Meet the female force who halted a major development project to preserve her working-class neighborhood and make it a leader in clean energy

• Elizabeth Yeampierre helped prevent a real estate investment company from rezoning her neighborhood.
• Where the developer saw profits, Yeampierre saw how it could push out the local working class.
• Yeampierre is spearheading a vision to decarbonize and revitalize Sunset Park, Brooklyn.

For many urban developers, progress looks like sleek and shiny multi-use developments, complete with apartments, office space, and restaurants all within walking distance.

But when Elizabeth Yeampierre thinks about these enclaves, she sees who they often push out: lower-income folks, the working class, and people of color.

"A lot of the green solutions right now result in the displacement of the people who have been breathing in toxic air for generations," said Yeampierre, who has a mind to upend the status quo.

Upending the status quo

Yeampierre was born and raised in New York, and trained as a civil rights lawyer before she started working on climate change and environmental justice in the Big Apple.

She was the first Latina chair of the Environmental Protection Agency's National Environmental Justice Advisory Council, is on a host of advisory boards nationally and in New York City, and founded the NYC Climate Justice Youth Summit to help young people of color understand the overlap between racial justice and climate change.

She's long been interested in how efforts to fight climate change can displace the communities that have traditionally been most impacted by the climate crisis — especially people of color, who are at higher risk for climate-related health issues than white people, according to research.

To that end, Yeampierre helped prevent developer Jamestown Properties, which manages billions of dollars worth of real estate globally, from rezoning her Brooklyn neighborhood, Sunset Park.

Where Jamestown Properties saw a bright future in redeveloping 6 million square feet on the Sunset Park waterfront, Yeampierre saw the ways her community could be left behind.

Business Insider reached out to Jamestown Properties for comment, but the company did not respond.

In 2020, UPROSE — a Sunset Park community organization focused on sustainability and resiliency that Yeampierre is executive director of — joined a local coalition and pressured the city not to rezone.

They won.

Then, Yeampierre worked with her community to go one step further.

A new vision for Sunset Park

Situated along the scenic New York Bay in southwestern Brooklyn, Sunset Park is a diverse neighborhood that many working class individuals call home.

Nearly half of residents are immigrants, three-quarters of households speak languages other than English, and in 2021, 42% of households made less than $50,000.

After defeating Jamestown Properties, Yeampierre, together with UPROSE, proposed an alternative future for Sunset Park: one that's decarbonized and revitalized, full of working-class jobs, renewable energy, locally grown food, and a burgeoning green economy.

This future and how to achieve it by 2035 is outlined in a development report called the Green Resilient Industrial District Plan 2.0. And even Yeampierre's critics are getting on board, Yeampierre told Business Insider.

Working class jobs and clean energy

The GRID Plan 2.0 "will incentivize the local economy while putting us on a path to resilience" by providing jobs for working-class residents, Yeampierre said.

Chief among the changes is pivoting jobs from carbon-based industries to green energy.

"The idea is, if you're bringing in these working-class jobs in this sector, people will be able to live here and work here," she said.

GRID 2.0 also involves a large focus on renewable energy, with shared rooftop solar and offshore wind replacing the neighborhood's two power plants that burn fossil fuels.

Rooftop solar is an important part of any plan to decarbonize New York's buildings, said Chris Halfnight, senior director of research and policy at Urban Green Council, a nonprofit focused on decarbonization in the Big Apple.

"Rooftop solar helps ensure buildings are using clean electricity, and also makes them more resilient with an on-site source of power," he told BI via email.

But rooftop solar will never be able to fully meet the city's electricity demands, he said, which is why large-scale efforts to decarbonize electricity production — like offshore wind — are important.

"We need to decarbonize utility-delivered electricity with renewable energy from outside the five boroughs," Halfnight said.

GRID 2.0 also includes a plan to help protect Sunset Park from food and supply shortages that are a growing concern in the face of the global climate crisis.

Climate change has led to consequences like more extreme drought, severe storms, and destructive flooding that can disrupt supply chains for local communities. To help protect Sunset Park from complete chaos in the face of an extreme weather event, UPROSE is focused on growing more food locally.

UPROSE already grows hydroponic gardens at its headquarters and hopes to add more open spaces for urban agriculture with GRID 2.0.

Leading by example

As communities across the US confront both climate change and social justice, Yeampierre would like her work in Sunset Park to serve as an example of environmental progress that also supports people of color and other communities who are disproportionately impacted by the climate crisis.

While there are no cookie-cutter solutions to addressing the climate crisis in a socially just way, the Grid Plan 2.0 can serve as inspiration for other maritime neighborhoods from Boston to Houston, Yeampierre said.

"We need to share what's working, what isn't working, the mistakes that we've made," she said. Because when it comes to finding solutions for climate change, "We just don't have any time anymore."