Cypress Hills Goes Verde and Skadden Fellow to Join Brooklyn A

By Dan Hafetz

CYPRESS HILLS LOCAL DEVELOPMENT Corporation (CHLDC), a client of Brooklyn A for over twenty-five years, is launching a brand new green initiative. Called “Cypress Verde” (Green Cypress in Spanish), CHLDC is planning a comprehensive redevelopment of the Cypress Hills neighborhood, focusing on green jobs, buildings and combating pollution. Thanks to the Skadden Fellowship Foundation, I will be joining Brooklyn A’s Community Economic Development (CED) Unit starting in the fall of 2010. As part of my two-year Skadden Fellowship I will represent CHLDC on Cypress Verde as a staff attorney.

My work with Cypress Verde will primarily focus on three key areas: energy efficiency retrofits to over two hundred units of housing by 2011; redevelopment of brownfields — heavily contaminated lots — into green housing or commercial space; and the creation of a green collar jobs worker training center. Together, the components of the project will create the foundation for sustained progress in this area. Not only will CHLDC create the demand for more green labor — and thus jobs for the local community it will be working with other organiz-ations to help train local workers to fill those jobs.

My roots in the community date back to when I taught eighth grade social studies at P.S. 218 in East New York, the neighborhood adjacent to Cypress Hills, as a New York City Teaching Fellow. I see community economic devel-opment as a way to help the families I worked with as a teacher, but through different means. Although I left teaching to enter law school, I always knew that I would return to East New York to do community development work.

Brooklyn A has been developing its green practice for a number of years. It already has one attorney (Nikki Prenoveau, an Equal Justice Works Fellow) who has been expanding the green building practice by assisting the CED Unit’s clients who wish to incorporate green initiatives in their affordable housing and other development projects. Through the Green Building Law and Justice Project, Nikki and other members of the CED Unit are providing holistic, transactional legal representation to community-based organizations throughout various stages of green development projects; and are developing resources on green laws and subsidy programs as well as model documents for green transactions to share with other CED lawyers and their clients.

I learned about the CED practice and the close, in-house relationship they form with their clients when I interned for Brooklyn A in the summer of 2008. I immediately become enamored of it. With its local community office model, Brooklyn A is plugged into the community in a way that is utterly unique in legal services in New York. I find that having a dedicated relationship to

representing non-profits and its physical proximity to the community is what keeps Brooklyn A so closely aligned with the mission of its clients.

As CHLDC begins to integrate environmentally sustainable design, development and practice into their operations and expansion efforts, Brooklyn A, through its soon expanding Green Building Law and Justice Project, will be at their side. I can’t wait to start.