Good morning!
Welcome to Digestable, your mouthful of things happening in the world.
Today’s ferments:
Before I lived in Vermont, I thought it was a particular way: idyllic, queer, long winters. I was worried that moving here would signify my withdrawal from *gestures* Big Important Things.
While it is stunning, gay, and often cold here, my broad assumptions were off the mark. Thanks to people who know this place better than me, I learned that here is complicated, just like and uniquely from everywhere else.
One year in, I’ve gotten to engage with some of that complexity. There is a lot, a lot of work to do, and it has been going on for a long time, just like everywhere. And yet: it feels like it matters that I’m here, and it makes a difference that I do what I do.
Burlington is a big town, so our city council meetings are just a bunch of folks in an auditorium. One scale smaller are the wards, eight of which make up the whole city. Each ward, since the time Bernie was our mayor, have Neighborhood Planning Assemblies, or NPAs, every month. At the NPAs, elected officials give legislative updates; representatives from city agencies show us the latest renderings for upcoming projects; and developers have to sit and answer questions.
Each NPA is guided by a steering committee, which is an elected group of volunteers who live in that ward. The committees set the agenda, invite the guests, and spend each NPA’s small budget. It’s not a body with much power, but most places don’t have funded community engagement entities whose job it is to hold public discussion about city affairs.
The smallest scale of government in New York City is Community Boards, which hold more power than the NPAs do. They’re the first stop in the Uniform Land Use Review Process, or ULURP. The ULURP is a zoning process during which the city can say yes, do this thing on the land, or no, do it this way, or absolutely not a chance. Developers go through this process at escalating scales of government to get approval for their projects.
When I was a kid, I proudly wore a button that said “Develop, don’t destroy.” They were all over my neighborhood; the slogan referred to a massive development on the cusp of going through the ULURP process. We fought it; the project would bulldoze a considerable swath of the singular, diverse, beautiful neighborhood where I grew up. Longtime residents would be displaced in favor of attractions. The community board heeded our call.
But then, in a classic jumping-through of bureaucratic loopholes, the Borough President removed everyone from the community board, and replaced them with puppets. The development was approved; homes were bulldozed. A luxury neighborhood was built on top of rail tracks. A stadium now receives tens of thousands of tourists per year. The night the stadium opened, I emerged from the subway, and felt the ground shaking under me and the sky lit up green from the inaugural show. It felt like the world had ended.
Losing my neighborhood is the greatest loss I’ve experienced. Feeling powerless, and like I could never find organizing work that addressed this harm, made me want to leave Brooklyn.
The neighborhood where I live in Burlington is on the brink of major rezoning and development. It could yield luxury housing that destroys this part of town and dooms the city’s potential to ever be affordable. Or, we could fight for accessible homes to rent and purchase that run on renewables and demand robust public transit. The fight here is just beginning.
This feels like my chance, a chance I never thought I’d get. A neighborhood I love needs me, and maybe this time I’ll be able to help. Last week, alongside some wonderful, sharp folks, I ran for and was elected to my ward’s NPA steering committee. We’ll be grilling developers and holding community discussions every third Thursday till the plan for this neighborhood is a really, really good one.
Local governance isn’t for everyone, but it really excites me. Maybe it excites you too; or maybe it’s helping out at the food shelf, or writing to your legislators about air pollution, or organizing with your neighbors for rent control. Even if you have it good, there’s lots that could be better.
The systems we live inside of are designed to function in dysfunction, and we are the only thing that will change that. If you aren’t sure your community needs you, they do. Find a thing that makes you feel the way responsible urban waste management, or upgrades to the drinking water supply, or grassroots-driven changes to the zoning code make me feel.
I started a day this week reading the latest issue of The White Pages, a newsletter I deeply appreciate for its sharp insight on movements for justice amid the State of Things. The final paragraph of is one I read a few times.
It made me immensely grateful for the healthy, relatively sustainable relationship I have with organizing these days. It’s pretty new that this feels good to me, and that change didn’t just happen by accident.
If you feel bad now, or if organizing or participating feels impossible or unreasonable, please, please know that it does not always have to feel this way. If you want to chat about how to move forward, I’m here and would love to do that.
I’ll leave you with Garrett’s words:
“It is urgently important, in a world full of pain, that we cultivate a fiery opposition to injustice in all its forms. The question is, will we care just as much about how we keep each other’s fires burning as we do about our own righteous flames? That’s the difference between burn-out and sustainability. That’s the difference between movements that flicker and movements whose warmth and brightness can enlighten the darkness. That’s the difference between being alone in our fear, and dancing together on the winning side.”
You have the tiniest post. You are a giant on the inside.