News

News last updated July 22, 2010

On Saturday, May 22, the Pratt Center, Queens Community House and Friends of Travers Park released the Green Agenda for Jackson Heights, the product of a five-month, community-wide visioning process for a sustainable future in one of New York City's most diverse neighborhoods. 

More than 400 community members contributed to multilingual grassroots planning sessions, which were held by volunteers in living rooms, schools, houses of worship, community centers, and senior centers. Participants identified priority areas for greening Jackson Heights, including expanding open space, reducing waste, and many other steps toward environmental and economic sustainability. Residents proposed strategies that built upon existing strengths while addressing neighborhood concerns. The final document includes goals as well as recommendations thatcan be implemented legislatively, by community-based organizations, and by individuals.

Download the Green Agenda here! [19 MB]

or download by section

News posted July 7, 2010

Street Value, a new book by Rosten Woo and Meredith TenHoor with Damon Rich (Princeton Architectural Press), delves into the history, streetscape, culture and politics of Brooklyn's Fulton Street Mall. It includes an interview with the Pratt Center's Vicki Weiner and Randall Mason of Minerva Partners, who collaborated on a Pratt Center report recommending strategies for the Fulton Street Mall's preservation. Weiner and Mason sought to preserve not only the architectural legacy of Brooklyn's premier shopping street but also its role as a home to local retailers serving a large and diverse base of longtime customers.

As Weiner told Woo: "Our big 'ah-ha' moment in the analysis of the data happened when we read through and analyzed the shopper surveys and found that a lot of the perceptions of the mall that we'd heard before were just not true - i.e., it's not successful, it's all discount stores."

News posted April 5, 2010

COMMUTE, a transportation equity campaign coordinated by the Pratt Center, is the subject of an in-depth case study from the Applied Research Center.

The study, by ARC's Seth Freed Wessler, reviews some of the coalition's most important accomplishments. Those include:

• Interconnecting grassroots groups throughout the city around an advocacy framework for transportation equity.
• Its research showing race and income disparities in current transit service, which leaves black New Yorkers with commutes 25 percent longer on average than white New Yorkers do. Nearly two-thirds of all New York City commuters with rides of more than 1 hour have a household income of less than $35,000 a year.
• COMMUTE's success in framing congestion pricing as an equity issue - a strategy that the case study argues might have changed both the debate and the outcome, if pricing advocates had embraced it from the inception of their campaign.
• The development of a community-led constituency supporting bus rapid transit as a means of bringing high speed transportation to underserved communities.

COMMUTE's advocacy for BRT has played a pivotal role in successfully pressing the New York City Department of Transportation and Metropolitan Transportation Authority to engage communities in planning for Select Bus Service routes that will lay a foundation for a citywide BRT network.

News last updated December 2, 2009

In This Issue:

• A Message from Director Adam Friedman
  
• Jackson Heights Green Agenda Sprouts
• Concrete Plant Park Brings the Bronx to its River
• Building Opportunity for Public Housing Residents
• A Second Chance for Houses of Worship
• Options for Seward Park
• Training for Green Jobs, Green Buildings
• Meet the Pratt Center Fellows
• Pratt Center Briefs