Overview
Deputy Public Advocate Kashif Hussain and Steve Fox pose with youth activists in Albany capitol building. Many raise fists and hold signs that read, 'NYC Needs Climate Justice. Fund it now!'
The Infrastructure and Environmental Justice Unit is responsible for assessing the state of our infrastructure within New York City, as well as the impacts of local policy on the environment in the city and beyond. Some topics we have worked on include power outages, helping our city reduce its carbon footprint, removing toxic chemicals from our environment and the food we eat, addressing traffic violence, calling for for safe streets and protected bike lanes, advocating for better bus redesigns and TLC related issues, and fighting against environmental racism.
What Have We Done?
As our city was hit by a worldwide pandemic this past year, our office strived to ensure our city’s most vulnerable were not overlooked, and that our city had what it needed to keep moving forward, all while making progress on reaching our city and state’s bold climate goals.
While the city was shutting down, we went virtual, managing a series called Frontline Fridays, which elevated the voices and needs of those vital workers who kept the city going, from emergency room nurses, to MTA transit workers, to the retail workers that kept us fed.
Though most of us were not able to go to work, the real estate industry continued to push for their agenda, but we kept the pressure on to ensure our city was built for the needs of the people. We successfully fought against the Industry City rezoning in favor of redeveloping the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal, which will bring thousands of good green offshore wind jobs to Brooklyn for years to come.
We also kept up the fight against fossil fuel expansion in New York, rallying against the North Brooklyn Pipeline, releasing a report on democratising our grid through public power, and advocating for tighter restrictions on the fracked gas industry.
We co-released a paper with Safer Chemicals Healthy Families on how toxic PFAS chemicals were contaminating our city’s food, and worked successfully to pass a ban on these forever chemicals from food packaging.