Eddie Bautista

When communities are targeted to carry more than their fair share of pollution, how do they fight back — and help create an alternative policy?

Join Leadership Talks with Eddie Bautista on Friday, May 21, 2004 at 1 pm ET. Eddie Bautista is Director of Community Planning for New York Lawyers for the Public Interest (NYLPI), and a 2003 Leadership for a Changing World award recipient. Bautista will share nationally applicable lessons from his efforts to help low-income New York communities block city plans to unfairly burden their neighborhoods with waste-transfer stations and other waste management facilities.

Read the transcript May 21, 2004 Leadership Talks Archive

As a teenager, Eddie Bautista watched his South Brooklyn neighborhood of Red Hook unravel. As the shipping industry left, jobs disappeared, buildings were condemned, and families—including Bautista’s own—were displaced. Red Hook had once been a thriving waterfront community of 25,000 residents, but the rise of containerized shipping and the subsequent loss of local contracts led to 40 years of decline. In 1977, city officials began, then suspended, a reconstruction project behind Bautista’s house, exposing the community to an open sewer for over a year. Several buildings in the neglected neighborhood collapsed, killing four residents and much of the neighborhood’s spirit.

Bautista remembers how, as a boy of 13, he watched neighbors organize to save the community. Despite his youth, he joined in, attending meetings and carrying petitions. But the grassroots effort ended when local politicians seized control of the campaign and the city condemned dozens of more buildings. Replacement housing was built but was unaffordable to displaced, low-income Puerto Rican residents.

Deeply affected by his experiences in Red Hook, Bautista co-founded the Organization of Waterfront Neighborhoods (OWN) and Communities United for Responsible Energy (CURE). The two coalitions worked to block additional waste-transfer stations, power plants, and incinerators in New York’s low-income communities. OWN and CURE helped convince officials to pursue alternative, citywide plans to maximize use of existing infrastructures and develop ecologically-friendly waste management and energy programs. In August 2002, Mayor Michael Bloomberg agreed to OWN’S proposal to equitably upgrade city-owned marine transfer stations and to consider closing truck-dependent waste-transfer stations.

Other campaigns focused on the conversion of city-owned buildings into a bilingual school, and housing and health services for people with H.I.V./AIDS. The Sunset Park/Red Hook communities also gained city council representation for the first time. In 1990, Bautista joined New York Lawyers for the Public Interest (NYLPI) to bring “communities the resources that my neighborhood could have used desperately when I was growing up.” Through a “community lawyering” model that Bautista shaped, NYLPI lawyers partnered with organizers and residents in their own neighborhoods to provide technical assistance to local empowerment campaigns. This team approach has been nationally recognized for providing effective legal and organizing assistance without interfering with local leadership.

For more information

Eddie Bautista Leadership for a Changing World profile

New York Lawyers for the Public Interest