interviews
Becoming Prosumers Of Energy
by Ruth Santiago
February 16, 2019
This interview with Ruth Santiago, a lawyer who works with community and environmental groups in southeastern Puerto Rico, was conducted and condensed by frank news.
How do you think of energy democracy?
Energy democracy stems from the effects of energy coloniality and how certain jurisdictions have been used for extractive and exploitative practices and have become sacrifice zones for operations that create great wealth for other people over time.
How did you get involved in this work?
I got involved because of proximity. We have this saying in one of the groups I work with that says, "The environment unites us and identifies us." Not just the subtropical dry forest, and mangrove forest, and salt flats, and offshore cays, but also things that impact that environment – they also unite us and define us.
I was raised to a certain extent in Salinas. I spent my formative, adolescent years here. I was born in the South Bronx, my parents were part of the return migration to Southeastern Puerto Rico. They were from a municipality that's a little bit further east of Salinas, but very similar in many ways in terms of being part of the sugarcane monoculture, a high concentration of Afro descendent people, and real situations of struggle and survival. They decided to return to Puerto Rico when I was 12. I was raised along this Southeastern coast on and off from that time. One of my memories of growing up here as an adolescent was the Aguirre Power Complex being built in the early 70s. It was something that came to us. We did not come to the nuisances. Nuisance was built where we are.
The government of Puerto Rico tried Operation Bootstrap. Rapid industrialization and a very intense industrialization program that affected Guayama with industry coming in. First, light manufacturing and then the petrochemical industry. Then, pharmaceuticals, which are still very present. These energy plants were meant to serve more than the communities. These big, central station, fossil fuel plants were meant to provide energy to those heavy industrial uses that consumed and required a lot of energy.
What we saw in two places in Southern Puerto Rico, one here in Salinas and the other over in Guayanilla in Southwestern Puerto Rico, was how the power plants were set up very close to the petrochemical industries. We had the Phillips Puerto Rico Core Petro Refinery. Aguirre Power Complex was basically in service to that and other heavy industrial users. People were told they would get jobs. They said, "Oh, we're going to generate upwards of 2,000 jobs." People were a little skeptical and concerned about how that would impact the possibility of safe fishing at least. They were told it would not be impacted. Ultimately, what happened was Phillips did not generate anything close to 2,000 jobs and folded after a few decades, but did leave a terrible legacy of contamination to air, water, and land. People lost a lot of their ability to do the subsistence fishing even.
Aguirre Power Complex came in stages. They had two power plants in one. In 1972, they set up what was known as the Thermoelectric Plant. Again, people were told they’d get jobs from this. Again, the plant does not hire many local residents. It’s estimated there was 20-25% local hires, and the rest came from all over, anywhere but Salinas and Guayama. The same thing with the Combined Cycle units, because as I said, it's two plants in one.
At the dawn of the 20th century Puerto Rico got its first coal-burning power plant and the only coal-burning power plant that was established by AES. They're a Delaware corporation with their headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, but they do business all over the world. In November 2002, they started a brand-new, so called clean-coal power plant. It's been disastrous. Again, people were told, this is going to be beneficial in terms of stimulating the local economy and bringing down the electric rates. None of that happened. What has happened is that people are getting more and more exposed to pollutants and heavy metals and public health is being impacted.
Your work seems two-fold. One is dedicated to producing energy that is actually clean and that will not leave a legacy of toxicity. The other is in trying to invert the power structure of how that energy is produced and sold. Correct?
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Can you talk about your work in both areas and how they come together?
We have done a lot of resistance work, and a lot of work to promote community alternatives on energy and sustainability issues. There's a long history of activism here. I became more active in energy issues around 2003. We started participating in the monitoring of the Aguirre Power Complex and how it impacts public health, air quality, and water. Both the sea water and the potable water. The only source of potable water here is the South Coast Aquifer. That was monitoring.
We started participating in different administrative proceedings with a group called Comite Dialogo Ambiental, the Environmental Dialogue Committee. Then we participated in proceedings against PREPA, the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, but also the AES Corporation.
I've done both administrative proceedings and litigation in courts related to different impacts from those plants, and most recently a company called Excelerate Energy out of Texas was proposing to build what they call an offshore gas port and a marine natural gas pipeline, that we just defeated. It would have been running right through the middle of Jobos Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve and impacted corals and seagrass beds and offshore cays and all kinds of things, and the ability of people to do subsistence fishing and ecotourism and otherwise just use and be in the environment.
We've done a huge amount of work with respect to the coal combustion residuals or coal ash waste related to the AES Power Plant. The coal ash waste is a concentration of heavy metals, toxic heavy metals that were being spread all over, and is now being accumulated at the AES Power Plant site in Guayama, Puerto Rico.
That summarizes the energy resistance work that we've done. In terms of going beyond resistance and seeking to build the solutions and the alternatives, we've done a lot of environmental education, both with Comite Dialogo Ambiental Inc. and another group, an umbrella organization called, Eco Development Initiative.
Prior to the hurricane in conjunction with IDEBAJO and a community board called Junta Comunitaria del Poblado Coqui, in Salinas, we helped start what is known as the Coqui Solar project. It's a community solar initiative. It was started with lots of workshops and consultation and collaboration with professors, like Efrain O’Neill from the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez, which is the technical campus here.
It was, for years, before the hurricane, quite a struggle to get people to understand, to want to move towards solar energy, especially rooftop solar communities. It was going very slow. We were certainly doing the education work and the policy work, but not getting very far on the ground in terms of actual implementation of the first steps, the pilot project for the solar community. But right after the hurricane when it became clear to, I think, everyone in Puerto Rico and probably anyone familiar with Puerto Rico that the current electric grid does not work for the people of Puerto Rico. People have been much more receptive to the Coqui Solar project and initiatives of solar communities and other alternatives to central station, fossil fuel generation.
Can you tell me how a solar community works?
That's something that's being developed right now. The way people in Coqui Solar envision it is people who have the appropriate rooftops, usually cement, which is not the case for everyone, are able to come together to think about and work on generating energy using PV systems on their rooftops. It's certainly much more than just everyone in the community having PV equipment. This is beyond just a technological solution. It's about the social agreements necessary to make that energy and that technology serve community needs in the most efficient way.
Are you seeing a lot of progress in new ways of approaching energy? From the community, but also from a municipal government level?
That's really hard to answer. Certainly with the mind set and attitudes. There's much more receptiveness to the things that we've been talking about for years about solar communities. That has definitely changed and there's a lot more interest and it's a very dynamic situation with respect to energy. After the hurricane, honestly, people realized we're basically on our own here and the government, local, federal, municipal, comes to help us. We have to figure out these solutions.
We're seeing a lot more on the formal scale. A group called ACONER, the Association of Renewable Energy Consultants and Contractors, say they're doing five to six times the number of installations they were prior to the hurricane.
Things have definitely changed. We don't know exactly how much.
There is what can be called, lip service. A lot of lip service about renewable energy which is dangerous, especially with the government of Puerto Rico. They're saying they're adopting the 100% renewable energy goal for 2050, and I think 50% by 2040, but their actions are promoting lots of natural and fracked gas. It's a tricky situation in that sense because you hear everyone saying we adopt renewable energy, but not only are they putting the money elsewhere, they're also talking about a kind of renewable energy that's not community-based,.
What we're seeing is that the government is being pushed by every energy company you can imagine. It seems everyone has an interest in doing some kind of project here, including at utility scale. That it is not the same as the kind of alternatives we're talking about in terms of solar communities.
Why is this an urgent issue for you right now?
We saw here in Puerto Rico, that it's a matter of life or death. People need to take this into their own hands, energy by and for the people. Become more than just passive consumers but actual producers of energy and control their means of production.
We knew before the hurricanes, and we experienced it afterwards. This huge and deadly hurricane was compounded by this terrible electric infrastructure system. It's not serving the people of Puerto Rico in a real way. Maybe that was the best we could do at some point, but that's no longer the situation here and we an opportunity to do things differently. To do better. Much better.
interviews
New York City Housing Authority with Polina Bakhteiarov
by Polina Bakhteiarov
May 3, 2018
This interview with Polina Bakhteiarov, the Deputy Director for Real Estate Development at NYCHA [New York City Housing Authority], was conducted and condensed by frank news. It took place April 24, 2018, in New York City.
Can you tell us about yourself and how you found yourself at NYCHA?
I was born in Moscow, Russia, came to the States as a child and grew up in Massachusetts. I ended up going to MIT and doing a five year program where I did double undergraduate degrees in Urban Planning, City Planning and Civil Engineering, and then a master's in City Planning.
I came to MIT wanting to do bioengineering, having no idea what that was. My freshman year was the year after Katrina, and I was walking down the hallway at school one evening, and this flier caught my eye. It was a discussion about recovery and resilience in New Orleans post Katrina, hosted by a professor named J. Philip Thompson. I was like, wow! I had been interested in what happened, what was going on in New Orleans at the time and wanted to go down there, but my mother was like, “no, you're not going anywhere”, I was 17. So I went to this forum to see what it was all about.
Phil ended up being my adviser and longtime mentor. He just got elected Deputy Mayor for strategic policy initiatives across the street. So we're looking to partner in a new way at this new stage of the game.
Tell us about NHYCA.
New York City New York City Housing Authority, NYCHA, we call it the acronym, is a huge organization, about 10,000-11,000 employees. We're technically part of the city of New York government, but we're also federal, so we’re in this strange purgatory of being funded by the Feds, but then reliant on City Hall.
NYCHA is the largest residential landlord in North America. We have about 2,000-2,500 buildings, and about 2,500 acres of land that comprises around 320 developments of various sizes. Small developments can be a walk up, then the largest development is Queensbridge, which has 3,000-4,000 units and about 7,000 people who live there. The scale is vast. We also corner about 8 percent of the rental market in NYC. We have a lot of untapped power which is very interesting for me because my I'm starting to get into the area of public asset management, and public finance, and how we can better leverage our public assets to generate additional income. Not just within the NYCHA world, but in government in general.
It's really started to pique my interest, especially because of the federal conversation, for better or worse, around infrastructure. Regardless of the motives, and even the mechanics of that conversation, there is still a legitimate point around the fact that we don't leverage our public assets, bridges, roads, airports convention centers etc.
How you would like to leverage NYCHA's assests?
One of the ways we do it now is through our infill program. We have two programs. We have what we call "100 Percent Affordable Program", and then we have the, "NYCHA Next Generation Action Neighborhoods Program", or the "50/50" program. In both of those programs we identify underutilized or vacant land within our development campuses for a new construction project. On the 100 percent affordable side, we build a building and all the units are up to 165 percent AMI [area median income], so there's different levels of affordability there.
On the 50/50 side, same concept. Identify a plot of land that’s developable, and when we construct a building, 50 percent of the units are affordable, and 50 percent are market rate. We take the revenue from the deal and reinvest a portion into the development on which the new building has been constructed, and then the other portion goes to the highest need development. The ones in the worst conditions, and in need of investment in systems, grounds etc.
That's like putting our toe in the water. Taking the intrinsic value of our developments and figuring out how to extract that value, and then reinvest it back in.
In order to be truly able to put any type of dent into that huge number, that keeps on rising, we have to get creative.
Is the 50/50 housing model working?
We have not actually constructed the building yet. That was rolled out in 2015 under the Next Gen NYCHA strategic plan, which is a 10 year initiative. The mayor is very aggressive in his housing goals, and he wanted to pilot this new structure, and this new framework.
What were the main points of anger towards the 50/50 idea?
The biggest fear is gentrification. You're bringing folks who can afford a market rate apartment in some of the hottest neighborhoods in New York City (Upper East Side, Prospect Heights, Williamsburg, Lower East Side). So gentrification is the biggest issue. The fear of rising rents and displacement, although that still bleeds into the new construction side, because residents oftentimes see a new building as an indicator that change is coming and folks are going to be pushed out.
The other issue is the destruction with the construction. The destruction of folks daily lives and how the new building will impact the lay out of the development, the neighborhood, what these new folks coming to live there bring. The cultural implications. There are a lot of considerations we're working through with residents in that process.
We're trying to continue to expand our thinking. One of the areas that we are now exploring preliminarily is selling air rights because it would really, really change the game for us.
How does that work, and how do you go about getting that approved?
A couple of things. One is the federal process. We have to figure out if HUD will allow us to do this, because it is still a transaction. We've been talking with with HUD about how to do that. It seems like everyone is fairly excited about it. Residents like that strategy because there's no construction, it doesn't disturb their daily lives. Politically, I think that it could really be a win for both the legislative and executive branch because again, it's really a cash cow for NYCHA with a very minimal administrative burden.
Do you anticipate backlash with that program, because you would in essence be throwing an issue onto another person? The idea of changing the New York City Landscape, the idea of environmental impact? The buildings you sell to, exceeding what they should be exceeding.
The buyer of the rights would only be able to use them to the extent that the zoning for their parcel, or parcels, allows. They would still have to go through every process on the city and state level with regard to environmental review. Every other type of testing that needs to get done in order for them to pull their permit. They would not be able to bypass any of that.
Okay, got it.
I want to talk about what I do, which is on the preservation side of things.
Sure!
The purpose of our team is to structure public-private partnerships in order to preserve public housing in the long term. The main tool that we use is Rental Assistance Demonstration. It's an Obama administration initiative that began around 2011, and is really a way to open up new avenues of capital, coming into a development that's prohibited within the public housing framework.
What RAD allows us to do is switch the funding for public housing developments from public housing, what we call Section 9, to Section 8 housing choice vouchers.
What that allows us to do, is go to the markets and bring in additional capital for that development, which was previously prohibited from us.
Our program focuses, once we get that financing package, on three pillars. The first one is a very substantial rehabilitation of the development under the federal guidelines. We have to address the 20 year capital needs of that development. We also switched the management to a private property management company which allows for streamlined property management, and also allows residents to revisit the conversation around house rules, which is something that NYCHA used to enforce very strictly back in the day. Over the past couple of decades it's really deteriorated. A lot of residents, in the forms that I've engaged with them, complain that there are no standards for how these communities are supposed to function. The last piece is around social services delivery. With the conversion we also bring in an onsite social services provider to really increase the services that folks are receiving in the development, tailored to the needs of that particular community.
Where does this work fit in under the larger umbrella of “planning”?
The great thing about planning is that it can be defined in so many different ways. For me, I see us focused on the housing aspect of planning. We are definitely very implementation focused. We obviously rely on planning studies and analyses that are done by our colleagues at the Department of City Planning, housing preservation, and development, and even internally have folks that do planning oriented analyses. But we're really focused on the implementation. We're looking at how we choose the developments that go through the Section 8 conversions.
We do look at it from a planning lens. We're looking at neighborhood context. One of the things that I've been looking to to add to that particular planning process, for our preservation pipeline, is that particular piece. When we first started the pipeline planning for RAD, it was really based off of financial feasibility. What we were doing was taking developments that were in some local proximity to each other geographically, and figuring out how to make them work financially. Because we're bundling developments together, we're not doing one at a time in order to get efficiencies. That's a great baseline, but there are other factors that we have to take into account when we do this planning.
There's also the piece around political planning.
What is NYCHA’s ultimate goal?
Our ultimate goal is to dig ourselves out of the $17 billion hole. We've lost our identity as a landlord, because that's really what we are. We house 1 in 14 New Yorkers. We have about 400,000 people in public housing, an additional 200,000-250,000 via the Section 8 program. We really need to get back to that identity, of being a strong landlord.