Elizabeth Yeampierre is a former civil rights lawyer and dean at Yale, who currently leads an initiative called Uprose and participates in the Working Families Party and a labor unions’ coalition, both local organizations from the industrial waterfront of Sunset Park, Brooklyn, New York. Their goals are to revive the area, maintain it as a working and active place, make greener, more sustainable and climate-change resilient jobs, products and public spaces locally. Yeampierre has achieved quite a lot with these organizations, but reminds us that now the area is being scoped by big enterprises, who want to build a streetcar line until Astorias, Queens. These top-down projects are not on their best interests or commonly made, opposed to long-term community improvements and claims made by Yeampierre and other grassroots initiatives’ works at the waterfront. Photo credit: David Gonzalez/New York Times
