happens."
To review: Mitigation and adaptation is a sequence with constant effort, no end and no real sign that it's working.
And still, "I would prefer to have a jillion dollars to do it faster," Wu says. "We're in a good place, knowledge-wise, but the phases of implementation could be faster. I think that's partially because people don't think it's urgent—because it's a long-term problem—and partially because of the world we live in, in which we don't have much money. What we need is for everyone to understand that this is pressing enough to be a priority."
Our lack of urgency, she says, is a global issue. It's a matter of "Humanity not wanting to look our own mortality in the eye."
In Climate-Change Tags Issue #91, climate change, Greenworks, Office of Sustainability
Illustration by Wyatt Glennon
It's time to double down on protecting community gardens
Betting the Farm
by Amy Laura Cahn
Philadelphia needs to act quickly if it does not want to lose its community gardens. We can't do it without leadership from the Kenney administration.
On March 20, a Philadelphia Inquirer headline read "Growing Pains for Gardeners: South Kensington plots may be lost amid growth, but the farmers are fighting back." It tells the story of what has come to be called La Finquita or "the little farm," established in 1988 by the Philadelphia Catholic Worker. Once an abandoned post-industrial dumping site, the garden now supplies the Catholic Worker and Drueding Center soup kitchens, a weekly farmstand and many neighbors. But after 28 years as a neighborhood mainstay, development—amid a rapidly changing neighborhood—threatens this precious space.
Last spring, the Philadelphia Housing Authority (PHA) displaced the North Philly Peace Park, which provided fresh produce to neighboring seniors. The Peace Park is still searching for a new home, as PHA begins to remake the neighborhood.
This story keeps repeating itself throughout the city, particularly in increasingly hot real estate markets. Last fall, National Geographic profiled the wildly productive Growing Home Gardens, which serves South Philadelphia's Bhutanese and Burmese refugee community. Within weeks of the story, it was uncertain whether some of those parcels were to go up for sheriff's sale.
West Philadelphia's Farm 51 recently eluded sheriff's sale, but its future is uncertain. As it is for Cohocksink Community Garden. University City Garden. Saint Bernard Community Garden. Sloan Street Community Garden. Mill Creek Farm. The list goes on.
Some of these spaces have already been lost or relocated. Of those that remain, not one is secure. The same goes for hundreds of gardens across the city. Even after more than 30 years of vibrant activity, many gardens have never had the option to secure stable land tenure. Philadelphia has lacked the city policy, commitment and leadership to provide assurance, site control and long-term preservation, and instead deemed gardening and farming "interim uses" for parcels awaiting more profitable uses.
Philadelphians talk about our "40,000 vacant lots," spaces that manifested from decades of neighborhood disinvestment and abandonment. But we don't talk enough about the decades of neighbors, particularly in communities of color and immigrant communities, who made certain that many spaces never became vacant. And we definitely don't talk enough about how to honor and preserve the work of neighbors who continue to step up, transforming abandoned properties into community assets.
As development picks up in Philadelphia and land becomes more valuable, we need to ensure that the communities that have been investing in themselves don't lose out. And as we move forward with policies that shape changing neighborhoods, this city needs to ensure that more would-be community land stewards have a clear path to obtain—and preserve—land.
When it is fully up and running, the Philadelphia Land Bank will be the tool this city needs to facilitate garden preservation; it will streamline and make transparent how we access publicly owned and privately owned tax delinquent land, including garden parcels. Its strategic plan states "[i]f properties are already in use as an active and maintained community garden, this use will be protected."
This could signal a paradigm shift from urban agriculture as interim use to recognizing it as a use that has been critical to the fabric of our neighborhoods for more than a generation. But the Land Bank is simply a tool. What matters is how we use it. And that will be guided by priorities set by our new mayor.
Under the Nutter administration, the Greenworks plan declared preservation of green space and increased access to healthy food key sustainability goals. The Philadelphia Water Department embarked on innovative green stormwater infrastructure projects with gardeners as a critical partner. The Office of Sustainability began exploring the need to mitigate impacts of a warming climate. Gardens, farms and open spaces have been recognized as contributing to these goals, but have never been made a priority.
The Kenney administration has affirmed a commitment to improving our neighborhoods, including parks and recreation centers. But we still do not know how community-managed gardens, farms and open spaces will fare. In a decision between a decades-old garden or a new development, we do not know what will win out.
If these decisions are made on a case-by-case basis, gardens will get picked off one by one. We need the Kenney administration to direct all relevant agencies to work together on a coordinated approach to aggressively protect the investments that communities have already made. And we need this city to retire the notion altogether that gardens are simply interim use. Generations of Philadelphia gardeners have proven otherwise.
Amy Laura Cahn is a staff attorney with the Public Interest Law Center where she directs the Garden Justice Legal Initiative and works to preserve gardens, including La Finquita and Farm 51.
In Guest Editorial, Column Tags community gardens, La Finquita, Greenworks, urban farming, Issue #84
Help TreePhilly Branch Out
TreePhilly partnered with the Friends of Gorgas Park, the Boy Scouts, and the Roxborough Manayunk Wissahickon Tree Tenders in April to give away 284 trees at Gorgas Park in Roxborough. | Photo by Charles Bouril
Program is Offering Community Yard Tree Giveaway Grants
to Groups and Local Businesses
In a bid to help restore Philadelphia's urban forest, community groups and local businesses can start in their own backyards and apply for TreePhilly grants to host yard tree giveaways in their neighborhood this fall.
In addition to receiving 50 trees and a grant for $500—a $2,000 value—recipients will also get educational materials, event planning and promotion guidance and free mulch. Groups and nonprofits that serve in low tree canopy areas will be given preference, but all organizations that serve Philadelphians are encouraged to apply. But hurry, the deadline is July 31.
In Community Tags Greenworks, TreePhilly, free trees, yard tree giveaways
Sustained Commitment: Now in his second term, Mayor Nutter continues to make green work
interview by Liz Pacheco | photos by Gene SmirnovOn his first day in office Mayor Nutter announced his intention to make Philadelphia "the greenest city in America." Now, four years later, with his Greenworks plan in full swing, the Mayor has proven he's serious. Our Green City, Clean Waters program is revolutionizing how cities handle their ancient stormwater systems. The growing number of urban gardens and farms is making access to local, fresh foods not just possible, but commonplace. Our recycling program is actually making money. And our plans for energy efficiency, whether through retrofits, new construction or renewable energy sources, are promising to significantly reduce our reliance on traditional fossil fuels. Recently, Grid had the chance to catch up with the Mayor and talk with him about his connection to Philadelphia parks, his at-home recycling habits and why there's still hope for solar projects in the city.
In #040 August 2012 Tags Greenworks, mayor nutter
Invest in Efficiency: Philly offering small businesses energy efficiency rebates
Greenworks Philadelphia is offering funding to small business owners for energy efficiency projects. | Image via phila.gov/green/greenworksEnergy efficiency improvements can be a major boon to small businesses, lowering energy bills and increasing savings each month. But for many businesses, the high costs of these improvements can put energy efficiency out of reach. Luckily, the Philadelphia Commerce Department is here to help.
For a short time, the Commerce Department is offering its Greenworks Small Business Energy Efficiency Rebate program to a limited number of projects. The rebate program encourages businesses to make investments in efficiency by reimbursing owners for improvement projects involving lighting, HVAC equipment, major appliances, electric motors and energy management control systems.
To receive the rebates, the proposed project must:
Be ready to begin immediately.
Reduce energy consumption by at least 20 percent.
Meet select payback period requirements; 10 years or less for non-HVAC projects and 15 years or less for HVAC projects.
Provide two separate estimates for the costs of improvements. One estimate must come from a minority, female or disabled-owned business.
Be completed by July 20, 2012.
This opportunity is too good to pass up, so be sure to submit all applications by the deadline, May 30 at 5 p.m. Download an application here. And for more information, contact Jonathan Snyder at jonathan.snyder@phila.gov.
Tags Greenworks, energy efficient
LEED Bill Passes City Council
In December, the City Council voted 17-0 to pass Bill No. 080025, introduced by Councilwoman Blondell Reynolds Brown. The bill requires LEED-silver standards for all government construction projects over 10,000 square feet that are primarily funded by city capital dollars and controlled by the city. The measure is an important step towards reaching the Target 1 goal of Greenworks Philadelphia (reducing government energy consumption 30 percent by 2015), and could someday be extended to all city buildings.
In #011 February 2010 Tags Greenworks, Intersections, LEED, energy
Sustainability 101: What Is Stormwater Management?
It's all about runoff. When precipitation from rain or snowmelt flows over the ground, impervious surfaces like streets and sidewalks keep the water from naturally soaking in, creating stormwater runoff. This can be problematic on several levels. Runoff erodes rivers and streams, and causes flooding.
In #011 February 2010 Tags Greenworks, Intersections, Philadelphia Water Department, education, water
News: Lean and Green by 2015
Mayor Nutter announced his plans for making Philadelphia the "greenest" city in America last month, highlighting five areas of interest and 150 initiatives he hopes to achieve by 2015. He has defined the ambitious plan as a restructuring of Philadelphia towards a "green economy," which, if it lives up to its alternate meanings, could definitely help a city living through a recession.
In #005 June 2009 Tags Greenworks, going green, mayor nutter