Trade-offs of Green Insfrastructure Investments

“Looking east from High Line over 30th Street on a sunny midday 2015.” Source: Jim Henderson. CC BY 3.0

Since it opened in 2011, the New York City High Line has been the focus of a number of studies that examined its impact on local economic growth and residents’ quality of life and wellbeing. While early publications were mostly supportive of this type of investment in green infrastructure, more recent research has revealed a series of negative outcomes at the resident- and local community-level, cautioning urban planners in London and other global cities not to ignore long-term social impact.[1]

These new findings address sustainability and economic benefits alongside social equity issues. The latter bring attention to (1) physical displacement of longstanding residents due to the loss of affordable housing in the neighbourhood, (2) social and symbolic displacement due to the remaking of the neighbourhood surrounding the High Line, (3) the closing of locally-owned small businesses due to excessive increases in rent and property prices, and (4) the decreased availability of affordable food due to the replacement of former shops (many of them family-owned businesses) with new stores that rarely target lower- and moderate-income populations.

These considerations show that the steep increase in the median market value per square foot in the proximity of the High Line tells only part of the story. The other part is revealed by data about displaced locally-owned small businesses and lower-income tenants, and about residents and tenants who have stayed in the neighbourhood but feel they are being increasingly excluded from it. The High Line in New York City is not alone among the green infrastructure investments that, albeit profitable for their investors and local authorities, have been shown to contribute to processes of environmental or ecological gentrification. Less celebrated parks and greening initiatives in London, Glasgow, Barcelona, Chicago, Atlanta, among other cities, have also played a significant role in long-term processes that resulted in the displacement of lower-income populations and local businesses.[2] What is more surprising is that, even before the High Line opened in 2011, there were studies that examined and warned against the paradox of environmental gentrification.[3]

Environmental gentrification is spurred by a range of regeneration programmes that combine greening of the built environment and marginalization of certain populations. It is an outcome of “the implementation of an environmental planning agenda related to public green spaces that leads to the displacement or exclusion of the most economically vulnerable human population while espousing an environmental ethic”.[4] In other words, this approach to green infrastructure is neither socially nor environmentally sustainable. In such cases, ‘greening’ strategies have a negative economic and social impact on vulnerable groups, and it may contribute to their displacement. Through this type of urban redevelopment, tenants and residents get the health and wellbeing benefits associated with access to green space only if they can afford the rising costs of living.

By placing economic growth and ecological/green design in social context, recent studies have proposed various ways of ensuring that environmental remediation avoids such negative outcomes. Some scholars have argued that sustainability, economic growth, and social equity can be balanced by creating ‘just green enough’ infrastructure.[5] This entails that local community groups come together and set limits for the planned green infrastructure improvements. Local participation and collaboration in the planning process becomes a key element in the redevelopment of parks and green spaces. The goal is to ensure that benefits from green infrastructure accrue to longstanding residents first and foremost. Research focused on the clean-up of Newtown Creek in Greenpoint, New York City, has shown that this approach to ecological and equitable design could indeed be successful.[6]

Other scholars have proposed green infrastructure ‘prerequisites’ as a way of simultaneously supporting environmental sustainability, creating local economic growth, and enhancing social equity.[7] The key to this approach is to measure and report the social impact of green infrastructure throughout the design, construction and post-construction phases of regeneration programmes. These scholars point to six prerequisites that could ensure that green infrastructure not only improves quality of life and creates local economic growth, but also serves as a social inclusive solution. Prerequisites include (1) the acknowledgement of socio-spatial inequalities and the social context in which they operate; (2) the inclusion of a range of actors in the design, planning and implementation of green infrastructure, as well as the recognition of their different needs; and (3) the acknowledgement of existing trade-offs between ecological and social processes of greening strategies and/or projects.

In a similar vein, a research study conducted by the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability and the University of Utah assessed whether regeneration programmes focused on large parks and green space implemented any anti-displacement strategies.[8] The study focused on 27 park redevelopments in 19 U.S. cities, and it reviewed a wide range of strategies aimed at ensuring that green regeneration efforts benefit longstanding tenants and residents living and working in the area. These include the following: inclusionary zoning, rent control, renter education workshops, down-payment assistance for prospective low-income homeowners, and establishing land trusts, among others. The findings reveal that anti-displacement strategies are implemented in only half of the examined park redevelopments. One additional significant contribution of this study is its holistic approach to beneficiaries and implementers. It highlights that park agencies and community advocates need to work across sectors to limit the negative impact of ‘green gentrification’. By working together, renters, homeowners, businesses, nonprofit and public housing organisations, private-sector housing developers, and public park funding agencies can ensure that regeneration of green infrastructure can lead to equitable communities.

The emerging green infrastructure scholarship shows that there is no simple recipe for ensuring simultaneous environmental, economic, health, and social impact. There is, however, enough evidence to support a nuanced, multi-layered approach to assessing the outcomes of greening strategies and projects. This approach becomes all the more important in the context of global cities like London and New York where the scale of international investments can create unexpected trade-offs between economic growth and social equity.[9]

[1] Dastrup 2015; Haase et al. 2017; Lang & Rothenberg 2017; Millington 2015.
[2] Anguelovski 2015; Rigolon & Christensen 2019; Slater 2017.
[3] Checker 2011; Curran & Hamilton 2012; Gould & Lewis 2012.
[4] Anguelovski 2015: 1211.
[5] Curran & Hamilton 2012
[6] Ibid.
[7] Haase et al. 2017
[8] Bliss 2019; Rigolon & Christensen 2019.
[9] Anguelovski 2016; Cole et al. 2019; Cole et al 2017; Gould & Lewis 2017. In addition to the academic publications already cited, O’Sullivan’s piece in City Lab explains the reasons for which it has not paid off to replicate the High Line in other global cities.  

References:
Anguelovski, I. (2016). Contesting and resisting environmental gentrification: Responses to new paradoxes and challenges for urban environmental justice. Sociological Research Online, 21(3), 1-7. 
Anguelovski, I. (2015). Healthy food stores, greenlining and food gentrification: Contesting new forms of privilege, displacement and locally unwanted land uses in racially mixed neighborhoods. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 39(6), 1209-1230.
Bliss, L. (2019). “How to Build a New Park So Its Neighbors Benefit.” CityLab. Available at: https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/09/gentrification-causes-new-public-parks-study-city-data/597580/ 
Checker, M. (2011). Wiped out by the “greenwave”: Environmental gentrification and the paradoxical politics of urban sustainability. City & Society, 23(2), 210-229.  
Cole, H. V., Triguero-Mas, M., Connolly, J. J., & Anguelovski, I. (2019). Determining the health benefits of green space: Does gentrification matter?. Health & place, 57, 1-11.
Cole, H. V., Lamarca, M. G., Connolly, J. J., & Anguelovski, I. (2017). Are green cities healthy and equitable? Unpacking the relationship between health, green space and gentrification. J Epidemiol Community Health, 71(11), 1118-1121. 
Curran, W. and T. Hamilton (2012) Just green enough: contesting environmental gentrification in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Local Environnment 17.9, 1027–42.
Dastrup, S., I. Ellen, A. Jefferson, M. Weselcouch, D. Schwartz, and K. Cuenca (2015). The effect of neighborhood change on New York City Housing Residents. A report prepared for NYC Center for Economic Opportunity. Available at: https://nextcity.org/pdf/nycha_ceo_report.pdf
Gould, K. and T. Lewis (2012). The environmental injustice of green gentrification: the case of Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. In J. DeSena and T. Shortell (eds.), The world in Brooklyn: gentrification, immigration, and ethnic politics in a global city, Lexington Books, Lanham, MD.  
Gould, K. A., & T. L. Lewis (2017). Green gentrification: Urban sustainability and the struggle for environmental justice. Routledge.
Haase, D., Kabisch, S., Haase, A., Andersson, E., Banzhaf, E., Baró, F., ... & Krellenberg, K. (2017). Greening cities–To be socially inclusive? About the alleged paradox of society and ecology in cities. Habitat International, 64, 41-48.
Lang, S., & Rothenberg, J. (2017). Neoliberal urbanism, public space, and the greening of the growth machine: New York City’s High Line park. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 49(8), 1743-1761.
Millington, N. (2015). From urban scar to ‘park in the sky’: Terrain vague, urban design, and the remaking of New York City's high line park. Environment and Planning, 47, 1e15.
O’Sullivan, F. (2019). That Sinking Feeling: London's 'Tide' Disappoints.” City Lab. Available at: https://www.citylab.com/design/2019/07/london-tide-park-diller-scofidio-renfro-landscape-design/593620/
Pearsall, H. (2010). From brown to green? Assessing social vulnerability to environmental gentrification in New York City. Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy, 28, 872e886.
Rigolon, A., & Christensen, J. (2019). Greening without gentrification: Learning from parks-related anti-displacement strategies nationwide. UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. Available at: https://www.ioes.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/Parks-Related-Anti-Displacement-Strategies-report-with-appendix.pdf
Rigolon, A., & Németh, J. (2018). “We're not in the business of housing:” Environmental gentrification and the nonprofitization of green infrastructure projects. Cities, 81, 71-80.
Slater, Tom. (2017) “Clarifying Neil Smith’s Rent Gap Theory of Gentrification.” Tracce Urbane. Rivista Italiana Transdisciplinare di Studi Urbani 1(1).