CEC is one of 16 national grantees receiving a total of $30 million from the DOE for this Weatherization Innovation Pilot Program. The $3 million grant to CEC–the maximum amount that the DOE has allotted to any program participant–requires the raising of $9 million in additional funding or in-kind support.

“CEC will partner with Con Ed, NYSERDA and the City to leverage the additional money that is needed for our Innovative Weatherization Project,” said Cherry.

“The DOE,”  Cherry also said, “has taken the excellent step of building on the federal government’s strong weatherization program with an imaginative new program, one that is open to forward-looking technologies and methodologies.  This is a very exciting time for the future of weatherization.”

One of CEC’s planned innovations will be to expand ways of delivering weatherization to low-income communities, by involving local groups in neighborhood-wide outreach. CEC will also educate and train building owners, tenants and maintenance staff to understand and preserve weatherization improvements once they are completed.

CEC’s technological innovations will include the installation of high-efficiency fiberglass windows, which do not conduct heat or cold, and the painting of roofs with reflective coating, to counteract the destructive ‘urban heat island effect.’

A pioneer in the use of solar thermal systems at New York City’s multifamily buildings, CEC will also pursue strategies to make solar hot water systems and solar PV systems sound investments for low-income home and building owners, and reduce their reliance on fossil fuels.

Organizations that will be helping CEC implement the program include the Sustainable South Bronx (SSBx); Solar One; Cypress Hills Local Development Corporation in Brooklyn; Nontraditional Employment for Women (NEW); Local 10 of the Laborers International Union of North America (LIUNA); the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board (UHAB); the 32BJ Thomas Shortman Training Fund (TSTF); and Forsyth Street Advisors.

CEC’s Innovative Weatherization Project is expected to begin in January 2011.

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For more information, please contact Alexis Greene, agreene@cecenter.org / 718-784-1444, ext. 156.

“It sounds like a cliché,” says Jay Ackley during lunch at the LIC restaurant La Vuelta one torrid August day, “but I do love New York. However, sometimes we Minneapple folks get homesick for family and friends, and things like the stupendous Minnesota State Fair.”

He was born in South Minneapolis 23 years ago, to two dyed-in-the-wool Minnesotans. His mother, who works for the brokerage firm Piper Jaffray, hails from near Duluth, where the winter temperatures regularly drop well below the minus-zero range. His father, a musician and guitar teacher (Jay’s mom was one of his students in college), is from Brainerd, celebrated for its hundreds of nearby lakes. Minnesota, after all, is known as “The Land of 10,000 Lakes.”

From his father Jay developed a love for music. First there were piano lessons, until Jay was about 12, and then his dad bought him an electric guitar. When that happened, says Jay, “I gave up piano and started playing songs with friends in our basement.” Eventually he organized “a garage band” for guitar, saxophone, bass, and a drum set donated by a friend of his father’s.

Then in 2004, when Jay was 17, his parents moved to London—his mother’s firm was setting up a U.K. outpost—and Jay went with them to take his senior year of high school across the pond. He would end up staying four years.

Minneapolis has a population of 400,000; add the “Twin City” of St. Paul and you get maybe 700,000. Still, the town supports a Major League baseball team. It has the third largest theater market after New York and Chicago, and its Walker Art Center is a world-class hub for contemporary art and performance.

But then there’s London. The city’s famous underground and double-decker bus systems carry nearly 14 million people–an extraordinarily diverse populace–to hundreds of museums, theaters, sports events, and schools, not to mention pubs and restaurants that probably number in the thousands.

Moving from Minneapolis to London was like—like what?  Stepping from comparative calm into a maelstrom? Going from a still photograph to a kaleidoscope of rushing images and sensory impressions?

It was “a crazy experience,” says Jay, “because I’d spent my whole life in the same house, and then at 17 I was in a whole new country. But it was a good bonding experience for my parents and me, with the three of us not really knowing what was going to happen. It was exciting.”

Exciting and stirring and stimulating. There he was, living in the East End of London, in a Turkish neighborhood; completing senior year at an international school and meeting the love of his life; taking a dual degree in economics and political philosophy at Queen Mary, University of London (“It was pretty left-wing”); playing gigs at local pubs several times each month. Not bad for a kid from Minneapolis. Not bad at all.

Jay's as-of-yet-unnamed band.

“One of the intriguing things at Queen Mary was how much we talked about Karl Marx in every class,” Jay observes. “Not in terms of whether Communism or Socialism is a good idea, but really respecting the influence of Marxist thought on political theory and economic theory, in a way that’s almost entirely ignored in North American universities.”

“More than anything,” says Jay, at Queen Mary “I developed an outlook on the relationship between economics and society. In Europe there’s a lot more emphasis on the ways in which our society makes us what we are and on how policy has to cope with the institutions that already exist.”  “There’s a lot of good work that can be spearheaded by governments, but it’s important not to think of intervention as a cure-all for market or social problems.”

Back in the States in 2008, Jay moved to New York to propose to Liz Dolfi, whom he married the next year. His plan: take graduate courses and pursue a music career. “I was going to take classes part-time while I tried to be a singer-songwriter,” he says, smiling at the naiveté of the ambition.

Money was an issue, and the New School offered a scholarship, but only if Jay attended full-time. So he enrolled in Milano, the New School for Urban Policy, and asked his professors if they could suggest part-time employment. An organization in Long Island City called Community Environmental Center was searching for an intern, he learned. He applied, and Rick Cherry gave him the spot.

His graduate education has been two-fold. CEC spurred his awareness of environmental issues, although, says Jay, “that’s a really strong theme in Minnesota politics.” Milano delivered urban policy courses and results-oriented projects. “I didn’t do as much as I could have in terms of strict policy,” he says. “I took statistics and data management classes, because I always like excuses to work with numbers. Milano is a place for students who want to do good things but are also looking for structure and skill sets.”

His thesis was about bi-level lighting, a topic for which he credits Thelma Arceo. One half of the paper was dedicated to the practical benefits; the other half to policy, in terms of programs that make installations easy and affordable for multifamily building owners.

The topic “got a little dry” toward the end, Jay admits. But he received an award for the best departmental thesis, and at the end of October 2010 he travels to Kuwait (that’s right, Kuwait), to deliver the paper to the 10th International Conference on Enhanced Building Operations.

CEC hired Jay full-time in June 2010, shortly after he graduated from Milano. Since the start of his internship he has written ten proposals, four of which have garnered contracts for CEC, and he was especially satisfied to help bring in the stimulus money for the multifamily weatherization contracts. “I love the diversity of the place,” he says. “And I think a lot of that is a testament to how really decent Rick is as a boss and manager. Getting to work directly with the CEO,” he adds, “is a really great way of learning the business.”

It is impertinent perhaps to ask someone who has recently married, recently settled in New York, and moved into a new job about long-range aims. Indeed, Jay avers that he really has none.

“I think part of moving to London, and knowing I wasn’t going to be there long-term—having no idea what’s going to happen—forced me to take things as they go. So I just try to make good and responsible decisions month by month and see how they play out. I feel if I had a job title or a specific goal in mind, then I would either be frustrated or I would accomplish it and not be satisfied (just based on a lot of novels I’ve read). People don’t necessarily want what they set out to accomplish.

“So when people ask me what I want to do, I flippantly respond, ‘Folk star.’ ”

Flippant, maybe. But Jay is serious, if modest, about his music. Now that school is finished, in fact, music is his primary pursuit outside of CEC. “I’m not an excellent guitarist by any stretch of the imagination,” he says, “but I like to write songs that have some substance to the lyrics.” His influences are the folk songs of the 1950s and ‘60s, Pete Seeger especially, mixed with punk groups from the ’80s and ’90s. “I write a three- or four-chord progression and write three or four verses over it,” he explains. “I invite people over to our apartment every week, and people write parts for their instruments. We jam and play a song for a few months, until it sounds like something a little more put-together. Just sitting around drinking a lot of wine and having fun with our instruments.”

Jay’s core band (as yet unnamed) includes his good Minneapolis pal David on bass, a young woman on violin named Jen, and Jay’s wife, Liz, singing. They have recorded a demo and are just starting to get the tracks back. Of course a recording studio does not come cheap, so Jay opened a “Kickstarter Account” on line, for pre-ordering CDs, and has raised enough money to cover the cost.

Rich though his life feels at this moment, he hankers periodically for Minneapolis. Not surprisingly, Minnesotan émigrés to New York City have found each other. Jay describes them as “a lot of friendly and displaced people who are not used to not being able to smile at everybody on the street.” Once a month they congregate for a Happy Hour, and they have set up a Web site called “Minneapple in the Big Apple,” for which Jay has just taken over the blogging duties. In honor of Minnesota State Fair Day, August 22, Jay participated in a food crawl to Manhattan eateries serving State Fair specialties such as cheese curds, fried Twinkies, and every true Minnesotan’s favorite—that unparalleled treat–the corn dog.

Taking time to celebrate a Minnesota event perhaps encapsulates Jay personally and professionally at this time in his life. “I’ve managed to get myself married to a terrific woman and set up a nice home. My résumé looks a lot better than it did a couple of years ago. So whatever happens,” he says, “I’m just trying to make sure that, on the way to what happens, I’m enjoying my friends and enjoying my family.”

A. Greene

Credit: Hamad Saber, on Flickr

By Jay Ackley

The bad news is that, last week Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced that the US Legislature would not be considering the widely expected ‘Cap and Trade’ carbon emission restriction bill before November’s elections. As a not-for-profit energy efficiency organization dedicated to global environmental sustainability, Community Environmental Center (CEC) is highly distressed by this news and concerned about the prospects for a sustainable American recovery that creates jobs and mitigates the threats from global warming.

The continued delay of a meaningful climate bill sends the message to Americans and the international c

ommunity that the US government does not see climate change mitigation as a priority. Considering that the US never joined the international Kyoto Protocol, and that little-to-no meaningful progress was made at the 2009 Copenhagen summit, American citizens could be forgiven for thinking that global climate change isn’t a pressing or dangerous issue. The continuance of unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions is not an environmental danger that can be ignored without catastrophic consequences for our global environment, and politicians of both parties must recognize this.

The good news is that Senator Reid has decided to include the HomeStar energy efficiency rebate program in the Clean Energy Jobs and Oil Accountability Act of 2010. If passed, this bill will provide substantial incentives and rebates for homeowners who make efficiency investments in their homes. In addition to reducing energy consumption on a nationwide scale, HomeStar will create living-wage jobs for out-of-work construction workers and laborers across the country. Although a comprehensive carbon-restriction bill will still be necessary to avert the catastrophic consequences of climate change, HomeStar is an important step toward recognizing that environmental sustainability is a sound foundation for economic recovery.

The American public now has a second chance to voice its support for a program that provides citizens with energy savings and economic benefits that far outweigh potential government expenditures. If Americans can get behind this legislation, then perhaps Congress can find the political will to pursue comprehensive climate legislation that will secure America’s future. Particularly with regard to improving the efficiency of our built environment, government support can be economically and environmentally beneficial for homeowners, laborers, and manufacturers of advanced energy generation products.

Community Environmental Center will continue to perform cost-effective and environmentally responsible retrofits for our stakeholders in New York City, but if a meaningful shift toward sustainability is to be achieved on a nationwide scale, all Americans must write or call their Congressmen and women to urge them to stand behind these vital federal efforts.

Donna Parris of Community Environmental Center

Donna Parris is a woman of many lives.

“I started out as a nurse,” she says jauntily, sitting one July morning in CEC’s conference room. And as she begins her story, what are intended to be the ingredients of a profile become episodes in a saga. A profile, after all, is only a partial view and. Donna’s history demands much fuller treatment.

She was born in the Bronx and raised in Brooklyn. But her parents and grandparents hailed from St. Helena Island, one of 13 islands off the coast of South Carolina. This a world of deep marshes lapped by rippling water, and earth that is rich enough for farming. In many respects, Donna is from there as well.

For one thing, she is imbued with the place’s history. St. Helena is sometimes considered the oldest settlement in the United States, a location where the African American Gullah culture and language survive. White slave owners fled the island soon after the start of the Civil War, for Union forces won St. Helena in 1861 and liberated the slaves, who took possession of the land on which they had toiled in bondage. Those men and women are Donna’s ancestors.

“I take my kids down there every three months, and we go to Penn Center and look at the exhibits or go to the heritage events,” she says, “and I tell them, ‘Grandma used to iron with this. And you had to heat it on a stove back then, it wasn’t plugged into the wall. And starch didn’t come out of a spray can; it was a block that you had to mix.’ We showed my son, ‘This is how you pick cotton.’ He knows what country living is all about and at the same time he can see the history of what happened during and after the Civil War.”

Penn Center is on the campus of what was originally the Penn School, a pioneering school for African American children that was started on St. Helena in 1862. In 1901 it became the Penn Normal School, which Donna’s mother attended before the school closed in 1948.

If the history of Donna’s family is unique, its size is extraordinary. This family fairly defines the term “extended,” it is so big. Donna is the youngest of 69 grandchildren. Indeed the members of this clan number in the hundreds, a group so large that they manage to congregate in St. Helena only once a year, on July 4.

Some people might find that acreage of relations overwhelming.  But Donna experiences it as a “united front” of people who are friends as well as relations.

But back to Donna’s nursing career.

“I think I always had a nurturing nature,” she explains, “and I guess I thought the best people to nurture were the sick. I had not a clue as to what I wanted to do, so I said, ‘Let’s do nursing.’”

After attending Julia Richman High School, which was a nursing school during the 1980s, Donna pursued geriatric care at a nursing home. But she found it depressing “to see families putting elderly people in nursing homes and not coming to visit them.” She tried private nursing, but that had its own set of challenges.

To sum it up, says Donna, with her slightly dry sense of humor, “I was traumatized by the elderly so I decided to take up mortuary science, because I figured dead people don’t talk back to you.”

Actually, “One morning,” says Donna, “I woke up and I was, like, I want to be a funeral director,” a revelation that she again attributes to desiring a nurturing line of work. Two weeks later she was enrolled at the American Academy McAllister Institute of Funeral Service in Manhattan and earning an Associate Degree in mortuary science.

For most of us, the less we know about the behind-the-scenes tasks of a funeral director, the better. But listening to the enthusiasm with which Donna describes this occupation, it is clearly her calling.

At McAllister, she studied biology, the funeral industry, and public speaking, among other areas. “We learned embalming. You go to Bellevue Hospital for your last two semesters and work on cadavers that haven’t been claimed in 30 days.”

Embalming skill distinguishes the expert from the run-of-the-mill funeral director. “It’s an art,” says Donna. “Anyone can be a good public speaker—anyone can say a speech at a funeral. But if you can master embalming, you’re a more highly valued commodity to a funeral home.”

The artful embalmer, Donna believes, is one who makes the deceased look, as much as possible, as they did in life, before illness or accident beset them. “The best satisfaction that you can get in this industry is when a family says that the person looks like their mother or their father, or whomever is deceased. It’s a comforting feeling.

Donna’s career began at Sparks Funeral Service in Brooklyn, where she completed her residency and worked for about 10 years. Then came a period of freelancing until she and Edwin Barnes established Barnes Funeral Service, on Avenue Z in Brooklyn. They are both funeral directors there, although, because of Donna’s schedule at CEC, she is not at the funeral home every day. “I do everything from making funeral arrangements to picking up bodies at the hospital, to embalming, dressing, cosmetology, and doing the funeral service.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, folklore aplenty surrounds the work of the funeral director. “There’s a whole bunch of myths that bodies sit up and all that kind of stuff. None of that happens,” she says.

The real life of a funeral director is startling enough, as it turns out. Donna has encountered bereaved relatives so distraught that they fall into the ground with the casket. And once, at the crematory, Donna was surrounded by friends of the departed, who drew guns and demanded that the body in question not be cremated but sent to the man’s original country (the wife had opted for cremation for financial reasons.)

“And I said, ‘Okay, as long as she gives me permission to do it.’ Because at that point, my whole thing was: This person is already dead, so why am I going to argue over a dead body? I can do whatever you all want with it. I just don’t want to be the one laying there.”

“You meet a lot of interesting people,” she concludes. “And you have to have a lot of patience.”

Being a funeral director has helped shape her view of the world. “I think my outlook on life is totally different from that of the average person. I’ve seen some of my friends on my table. Life is too short—you really can’t think about what happened yesterday, and I can’t worry about tomorrow. I need to live for right now. Make the best for right now, make the right decisions, and treat people the way I would like to be treated.”

Marriage and children, for instance, were events that had to be dealt with in the present.

In the late 1990s, Donna decided that she wanted to stay home with her infant son, Quamel, and did not want to work in the funeral industry full-time. But as often happens when you are a stay-at-home mom, boredom sets in. To combat tedium, Donna found a part-time job in the marketing department of Schulte Roth and Zabel LLP, and when she decided she wanted a full-time position with flexible hours, Gregory Pressman at Schulte recommended her for the receptionist’s post at CEC.

She’s been at CEC since 2000, except for maternity leave to have her daughter, Quiana. She moved up from receptionist to being the administrator and then the operations manager for Leroy Anthony’s department.

“What do I do at CEC? Everything,” Donna laughs. Visit Donna in her office above the garage and you are likely to find her on the phone, ordering items for fee-for-service installations; marketing; scheduling; talking with community groups. “It’s a lot of arranging, a lot of making sure that things are on the right track.”

How does she juggle her various lives? St. Helena descendant, single mom, CEC administrator, and funeral director? “Time management,” says Donna. And on the few occasions when that skill has failed her, and the demands of daily living threaten to interfere with work, the support of Richard Cherry has come to the rescue. “He cares for his employees,” says Donna, “and I really think that he has a big heart. He is willing to see not only what is best for the company but what is best for you.”

CEC is a world removed from the life Donna experiences in St. Helena. “When I go down there,” she says, “you would never think that I lived in New York. And I don’t do well with bugs. But my kids and I will go in the creek for oysters and clams. My son, he goes down there and gets the eggs from the coop and they still eat everything fresh from their farms.”

CEC is also removed from the life Donna leads with her children, who are into soccer (12-year-old Quamel) and cheerleading (9-year-old Quiana) but who also submit to Donna’s life lessons. “When they feel that they’re supposed to have something, that’s when their mother takes them to volunteer in the soup kitchen. You have to teach kids to appreciate what they have and be humble. Be humble and strive for more, but not on someone else’s expense.”

Lessons from the many lives of Donna Parris.

Richard Cherry, president of Community Environmental Center

Long Island City, NY (July 23, 2010) — Community Environmental Center (CEC), the Queens-based non-profit organization dedicated to energy efficiency and green building, along with Sunset Park Redevelopment Corporation and the Opportunity Development Association (ODA), have been awarded $12.9 million by the New York State Division of Housing and Urban Renewal (DHCR) to bring energy efficient retrofits to Lindsay Park, the 2700-unit affordable housing complex in Brooklyn, announced Richard M. Cherry, CEC’s president.

The award — one of the largest in DHCR’s history — comes through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009. CEC is coordinating the weatherization, which will begin in Fall 2010.

CEC’s Cherry joined New York State Assemblyman Vito J. Lopez and DHCR Commissioner Brian Lawlor on stage at P.S. 250 on the evening of July 20, to speak with Lindsay Park residents and address any concerns. Tenants will receive new windows, energy-efficient light fixtures, energy efficient refrigerators, and new smoke and carbon monoxide detectors. Rooms will be tested for the presence of carbon dioxide, and basement pipes will be insulated.

“These retrofits,” Cherry told the appreciative crowd, “will save you over $2,000,000 a year, which otherwise would be coming out of your pockets for energy bills.”

“The windows,” he said, “are double-paned, with insulation between the panes, so you will be less subject to cold and heat. They will also lessen noise from the outside. You will feel as though a blanket surrounds your apartment.”

Refrigerators, Cherry explained, will only be replaced if they predate 1993 or are inefficient. “This is not a replacement program,” he advised, “but an energy efficiency program.”

NY State Assemblyman Vito J. Lopez

Assemblyman Lopez, who has represented Brooklyn’s 53^rd District since 1984 and helped work out the arrangements for the State grant, assured the Lindsay Park tenants, to great applause, that “no one’s rent is going up.” The Lindsay Park Housing Corporation will contribute an additional $500,000 toward the cost of the weatherization.

Windows were particularly on the minds of most of the tenants who lined up in an aisle of the auditorium to ask questions. Manufactured by Crystal Windows, the new, aluminum windows will be fitted to the frames in the apartments, will accommodate air conditioners and will tilt into rooms for easy cleaning.

Others on stage at the town meeting included DHCR Assistant Commissioner Daniel Buyer; DHCR Regional Supervisor Pauline Morgan; Gary Brown, Director of Sunset Park Redevelopment Corporation; Jay Silverberg, managing agent for the Lindsay Park Housing Corporation; and Lindsay Park’s board of directors.

Representatives of A.S.K. Construction, which will be installing the windows, and Riverdale Electric, which will be installing the lighting, were also on hand to answer questions.

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CONTACT: Alexis Greene, Community Environmental Center, 718-784-1444, ext. 156; agreene@cecenter.org

Coopper heat exchangers for the solar thermal system at Plaza de los Ancianos in Bushwick

(July 14, 2010)—Community Environmental Center (CEC) in Queens is heading a solar thermal project for the Ridgewood Bushwick Senior Citizens Council, which is installing the state-of-the-art system at Plaza de los Ancianos in Bushwick, announced Richard M. Cherry, the president of CEC. 

Located at 297 Wilson Avenue, the 8-story Plaza de los Ancianos has been providing Brooklyn’s seniors with affordable housing for 15 years. Low-income residents pay only 30 percent of their income toward rent.

“The climate crisis and the evident need to use energy sources other than oil and gas are driving an urgent, growing demand for free, renewable energy,” said Cherry. “The Ridgewood Bushwick Senior Citizens Council is a forward-looking agency and recognizes that solar energy can reduce fuel costs and keep Los Ancianos affordable for the elderly residents who need its services.”

Maggie Grady, the project manager at Ridgewood Bushwick who has been overseeing the installation of the solar thermal system, commented, “All the housing units that Ridgewood Bushwick develops and manages are 100 percent affordable, and affordable buildings often run on very tight operating budgets.  We’ve been looking at new forms of green technology that would help us reduce our operating costs, and the solar thermal system fits our needs exactly.  Of course we’re also excited to be able to reduce our carbon footprint.”

The solar themal system at Los Ancianos will have 21 4’ x 10’ solar panels, or collectors, on the roof of the 8-story building and a single 1,200-gallon water-storage tank in the basement. The tank is outfitted with two layers of seven massive copper coils, or heat exchangers, which will heat the water for the tenants’ showers and baths, the dishwashers and washing machines.

Quixotic Systems, Inc., of New York City designed the entire system, which uses panels manufactured by Heliodyne, Inc., of Richmond, California. The system will be fully operational by the middle of August.

“The large collectors,” says Richard Klein, Quixotic’s president, “result in a higher output rating. This is a big building–94 units–and these collectors are the right size for creating the heat value that will result in the best savings-to-investment ratio.”

The single water-storage tank was a matter of economy of scale as well as cost: the basement at Los Ancianos cannot accommodate a series. The lone tank, which has a galvanized sheet-metal exterior and an EPDM liner–the sort used to line ponds and water gardens–has the added advantage of being partially collapsible, which facilitates delivery and set-up.

Still, Klein reports that it was a bit of an adventure transporting the water-storage tank from the first floor of Los Ancianos to the basement. Posts and railings had to be removed, to maneuver the tank down a flight of stairs. 

Indeed, installing solar energy systems in New York City dwellings can be challenging. “Installations on tall city buildings can get very complex and expensive,” says Klein. “But the environmental and financial benefits are unparalleled.”

A well-designed system, according to Klein, “is capable of providing approximately 50 percent of a building’s annual hot water usage. A large residential building uses an average of 200 million Btu of natural gas per month for hot water only. Using this average consumption in 100,000 residential buildings in New York, one can begin to see that 50 percent savings is a very respectable number indeed.”

The solar hot-water system at Los Ancianos is one of three that the nonprofit Community Environmental Center is installing in New York City this summer, including the city’s largest residential solar-thermal installation, at Wadsworth Terrace in Manhattan.

CONTACT: Alexis Greene, Community Environmental Center, 718-784-1444, ext. 156; agreene@cecenter.org

Part of an array of solar panels at Wadsworth Terrace

Long Island City, NY (July 8, 2010)—Community Environmental Center (CEC), the Queens-based not-for-profit organization committed to energy efficiency and green building solutions, is installing solar hot-water systems at three sites in New York City this summer, including the largest installation to date for a multifamily NYC building, announced Richard M. Cherry, the president of CEC.

The new installation—actually two systems—was designed by EarthKind Solar of Kingston, NY, and consists of 42 4’x 7’ solar panels in 4 arrays and 7 200-gallon water-storage tanks. They are located at two adjacent rental apartment houses at 75-79 and 81-85 Wadsworth Terrace, in the hilly Washington Heights section of Manhattan.

“The climate crisis and the evident need to use energy sources other than oil and gas are driving an urgent, growing demand for free, renewable energy,” said CEC’s Richard Cherry. “Solar heating systems that provide hot water for domestic use are still in their infancy in New York City, so for a privately owned building such as Wadsworth to install these systems is a significant investment and a turning point. Ultimately it can benefit all New Yorkers.”

Edmund Miller of Lemle and Wolff, Inc., the Bronx-based management firm for Wadsworth Terrace, recognized that the property’s hilly location made the buildings good candidates for using the sun’s energy. He investigated PV systems but opted for direct solar heat because, he says, “I wanted a quicker return on investment.” Says Miller, “I expect that it will be 5 years before the buildings’ owners make back their money, but if the cost of fuel goes higher, the payback will be faster.”

At EarthKind Solar, Senior Vice President Ron Kamen estimates that Wadsworth’s solar hot water collectors will save the buildings’ owners 3,500 gallons of heating oil per year, or more than 87,500 gallons over the 25-year life of the system. The systems will also eliminate the emission of more than 86,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per year. 

The Wadsworth solar thermal systems will begin operating in August. In the meantime, CEC is installing solar hot-water systems for Plaza de los Ancianos, an 8-story residence for senior citizens at 297 Wilson Avenue in Brooklyn, and for a 4-story multifamily apartment building at 1501 E. 10^th St. in Brooklyn.

Quixotic Systems Inc. of New York City has designed the system for Plaza de los Ancianos, which will have 21 4’ x 10’ solar panels, manufactured by Heliodyne, Inc., in Richmond, California, and a single 1,200-gallon water-storage tank outfitted with two layers of seven massive copper coils, or heat exchangers. It will be operational at the end of July.

“The larger collectors,” says Richard Klein, Quixotic’s president, “result in a higher output rating. This is a big building–94 units–and these collectors are the right size for creating the heat value that will result in the best savings-to-investment ratio.”

The single water-storage tank was a matter of economy of scale as well as cost: the basement at Los Ancianos cannot accommodate a series. The lone tank, which has a galvanized sheet-metal exterior and an EPDM liner, has the added advantage of being collapsible, which facilitates delivery and set-up.

Community Environmental Center, which is the largest supplier of weatherization services under New York State’s Weatherization Assistance Program (WAP), first installed solar hot-water systems in March 2009 at two multifamily buildings owned by the not-for-profit Cypress Hills Community Development Corporation in Brooklyn.

“For us in the Northeast,” says CEC’s Cherry, “using solar panels to heat our water is an exploratory process. We do not know yet if it will prove an accepted, economically viable use of renewable energy. In a city like New York, there are engineering challenges and expense associated with putting 90-pound panels on rooftops and connecting them to storage tanks many floors below.”

But,” Cherry adds, “the more solar thermal systems we install, the more likely we are to refine the installation process, reduce the costs and transform the market – we’ve already brought down the costs substantially from where we were a year ago.”

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CONTACT: Alexis Greene, Community Environmental Center, 718-784-1444, ext. 156; agreene@cecenter.org

For more information about Community Environmental Center: www.cecenter.org

For more information about EarthKind Solar: www.earthkindsolar.com

For more information about Quixotic Systems Inc.: www.quixotic-systems.com

NYC Buildings Commissioner Robert LiMandri and Richard M. Cherry, President of CEC

Long Island City, NY (June 21, 2010)—JetBlue Airways was welcomed into the Cool Roofs Movement by Robert LiMandri, the Commissioner of the NYC Buildings Department, and Community Environmental Center (CEC) on the hot, breezy first day of summer, announced Richard M. Cherry, the president of CEC.

JetBlue’s volunteer crewmembers were on hand to paint the roof with a reflective white coating that cuts greenhouse gas emissions. 

“You are pioneers in this Cool Roofs movement,” said Commissioner LiMandri, addressing the JetBlue volunteers during a break from their roof coating. “If we paint enough roofs in our NYC neighborhoods, we will meet our goal of 1 million square feet. Doing this will reduce the cost of energy and help building owners and tenants alike.” 

CEC’s 8,000-square-foot roof is one of hundreds scheduled for painting since May 12, 2010, when the NYC Mayor’s office launched its citywide Cool Roofs Program.  So far, 215,494 square feet have been painted; 757,732 square feet have been inspected and are waiting for paint application.

JetBlue Airways, which will move its headquarters to Long Island City in 2012, is a signature supporter of the National Conference on Volunteering and Service, which is taking place in NYC from June 28-30 and is focusing on environmental sustainability. The low-cost airline will be sponsoring Cool Roofs at two other Long Island City sites: The Noguchi Museum and a shelter operated by the Department of Homeless Services.

Also in attendance at the roof coating were Diahann Billings-Burford, Chief Service Officer of NYC Service, which brings volunteers to City programs and partners with businesses to engage corporate employees in the volunteer effort, and Icema Gibbs, Director of Corporate Social Responsibility for the JetBlue Airways Corporation.

“We can impact real change across the City with volunteers,” Billings-Burford told the JetBlue crewmembers. “We’re going to save the world, and you’re going to do it.”

CEC, a non-profit company dedicated to energy efficiency and green building solutions, is organizing the painting logistics for the Cool Roofs Program.

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For more information about Community Environmental Center: www.cecenter.org

Contact: Alexis Greene, Community Environmental Center, agreene@cecenter.org or 718-784-1444, ext. 156

She is 21-year-old Kahryl Fann, a long-time resident of Spring Creek Towers and a paid intern learning to weatherize houses and apartments, so that people can be warm in winter and cool in summer, lower their energy bills, and lessen the impact of the climate crisis.

“It’s something I want to do,” says Kahryl, interviewed one afternoon at Community Environmental Center (CEC) in Long Island City, where she is doing her internship. “Seeing how effective weatherization is, I want to help people save money and make sure they’re healthier.”

It’s an adventure, but Kahryl has always welcomed new experiences, beginning with her family’s move in 1999 to Spring Creek Towers. She happily has taken advantage of everything this enormous apartment complex offers: public elementary school and junior high school, a sports club and the shopping center, which she visits nearly every day (it’s a great source for pizza and Chinese food, not to mention a Radio Shack and an Associated Supermarket).

Indeed, despite Spring Creek’s size—46 buildings containing 5,881 apartments for   nearly 15,000 people—Kahryl refers to her own area as “a small community.”

“It’s big,” she grins, “but like, my section, with the kids I know? It’s close-knit.”

So, undaunted by things new, when Kahryl learned last fall from her high-school counselor that Green City Force (GCF), which prepares young people for careers in the emerging green economy, was offering a 6-month training program…she decided to postpone college and explore it. “Because it was something I didn’t know about,” says Kahryl.

She impressed Green City Force interviewers with her commitment and focus, and aced the required T.A.B.E. Test (Test of Adult Basic Education). December 2009 found Kahryl going door-to-door in the East New York section of Brooklyn, informing homeowners about weatherization.

“We started by doing outreach,” says Kahryl, with the enthusiasm that characterizes this energetic young woman. “For about a month and a half we were knocking on doors, giving out flyers, making presentations. It was cold! And whoever was interested, whoever was eligible, we got them set up for weatherization—we were trained to teach them how to fill out the applications.”

Her training, co-led by Green City Force and Community Environmental Center, included classroom instruction in personal and career development, job readiness, and ecoliteracy—a field of knowledge involving the well-being of the earth.  And a taste of the technical aspects of weatherization, with its focus on blowing cellulose insulation into walls and attic spaces, those perfect hiding places for the draughts that chill a household during the winter.

Now, as an intern at CEC, Kahryl is officially on track to be hired for a professional weatherization crew. She particularly likes installing windows, and her newly acquired knowledge comes tumbling out with a confidence that would please any mentor.

“You have to measure first,” she says, “because you don’t want a window that’s too big for the area, because if it’s too big, there’s no way. If it’s too small, you can put wood around it, to make it flush. So first you take out the old window—you take everything out and you vacuum the wood left behind. Once you have the new window that fits the space you put caulk around the perimeter, you put the window in, and then you take shims—little wood chips that help you level the window—and you put them around the sides. You level the window, caulk around it, add your molding, and after you have that, you caulk again.”

Installing windows is satisfying and even fun. Wriggling along a crawl space? Not so much. “That was major uncomfortable,” says Kahryl. “The space was really little and it had, like, studs coming out, and I had to maneuver myself. It looked like a maze. I don’t know how I got in and how I got out, but I did.”

Indeed, nothing seems to daunt Kahryl, not even getting up at 5:00 a.m. to be at CEC by 8:00 a.m. “Yeah, it’s a long commute,” she acknowledges, “but I do it.”

One of her most positive experiences so far involved a Brooklyn homeowner. Kahryl first met the woman last winter during the application process and subsequently during the “energy audit,” which tests a residence for draughts and carbon monoxide levels, and ascertains the need for energy efficient light bulbs and appliances. Then in May, Kahryl was on the crew that returned to the house for the two-week-long weatherization.

“The owner remembered me and everything, so that felt kind of good,” says Kahryl. “But also, I got to see the weatherization from start to finish, and that was great.”

Back at Spring Creek Towers, her friends have various reactions to Kahryl’s new job. “My female friends think that it’s construction,” she says. “They say, ‘Wow, you’re going to do that? You don’t seem like you would do that.’ My guy friends, they say, ‘That’s cool. You can do that? I can’t even do that.’ And that makes me feel good.”

She hopes that the internship will lead to full-time employment at CEC and then to an auditing position. Further into the future she would like to go to college and ultimately receive an engineering degree.

But right now? “I’m learning and I enjoy it,” says Kahryl. “All my life, little jobs I’ve had, nothing has really been ‘hands-on.’ So I like being able to use tools, really getting in there and doing things. I just like to learn things that I didn’t know before.”

CONTACT: Alexis Greene, 718-784-1444, ext. 156; agreene@cecenter.org

MORE ABOUT GREEN CITY FORCE

Kahryl Fann began her weatherization training at Green City Force (GCF), a NYC-based not-for-profit organization that combines job training and community service to foster environmentally healthy urban communities and also prepare young people for careers in the emerging green economy.

GCF works with unemployed urban youth ages 18 to 24 who have a high school diploma or GED and offers them the chance to be on the front lines in greening NYC: painting cool roofs, weatherizing low-income homes, and performing outreach block-by-city block to educate citizens about the Weatherization Assistance Program.

Participants commit to 6 months, full-time, with Green City Force. The program involves learning marketable skills while gaining hands-on experience, classroom training, entry-level certifications, support for job placement and follow-up, and stipends.

To learn more about GCF, call Danza Huey at 718-923-1400, ext. 287

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From the distance, the tan-colored brick buildings appear to rise slowly out of the haze, growing taller and taller as you drive toward them along Brooklyn’s Pennsylvania Avenue. They look like an urban Stonehenge, a monolithic stand of brick towers, bare against the sky.

Upon arriving at Spring Creek Towers, however, the prospect is different. Now the buildings are surrounded by expanses of meticulously trimmed grass, and flowering trees and shrubs overhang asphalt pathways and decorate the lawns. Along the avenues that encircle this universe are banks and supermarkets and restaurants, and people walk about on personal and purposeful missions. This is, despite the first impression, a community after all. A city within New York City.

Initially called Twin Pines, the project was the brainchild of the United Housing Federation (UHF), a conglomeration of unions, civic organizations, and housing cooperatives created after World War II to sponsor housing developments. The UHF had emerged, in part, from a post-war drive to rid the city of slum buildings and create multistory affordable housing, which ideally would rejuvenate run-down neighborhoods.

The other aspect of UHF’s goal was to create affordable housing for union members. But their plans ran aground with Co-op City, which UHF built from 1965 to 1973 in the East Bronx. A debacle for UHF in terms of design, construction and financing, Co-op City ended up a much more expensive venture than UHF had ever conceived. What’s more, these additional costs were passed along to tenants, who promptly engineered the longest, largest rent strike in history.

In 1971, UHF decided that it was “not organized to sponsor housing which average working people cannot afford” (1). It sold Twin Pines to a private developer, National Kinney Corporation and the Starrett Housing Corporation, and exited the housing development business.

Starrett Housing Corp. (SHC) took control.  The company had a long history, beginning in 1887 as a family-owned construction business, going on to erect the Empire State Building and spending much of the 1960s building low- and middle-income apartment complexes in the metropolitan New York area. SHC finished building the mega-complex under the State’s Mitchell-Lama program, as subsidized working- and middle-class housing.

Starrett City, as Spring Creek Towers was originally called, opened in 1974. The giant complex contained 46 buildings ranging from 11 to 20 stories, with 5, 881 apartments. It stood atop what had been more than 140 acres of swampland and marsh. Indeed today, if you are lucky enough to rent an apartment facing west, you overlook Spring Creek Basin. Facing south, you can see Jamaica Bay and beyond that the Atlantic Ocean.

A 1979 television commercial for Starrett City, available on the Internet, advertises the advantages of living in this enormous development: the proximity of supermarkets, an indoor gym and swimming pool, attractively dressed men and women going off to work, and happy youngsters playing safely on landscaped grounds.

For people willing to make a 90-minute subway commute to and from jobs in Manhattan, Starrett offered the allure of a community that could answer every need. There were a post office, churches and a synagogue, and an extensive and well-monitored security system. A co-generation plant on the grounds supplied heat, electricity, hot water, and air conditioning to all the buildings.

Starrett Housing Corp. was far-sighted in terms of installing energy-saving measures. In the early 1990s, for instance, the management caulked and/or replaced windows throughout the complex, to prevent the loss of heated air during the winters and to retain cool air during the summers.  They installed bi-level lighting in hallways and CO detectors in apartments.

But there were also difficulties. When apartments were first rented at Starrett City in 1973, a racial quota system was in place, and SHC sought to maintain 64 percent of the apartments for white tenants, 22 percent for black residents, and 8 percent for Hispanic. In fairness to SHC, it always maintained that the quotas were designed to preserve racial integration within the Starrett complex. But times had changed, and the US Attorney General challenged this arrangement. In 1988 the US Supreme Court banned the quotas, ruling that they violated the Civil Rights Act of 1968.

As of the 2000 US Census, the demographics had changed considerably: 44.7 percent of the tenants were African American, 38 percent were white, 18.4 percent were Hispanic or Latino, and 4.1 percent were Asian.

The owner’s next significant challenge came on November 30, 2006, when Starrett City Associates, as the company was now called, announced plans to sell the entire property. Fearing that a new owner would raise rents and force out tenants, residents sought the assistance of Tenants and Neighbors (the State’s largest tenants rights group) and the community activist organization ACORN, and formed Save Starrett City.

On February 8, 2007, at 3AM, Starrett City Associates agreed to sell the sprawling complex to Clipper Equity LLC for an astonishing $1.3 billion.

The buyers insisted the complex would remain affordable; housing advocates were doubtful. Among other things, Clipper Equity had a history of irregularities, which had led to its being banned from converting apartments to condominiums or co-ops in New York State.

The State’s prominent politicians, including New York City’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg, voiced concern about the sale. Congressmen Anthony Weiner and Edolphus Towns indicated that federal hearings might be in order. Senator Charles Schumer “vowed … that he would not allow the deal to go through without an ironclad agreement from any buyer that Starrett stays affordable.” [2]

Housing and Urban Development (HUD) rejected the deal, and Clipper Equity proposed a new bid aimed at appeasing its critics. But that, too, met the cutting-room floor when, on April 7, 2007, Commissioner Deborah Van Amerongen, speaking for the New York State Department of Housing and Community Renewal (DHCR), asserted that Clipper’s plan for rents to reach market rate after three years failed to protect residents adequately and would require more government support than was feasible.

The story has a happy ending for both Starrett’s tenants and owners (although not perhaps for Clipper Equity). As Affordable Housing Finance Magazine reported in February 2010, Wells Fargo originated a $531.4 million refinancing loan for the massive complex, through Freddie Mac’s Capital Markets Execution program. “The loan is the largest single-asset affordable housing loan in Freddie Mac’s history,” the magazine reported, “and allows the owners to pull out a substantial sum of equity while agreeing to keep the complex affordable for the next 30 years.”

These days, the owners continue to improve Spring Creek Towers’ physical plant. In one of the largest weatherization projects since the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), the non-profit Community Environmental Center (CEC) of Queens, NY is heightening the energy efficiency of Spring Creek Towers’ 5,881 apartments. ARRA funds cover $6 million of the total $9 million cost of the retrofitting; Spring Creek Towers is supplying $3 million.

Ramasu Ryan, a Green City Force trainee, tests for carbon monoxide levels at Spring Creek Towers

The retrofitting, which will take place over 2 phases and extend until the end of June 2011, will save energy, combat the climate crisis, and help preserve the apartments’ 36-year tradition of affordability.

• Apartments will receive energy efficient lighting fixtures, which will reduce the energy consumption of the complex;
• Refrigerators will be replaced by Energy Star models, which ensure efficiency, performance and reliability
• To provide the continued safety and health of the residents, stoves will be tested for carbon monoxide levels, and old or inoperable CO detectors, as well as smoke detectors, are being replaced with newer models. Air ducts will be cleaned.

These energy-saving and health measures will prevent approximately 5,800 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) from being emitted into the atmosphere each year—the equivalent of taking almost 1,000 cars off the road.

To assist with the energy audits, an essential step before retrofitting can begin, CEC is employing trained energy conservationists from Green City Force, a non-profit organization that prepares young people for careers in the new green economy.  To see men and women in their late teens and early twenties—men and women whose backgrounds often make them among the most vulnerable in the City’s workforce—learning how to test for carbon monoxide levels, or assess the efficiency of a refrigerator or a smoke detector, and learning the discipline involved with performing a job on a regular basis, are some of the biggest rewards of the Spring Creek Towers’ weatherization.

It is a fitting achievement for a housing project that began, so many years ago, as a peaceful, beneficial community within the community of New York City.