Trees versus People

This article analyzes a contentious battle over New York City’s plan for major climate adaptation infrastructure in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Drawing on an analysis of the history of housing development and ethnographic fieldwork conducted among residents and community advocates between 2018 and 2021, I analyze how and why the city’s plan for the East Side Coastal Resiliency (ESCR) project—a US$1.5 billion sea wall and park—led to a bitter fight among neighborhood leaders in the Lower East Side. I draw on Stuart Hall’s approach to articulation to analyze the role of racism in this liberal-progressive effort to articulate a unified “people” against the city and its plan for major climate adaptation infrastructure. Although white middle-class resident leaders and Latinx and Black working-class resident leaders split over the city’s plan, both groups focused predominantly on individualized expressions of racism and antiracism and demanded a version of environmental justice that accepted the conditions of the existing liberal capitalist state. I argue that in a context of diminished expectations and fears that conditions could only grow worse, resident leaders ultimately demanded that the state preserve current levels of injustice.