It's time to stop building the shopping malls, the prisons, the stadiums and other tributes to all of our collective failures. It is time that we start building living monuments to hope and possibility.

Sustainable South Bronx advocates for environmental justice through sustainable environmental and economic development projects.

It's time to stop building the shopping malls, the prisons, the stadiums and other tributes to all of our collective failures. It is time that we start building living monuments to hope and possibility.

Neither the Destruction of the Ninth Ward Nor the South Bronx Was Inevitable

You know, I personally think that gentrification happens long before you start seeing white people in formerly people-of-color neighborhoods. It starts happening when we start telling the young, hard-working, quote-unquote "smart" kids that they need to measure success by how far they get away from our communities.

Build. Transform. Love. These are words I use all the time as we speak about community building and even real estate development because these are the kind of communities, like, we want to show you don't have to move out of your neighborhood to live in a better one. And when people think about living in a neighborhood, they are not thinking about fight - the community of their dreams, they are not fighting in it, they are not struggling in it. It's not, "Oh, I gotta put on my armor." All the time. I don't want to live like that. I don't.

To me, charity often is just about giving, because you’re supposed to, or because it’s what you’ve always done — or it’s about giving until it hurts.