Mapping Environmental Justice in NYC with Paul Lozito, AICP

Welcome to Critical Conversations in Transportation Planning, where we're bringing you a series of interviews with pioneers and industry leaders who are offering insights into the most challenging issues facing our field. This podcast is produced by the American Planning Association's Transportation Planning Division. TPD connects planners working across all transportation modes to share innovation, foster collaboration, and advocate for sustainable mobility solutions.

[00:33] - Divya Gandhi

I'm Divya Gandhi, a transportation planner and a member of the Transportation Planning Division Board.

[00:40] - Em Hall

And I'm Dr. Em Hall, an urban planning consultant and member of the TPD Board of Directors. In this episode, we speak with Paul Onyx Lozito, deputy executive director of the NYC Mayor's Office of Climate and Environmental Justice and the president of the American Planning Association's New York Metro chapter. We really enjoyed this conversation. Let's get right into it.

And let's start, Paul, tell us a little bit about yourself, your background in planning or other background and what you do now in your current role.

[01:16] - Paul Lozito, AICP

Thank you so much. I'm excited to be here. So as you said, I'm the deputy executive director for the mayor's office of climate. I also happen to be president of the American Planning Association for the New York Metropolitan Chapter. I got into planning actually when I about turned 17 years old. I happened to be on a college search in Oregon, and I was walking down Burnside Avenue, which is the main street, and I saw a shield that said U.S. Route 30. And I lived on U.S. Route 30 in southern New Jersey, and I was like, this is strange, why would I see the same street sign as back at home? And then I went into a library and then I saw how the U.S. highway system was set up. And I immediately realized, as someone who'd always loved geography and maps, there are people who manage these systems. 

And so that led me to go to the Blaustein School at Rutgers undergrad and then Hunter College for my master's degree. And what ultimately ended up happening was after I graduated with my master's degree, I went into disaster recovery. So the Sandy recovery for New York State, primarily on Long Island. And so that morphed into overseeing housing recovery programs, the city's buyout program on Staten Island, where we acquired over 620 properties, demolished them, and restored that land to open space. Construction of a number of resilience projects, the Living Breakwaters. And ultimately, after my tenure at the Governor's Office of Storm Recovery, I came to the Mayor's Office of Climate to really work on how to help us adapt to a changing climate in the future.

And so my job there is to work with a team that oversees the New York City Panel or works with the New York City Panel on Climate Change, which does our climate projections from 2050 through 2100, then develop action plans to address the risks identified by the New York City Panel on Climate Change and our environmental justice report that was put out last year. And then ultimately, once we plan for those actions that address the issues that we've identified in the data, work with our constellation of agency partners to address or to build their capacity to meet the goals and the recommendations.

[03:52] - Em Hall

The report you mentioned or referenced, that's the EJNYC, New York's Environmental Justice NYC report, is that right?

[03:58] - Paul Lozito, AICP

Yes. 

[03:59] - Em Hall

And so that has been described as the first comprehensive citywide study of environmental inequity of its kind. So it's a first of its kind. What had to happen institutionally, politically, organizationally to produce something like that?

[04:15] - Paul Lozito, AICP

Well, it's interesting because — it's almost as if you want to ask, where do you want to start? So where does environmental justice start? It starts with what caused the issues in those communities and who plays a role. And so for generations and, and quite frankly, centuries, there are communities of haves and communities of have-nots. And that has played out over a course of a period of time amongst a number of professions, including urban planning.

And so it's looking at the issues promulgating on those communities that — you know, a reference point people like to point to is redlining. One really important reference point for environmental justice near the start of what people call the modern environmental justice movement is there was a protest against a landfill in Warren County, North Carolina. It was a polluting landfill for really significant toxins that was to be sited there. And that protest ultimately informed a United Church of Christ report called Toxic Waste and Race in the United States in 1987. And the central premise of that report was communities like Warren County, Black and brown communities, often saw these sitings. Are those communities unlucky or is this part of a system? And the report's conclusions were that it is in fact a system. It's a systemic issue where in certain communities we are siting polluting facilities or facilities that ultimately are deleterious towards the overall quality of life. And this leads to political momentum that culminates in an executive order from the Clinton administration in 1994 to talk about means and methods to address those issues.

How this plays out in New York City, which is more germane to the EJNYC report and development process, is that we had and have a robust environmental justice — a constellation of environmental justice advocates. We have the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance. We have WE ACT. We have other community partners. Shout out to my partners at South Bronx Unite.

And what early on those environmental justice advocates did in the '80s and '90s where there was a siting of a wastewater recovery facility, otherwise called a wastewater treatment plant in some parlances, in West Harlem. And the community really protested how the state and the city were going to site that facility. And ultimately that culminated in the siting of a facility but with amenities. So that wastewater treatment plant is capped with Riverbank State Park, which has a pool, a lot of public facilities, is built out into the water. And so it really took something that was historically seen as an unwanted facility within the community and made it into a community benefit. 

Those same partners continued — or I'm sorry, those same advocacy groups continue to this day, and they advocated for the passage of Local Laws 60 and 64 of 2017, which obligated the City of New York, and it's our pleasure, in fact, to develop this EJNYC report, which is a brisk 420 pages. [laughs] But also, as a companion to be transparent and accessible, publish our EJNYC mapping tool, which is online, which means that you can click down to the neighborhood, what your issue is across over 115 data layers.

And in addition to that, it wasn't just about really putting together, as part of the EJNYC report, the modeling for why certain communities are haves and have-nots, ranging from disparity in access to tree canopy, disparity in access to open space, exposure to air pollution, exposure to — and where that stems from. In addition to doing the methodology so that people had concrete and rigorous fact-based substance, we developed the report and the mapping tool as a means to really help the community be able to defensively tell to policymakers in an academically rigorous way the issues in their community. Because unfortunately, to this point, their lived experience needed that support in order for them to make a more robust case to take the actions in order to solve the issues in their community. 

When we developed the EJNYC report, we also were obligated to develop a plan. And so we've been going through the issues in the report and working with our Environmental Justice Advisory Board, which includes a number of environmental justice advocates because it's important for the community to inform our process. With an interagency working group of over 20 city agency partners or city agencies to really create recommendations and actions to resolve those issues of environmental justice outlined in each EJNYC report.

[09:53] - Em Hall

Yeah, and it sounds like the report in some way is validation of that lived experience in a way that was maybe not there before, and it helps you develop those plans. And I'm wondering, on the other side of that, were there any really big surprises that came out of this, positive or negative? But I mean, a lot of the issues you discussed, folks would say, well, of course that's the case, right? Or of course, blah, blah, blah. But anything jump out from those 420 pages where you're like, an aha moment, or just a real moment of surprise at something that came out?

[10:25] - Paul Lozito, AICP

I think two key deliverables that come to mind, among many — First is cumulative impact. And so it's really appreciating the order of magnitude of dealing with issues of lack of access to resources, air quality, extreme heat, flood vulnerability.

[10:48] - Em Hall

It is all of it.

[10:48] - Paul Lozito, AICP

In a particular neighborhood. So it's not as if one neighborhood is environmental justice because of an air quality issue. It's because of the accumulation of impacts and how that plays out across communities. And it's weighed differently. So some communities are more heat vulnerable, some communities are more flood vulnerable. Setted on top of that are a number of other different issues. And so being able to synthesize that citywide also helps us as we're calibrating what strategies work for each neighborhood.

And another benefit of the EJNYC report that didn't exist before was that we — I started to look at flood vulnerability. And so it's a flood-prone area, and then on top of that, looking at social vulnerability of those New Yorkers who need to endure — it could be persistent flood risk on a daily basis, or it could be their ability to recover from a shock event.

[11:43] - Em Hall

That's very interesting.

[11:46] - Divya Gandhi

Yeah. Wow. Also, Paul, you've described, and you know, as you've described this report and all the work that went into it, you've described environmental justice as something that has been, of course, rooted in histories of inequity from redlining to the concentration of harmful facilities in communities that have long been treated like you define them, the have-nots. And we've also seen, going back to early EJ advocacy in places like West Harlem, like you just highlighted, how communities have pushed back, reshaped outcomes into tangible benefits.

So given that context, I'm curious, you've emphasized storytelling over semantics as central to EJ work. What does storytelling actually look like in practice when you're helping a community understand what an EJ designation means for their neighborhood, their quality of life, and their agency in shaping outcomes?

[12:45] - Paul Lozito, AICP

That's a great question. We as planners, we as policymakers often use jargon, and jargon does not translate. So if I say we have a climate issue in a community, a person who's not informed on the topic, maybe an expert in something else, just wanted to go about their day-to-day lives, they are going to understand some, maybe some of what I'm talking about. Maybe they'll be interested, maybe they won't.

But if instead you have the conversation, hey, New York City today has 17 days a year that's over 90 degrees, and by 2050 that's looking to double or triple. You catch people's attention. And then on top of that, if you say, hey, in our neighborhood, my neighborhood on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, because of impervious surfaces, because of the amounts of asphalt, generally 90 degrees in Central Park means it's 110 in my neighborhood. So our neighborhood's looking at 110 degrees, in the range of 38 to 60 days a year by 2050 for your children. People's ears perk up and then you start to have a different conversation about what are you going — what should we do about that? 

And that changes the frame of the conversations around shading from trees, making sure to find tactical ways to expand open space. How do we get more air conditioners into more bedrooms, which is the biggest climate killer in New York City? We have 580 New Yorkers die a year of heat death, and of which the vast majority of those are Black and brown New Yorkers and one of the key identifiers, roughly about around 80 percent of those are folks that don't have air conditioning in their homes.

[14:48] - Divya Gandhi

Wow.

[14:49] - Em Hall

I think it's hard to imagine some of these scenarios if you've never experienced them. And I think flooding in particular is devastating, but once you've experienced it, especially, it can be hard to understand, I think, the power of water sometimes. And so, there is a city voluntary buyout program for flood-vulnerable properties that's been described as the first of its kind for a major U.S. city. And talk to us a little bit about how this is possible at scale and maybe some of the challenges inherent to that. But it sounds like the flood mitigation and just flooding in general has become an extremely important issue to the EJ work and the planning work in general.

[15:32] - Paul Lozito, AICP

I'm glad you asked about Resilient Acquisitions. Resilient Acquisitions is a concurrent effort that was led by my office. When I came to this position a couple years ago, I was tasked with developing Resilient Acquisitions. And so Resilient Acquisitions is intended to be, again, the first sort of blue-sky ongoing buyout program in New York City.

We had a buyout program after Superstorm Sandy that was with federal resources, that's the over 600 properties on Staten Island I talked about that we acquired, and the state acquired those properties. New York City acquired some tactical properties as well. But the goal of Resilient Acquisitions is that there would be a standing program available over the course of a period of time. We know from the New York City Panel on Climate Change that our sea levels are rising, and we know that there may be some opportunities, some instances in New York City where it is best to acquire a property because there is no readily available infrastructure solution. And so the program's designed to be available in blue skies and gray skies.

[16:44] - Em Hall

Explain that to me.

[16:45] - Paul Lozito, AICP

So blue skies being that we today are sitting around a table and we know that there are some flood-prone areas, and we've consulted with our New York City agency partners and we've considered the thoughts and concerns of the community, and we've detected that there are some number of homes in a community that perhaps need to be acquired because there's no infrastructural solution. And so actively going to the community, identifying that there's the need for a buyout in this community, and acquiring those homes before the flood — before the shock event happens, the flooding.

[17:27] - Em Hall

Right. So it's like, literally, it's a nice day, but we're telling you that there may be a big problem down the road and we want to talk to you about what that looks like.

[17:35] - Paul Lozito, AICP

Let's protect your family now as opposed to have you endure a flood event and use that as the rationale to buy the property.

[17:40] - Em Hall

Yeah. Okay. So that's your blue sky. And then I can imagine what the gray sky looks like.

[17:44] - Paul Lozito, AICP

Gray sky is what we saw after Sandy. Massive flood event, loss of property. Unfortunately, in most instances, loss of some life.

[17:52] - Em Hall

Right.

[17:55] - Paul Lozito, AICP

And that's what we want to avoid, is people being exposed to risks to their lives.

[18:01] - Em Hall

Right.

[18:01] - Divya Gandhi

Exactly.

[18:03] - Paul Lozito, AICP

And so how Resilient Acquisitions plays out as it relates to environmental justice is that we bake in environmental justice into all of the work of our office. It's baked into Resilient Acquisitions, it's baked into the Urban Forest Plan. It's going to be baked into — it's baked into the next version of our comprehensive climate plan that's coming out next year. That's going to consider adaptation, energy, and sustainability. It's the first time New York City's doing that all together. We've previously looked at those plans separately.

And so how this plays out, where we inform environmental justice into our planning effort for resilient acquisitions, was that the first thing that we did was we consulted with communities across the city about their experience. We worked with our partners at Rebuild by Design to convene a consortium called Rainproof. We established working groups that were co-led by a city government employee and by a nonprofit partner. And through that convening, we spent about roughly a year really talking to local communities about how we should develop a blue sky buyout program that was equitable.

And so ultimately Rainproof published recommendations to us that define that the buyout program should be transparent, equitable, and also really factor for the needs of tenants, which is not always the first priority when you're talking about an acquisition of a property.

[19:46] - Em Hall

How are those conversations going? I'm assuming you're not the one directly having them, although maybe you are, but how do you even think about the approach of literally going to somebody's door and saying, we'd like you to not live here anymore in your best interest? I'm being a bit facetious, but you can imagine that it's a really tough conversation to deliver and have. So how do you prepare people for that? What's that look like?

[20:11] - Paul Lozito, AICP

That's a great question. I'm not directly going to doors, although in my role at the Governor's Office of Storm Recovery, I was close to the team that was doing that. Today, what we're doing with Resilient Acquisitions is we're piloting in our first community. In Brooklyn, it's called the Jewel Streets. And so we are working closely with community leaders there to talk to that community about how to address flood risk as a whole in the community, which includes targeted buyouts. And so the community is well aware that there may be a buyout — that there is a buyout opportunity. They're also aware of other infrastructure projects that the city is doing in the area that are intended to mitigate flood risk.

One thing I will say to you and this has been pretty common in most buyouts I've worked on in the city and also outside of New York City. Those communities are seeing the impacts of climate change every day. In the Jewel Streets, it'll rain and the puddles won't go away for weeks. People are having a hard time getting out of their driveway. In a blue sky. And so the idea of a buyout to them or the acquisition of their home is not outside of the realm of possibility.

So it's — the conversations are a little bit easier to have because we're both standing on a, you know, there's a photo of us all standing on a street with a homeowner. The homeowner can't cross the street from their home to have a conversation with us because there's a massive puddle between us. Eventually, you know, there's a circuitous way of walking around and we all get to have the conversation. But that's what we're seeing in that neighborhood as we approach having conversations about buyouts in that community.

[22:02] - Em Hall

Got it. Piloting it first. It makes a lot of sense. 

[22:06] - Divya Gandhi

I wanted to really build on something that you briefly mentioned here, Paul, about NYC's urban forest plan. And, you know, when you think about solutions like the tree canopy, shading, expanding open spaces, how do you and your office, how do you make sure that those investments actually reach the same have-not communities that we were just talking about that often bear, really are bearing the brunt of those heat impacts that you mentioned as well? So, yeah, tell us a little bit about the plan.

[22:35] - Paul Lozito, AICP

Happy to talk about trees. So the urban forest plan that was just published last Tuesday, just ahead of Earth Day, it focuses on three — the first thing that the plan does is it does an analysis of have and have-not neighborhoods. And it tells you that, you know, there are some environmental justice neighborhoods that have 6 percent tree canopy where the citywide average at this point is 23.4 percent. But as a whole, environmental justice communities have about a 19 percent average. So you see the disparity in the data.

So the first thing the plan does is it tells you about the data. It's always important, we feel like, at first to tell you why we want to recommend to do something, what problem we're trying to solve for. And then through the recommendations, the over 40 recommendations fall into three different cohorts. Preserve tree canopy. We know that 90 percent of our new shade comes from existing trees, so take care of the trees you have. At least in New York City, I can't speak to elsewhere. And then there's plant new trees wherever practical and find new opportunities to plant new trees. And then third is cultivating an ecosystem of stewards. 

So the urban forest definition is the leaves, the branches, the trees themselves, and the community that supports them. You know, the urban wild includes the humans. And so how that breaks down with environmental justice is when it comes to tree preservation, it's about how do we figure out tactical strategies to train more members of a community to be informed about what it looks like to take care of trees? What's that education look like? What does it look like to train more folks, environmental justice communities, to be citizen pruners? What does it look like to make sure that those trees get more nutrients or the necessary watering over the course of the time? So that's one element of tree preservation.

In the second category, which would be tree planting, we work closely with the Parks Department, who focuses on planting in areas where there's a tremendous amount of extreme heat, which often aligns with areas that have been underserved in the past. And through those targeted plantings, we are trying to get at the disparity of the number of trees, the whole number of trees between have and have-not communities.

And then the last being cultivating the ecosystem. There's a focus we have on the 34 percent of property owners in New York City to plant more on their in their yards and on their campuses. In an environmental justice community, we're thinking about how to break down those barriers. So, you know, in some communities we ask you to plant a tree. You might be able to just go out and buy a tree from wherever. And in other communities you may not have the right reference points. You may need to know that you need to buy soil, you may need certain education. In addition to that, you actually might just need a tree, and it's, how do we just get you a tree if you can't afford a tree? How do we get soil, and in addition to that, the necessary education around watering the tree in its early life? 

[26:01] - Em Hall

Sometimes you just need a tree. That's my takeaway. You just need a tree. It's a good one.

[26:07] - Divya Gandhi

Yeah, it's really powerful to see how the urban forest plan is tying data into action, from of course protecting existing trees and targeting planting trees in underserved areas, and also building all the community stewardship that is being led. So, building on that, what does it take to really ensure that these trees are actually sustained long-term and not just planted? Especially in communities that are disinvested. Underinvested.

[26:42] - Paul Lozito, AICP

That's a great question. There are several different ways to answer that question, but I'll give you one, which is first, follow best practices. So we know our Parks Department has the best practices in the city, and so we know that following their process, they have the highest success rate amongst agencies and probably amongst private properties, but we don't have any measure of that. And so making sure people are informed of the Parks Department's planting practices, and to the extent practical, having all of the city agencies follow Parks' process. Part of that process also includes once you plant a tree and you plant it with a high enough quality soil, you water that tree for its young life until it's fully established. And so once you do that, then the tree's much more likely to be viable over time.

[27:32] - Divya Gandhi

That's amazing. Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. It also is very, very evident, and with so many innovations that are being piloted in New York, led very much by your department from the city or the planning department, for a city or planning department that is without New York City's resources or scale, what are some transferable principles that you think can be applied, thinking about it from the perspective of our audience, which is close to 5,000 transportation planners. What would you tell a planner in Detroit or in Denver or in rural Maine who wants to do this work and innovate at the rate and the scale that you're really able to innovate and lead?

[28:22] - Paul Lozito, AICP

That's a good question. You know, honestly, I think most of the concepts are transferable. So, know the story of your community, and most planners do. Once you know the story of your community and you — and most planners that I know are public servants, and obviously through our code of ethics want to treat our communities equitably. So to the extent that you detect in your community that some areas have less access to resources as others, understanding how you might be able to accommodate for that and what that might look like based on the resources you have. And so first it starts with knowing the history and having the right ethos and the approach to your work as early as possible. 

Then from there, looking at what data is available to you that helps justify why you might take a certain action. So it's not just an assumption, it's, well, I know that neighborhood is hotter, I know that neighborhood has more impervious surfaces. So maybe depaving might decrease the urban heat island effect, if that's the data available to you.

When you then go to deploy a project, think about as part of, you know, a capital project, how can you incorporate more trees or bioswales if flooding is an issue, or tactically other improvements that can make the community better. And I found it to be really rich to think about this from a number of different paradigms. And I don't think — you could be in rural Maine and you could still have disparity within a community. I mean, my— I come from a rural community in southern New Jersey, and I come from the historically Black part of town and across the railroad tracks, and our community was a have-not community, and everyone was aware. And there are things that you could do in that community that are— that in my hometown that could learn from how we do things in New York City.

[30:24] - Divya Gandhi

Well, three takeaways that I'm hearing you describe, Paul, is yes, knowing the history and grounding the work in history and the right ethos, using data to clearly diagnose what the problem is and justify action. And then translate it into tangible, real capital projects on the ground. This is, of course, a very strong reminder that EJ isn't just a framework, but it's about delivering tangible, lasting changes in our communities.

[30:59] - Paul Lozito, AICP

Everything you said, and something I say to members of the planning community when I have an opportunity to speak to them — you know, our profession comes from an intersection of public health and landscape architecture. And ultimately that informs — the zoning ordinances that we've seen in the early 1900s were predicated on public safety, right? Preserving your health. And that's where we start to site things in certain areas versus where residential is. And that's — so the basis of our profession is the geography and a foundation in public health. And so when we think about environmental justice, we are seeing public health issues.

And so no matter where you are in the country, if you look at environmental justice, it really, in my view, provides a future-facing way for us to address planning, because not only is it about resolving the issues that were in part caused by planners over the course of a period of time, it's really about how when we move into the future, we can intentionally act in a way that better preserves the public health of our communities, which really goes back to the genesis of our profession, no matter where you are.

[32:19] - Divya Gandhi

Very much, very much, Paul. Thank you. This was incredibly insightful. You've really grounded environmental justice in both history and action with all the work that you're leading and actually shown us what it takes to turn principles into real on-ground change. So thank you for that. And we super appreciate your time and your perspective today. Thank you.

[32:42] - Paul Lozito, AICP

It was a privilege to be here. Thank you so much.

[32:43] - Em Hall

Thank you.

Thanks for listening to another episode of Critical Conversations in Transportation Planning, an APA podcast series brought to you by the APA Transportation Planning Division. To learn more about the division, visit TPD's website at transportation.planning.org. And if you want to hear more great conversations with experts from across the planning landscape, subscribe to the APA Podcast so you'll never miss another episode. You can find the APA Podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find our entire library of past episodes at planning.org/podcast.