Greening the Ghetto: Carter brings business acumen to social causes

When Majora Carter walked through an abandoned riverfront lot in the South Bronx in 1998, all she saw was old tires, garbage and cracked cement. In 2005, a project headed by Carter led to a complete rejuvenation of the area, transforming the space into one of the only public parks in the neighbourhood.

Such transformations have become standard practice for Carter since then, as her consulting company has supervised the startup of several companies. These endeavours and others were discussed in her talk on Monday, Nov. 16, as part of the Sustainability Speaker Series hosted by the Office of Sustainability.

As founder of Sustainable South Bronx, a community greening program, as well as the Majora Carter Group consultancy firm, Carter has been called “The Green Power Broker” by the New York Times. Carter’s Greening the Ghetto, is one of the original six TEDTalks clips on YouTube, and has over 1.2 million views. Receiving numerous awards for her activism and business acumen, Carter’s sustainable approach to all of her projects has defined her work.

“The process of bringing an idea or project concept to reality is very similar to launching a product,” Carter said. “You have to identify a market, get some investment of money and time, and create a beta version of the idea.”

Startups supervised by Carter include a contracting company that creates green roofs on the traditional tar-topped warehouses so familiar in New York City, to a startup that employs young people for quality control in the tech and gaming industries. Carter said her goal with all these projects is to create a fiscally viable idea that people will buy into.

Carter emphasized keeping environmental and social sustainability in the fore of any project. Her green-roofing business, where warehouse roofs are turned into gardens, arose from New York City’s issues with waste water management. Rather than building large and unsightly stations to deal with runoff, Carter’s startup used the water to irrigate rooftop gardens.

Combined with the fact that food can be grown on these green roofs and the fact that the startup hired mainly young people from low-status neighbourhoods, Carter’s concept caught on quickly.

“Now, people who install these green roofs can get pretty significant tax abatements from the city,” Carter said in her talk. “It was a win-win-win.”

Currently, her Startup Box South Bronx initiative is employing young people from underprivileged backgrounds to do quality assurance for tech companies. Carter said that since the community around her was so tech-savvy already, it made sense to take a service that was usually shipped overseas and bring it local.

In terms of future endeavours, Carter said that making the South Bronx a place where people want to stay and keep their time and effort is a main goal.

“We hand-deliver gentrification,” Carter said. “We should be providing housing that makes people want to stay.”
Preventing the brain drain out of the neighbourhood creates a mixed income space, which Carter said encourages economic development.

“The things that make you know that you are in a poor community breed poverty,” Carter said. “A mixed-income neighbourhood helps prevent this.”

Though Carter has grand plans for revitalizing the place where she lives with new construction, her advice to students looking to make change was simple.

“Know your market, and come up with something that will make them love you. Taking your idea and turning it into something you can sell is the key.”