Bridgeport is Going Green to Improve Health
Three years ago, Angel Torres-Sosa avoided the menacing, vacant lot around the corner from his Bridgeport, Conn., home. The neglected area in the Reservoir neighborhood was smothered with weeds and trash.
Today, however, the 16-year-old spends every day he can there.
The site has been transformed into the Reservoir Community Farm, a bountiful urban site run by a nonprofit on city land and staffed by 20 local youth interns. Torres-Sosa tends to vegetable beds, sells produce at a farm stand, takes school classes on guided tours and even offers customers advice on preparing kale or collard greens. In the meantime, he and his peers are racking up the skills and knowledge to be community leaders.
“People from the neighborhood spend the day here to relax and to tend to their community garden beds. It is a peaceful gathering place,” says Cristina Sandolo, executive director of the Green Village Initiative, which runs the farm.
The conversion of an eyesore lot into an urban farm is a two-acre success story that is part of a much larger, 1,100-acre challenge for this once-mighty industrial city. Twelve percent of Bridgeport’s land area is vacant—much of it contaminated former industrial sites, or “brownfields,” that have little value and pose health risks to surrounding communities.
Bridgeport is rejuvenating its land and adopting clean-energy policies, while generating new jobs by establishing itself as a hub for innovative, eco-friendly businesses. Redeveloped brownfield sites are also leading to new schools, housing, parks and other open green spaces. These strategies are all connected by a core theme: improving health and the economy by “going green.”
The overall strategy is known as BGreen 2020, a master plan that lays out a public-private partnership approach to attracting green jobs and businesses while reducing the city’s reliance on fossil fuels. The results have been transformative, but the city is far from finished.
David Kooris, the city’s director of planning and economic development, said winning the RWJF Culture of Health Prize is incentive “to keep engaging stakeholders ... to figure out what’s next, and not to rest on what we’ve done so far.”