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Mike Bloomberg on Environment
Independent possibility for President
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Creative housing: deck over highways & build brownfields
PlaNYC addresses our most basic resource: land. As our City grows, we propose to use our land more creatively and efficiently. To accommodate nearly a million more New Yorkers, our plan calls for doubling the amount of land available for possible housing
development. We can do it by decking over railyards and highways, and using government land more productively. 95% of the sites that we propose for new housing development are within a short walk to mass transit. Some of these sites are brownfields.
Source: PlaNYC speech at the Museum of Natural History
Apr 22, 2007
Clean up 7,600 acres of brownfields; build more parks
We propose to speed the clean-up of all the 7,600 acres of brownfields still in our city - while also ensuring public health protections by developing new time-saving strategies new city-specific remediation guidelines, and a new city brownfields office
to oversee the initiatives and encourage community involvement. Some of our brownfields may also become open space and parkland, which bind communities together. We’ve added more than 300 acres [but need more in some neighborhoods].
Source: PlaNYC speech at the Museum of Natural History
Apr 22, 2007
Environmental justice: clean soot in poor neighborhoods
Our goal is a simple one: giving New York the cleanest air of any major city in the nation. Today, our air - like our water - is far less polluted than it was just a few decades ago. But in that clearer air hangs this ominous cloud: New
Yorkers still breathe more of the soot that contributes so heavily to deadly heart and lung disease than do people in all but one other major American city. And because of exposure to sooty diesel exhaust and smoke-belching power plants that are
concentrated in low-income communities, many of their residents bear the brunt of this public health menace. In parts of the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Harlem, children are hospitalized for asthma at nearly four times the national average. Four times!
We cannot turn a blind eye to this outrage. All our children deserve a healthy start in life. Many people call that environmental justice; I simply call it the right thing to do. [The goal]: eliminating roughly 40% of locally produced soot by 2030.
Source: PlaNYC speech at the Museum of Natural History
Apr 22, 2007
$8 fee to enter NYC by car, to encourage mass transit
As the city continues to grow, the costs of congestion - to our health, to our environment, and to our economy - are only going to get worse. The question is not whether we want to pay but how do we want to pay. With an increased asthma rate?
With more greenhouse gases? Wasted time? Lost business? And higher prices? Or, do we charge a modest fee to encourage more people to take mass transit?I understand the hesitation about charging a fee. I was a skeptic myself.
But I looked at the facts: in cities like London and Singapore, fees succeeded in reducing congestion and improving air quality.
In setting the fee, there’s no magic number, but it has to be high enough to encourage more people to switch to
mass transit and low enough not to break the bank - for businesses and for those who have to drive. We believe that an $8 charge would achieve these goals, for cars traveling south of 86th Street on weekdays.
Source: PlaNYC speech at the Museum of Natural History
Apr 22, 2007
Page last updated: Feb 08, 2010