Toward Praxis: How a Community Coalition Pushed for Housing Equity and Environmental Justice
Public Health Liberation Board member Rhonda Hamilton is a talented and highly recognizable community leader in Washington, DC. She has been an elected neighborhood-level public official for more than a decade and Resident Council President of the Syphax Apartments, a public housing community. She is also an award-winning environmental advocate, soon to be recognized in a Smithsonian Museum exhibit among other women activists. As part of that role, she formed the Near Buzzard Point Resilient Action Committee (NeRAC) in 2018 with community members and academic researchers. When the city council in Washington, DC began to revise its Comprehensive Plan, she led NeRAC’s effort to provide public comment on the harm that communities of color have incurred. The city's Comprehensive Plan - the single most important document for neighborhood planning and development. The Comprehensive Plan is the most important planning document. It establishes guiding principles and policies on twelve elements including housing, economic development, community services, and recreation. It tends to approve development into certain low-income neighborhoods while protecting affluent areas such as Ward 3 from greater density. While the rest of the city is rapidly increasing in density, affluent areas largely remained confined to single family housing.
The coalition was made up of public housing community leaders and residents, a public health educator, non-profit partners, environmental scientists, and a former EPA administrator. PHL Board member Patricia Bishop and PHL Director Christopher Williams participated. They formed two work groups and met over a series of weeks. The Environmental work group discussed the persistent environmental racism near public housing in Southwest and called on the city to de-industrialize the area with proposed text revisions. The Housing work group criticized the city’s policies that catalyzed gentrification and Black displacement and provided text recommendations to further racial and environmental equity.
With the support of other citywide coalitions, the city made progress on several fronts that concerned NeRAC, including removing some industrial activity in Buzzard Point, greater focus on racial equity in city planning, and requiring racial impact assessments.
Excerpt of NeRAC’s Public Comments on Bill 23-736, the “Comprehensive Plan Amendment Act of 2020”
“Our community group, Concerned Residents & Friends for Better Air Quality and Environmental Justice for Buzzard Point & the Old Southwest Community, appreciates this opportunity to comment on the 2020 Comprehensive Plan Amendments. Our public comments will focus on our shared concerns about the Comp Plan amendments and remedies to injustices that our community is currently experiencing. For over a decade we have experienced non-stop construction in Buzzard Point. Many residents feel like prisoners in our own homes. We wake up to the sound of hammers banging, power drills and soldering irons. We can't open my windows because of clouds of dust and engine exhaust fumes from concrete mixing plants and idling construction vehicles. Sometimes it smells like something is burning. Traffic is horrific with the construction vehicles and the normal everyday traffic. After the workers go home, residents open windows and turn on air filter machines and the indicators go directly to red. This indicates particulate air pollution. Rodents are running through our yards because of the digging of the ground. Parking is impossible. If we leave to go anywhere when we come back we can't even find a space to unload our groceries. The construction workers come to work early to commandeer the residential parking spaces. High rise buildings and hotel projects are a constant, with our homes being sandwiched in between. Over time, some families have been forced out of their homes. The community is feeling suffocated and disenfranchised. Whenever plans are made, we as a community are the last to be notified. Developers and the city ask our opinion. They give the impression that residents have a voice. But in reality the project is already a done deal when it is presented to the neighborhood. They make presentations of proposed projects, and the neighborhood rejects them, but they get approved anyway. We have no say in these projects but we are the people that are affected. The Comprehensive Plan needs to address these kinds of injustices. Our group has prepared written comments with specific concerns and recommendations on the Environmental Protection Element and the Housing Element below.”
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