What will Trump Mean for Red Hook? by the Red Hook Star-Revue Staff

Red Hook’s streets were quiet Wednesday morning, with the few pedestrians walking their dogs or waiting for the bus looking despondent.

“It’s unsettling and confusing and I’m not really sure what’s going to happen next,” noted a man on King Street.

“I think it’s embarrassing,” said a woman near Wolcott. “This is what happens when people don’t go vote. I’ve been thinking about it all morning – I don’t know what it means I just know I don’t like it.”

Employees at several businesses were in tears and did not want to comment.

Donald Trump will be President of the United States come January, which means that the businessman and reality television star will assume leadership of a wide variety of important federal agencies and departments.

As a diverse coastal community, Red Hook is impacted by a wide array of these agencies, from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (which funds the Red Hook Houses) to the Environmental Protection Agency to the Department of Homeland Security, which manages the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Due to Trump’s political heedlessness and inexperience, it is hard to predict how Red Hook will be impacted by his presidency. His policy positions are unclear, and his efficacy as President is uncertain. But what impact might President Trump have on our neighborhood?

Immigration and Education

Border control and deportation of undocumented immigrants was, in many ways, the centerpiece of Donald Trump’s campaign. In September he promised to target  between 5 and 6.5 million undocumented immigrants for

immediate deportation and to triple the number of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials. In total, his plan would cost between $51.2 and $66.9 billion dollars over the next five years, according to the Washington Post.

New York City has an estimated 500,000 undocumented immigrants, and some of them attend Summit Academy Charter School.

“We serve a migrant community, and many of our scholars and their families are in this country without citizenship,” says Natasha Campbell, founder and executive director of Summit Academy. “And [Wednesday], in light of Donald Trump being elected President, we had kids who were concerned that almost immediately they or their families would be deported.”

Summit Academy staff is working to provide students an outlet for their concerns, holding multiple assemblies Thursdays where scholars can voice their fears and ask questions.

“In the coming days, they’re going to all write letters to Mr. Trump, to talk about what they’d like to see happen in his four years as our leader,” says Campbell. “I don’t know, we’ll see. We have to explain to our kids that it’s not that simple, that Donald Trump doesn’t wake up tomorrow and deport everyone that doesn’t have citizenship.”

Tim Vetter is Summit’s High School Assistant Principal.

“We don’t really know what’s going to happen, but since I’ve been here we’ve had kids that were stop and frisked, we’ve had staff members who were stop-and-frisked, that’s confusing to a lot of people. We had a graduate last year whose parents were illegal immigrants, who shared stories with us about working with their parents on days off, who needed the money.”

“We have a number of kids whose parents are undocumented,” says Vetter. “It could have a drastic impact. The impact that we’re already seeing, the reason we’re having this assembly today, is that people are just freaking out. People are upset, I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

Vetter also has concerns about Trump’s impact on the Department of Education, which the President-Elect has indicated he would like to close entirely or at least drastically scale back in favor of local control and school vouchers. Although Vetter works at a charter school, he says different students have different needs.

“In this neighborhood, there was a need for [a charter school]. But I’ve worked in public schools, I’ve seen teachers in public schools who work incredibly hard,” says Vetter. “It’s tough. It’s tough in New York City, it’s tough in a neighborhood that needs help, and we need to look at it more as a community issue than as a school issue or a public versus charter issue.”

“When your only meals are the subsidized meals you get in school, or you’re going home and raising your younger siblings, or you’re going home and working for the family, these are all things that people hear about happening in a low-income community,” adds Vetter. “And it is just the reality of all of our kids here.”

Public Housing and Health

“For me, it’s too soon to speculate as to what it will mean for the community,” says Bea Byrd, who serves on the boards of the New York Public Housing Authority and the Addabbo Family Health Center. “I think we’re all in shock.”

Trump has repeatedly vowed to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act immediately on assuming office.

“I will ask Congress to convene a special session so we can repeal and replace, and it will be such an honor for me, for you and for everybody in this country, because Obamacare has to be replaced,” Trump said November 1 per the Los Angeles Times. “We will do it and we will do it very very quickly.”

Byrd says that if that happens, a lot of Red Hook residents will lose their health insurance.

“With the Affordable Care Act, a lot of people who were uninsured and had no health coverage at all were able to get coverage,” says Byrd. “I certainly don’t think that anyone would like to see that rolled back.”

Byrd says that Trump and his supporters care less about improving Americans’ access to care than undoing President Obama’s legacy.

“It’s not Obamacare, it’s the president himself,” says Byrd. “It’s not Obamacare, it’s black people and minority people moving forward, and whenever the pendulum for minorities moves forward, there’s going to be a swing back. That’s been my experience. We made progress by electing an African American president, so here is the backlash, electing Trump.”

Trump has not taken a stance on public housing or housing assistance programs. NYCHA and other public housing projects are funded mostly by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the leader of which Trump will be able to appoint as president.

“Most of the money that we get for NYCHA comes through HUD,” says Byrd, noting that most housing projects across the country are already underfunded. “And again, these are poor people, these are minority people who live in low-income housing, and… there’s always been a shortfall. So today, just because Trump is now in the White House, we’re going to have even more regression. We don’t have enough, even as we speak now!”

Byrd is unwilling to give in to cynicism, however.

“I’m not a doom and gloom kind of person,” says Byrd. “Let’s give him an opportunity to stand up and be the man that he alleged that he was going to be for all of the people, and let’s see where it goes from there.”

Byrd was excited by the long lines of people waiting to vote in Red Hook, but she cautions against complacency.

“You have to care every day, you have to be vigilant every day, if affordable health care is under attack, we have to fight back. You can’t just lay down and roll over because there’s a different person in the White House,” says Byrd. “All those people who stood in long lines and who voted, stay on the lines! Stay out there! Stay vigilant in your community!”

“Whoever is in the White House will not make a difference in this community if the people in this community stay on their watch,” she added.

Climate Change and Resilience

Trump’s position on climate change has been contradictory. In 2012 he tweeted that “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.” Though he later claimed this tweet was a joke, sources close to his campaign reported Wednesday that he had selected Myron Ebell, a famous climate change skeptic, to spearhead his takeover of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

His campaign website also promises that he will “Unleash America’s $50 trillion in untapped shale, oil, and natural gas reserves, plus hundreds of years in clean coal reserves,” “reduce and eliminate all barriers to responsible energy production [created by Obama’s executive actions],” and “open onshore and offshore leasing on federal lands, eliminate moratorium on coal leasing, and open shale energy deposits.”

Alexandros Washburn, a local expert on coastal resilience about whom the Star-Revue has written previously, says that Trump needs to pay attention to climate change.

“Even for people who are skeptical of anthropogenic climate change, what has happened already demands attention,” says Washburn. “We get it, as New Yorkers, because we were hit by Sandy. Trump is a New Yorker, after all, he knows about Sandy.”

“We don’t have to agree about why the climate is changing, but we do have to agree that we have to do something about protecting ourselves,” Washburn continues. “The effect climate change has had already requires adaptation, requires coastal resilience. And sea level is rising, which is measurable.”

Washburn says that while a Trump presidency will have a lot of risks for the coastal communities around the world, environmental regulations do need a shake-up.

“I’ve said for a long time that environmental law may be the Achilles Heel of resilience,” says Washburn, noting that most of the laws were designed in the 1970s. “These laws were made to protect nature from us. We are now in an era of Hurricane Sandy, of coastal dangers, where we need to protect ourselves from nature. Is this an opportunity to look at that law and realize it needs to be rebalanced?”

Coastal resilience means impacting the environment and managing humans’ relationship with the water, something very difficult to do presently.

“The regulations make it virtually impossible to do the sorts of things that you have to do now to protect yourself in a coastal hurricane environment,” says Washburn. “Like off-shore breakwaters. Like building up berms with dredged materials. Like reshaping parts of our coastline to serve new purposes.”

The answer isn’t less regulation but “more accurate” regulation.

“You can’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, but you have to pare down the regulations, make them more accurate, get them to support the needs of today and tomorrow,” says Washburn. “It’s a new paradigm.”

We hope to cover more of the ways Trump’s presidency will affect Red Hook, such as immigration, policing, and even shipping in the near future. Please email noah@redhookstar.com with your thoughts and insights about what impact Trump might have on our community.