The history and evolution of NYLPI's Environmental Justice Project demonstrates NYLPI's commitment to work with community groups and stakeholders to reverse the shameful legacy of environmental discrimination. The Project works to prevent further environmental degradation of threatened neighborhoods by challenging the siting and expansion of noxious facilities for solid waste transfer stations and power plants. But it also works with community groups to develop brownfield properties that improve the neighborhood, and other special projects. NYLPI's goal is to strengthen the ability of communities to assert their right to a healthy environment while promoting community-driven economic development, affordable housing, open space and community services.

Most recently, NYLPI’s environmental justice team filed a lawsuit challenging a weak brownfield cleanup program approved in December of 2006 during the last days of the Pataki Administration, claiming that the new rules fail to live up to the higher standard required by the state legislature when it passed the brownfields law in 2003.

NYLPI staff and volunteers from our member firms provide neighborhood residents with the legal tools needed to enforce environmental regulations. NYLPI also offers communities grass-roots organizing assistance to help them build lasting neighborhood-based advocacy institutions. With this help, local communities can develop the capacity to tackle environmental problems and to undertake initiatives that will lead to new economic development, affordable housing and more vital neighborhoods.