UPROSE says GRID 2.0 is a community plan, not a competing pitch

Dear Sunset Post,

Thank you for covering the future of the Brooklyn Army Terminal and for engaging with the perspectives of organizations rooted in Sunset Park. We appreciate the opportunity to clarify several points and to offer context that we believe is essential for a full and accurate understanding of UPROSE’s position.

First, while the article presents the disagreement between UPROSE and NYCEDC as a clash of competing visions, it understates a critical distinction: UPROSE’s GRID 2.0 framework is not simply an alternative proposal but the result of over a decade of community-led, community-ratified planning grounded in the lived realities of Sunset Park residents and workers. This plan did not emerge from a design competition or external consultancy model like BATWorks; it was built through sustained organizing, technical analysis, and democratic engagement with frontline communities most impacted by industrial land-use decisions. This is not just an aspirational plan, it is operational.

Second, the article frames BATWorks as a relatively limited intervention, 200,000 square feet within a larger campus, without fully grappling with the precedent-setting nature of introducing AI- and tech-centered uses into one of the city’s most critical remaining industrial waterfronts. For Sunset Park, the issue is not only square footage or displacement in the narrow sense, but trajectory. Once land is repositioned for speculative “innovation” uses, it fundamentally alters land values, infrastructure priorities, energy demand, and future access for manufacturing that directly supports climate adaptation and mitigation at scale.

Relatedly, the characterization of BATWorks as “climate innovation” is presented largely on NYCEDC’s terms. The article does not sufficiently interrogate the well-documented environmental and energy impacts of AI and data-driven industries, nor does it explore how these sectors have historically externalized harms onto frontline communities while branding themselves as climate solutions. From UPROSE’s perspective, innovation divorced from community control, material production, and environmental limits is not climate justice; it is greenwashed extraction.

We also want to clarify that UPROSE’s critique is not a rejection of collaboration or workforce development. Our concern is that community engagement is being treated as a mechanism for integration into a pre-determined plan, rather than as a process that shapes whether and how development should occur in the first place. Outreach to hundreds of stakeholders, many of them outsiders, does not substitute for respecting an existing, operational community plan that already aligns with city and state climate mandates.

Finally, while the article notes UPROSE’s history of collaboration with NYCEDC, it does not adequately reflect the significance of projects like Sunset Park Solar as evidence that community-led climate infrastructure is already working. GRID 2.0 builds on this success by prioritizing manufacturing, resilience infrastructure, and clean industrial uses that meet the scale of the climate crisis while protecting Sunset Park as a working waterfront.

We hope future coverage will more deeply examine the power dynamics inherent in industrial waterfront planning and center the question that matters most to our community: not simply what can be built, but who decides, who benefits, and who bears the risk, but also what is possible when the community leads.

Sincerely,

Elizabeth Yeampierre