The Mess In Texas (Houston: We Have a Recycling Problem)

The New York Times reports that of the nation’s 30 largest cities, Houston, the fourth largest city behind New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago, comes in dead last in recycling, turning over a shameful 2.6 percent of its total waste. The Times cites a study conducted this year by my new favorite news source, Waste News, that puts New York City—roughly four times the size of Houston—at the top of the big city recycling list with a 34 percent ranking.

The Times report goes on to say:

But city officials say real progress will be hard to come by. Landfill costs here are cheap. The citys sprawling, no-zoning layout makes collection expensive, and there is little public support for the kind of effort it takes to sort glass, paper and plastics. And there appears to be even less for placing fees on excess trash.

Houston Mayor Bill White appears to pride the his townsfolk’s rejection of the recycling “trend.”

We have an independent streak that rebels against mandates or anything that seems trendy or hyped up. Houstonians are skeptical of anything that appears to be oversold or exaggerated.

And Mayor White supports increased recycling efforts! Of course, there’s hope. White says that Houstonians are amenable to change: “Houstonians can change, and change fast. Thanks for the comforting words, Mr. Mayor.

But how fast is fast? (Vice) President Al Gore’s challenge of achieving 100 percent domestic clean energy within 10 years is visionary, and necessary. The planet has been backed into an eco-corner.

But a comprehensive recycling plan is not only not visionary, it’s doable, and so old school that it’s shocking the city has lagged so far behind. The fact that Houston has so shirked its responsibilities when it comes to responsible waste collection is far more ethically unsound than Ted Stevens’ taking feng shui advice from oil companies.

The Times quotes a local chef who was turned away from a city recycling depot. Why? She had too much recycling material!

They said my truck was too full. There are cultures that just dont get it, and, unfortunately, Houston is one of them.

Recycling is the absolute least we can do as a society in resource reduction for sustainable living. The eco-mantra “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” is not crafted for cadence, rather, its words are listed in order of importance.

Houston’s recycling rates are appalling because the complexities of the planet’s environmental strife are so great, that recycling, the low-rent, feel-good, easiest possible way to take part in the environmental movement, should be rote for big city governments. You don’t need a ten-gallon hat’s worth of eco-knowledge to know that.

We now know that there is a 75 percent chance that within five years the entire ice cap will completely disappear during the summer months, increasing the melting pressure on Greenland. Hold this up next to the fact that of Houston’s 340,000 households, fewer than half have recycling bins, with roughly 25,000 households on the waiting list for bins and you see that we must urge our local governments and look at the big and small pictures, including the implementation of regular curbside programs that handle recycling.

According to the EPA, in 1999, recycling and composting activities kept about 64 million tons of material from ending up in landfills and incinerators. The country’s current recycling rate, about 32.5 percent, has doubled over the past 15 years.

Further, only one curbside recycling program existed nationwide 20 years ago, but by 2006, about 8,660 curbside programs had sprouted up across the nation. As of 2005, about 500 materials recovery facilities had been established to process the collected materials.

So where’s Houston? With only a fraction of the households of New York City: 162,000 as compared to NYC’s 3.2 million, Houston’s program is not mandatory, as opposed to New York’s mandated program. Also, just a detail of note, all of New York’s city vehicles that hand recycling operate off alternative fuels. Houston’s do not.

All throughout New Jersey, smaller towns are working with consultants in finding ways to devise a sustainability plan conserve energy, reduce carbon footprint, and subsequently save money in the long term by way of resource reduction. Highland Park, Princeton, Montclair are just to name a few. And they are light years beyond recycling, conducting green community audits, and addressing transportation needs to reduce car traffic and pollution.

Governments need to be pressured to devise plans that have long-term environmental and financial benefits, and Houston, thanks to the Waste News, appears to have a long, long way to go.

By the way, the Times reports that Houston cannot afford more recycling bins for residents who don’t have one. Natch.

In New Jersey’s Hub City, A Push to Change Government Gets Big Government Resistance

Editor's note: This piece was originally posted by the author at the blog site, www.rooflines.org

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In the 1970s, New Brunswick, NJ was struggling.

Like other New Jersey cities experiencing the hangover of race riots of the 1960s, the schools were in decline, white flight began to set in, and all of a sudden, the Hub City, as it’s called, that was home to the world headquarters of pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson and Rutgers University was in serious trouble.

But there had always been hope. In the summer of 1967, as peace was shattered throughout cities in the Garden State, New Brunswick held fast, no blood was shed, and the peace was preserved. Then-mayor Patricia Sheehan, a 33-year-old widow and mother of three actually went out on patrol with the police, appeared with local clergy, and made it known—in person—that whatever happened in New Brunswick, her incumbency, part of a so-called “New Five” ousting 27 years of a previous administration, would watch over the city.

That resilience and sense of hope was instilled in the residents, and in 1975, New Brunswick Tomorrow, a partnership of public and private sectors, was organized. The following year, The New Brunswick Development Corporation, a private, non-profit organization designed to serve as New Brunswick Tomorrow’s implementation partner for economic development (and is still the city’s ostensible redevelopment arm), was created, and a city was on the move again.

Johnson & Johnson announced it would stay in New Brunswick in 1978, housing its headquarters in an I.M. Pei-designed campus, near the Rutgers University campus in a run down segment of the downtown.

While it can be argued that, once upon a time, concerned residents needed needed bold, do-it-itself government initiative to revive the city, the residents, as is the case in any locality, have always been the lifeblood, though city government did not always reflect that. There had already been a problem with the extreme transience of this community of 50,000 residents, whose tens of thousands of students passed through with few staying to raise their families in the city, and the changing immigrant population—for example, a once Hungarian neighborhood is now a vibrant Hispanic area—is changing the face of the city.

New Brunswick, being in the geographic center of the state, was, for a long time, at the center of New Jersey’s infamous corrupt Democratic Machine. Mayor John Lynch, who served as mayor from 1979 to 1991 and is the immediate predecessor of the current Mayor James Cahill, is currently serving a three-year jail term immediately preceding the current mayor.

To be sure, not all are corrupt, but there are so many tributaries that link New Brunswick government to the larger state Democratic Machine (the municipal attorney, William Hamilton, a junior grade Navy lieutenant before receiving his JD from Georgetown in the early sixties, and an overall decent man, was briefly the Speaker of the State Assembly in the 1970s) that it could take up an entirely separate article.

But back to Mayor Sheehan, who marched with police under the threat of race riots in the 1960s. Her daughter, Elizabeth “Betsy” Sheehan Garlatti, is currently the New Brunswick City Council president. Garlatti, the director of Finance & Research at the New Jersey Commission on Higher Education, was appointed—as is often the case in machine politics—to a vacant city council seat in 2004 and has since won reelection by way of the 3,000 or so party insiders and municipal employees who actually vote in New Brunswick.

Because the Democratic Party has effectively shut out the primary process, various residents have run hopeful campaigns on an independent ticket, but have always failed miserably. Forget about Republicans. They hardly exist here.

One way Council has been able to hold power is by way of the at-large Council system that was established in the 1970s. New Brunswick is divided into wards, but none has direct ward representation.

This is nothing new, of course, in so many local governments, but a recent grass-roots push to change that government structure has begun to garner some attention.

A group, Empower Our Neighborhoods, last month filed a petition with the city clerk’s office to advocate for a ballot question that would change the current form of municipal government from an at-large system to a ward-based system, as well as increasing the number of seats on Council from five to eight.

But as is the case in cities where government is threatened, on July 2, the New Brunswick City Council passed a counteracting ordinance to push the citizens’ initiative off the ballot, and replacing it with a Council-crafted initiative that calls for creating a study that would examine the need to change government.

Knowing that they have at least 3,000 votes, and that Rutgers University students rarely vote, Council would entertain this question, it would fail, and Council could claim that it reached out to the community, and the community decided that it did not want to change government.

A legal battle could ensue that would determine whether the community or the City Council had first initiated a legal proceeding on that ballot question, but experts at Rutgers’ Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy appear to think Empower Our Neighborhoods is in the right.

Attending a New Brunswick City Council meeting is interesting. Based on what you’ve just read, you might think this is a contemptuous lot, but it’s not. They are good people who will speak to you after meetings, but seem averse to criticism, particularly when they stock Council chambers with municipal employees to attend the public meetings. At least two are dual office holders (Council Vice President Joseph V. Egan is a long-time state Assemblyman and Blanquita Valenti serves on the county governing body), and one, the aforementioned Garlatti, has bloodlines in city government.

All but one were born and raised in New Brunswick, and the one that wasn’t—Valenti—came to New Brunswick in 1956 from Puerto Rico and in 1971 became the first Hispanic appointed to the New Brunswick Board of Education.

These are community folks, no doubt about it, and their commitment to the city was never in doubt (though there are plenty of people who make strong cases to the contrary). This is not evil empire stuff: it’s simply a case of a city government that has apparently lost its way, forgetting about the fundamentals that make a city tick, like when Garlatti, and incumbents Jimmie Cook and Robert Recine cited scheduling conflicts for not being able to participate in a pre-primary forum co-sponsored by Empower Our Neighborhoods and the local NAACP chapter. New Brunswick has undergone an unbelievable downtown renaissance in the past 10 years, with an arts, culture, and culinary scene that is unparalleled in the state, but the schools still suffer (it’s an Abbott district), the residential neighborhoods near town are largely unsuitable for quiet, secure family living because of the rampant off-campus student housing situation. Absentee landlords let their properties deteriorate, broken glass, drug dealing, and homeless in neighborhood parks is the norm. Again, not surprising for so many cities, as isn’t the government’s resistance to this grass-roots effort, if not frustrating—but that doesn’t make it acceptable. If the folks at Empower win this battle, it would go to show that a once-impenetrable system can be changed, and that, just like Mayor Sheehan displayed during her courageous outreach efforts in the 1960s, residents are indeed the lifeblood of any locality.

It’s an Affordable Housing Victory, But How Do We Win Over the Towns?

Let's get one thing clear: at least in New Jersey, we're _having_ the affordable-housing-as-mandate discussion. The fact that so many taxpayers, elected officials, and housing advocates in the Garden State are committed to implementing some sort of affordable housing set-aside as development and jobs increase is a good thing.

That said, it's time to realize that a uniform housing rule might not be the way to go.

On Thursday, Gov. Jon Corzine "signed into law":http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2008/07/gov_jon_corzine_signed_legisla.html legislation that is being touted by proponents of the bill as a major step forward in ensuring that representation from all income brackets can be part of the same community.

In addition to creating an affordable housing trust fund, the new law also eliminates RCAs, or Regional Contribution Agreements, which are typically used by wealthier localities who send their affordable-housing requirements by way of a financial contribution, to, most often, a nearby poorer community. Naturally, critics of RCAs claim that all towns, not just rich ones, have moral obligations to supply affordable housing within their borders.

The RCA elimination is a hallmark of the incumbency of Democratic Assembly Speaker Joseph J. Roberts Jr., and the bill signing took place in Mount Laurel Township -- the namesake of the original landmark lawsuit that resulted in a State Supreme Court ruling requiring all towns to provide affordable housing. What made the event all the more symbolic was that Corzine & Co. brandished their signing pens at the Ethel Lawrence Homes, named after one of Mount Laurel's original litigants.

In order to finance affordable housing, the bill also mandates a 2.5 percent commercial developer fee that is gauged by the value of new construction. The fee is expected to raise about $80 million per year and has the support of the New Jersey Builders Association, a trade association. The group has also endorsed Corzine's plan to increase affordable housing and apartments by 100,000 units by 2018.

At the bill signing, Roberts touted the amendments:

bq. New Jersey's affordable housing laws have failed to live up to the promise of providing home for low- and moderate-income residents while having the insidious side effect of concentrating poverty in our inner cities. [T]he state's almost barren affordable housing landscape from one of lost opportunities to one of hope and promise for thousands of families.

As Rooflines contributor "John Atlas writes":http://www.rooflines.org/1032/new_jersey_regional_coalition_wins_affordable_housing_victory, RCAs have commonly been charged with concentrating poverty in the inner city and with perpetuating segregation. This is mostly indisputable, but towns are still trying to wrap their brains around the new bill. In New Jersey, where home rule is, sadly, still the rule, some localities are balking.

New Jersey's Council on Affordable Housing, or COAH, an arm of the State Department of Community Affairs in June enacted its latest regulations as part of the ongoing Mount Laurel agreement. In those regulations, developers must provide one affordable unit for every four market-rate units built. Further, for commercial development, one affordable unit must be built for every 16 new jobs created by commercial development.

Towns notwithstanding, academic institutions and hospitals are not very pleased with the latter regulation.

But by way of the New Jersey State League of Municipalities, "161 towns have thus far contributed more than $80,000 to help finance a legal challenge":http://www.nj.com/news/ledger/jersey/index.ssf?/base/news-11/121618294437120.xml&coll=1 against COAH's rules.

The challenge is not directly related to the bill Corzine signed last week, but it does point to a fundamental difference in philosophy between the Legislature and more than 20 percent of the state's 566 (or 567 depending on who's counting) municipalities. Opponents of the latest affordable-housing rules worry that costs associated with housing requirements would be levied upon the taxpayer. A League lawyer told _The Star-Ledger_ that COAH's calculations were "fatally flawed," and that they should be "thrown out," citing worries that towns would be forced to pay for affordable housing. Under the regulations, towns would have to make sure developers comply.

Moreover, there is the matter of workforce housing. If these mandates were only for workforce housing, that would be a different story, but the affordable housing law requires towns to market affordable housing affirmatively -- meaning _anyone_ who qualifies is eligible for the housing -- not just people who work or have lived in the town for a generation -- but also people who qualify from elsewhere. We should be meeting our local needs first, and then market housing affirmatively. Have a waiting list, have a local town preference, and then move forward.

Now what about ethnic and racial diversity? It's immensely important, but poorer people -- no matter the ethnicity -- who work within the community should have the preference for local affordable housing. It makes sense environmentally, it makes sound transportation sense, it makes sound smart growth sense.

While the League's complaint will not be heard until the fall, I maintain that the state legislators and other proponents of COAH and the recent Corzine bill should travel the state, recognizing these concerns, while explaining the vast social and long-term economic benefit of housing low-income and working-class residents close to where they work.

Just like Corzine and Roberts held a symbolic bill-signing in Mount Laurel to make clear the importance of the housing bill, they need to, at the very least, make clear why this is important for residents who worry -- like the blue-collar workers who can't afford to live near their places of employment -- that they too will be taxed out of their neighborhoods.