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77 Cromwell Towers By, Locust Hill Avenue, Yonkers, NY

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77 Cromwell Towers By, Locust Hill Avenue, Yonkers, NY

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77 Cromwell Towers By, Locust Hill Avenue, Yonkers, NY

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Artist Shanequa Benitez, constructed an excellent exhibit titled, “But It’s Ours: The Redline Between Poverty and Wealth,” which illustrates the effects redlining and racial segregation have had on black and brown residents of Southwest Yonkers. Her pieces highlight the public housing project she grew up in, the Cromwell Towers, as well as the many issues that can be directly retraced back to redlining such as food deserts, increased health risks such as asthma and gentrification out sourcing residents. I have attached a photo of her and I in front of one of her pieces.

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Smith O'Hara Levine Memorial Park, Wolffe Street, Yonkers, NY

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Smith O'Hara Levine Memorial Park, Wolffe Street, Yonkers, NY

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Smith O'Hara Levine Memorial Park, Wolffe Street, Yonkers, NY

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The article listed discusses efforts of High School students from Yonkers, to combat the issues faced in their local region of Southwest Yonkers. The “Green Team” has made efforts to provide solutions to the environmental injustices faced in their communities by maintaining greenery, planting a shade tree, and installing a rain garden as well as many other things.

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"Dying from heat is not something that I considered to be a prominent top ten killer of people." The incredulity was not missed on Jessy Zhang who is part of the Green Team, a group of Yonkers public high school students putting their boots on the ground and working on environmental restoration each year. Excessive heat, also known as the "silent killer," takes more lives than any other natural disaster. The other climate crisis, flooding, stands as the country's most common natural disaster, costing the City of Yonkers millions of dollars in damages.

Yonkers is a unique city both geographically and socio-economically. Its entire west side borders the Hudson River, and three additional north-south rivers create steep hills that contribute to extreme flooding. Southwest Yonkers is unlike the rest of the city due to poor policy decisions. Through historic racism and redlining practices, it has a high population density, a neglected infrastructure, a low rate of employment, and environmental contamination that goes back over a century. All this adds up to a significant vulnerability to excessive heat.

Many of the Green Team come from this part of Yonkers, living on the front line of today's most pressing environmental issues, such as extreme heat, flooding, air pollution, and land use. They are also increasingly aware of the risks the climate crisis poses to our society and the need for solutions. Young people make up 25 percent of Yonkers' population, and although they are among the most climate-vulnerable population, they are oftentimes underrepresented in decision-making and planning processes.

"I live in a low-income area, I'm in a house that has cooling and heating cut out during the summer and winter, and the area near me has a park with too few trees and too much trash to make it a suitable option." Ulizes Atlixqueno shared.

Ulizes is also a member of Groundwork's Green Team and is one of the many affected by too much asphalt and too little tree canopy coverage and viable green spaces. Oftentimes, this causes people to feel trapped in their apartments without a place to cool off during the hottest days of the year. That is why Ulizes and 29 other teenagers who make up the Green Team decided to be part of the solution to these environmental injustices.

In the past year, the Green Team tackled the impacts of climate change by planting hundreds of trees, building pollinator and rain gardens, installing infiltration drainage trenches, and removing invasive plants across Yonkers and Westchester County. Lily Bartlett, Groundwork Hudson Valley's Youth Programs Manager highlighted, "Youth are the driving force for environmental justice in our communities."

At the Smith O'Hara Levine Park, the site of the old Putnam rail line and the future Yonkers Greenway, the Green Team has maintained greenery at the new playground, and planted a shade tree to provide respite from the extreme heat. During a heatwave in July 2022, the temperature at the playground reached 101 degrees - 5 degrees hotter than the city's official temperature. An adjacent shaded seating area constructed by the youth also helps the community escape the brunt of the heat.

The Green Team has also worked to address flooding in climate-vulnerable areas. They installed a rain garden at the Francis Reagan Townhouses, a municipal housing property affected by flooding every time it rains. Rain gardens filter storm water before entering the local waterways, alleviating and reducing flooding issues. They also serve as a nourishing habitat for birds, butterflies, and other wildlife, while providing a green space and beautification. Something as simple as a rain garden can prevent millions of dollars of damages due to flooding and improve the safety and quality of life for vulnerable tenants.

Groundwork Hudson Valley is working to address these issues caused by climate change through hyperlocal nature-based solutions and by expanding its Green Team program to build the capacities of future environmental leaders. "Our programs provide a platform for youth's voices to inform organizational and political decisions in the community. With Groundwork, they transform their community, and themselves, through technical training and skill building." Bartlett added.

Future plans are in place to pilot a workforce development program for young adults ages 18 to 24. This program is used by other Groundwork organizations across the nation to propel young adults into prosperous technical and vocational careers, providing industry-standard training and certifications, work experience, and mentorship. This model creates a pathway that youth can use to transition to a professional network in the workforce.

For now, Groundwork's determined Green Team high school students will continue to devote themselves to providing cooler and healthier green spaces in their communities, gaining the skills necessary to one day become environmental leaders.

Groundwork Hudson Valley is an environmental justice non-profit working with communities to improve climate resilience, promote sustainability education, and nurture the next generation of environmental leaders. Visit us at: groundworkhv.org for more information.

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A New Generation of Environmental Leaders are Changing Their Community | Yonkers Times

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Teens fight for environmental justice in Yonkers, NY. "Dying from heat is not something that I considered to be a prominent top ten killer of people." The incredulity was not missed on Jessy Zhang who is part of the Green Team, a group of Yonkers public high school students putting their boots on the ground [...]

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Palisade Towers, Schroeder Street, Yonkers, NY

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Palisade Towers, Schroeder Street, Yonkers, NY

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Palisade Towers, Schroeder Street, Yonkers, NY

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The source listed focuses its attention on the voices of Yonkers residents of the Schlobohm housing projects, following the release of the HBO mini-series Show Me A Hero based on the book. The source gave an opportunity for the voices to be heard of those who have been often overlooked, providing them with a chance to speak on the desegregation and the construction of the scatter site housing.

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Housing policy hit the small screen this year. HBO's latest miniseries, Show Me a Hero, shone a light on challenging housing issues faced by communities across the country, but seldom given such wide-reaching attention. Co-written by David Simon, the creator of The Wire, the miniseries tells the true story of a polarizing fight over the construction of public housing in Yonkers, NY in the late 1980s. (We recapped the miniseries and hosted policy debates over its polemics as well.)

The show focuses on the development of new scattered-site public housing in predominantly white communities and the families that move into those homes from the Schlobohm Houses, a high-rise public housing development. Many families, however, stayed behind in their existing homes and communities. The voices of those families are an important part of the story as well. We went to Yonkers to speak with some of the long-term residents of the Schlobohm Houses to hear their own reflections on Yonkers during the housing fight in featured in Show Me a Hero.

Mary Royster

When I first moved here [43 years ago], it was mixed, black and white and Hispanic. It was all mixed. It was nice, very nice. Had soda machines. You didn't have to worry about locking your door. It was nice. When a lot of the blacks started moving in, the whites moved out. I don't know [why]. I really don't know. All I know that when the blacks started to move in, the whites started moving.

I raised my family here. I had five kids. I never had no problems. I minded my own business. My kids grown up and I had no problems fighting and going on with my kids. They trying to tell me, "why don't you move, mama?" I never thought about moving. I've been here, that been my home for 43 years. Nobody bother me. I don't bother nobody.

Dorothy Reeves

I've been living in Yonkers since I was 15, but I moved down here back in the '70s. When I first heard they was building the townhouses, we were very excited. But then as they were building the places, you were hearing all types of threatening talk. People protesting that they don't want the people from the projects to bring the drugs into their neighborhood. We heard about the threats to put pipe bombs into some of the townhouses.

When you hear stuff like that practically every day, who would want to move? I'm not gonna move over there, I'm gonna stay here.

I remember when they had the lottery. The first name she pulled is my sister's name. She was excited to move. When they got to my name [on the waiting list] and they called me and asked if I wanted a two-bedroom townhouse, I told them no. I wouldn't want it. I just didn't like the way they looked at people like us, like we were so bad and everything. They didn't want to live with us. That was terrible.

Anonymous

I can really say that I had a childhood down here, regardless of what the atmosphere was like. We played hopscotch, we played jump rope, we played dodgeball. My mother, she stopped a lot of things from happening down here, bad things. There were some shootings and there were a lot of people that used drugs in those days.

My family was picked-we could've lived in the townhouses. My mother was one of the people that was really into her community, so she didn't want to leave here. I was upset because I did want to move. I was like, "Mom, why didn't you take it?" When I saw the townhouses, I was even more upset. I said, "Wow, we could've had a little backyard." That's what I always wanted.

Even now, if they pick me today or tomorrow, I'm going and I'm staying. I'm not coming back here. Sometimes, you have to just take that chance, you know? Give your kids a better opportunity, something better than just being out here.

Dawne McCray

I was like 15 when I moved here. When I moved down here, I thought that this is like any other place you move to. It ain't dangerous. I mean, any place you go is dangerous. It was still a nice place, and I felt safer in here than I did outside of here. Honestly, my brother got killed down here, but that's totally something totally different. That was in a drug era. He got killed in 1990.

But I'm still here, so it must be something. It's not just that the rent is cheap. The people are good. Me, personally, when I walk outside, everybody speaks to me. Everybody. Little kids run up to me and give me hugs because I'm blessed. I just feel so loved. I only speak for me, how I feel about being around here. Everybody, everybody loves me, and I love them.
This blog is part of the Housing Assistance Matters Initiative which educates Americans about the vital role of housing assistance. The initiative is a project of the Urban Institute, made possible with support from Housing Authority Insurance, Inc. (HAI, Inc.). The Urban Institute is a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization and retains independent and exclusive control over substance and quality of any Housing Assistance Matters Initiative products. The views expressed in this product are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Urban Institute or HAI, Inc.

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25 years after Show Me a Hero: Voices from Yonkers public housing

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Housing policy hit the small screen this year. HBO's latest miniseries, Show Me a Hero , shone a light on challenging housing issues faced by communities across the country, but seldom given such wide-reaching attention.

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Lisa Belkin author of Show Me A Hero, discusses the desegregation of Yonkers housing years after her book was published. The famous book Show Me A Hero details the events of the scattered site public housing plan, on the white middle class neighborhoods of Yonkers, and the feelings of both parties on the matter. Lisa in the podcast notes that while integration of the city was unsuccessful, desegregation was to a degree, as these public housing projects were built.

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Did the Famous Desegregation of Yonkers Actually Work? by ProPublica

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Lisa Belkin, author of “Show Me a Hero,” joins ProPublica senior reporter Ginger Thompson to discuss the real-life civil rights battle behind the HBO miniseries.

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Juices for Life, Nepperhan Avenue, Yonkers, NY

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Juices for Life, Nepperhan Avenue, Yonkers, NY

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Juices for Life, Nepperhan Avenue, Yonkers, NY

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Food Deserts are places where both affordable and good quality healthy food are almost impossible to come by. Residents in South Yonkers have suffered from living in areas that lack proper supermarkets and areas to find healthy food. The article discusses the work of Jadakiss and Styles P, two Yonkers based rappers in promoting their Juicing establishments which have looked to provide affordable and easy access to healthy food to those who live in food deserts.

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Felicia "Freckles" Forbes knew she needed to lose some weight but wasn't too concerned until a test revealed she had high cholesterol. At age 26. She was shaken. Freckles worked in hospitals and the dietary department in nursing homes; she knew the diagnosis could lead to serious health problems. So Freckles took stock of what she was eating. And got serious about juice.

Like many New Yorkers, Freckles lived and worked in a food desert-places where bodegas and greasy fried food are practically the only dining options. City-mandated warnings about sugar and sodium content don't help much if there aren't healthy alternatives. Freckles had to make a dramatic change. In the process, she unwittingly formed a juicing community.

"My church was doing a 21-day fast where you could only eat vegetables, so I started juicing them," she said. "Once I started juicing I saw the changes in my life. But I'm not going to lie: It took seeing the changes in others for it to sink in."

Co-workers started depending on Freckles to bring juices for lunch, knowing they'd otherwise eat junk. Demand grew quickly, especially after friends started to promote Freckles's concoctions on social media. In a whirlwind few months she quit institutional health care and opened Freckle's Juice on Dyre Avenue with her cousins in October 2015. They join other brave Bronx entrepreneurs bringing life to the desert-oases serving juice.

The Freckle's Juice menu is divided into three sections. Smoothies include the One Love Chuck, which features beets, mango, spinach, agave and pineapple juice. Juices include the Kev Shaw: pear, cucumber, ginger and wheatgrass. The signature drink is on the Filler Upper menu: the nutty Al-MoGoodness, a creamy blend of almond milk, mango, kale, banana, orange and lemon.

As good as the juices are, foot traffic on Dyre Avenue is skeptical and a large part of Freckle's Juice customers drive in. "People have this notion that healthy tastes nasty. But then they try it and they're, like, 'Oh, wow, this tastes good. That's better than I thought,'" she said. "It's difficult to get healthy food. And not everyone is health conscious. A lot of people don't care that we're there. So we have to educate the public."

Freckles's cousin and Operations Manager Monay Bernard said people come in scared of the ingredients but leave happy. "They're, like, 'Oh, beets are disgusting. I'm not eating no beets.' They're scarred from beets. But then they're, like, 'Oh, I didn't know beets were so sweet,'" she said. "That's a step we're working on, getting people in here. They're surprised a green juice can taste good." Bernard said a recent customer gave the juice oasis the ultimate compliment, saying "I'm so glad you are here because otherwise I wouldn't be eating healthy at all."

In Yonkers, deep in another food desert, hip-hop stars Jadakiss and Styles P are using the power of their celebrity to spread the message of better health through juicing. In a dramatic online video they say they had no idea what constituted good food while growing up in the neighborhood, and even if they had it was nearly impossible to find something healthy. With their juice bars, Juices For Life, they've set about to change that. While the video explicitly promotes the personal and social benefits of healthy eating, it's careful to maintain gritty, street-wise hip-hop stylings that help draw customers. "There's nothing soft about juicing," Jadakiss says in the video.

Juices For Life opened in Yonkers in 2011, and later a second Bronx bar on Castle Hill Avenue. Juice bar manager Akil Rollocks said at first the rappers' popularity alone was driving business but that they now have a broad mix of dieters, body builders, people attempting a month-long cleanse, health-conscious older people and kids hanging out after school.

"Some people come in because it's very healthy, other people come in because they like the stars that do come by. Then you have people who don't know much about juicing but they are interested," Rollocks said. "It's just a good juice spot."

The go-to drink is a Kiss of Life, he said. With strawberry, banana, blueberry, pineapple and pear, it's healthy and sweet. All the juices and smoothies are customizable. Often customers will add kale to the popular Morning Rush, which is banana, peanut butter, almond milk and protein. "That one right there, everyone enjoys that," he said.

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Felicia "Freckles" Forbes knew she needed to lose some weight but wasn't too concerned until a test revealed she had high cholesterol. At age 26. She was shaken. Freckles worked in hospitals and the dietary department in nursing homes; she knew the diagnosis could lead to serious health problems. So Freckles took stock of what she was eating.

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The article listed is an opinion piece from the New York Times, which discusses the history of what we refer to as Ghettos. The creation, the maintenance, and the approval of these ghettos by whites as a form of social and physical segregation. Those who reside in the ghettos are frustrated and outraged by the living conditions, while in contrast those in power (Nixon) have continued to refer to these places as opportunities for the growth of “Black Capitalism” despite stripping these places of all means for any capital growth.

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Opinion | The Real Roots of ‘Black Capitalism’ (Published 2019)

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Nixon’s solution for racial ghettos was tax breaks and incentives, not economic justice.

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Otis Elevator Company, Odell Plaza, Yonkers, NY

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Otis Elevator Company, Odell Plaza, Yonkers, NY

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Otis Elevator Company, Odell Plaza, Yonkers, NY

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The article listed here from 1972, discusses the Urban Renewal plans of Yonkers to demolish 400 homes in order to construct a site for the famous Otis Elevator Company. The Destruction of these homes occurred along the Hudson River, as well as Otis Avenue, which was marked as yellow, as it was seen as a declining neighborhood, due to the residents of this region being surrounded by “hazardous regions” and thus the children were forced to attend schools with “coloured and foreign born” as seen in the provided image. Click on the link to read the direct NY times source regarding the urban renewal, and the plans Otis’ and the city of Yonkers had in store.
https://www.nytimes.com/1972/06/05/archives/yonkers-maps-urban-renewal-project-special-to-the-new-york-times.html

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The link provided using charts and demographic data illustrates the health disparities that are noticeably increased in Yonkers, in comparison to the rest of Westchester County and New York State. Yonkers is 61.9% minority, with the majority of these residents living in high density urban housing. The effect of this high density housing has created increases in pollution and “heat islands” both of which have noticeable effects on the outcome of peoples well being and health, most notably in substantial increased asthma rates.

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The image provided shows a stark contrast between the high density, high minority populated Southwest Yonkers, and the lower density white populated outer suburbs of Yonkers. The race data, gathered from the 2020 census displays the vast differences of the city. Due to its longstanding past of segregation, Yonkers remains segregated to this day, remaining a tale of two vastly different cities, with different experiences. The Saw Mill has acted as a barrier in separating the two regions from one another. Link provided to the map, zoom in on Yonkers, NY to see the extent of the segregation.
https://www.arcgis.com/apps/mapviewer/index.html?webmap=30d2e10d4d694b3eb4dc4d2e58dbb5a5

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An area description of the willow place neighborhood of Yonkers. Formerly redlined, with reasons for this exclusion being the inhabitants of this neighborhood being black factory workers, and foreign born immigrants as seen in the provided image. This resulted in the exclusion of home loans for residents of this region. The effects of redlining this neighborhood as well as many other South Yonkers neighborhoods led to decreased home ownership and a generational racial wealth disparity which legacy lives on today. Link to the image and redlining map provided https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/#loc=16/40.943/-73.898&city=lower-westchester-co.-ny&area=D5&adview=full&adimage=2/61.935/-151.061

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Gorton High School, Shonnard Place, Yonkers, NY

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Gorton High School, Shonnard Place, Yonkers, NY

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Gorton High School, Shonnard Place, Yonkers, NY

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The article listed recounts on personal experiences of the desegregation of Yonkers school districts. Individuals who grew up in Southwest Yonkers, (which accounts for 80% of the minority population), recall their experiences of being bused to Groton High School, and the unwillingness of teachers students and parents to accept the transition of desegregation. In turn, the article also discusses the experience of White residents of East Yonkers, and their feelings towards being bused.

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As a black girl growing up on the southwest side of Yonkers, La Rhonda Jefferson would walk up a hill to get to elementary school.

In the mid-1980s, Jefferson and her family lived in a building that was not far from a public housing complex. She and her mother thought she would be going to nearby John Burroughs Junior High School. However, Jefferson's mother believed letting her daughter go to middle school outside of their neighborhood would be an excellent way for her to "get out of the community."

When Lauren Rufo Stanco was a child, she would bike around her neighborhood on Yonkers' east side and feel safe. Cape Cod and ranch-style homes mainly populated her close-knit community of mostly Italian, Irish and Jewish families. She attended neighborhood schools until she was bused to a racially mixed John Burroughs Junior High School.

Jefferson, Stanco - and a host of other children - would be offered various educational opportunities through busing and magnet programs to integrate Yonkers schools.

Busing as a means of desegregating schools has once again become part of the public discourse. Its recent resurgence came during the round of presidential debates in June, with U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris' searing attack in the first presidential debate of the year on Joe Biden's busing record.

"I did not oppose busing in America," said Biden, a supporter of bills to ban busing for school desegregation in the 1970s and early '80s. "What I opposed is busing ordered by the Department of Education. That's what I opposed."

The former vice president and Harris continued their debate on busing during Wednesday's Democratic debate in Detroit. When asked whether their positions on the issue were essentially the same, Harris replied by saying, "That is simply false.

"When Vice President Biden was in the United States Senate, working with segregationists to oppose busing, which was the vehicle by which we would integrate America's public schools, had I been in the United States Senate at that time I would have been completely on the other side of the aisle," Harris said while standing next to Biden.

Biden retorted by mentioning that he didn't see "a single solitary time" that she brought a case to desegregate two of the most segregated school districts in the country, in Los Angeles and San Francisco, when she was the attorney general in California for eight years.

In light of re-emergence of the busing issue, The Journal News spoke with two women, now mothers who grew up in Yonkers, about their educational experiences back then and being raised on different sides of the city.

A city divided

Yonkers, the City on the Hill, as it is sometimes called, had to dive into the issue of desegregation in the not too distant past.

A lawsuit, started by the Justice Department in 1980, and eventually joined by the NAACP challenged decades of municipal practices, according to news archives. Those patterns concentrated public housing, heavily occupied by blacks, on Yonkers' west side and gradually produced segregated schools.

At that time, Hispanics and blacks made up less than 20 percent of the population in Yonkers, according to the archives. However, more than 80 percent of them were in southwest Yonkers.

In 1986, Judge Leonard Sand appointed a federal monitor to oversee the integration of the school district through a host of court-ordered measures that included magnet programs and busing, according to news reports. He also ordered that Yonkers remedy the housing portion of its violations by adopting a plan for building low- and moderate-income housing in primarily white neighborhoods.

Racial tensions in schools

Those courtroom battles trickled down into the education of Jefferson, who excelled in a middle school that was not in her neighborhood. But by the time she entered Charles E. Gorton High School, Jefferson, 39, said she felt the "racial tensions" because they've been teaching in these schools before all the desegregation.

"It felt like they didn't want to teach you... and you are like getting the shorthand of the stick," she said.

She recalled a guidance counselor who wouldn't help her when she was trying to get assistance in applying for college.

"He would look, like, across me, help everybody in front of me," she said. "I was just discouraged... I just walked out of the office. Several times, I would go back."

On her white classmates, she said, you could tell that "they were kind of forced into the situation" and that "they really didn't have no real interactions with other black kids." At first, she said, they were "kind of leery to speak to us," but that they eventually all became good friends.

As a result, Jefferson said she spent a year at home, instead of going straight to college. She holds many of her teachers accountable for the gap.

Jefferson is a homemaker. She went to Westchester Community College and Lehman College. She's still working on getting a degree in English.

Even at the age of 46, Stanco still recalls the arduous bus rides from her primarily white community to a racially mixed Burroughs Junior High School as being particularly "frightening."

"Being on the bus, you felt very vulnerable," she said in a phone interview, adding that you could see people wandering on the streets and "crack houses" during the rides.

At school, people tended to stay in their own pockets and that she was bullied intensely, she said.

Stanco, who is white, had stayed at her local elementary school for the sixth and seventh grade but was bused to Burroughs in 1986.

Although Stanco's parents were not the most concerned about her being moved, she recalled that other parents had been angry that their children were being bused off and at the possibility that their housing values could go down. Many of her neighborhood peers were enrolled in private school, she said.

In east Yonkers, some residents had been angry that the city had bowed to the judge's desegregation ruling, according to newspaper archives. They staged rallies and packed local meetings, propelling Yonkers into national headlines.

Reflecting on the experience, Stanco said it taught her that "you can't judge a book by its cover.

"You can't turn around and say, 'Well, I didn't grow up with anyone of that type, so I'm not going to like them," she said.

Stanco chose to go to Saunders Trades and Technical High School, where she studied cosmetology and graduated in 1991. Stanco, who owns a hair salon, had fond memories of her high school years, saying she was able to make a diverse group of friends for life.

Schools underfunded, overcrowded

As the two mothers shed light on their experiences, Yonkers Public Schools looks significantly different and is working through a host of issues, including persistent underfunding and overcrowding in schools.

The public school system in Yonkers was about 35 percent minority when the federal government and the Yonkers branch of the NAACP sued the city.

Today, Yonkers Public Schools are made up of more than 70 percent black and Hispanic children, according to the school district's website.

The school district is more than 4,400 students over capacity and increasingly over-crowded each year; school buildings are an average of 75 years old and crumbling.

Stanco, a mother of two, said she understands that all children need to have an excellent education but maintains, "There's a very safe feeling for me knowing that I can get to my kids in five minutes."

The Hawthorne resident said that if her children had to be bused, she would have sent them to private school.

Despite some misgivings about her high school experience, Jefferson said she would take the same chance with her children.

"If you don't send your kid to a school that's on the other side of town," she opined, "your kid is not going to get the education that they need."

Jefferson said, "it was the best thing ever" when her 5-year-old son was accepted into a Montessori school that's outside of their neighborhood. When she got the letter, Jefferson said, she "honestly cried" because "I'm happy he's going to get a good education in Yonkers."

None of her other school-aged children, she said, were able to get the same resources as her 5-year-old.

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Yonkers desegregation: Black, white women recall experience with busing

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As a black girl growing up on the southwest side of Yonkers, La Rhonda Jefferson would walk up a hill to get to elementary school. In the mid-1980s, Jefferson and her family lived in a building that was not far from a public housing complex.

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Direct source from Yonkers police, which shows crime statistics throughout Yonkers. High Crime rates are shown to occur in formerly redlined areas, which still suffer from high concentrations of poverty. East of the Saw Mill there is little crime in stark contrast to what is seen in Southwest Yonkers neighborhoods such as Locust Hill and the tree streets.

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School 23, Van Cortlandt Park Avenue, Yonkers, NY

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School 23, Van Cortlandt Park Avenue, Yonkers, NY

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School 23, Van Cortlandt Park Avenue, Yonkers, NY

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The article provided discusses the creation of “heat islands” in East Coast Cities. Heat Islands are regions in cities, that are barren of green areas, and covered in concrete, which trap the sun and heat, making the surrounding areas hotter. Formerly redlined regions of Yonkers suffer from being heat islands, lacking true green space even in parks, which was an attempt to indirectly label these places as undesirable. The people residing in these regions today must suffer the consequences of the past.

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Thelma Mays couldn't breathe.

On a blazing summer day, she began gasping for air inside her Petersburg, Virginia, apartment, and was forced to call 911. If she'd been able to look out her window to see the ambulance pull up at Carriage House, an income-based complex for the elderly, she wouldn't have been able to see a single tree. Just the other side of the sprawling brick building.

She lives on the edge of a type of "heat island," with wide stretches of concrete that bake in the sun and retain heat. She turns on the air conditioner when her room gets unbearably stuffy, which may have been the cause of her sudden coughing spasm.

When it is too hot to go outside on city streets, the indoors can be just as dangerous for her lung condition, if she gulps refrigerated air for a precious few minutes in front of the AC vent. Mays, 78, has chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and a quick shift in humidity or temperature can trigger a respiratory emergency.

These days in central Virginia, trapped on the edge of a hotter-than-normal part of an often-overlooked majority Black city, escalating heat and weather patterns are putting Mays and others under health and financial stress. It's pressure not yet being felt equally in wealthier, majority white suburban areas of the state with landscaped gardens and plentiful indoor cool spaces.
Graphics: Record-high temperatures from heat dome affect millions
Mays was transported to the emergency room that day.

Doctors worked for hours to stabilize her breathing, giving her IV steroids to help her lungs function.

Stranded on an urban heat island, many don't survive

The Carriage House apartment complex has a few small trees by the sidewalk, none big enough to provide cover for a single person.

By contrast, Walnut Hill - one of the wealthiest and most tree-lined parts of the city - was more than 13 degrees cooler in the shade. Large trees create an arching canopy over the streets. Nearly every house has wide lawns skirted by mature shade-providing trees. Even in the sun, it was 6 degrees cooler than in Old Towne.

Old Towne is the hottest area in Petersburg based on 2021 heat-mapping.

Even on hot days, Mays uses her walker to reach the other side of the street where she can sit under the shade of a couple of small trees by a parking lot. She hates being cooped up in her apartment.
Urban heat islands: Why it can feel 20 degrees hotter in different parts of the same city Everything you need to know about heat: From the heat index to a heat dome to an excessive heat warning
Blocks of shops and long treeless stretches of asphalt and concrete trap the heat in Old Towne. On a sweltering July afternoon, we recorded field temperatures at a scorching 101 degrees. Unlike in the West, this level of heat on the East Coast is often accompanied by moisture in the air.

"When you have very high humidity, your body can't evaporate your sweat off of your skin," said Jeremy Hoffman, the David and Jane Cohn Scientist at the Science Museum of Virginia. "It's very difficult to cool off naturally. You really need additional help."

A difference of a few degrees in extreme heat can affect the body's ability to regulate its temperature. Some emergency rooms will put out extra gurneys in anticipation of more patients who'll come in with syncope, respiratory illnesses or heart failure.

Thelma Mays recovered and her granddaughter drove her home. Others in her situation are not so lucky.

Heat death in East Coast cities
About that dire climate report: We have the tools we need to fix things
We looked at heat islands during an extensive USA TODAY Network reporting project called "Perilous Course," a collaborative examination of how people up and down the East Coast are grappling with the climate crisis. Journalists from more than 30 newsrooms from New Hampshire to Florida are speaking with regular people about real-life impacts, digging into the science and investigating government response, or lack of it.

Death on a heat island is not as visible or cinematic as the dramatic images of homes crushed by a hurricane, belongings washed away and trees bent by the wind. The elderly and young children fall victim to excessive heat in their homes or inside of cars, away from the public eye and the flashy news headlines.

Hurricanes are short-lived phenomena which are often predicted weeks in advance. Heat's different. It can come as a heat wave, which can last for days and have no set, predictable spatial boundaries. It enhances conditions on the ground which absorb the heat.

"A heat wave is very hard to define in space and time," said Hoffman. "It's not something that you can see on the map; it is something that you feel in the outdoors. So, we have a crisis of communication around heat."

Climate change has exacerbated the intensity of heat waves, the number of excessive heat days per year and the length of these heat waves. The average length of a heat wave season in 50 big cities studied is now around 70 days, compared to 20 days back in the 1960s. In less than one lifetime, the heat wave season has tripled.

In some places, summer can feel like one long heat wave.
'Code Red' Heat: The climate emergency is sending more kids of color to the emergency room
The warming climate has been tied to increased mortality around the world. In a large-scale study that examined heat in 43 countries, including the U.S., researchers found that 37 percent of heat-related deaths could be attributed to the climate crisis.

Extreme heat can be more dangerous for those in the Northeastern United States.

"What becomes really dangerous in these more northern cities is that they haven't yet adopted air conditioning very widely yet," Hoffman said. "And especially in lower income and communities of color or immigrant communities, prevalence of air conditioning utilization is very low."

Three of the country's nine least-air-conditioned cities are in the Northeastern states - Providence, Rhode Island; Hartford, Connecticut; and Buffalo, New York, according to U.S. Census bureau data and a USA TODAY report.

In Florida, researchers have been testing the impact of heat islands.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has conducted studies in West Palm Beach and Jacksonville, sometimes using volunteers to capture data. Its studies have indicated that low-income neighborhoods in Florida have less ability to cope with the damaging results of manmade heat islands.

A nonprofit research group called Climate Central found that Jacksonville's heat island was potentially raising the overall average temperature of the entire city by as much as 6 degrees.

The "feels like" temperature or heat index can make a major difference for people living in humid places like Florida.

On 58th Street in West Palm Beach on a block barren of shade trees it reached 93.9 degrees near noon on July 22 with a relative humidity of 58%. That means it felt like 106 degrees.

"My electric bill was almost two-fold in June from what it was in March," said 27-year-old Varun Parshad. "I try to be more disciplined with the temperature settings."

Six miles to the southwest, the National Weather Service's official gauge at Palm Beach International Airport registered 88 degrees with a lower feels-like temperature of 98 degrees.

The difference between 58th Street and the airport is significant enough when meteorologists and emergency officials have to make heat-related decisions, and it's something some cities are recognizing as they plan for a warmer future.

No matter what part of the East Coast you're in, things are getting hotter and more dangerous.

Extreme heat affects low-income communities and people of color on a greater scale due to structural inequities. From 2005 to 2015, the number of emergency room visits increased by 67% for Black people, 63% for Hispanic people and 53% for Asian Americans, compared to 27% for whites.

The conditions for heat to become deadly in certain places were set into motion decades ago by people who were very aware of race. As Hoffman himself would discover, those intentional decisions led to unintentional consequences in the present.

Discrimination made East Coast neighborhoods worse

In Petersburg, to the west of Thelma Mays' apartment, there is an empty lot that dates back to colonial America and has housed a trading post, tobacco stemmery and Civil War prison in a town that had the highest percentage of African Americans of any in the Confederacy.

The block that remains has grass and some shady trees, and money has been spent on history signage and the stabilization of a crumbling wall. But there are not municipal improvements that give anyone who lives nearby many options to sit and use the shady space during the suffocating summer.
The new normal: People haven't just made the planet hotter. We've changed the way it rains.
Hundreds of miles north from Thelma Mays' apartment, there's another woman who can't stay indoors when the sun comes up in summer.

Several streets in Brianna Rodriguez's Nodine Hill neighborhood in Yonkers, New York, are named for trees. But few trees actually line the sidewalks, and there aren't many parks.

"I couldn't just stay in my room," she said about the July 4 holiday weekend. Unable to afford AC units, Rodriguez's family goes outside instead, to try to find a park to cool off.

When they have to be inside, three industrial fans normally used to quickly dry paint circulate air toward the center of Rodriguez's living room in Yonkers. But even on full blast, they can't cool the 18-year-old, her mom, stepdad and their dog inside their third-floor apartment.

There isn't much shade throughout the working-class Black and Latino neighborhood. Rodriguez avoids certain streets she knows would be too hot between rows of taller apartment buildings and scalding pavement and asphalt.

The characteristics of the neighborhood Rodriguez lives in - residential areas with little or no parks or tree-shade, often bordered by industrial areas, warehouses or bisected by highways and overpasses - are the material remnants of an economic rating system nearly a hundred years old that disincentivized mortgage loans and devalued property.

The creation of "undesirable" economic districts by the government and banks isolated parts of the city populated by non-white people. Those "redlined districts" and the neglect of those areas that followed created the conditions which studies are now proving to be dangerous for human health amid the climate crisis that has already arrived.

Maps of city heat islands are a deadly mirror of redlined neighborhoods

In July 2017, Jeremy Hoffman set out to map Richmond, Virginia, using a new heat-tracking methodology developed by his colleague Vivek Shandas.

Someone told Hoffman that his heat map looked a lot like a map of Richmond's redlined districts, which Hoffman didn't know much about at that time. When he compared them, they looked almost identical.

He went to Baltimore, Boston and Washington, D.C., to gather temperatures. The results of the heat maps again matched up with the redlined maps of each city.

That next summer, Hoffman gathered surface temperatures through satellite imaging in each of the 250 redlined cities to see if the heat islands correlated with previously redlined areas, available through historical maps.

The pattern repeated itself in virtually every redlined city across America. Hoffman found redlined areas were on average 4.7 degrees hotter than greenlined areas of the same city.
'By design or neglect':Flood, climate hazards threaten MA's redlined neighborhoods
His team was the first to compare heat and redline maps on a nationwide scale.

When Hoffman started the research, some scientists in his circle were skeptical. Was he looking at heat-mapping through a racial lens?

What he saw was the consequence of historical human decisions which themselves were racial in nature. Which areas should get investment? Or parks? And which areas could be sacrificed to have freeways built through existing neighborhoods?

"Cities don't happen by accident," Hoffman said. "Our neighborhoods don't happen by accident. Everything is a decision that's been made. Every single second of your daily life in a city is the integrated outcome of all the historical planning policies and decisions that were made before that."

A harsh but telling example: Maps made by the Home Owners' Loan Corporation described Nodine Hill, then heavily Italian, as "hazardous," a September 1937 form said. Its detrimental influences, the form said, were aging buildings and the "character of occupants."

On average, a person of color lives in a census tract with higher surface urban heat island intensity than non-Hispanic white people in all but six of the 175 largest urbanized areas in the U.S., according to a 2021 study published in the science journal Nature Communications.

Black residents had the most exposure to heat islands, researchers said, followed by Hispanic people.

The underlying conditions for heat islands were set decades ago by the economic isolation of redlining. Climate change just catalyzed these places to make them even more dangerous to human life.

Absorbing the history of heat

As a young child, Rodriguez didn't play on the swings at her Nodine Hill elementary school on the hottest days, though they were her favorite part of the playground.

At recess, she skirted School 23's playground, built on a black rubber mat over concrete, and joined hundreds of students huddled under a few trees. The sun glared directly down on the swings' metal links, making them too hot to hold onto.

"I had always felt that it was hotter," Rodriguez said on a recent Friday afternoon in the shadow of her old school, a large brick building for K-8 students built in 1918. "It was just evident to me."

Temperatures were in the 90s on July 1, 2022. But Rodriguez felt it was even hotter in Nodine Hill. The neighborhood is just a mile uphill from the Hudson River, which provides daily breeze for those along the water.

School 23's playground was nearly empty a week after classes ended. A few teens sat by one of the basketball hoops in the shade. Rodriguez's gold necklace with her middle name, Brooklyn, glinted in the sun.

On hot days, without shade or greenspace that can cool neighborhoods, fewer people are outside in Southwest Yonkers. Instead, many cluster indoors to keep cool.

The Civil Rights Act's eighth provision, the Fair Housing Act, ended redlining in 1968. But previously redlined areas remain low-income and overwhelmingly non-white.

Upscale neighborhoods are edged with trees and parks with shaded pathways. In Southwest Yonkers, where Nodine Hill is located, residential areas are edged with unwanted facilities, congested roadways, sewage and wastewater treatment plants, according to Brigitte Griswold, executive director of Groundwork Hudson Valley, an environmental justice nonprofit that's studied the local effects of redlining.

Resulting air pollution contributes to higher rates of asthma and heart disease in these communities, she added.

Griswold said the self-imposed isolation impedes people from checking on each other during a heat wave.

"It's kind of a double-edged sword," she said. "The heat itself prevents that social cohesion from happening. And then that breaks down community resilience to respond to the very thing that is driving people apart."

Growing development brings more heat

The little growth that has come from the end of redlining is not always welcome or healthy. In these spaces, where land is cheaper and zoning fluid, manufacturing sites, energy plants and big box stores have sprung up.

New Jersey resident Tanisha Garner knows more buildings in her neighborhood mean more heat.

Garner, a Newark native who has lived in an area called the Ironbound for the past four years, said at least 10 projects are being planned for the area - and that they will be built with materials that absorb and radiate heat.

The Ironbound area got its name from the metalworking factories and railroad tracks in the area. For over a hundred years, this eastern section of Newark was home to all kinds of industrial activity. It was also an area redlined back in the late 1930s, classified as "dangerous" and marked by the federal government to be excluded from mortgage eligibility.

Many of those industries are long gone. Others have taken their place. A waste-to-energy incinerator, a sewage treatment plant, a metal plating shop and numerous warehouses. The area has been subject to some of the worst pollution in the state.

Garner thinks these development projects take out greenery and open space and fill them with buildings that help amplify the heat in her neighborhood.

"What creates that heat island? Is it the structure of the building, is it a lack of trees, is it the lack of balance between nature and construction?" Garner said. "When you look at the Ironbound, you can see there is an imbalance."

During a tour of her neighborhood in July, Garner pointed out some of the areas designated for development.

One of those areas encompasses Freeman and Ferry streets, the future site of a six-story, 280-unit complex to be built at the site of the historic Ballantine Brewery, starting this summer. The current area has no trees lining the sidewalk. A rendering of the proposed project shows numerous trees surrounding the building. Will it be enough to offset the potential heat effect of such a huge structure?

Cities can open more cooling centers during hot days to give residents respite from the heat.

Property managers can do checks on apartments when indoor temperatures soar above 90 degrees.

Planting trees in heat islands can also have an immediate impact that will only grow as increasing canopy creates more shaded area, while adding oxygen to the local atmosphere.

A temperature check of that block at 11:20 a.m. registered 95.7 degrees, six degrees more than the city's temperature of 89 degrees at that time, according to the website Weather Underground.

Heat island as zombie apocalypse

In July 2020, Brianna Rodriguez took her handheld FLIR thermal camera and pointed the bullseye at School 23's black rubber mat where she once played. It was 88 degrees in Yonkers that day, she noted. Down on the mat, it was 127 degrees.

The infrared camera captured yellow and orange colors around the mat, signaling more surface heat, as opposed to blue and purple meaning cool.

She jotted the reading down in her journal, as part of Groundwork Hudson Valley's green team, composed of Yonkers teens interested in sustainability and climate change. They were completing an exercise developed by Shandas, where they pretended a zombie apocalypse happened in Yonkers. Cooler temperatures meant zombies thrived.

The image of her playground looked like the surface of the sun. While these hot temperatures meant good news for the zombie apocalypse, they are also dangerous for human health.

Ultimately, potential solutions for minimizing the deaths from heat islands should be a lot easier than protecting a city from zombies. Shandas, a chronicler of the "heat dome" phenomenon that settled over Portland, Oregon, with deadly results in its hottest neighborhoods last summer, said immediate action can be taken with lifesaving results.
- Palm Beach Post reporter Kimberly Miller contributed to this story.
Such changes, Shandas said, can be implemented ahead of more complex structural changes to amend building codes for cooler buildings with walls or roof construction materials that deflect heat.

Tree planting programs have been implemented in many states. But where the trees are planted matters. While thousands of trees have been planted in Newark in the last several years, the agency in charge would not say how many were planted in the Ironbound. Walking through the Ironbound's streets, it's hard to think that this area has been targeted for a tree-based solution.

A few years ago in Rhode Island, a young musician-turned-activist noticed a similar lack of new trees being planted in the least shady neighborhoods in places such as South Providence and Central Falls. Kufa Castro worked with local governments and citizens to make sure that over 190 trees were planted in a two-year period in areas with little tree canopy.

Ultimately, Shandas explained, heat islands are manmade and can be managed.

"It goes back to a lot of conditions that have been created by human decision-making processes," he said. "What we really want to do is try to figure out what are the ways we can unpack some of this and get ahead of it."

Down the street from School 23, children took turns running past an open fire hydrant that sprayed water into the middle of the street. Scrambling in a ragged line, they screamed with delight as the cool water hit them. Rodriguez had done the same as a kid.

That night, as fireworks sizzled and boomed overhead, the pavement by the hydrant had long since dried in the heat. The heat of the day, held like a memory by the playground's metal and rubber matting, slowly released into the night.

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We created scorching 'heat islands' in East Coast cities. Now they're becoming unlivable

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Thelma Mays couldn't breathe. On a blazing summer day, she began gasping for air inside her Petersburg, Virginia, apartment, and was forced to call 911. If she'd been able to look out her window to see the ambulance pull up at Carriage House, an income-based complex for the elderly, she wouldn't have been able to see a single tree.

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Palisade Towers, Schroeder Street, Yonkers, NY

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Palisade Towers, Schroeder Street, Yonkers, NY

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Palisade Towers, Schroeder Street, Yonkers, NY

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The film brick by brick discusses the stories of three families from Yonkers in the midst of the desegregation of Yonkers. The film uses place and spaces such as the Schlobohm projects to illustrates the harsh realities segregation has created for many individuals, in limiting opportunity and quality of life. The website has provided a comprehensive timeline of the city’s history of segregation, and its attempts to move forward in recent history.

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Pre-1970

1920-1940: The only African American neighborhood outside of Southwest Yonkers grows in an area isolated from neighboring areas. Runyon Heights neighborhood is founded on a large tract of land by a state senator who regularly brings busloads of blacks from Harlem for picnics at which parcels of land are auctioned off to them. Runyon Heights is bounded to the north by a white neighborhood called Homefield.

The original deeds for many Homefield properties contain restrictive covenants prohibiting the sale of such properties to minority owners, and as Runyon Heights develops, the Homefield Neighborhood Association purchases and maintains a 4-foot strip of land as a barrier between the streets of the two neighborhoods. All roads between the two communities have dead-ends at the barrier.

1940-1980: 7,000 units of public housing are built in Yonkers, NY. 97% of public housing is built in a one square mile area of Southwest Yonkers. An informal City Council veto over unwanted projects in each Councilor's home district keeps all but senior citizen housing out of other areas of the city.

Federal monies for Section 8 voucher funds that might be used by low-income tenants to help pay rent outside Southwest Yonkers are refused by the local City Council.

1970 - 1980

1978: Seeing no progress with respect to their concerns, Yonkers NAACP files charges of discrimination with state and national officials.

1985 - 1990

1985: After a lengthy trial, Yonkers is found to have intentionally caused the segregation of its schools and public housing in the city. Federal District Judge Leonard Sand's ruling holds that institutional discrimination in housing is linked to school segregation. Sand writes a 600-page decision detailing the evidence against the City and the Board of Education. An excerpt: [t]he record clearly demonstrates that race has had a chronic and pervasive influence on decisions related to the location of subsidized housing in Yonkers.

Overwhelming evidence of private housing discrimination and discriminatory actions in the school system are cited in the decision as well. The City of Yonkers decides to appeal the courts ruling.

A housing remedy is also discussed with the City Council. No resolution is in sight and negotiations continue into 1987. Judge Sand appoints a housing expert, Oscar Newman, to assist in locating potential housing sites, with or without the Council's cooperation.

As resistance continues, the U.S. Supreme Court backs Sand. The Supreme Court refuses to modify the remedy order except that the personal fines and potential jail time for the Councilors are voided. Fines against the city are allowed to continue and double daily. A one million-dollar per day cap is implemented by the Supreme Court.

The City Council continues to vote against zoning changes for over a month and the fines are soon to reach one million dollars per day.

1990 - 2000

The State of New York appeals to end its responsibility to pay education costs in Yonkers. The State claims not to be responsible for eradicating "vestiges of segregation." Programs in Yonkers schools to boost reading and remedial education are affected.

Mayor Spencer and the Yonkers NAACP lock horns over housing and education issues. Spencer's new School Superintendent begins his term supporting the Mayor on dispensing with a plan called EIP II to attack vestiges of segregation.

2000 - 2006

2000: State and Yonkers authorities negotiate to end the lawsuit against New York State on education. The Yonkers NAACP is cut out of discussions. Yonkers Superintendent of Schools Andre Hornsby breaks with Mayor Spencer and speaks out against letting New York State be exempted. Hornsby is fired over this and other issues.

State and Yonkers negotiations bear no fruit and Judge orders State contributions to education costs be paid.

After experimentation with local control of the affordable housing program Mayor Spencer refuses to accept race as criteria for allocating housing units. Court requires Yonkers to make affordable housing available to African-American and Hispanic families as originally intended under remedy order. Only roughly 175 units of affordable housing have been awarded under Yonkers' control so far.

2nd Circuit Court of Appeals upholds Judge Sand on affordable housing availability to African-American and Hispanic residents.

The City of Yonkers announces it will appeal the Circuit Court decision to the U. S. Supreme Court. Mayor Spencer claims the City should get credit towards its target for all white families housed under their version of the affordable program. Yonkers has been given credit by the court with only 200 units total since the program began in 1997. Since 1997, Yonkers has never made available its own stated goal of 100 units per year to qualifying families.

2006: Yonkers remains short of full compliance with the affordable housing program and is still negotiating with the plaintiffs. Parts of East Yonkers are, however, much more integrated than before the lawsuit, especially around the public housing built during the 1990's.

Yonkers schools, which are no longer under oversight, are continually underfunded and have over the years become far less competitive with the county's other systems. Many parents have pulled children out of the system as a result.

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1920-1940: The only African American neighborhood outside of Southwest Yonkers grows in an area isolated from neighboring areas. Runyon Heights neighborhood is founded on a large tract of land by a state senator who regularly brings busloads of blacks from Harlem for picnics at which parcels of land are auctioned off to them.

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U.S. District Court - Southern District of New York, Pearl Street, New York, NY

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U.S. District Court - Southern District of New York, Pearl Street, New York, NY

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U.S. District Court - Southern District of New York, Pearl Street, New York, NY

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The article published by the New York Times illustrates the findings of Judge Sand, that Yonkers school districts and residential neighbourhoods have been segregated on the basis of race. Published in 1985, many years after Jim Crow and segregation had been abolished, the practice was continued in Yonkers for many years which lead to unequal opportunity for minority groups.

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Credit... The New York Times Archives

This is a digitized version of an article from The Times's print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.

Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions.

A Federal judge ruled yesterday that city and school officials in Yonkers had ''illegally and intentionally'' segregated the city's public schools and public housing along racial lines.

In a 600-page decision, Judge Leonard B. Sand of Federal District Court in Manhattan said the segregation that existed in the Yonkers schools resulted from actions taken since 1949 by city and school officials.

He said these included the deliberate placement of publicly financed and subsidized housing projects in residential areas with large minority-group populations.

''The Yonkers public schools not only are racially segregated, but also are unequal in the quality of educational opportunity afforded to students in these schools,'' Judge Sand wrote in his opinion.

The judge did not order specific action to desegregate the schools or housing, but said further proceedings would be held on the issues. He set a hearing for Dec. 18 at the United States Court House on Foley Square in lower Manhattan.

The ruling yesterday was issued in a five-year-old landmark Federal suit that charged Yonkers officials with causing school and housing segregation. Although the officials did not dispute the allegations of segregation, they denied having been responsible for actions that caused it.

The suit, filed Dec. 1, 1980, marked the first time the Federal Government had linked school and housing discrimination in one case, according to Federal officials.

Yonkers officials said they had not decided whether to appeal the decision.

After a detailed review of more than 30 years of housing development in the city, Judge Sand said, the record ''clearly demonstrates race has had a chronic and pervasive influence on decisions relating to the location of subsidized housing.''

Furthermore, he said, the city's ''own discriminatory housing practices contributed substantially to the systemwide perpetuation and exacerbation of racial segregation in both housing and schools.''

Concentrations of Races

''This court,'' Judge Sand wrote, ''is fully persuaded that the extreme concentration of subsidized housing that exists in southwest Yonkers today is the result of a pattern and practice of racial discrimination by city officials, pursued in response to constituent pressures to select or support only sites that would preserve existing patterns of racial segregation, and to reject or oppose sites that would threaten existing patterns of segregation.

''As a factual matter,'' the judge added, ''the existence of such disparities has clearly worked to the disadvantage of minority students, who for many years have received their educational instruction in generally inferior facilities, from generally less experienced staff, in generally more overcrowded unstable conditions.''

In Yonkers, a city of 194,000 people just north of New York City, nonwhites are concentrated west of the Saw Mill River Parkway, and most whites live east of the parkway.

'Segregative Practices'

The Justice Department suit specifically cited six categories of what it termed ''segregative practices'' perpetuated by city and school officials. These included the assignment of faculty members and administrators by race, according to the racial composition of the enrollments of individual schools and the board's historical operating hypothesis that minority-group students could not perform at the level of white students.

Judge Sand concluded that school officials had engaged in a practice of assigning disproportionate numbers of minority-group staff members to disproportionately minority-group schools in southwestern Yonkers.

The practice, he said, ''served as a clear indication that racial segregation was acceptable, even where residential segregation and transportation concerns did not impede the implementation of race-neutral assignment policies.'' Role of H.U.D. The case was one of a few in which a Federal agency was a plaintiff and a Federal agency a defendant. The Department of Housing and Urban Development was named as a defendant after city officials had argued that the responsibility for the housing pattern lay with H.U.D., which approved all sites selected by city officials.

In February 1984, H.U.D., the Justice Department and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which joined the suit as a plaintiff in 1981, separately settled the housing portion of the suit. There was an agreement from H.U.D. to provide money to build a low-income housing project of 200 units in the predominantly white eastern side of Yonkers.

There are 7,000 public-housing units in western Yonkers, and there is one project for the elderly on the eastern side.

Judge Sand said in his decision that ''H.U.D.'s 'failure to insist' '' on projects for the eastern part of Yonkers ''has no bearing on the city's liability.''

Trial Began in August 1983

The trial in the housing and school suit, which began Aug. 2, 1983, and ended Sept. 19, 1984, focused on the single issue of who was responsible for the segregation.

None of the defendants in the case disputed allegations that the schools and public housing were segregated, but in each instance the city and the school board denied that the pattern of segregation was a result of their actions.

The reaction to Judge Sand's decision was, for the most part, consistent. The plaintiffs lauded the findings and conclusions, and the defendants, who from the outset have denied the allegations, maintained their positions.

'Climate Is Better'

Mayor Angelo R. Martinelli, on vacation in St. Thomas, V.I., said in a telephone interview from his hotel that the ruling was ''what we had expected.''

''Those who didn't were living in a dream world,'' said Mr. Martinelli, who was re-elected this month to a sixth term as Mayor. ''The climate is better today for a settlement. I certainly want to be involved and get this thing behind us. I certainly believe the new City Council will be more amenable to a settlement. But that doesn't mean we will give away the store.''

In his decision, Judge Sand, a 57-year-old who was appointed to the Federal Court by President Jimmy Carter in 1978, noted that Mr. Martinelli and previous mayors had contributed to the racial millieu in the city by failing to reappoint members of the school board known for their commitment to desegregation. The judge also faulted the appointment and reappointment of people consistent with a commitment to neighborhood schools and the resultant segregation.

A Justice Department lawyer who argued the case, Josh Bogin, said everyone connected with the suit on the Government side was ''pleased, not only at the result, but also with the way in which the judge went about reaching the result.''

'I See Great Hope'

''I am also excited for the greater community in Yonkers, which I think stands to benefit greatly from this opinion,'' he added. ''I see great hope in this opinion in providing a vehicle for the community to heal any wounds that might exist and to vindicate the rights of the minority community to encourage new approaches to race relations.''

Herman Keith, former president of the Yonkers N.A.A.C.P. and now a Westchester County Legislator representing southwestern Yonkers, recalled that he became involved with the issue in 1975, when he sought meetings with the Board of Education to discuss segregation.

Mr. Keith expressed his happiness and relief with the decision, but said the parties faced an even ''larger and, perhaps more difficult, task'' to work out a remedy ''that will provide quality, integrated education for all kids in this city.''

Out-of-Court Efforts Failed

Yonkers, a financially beleaguered city, has spent nearly $10 million in legal fees on the case and may have to spend millions more in working on the problem.

Two out-of-court efforts to settle the case collapsed under political haggling and community pressure. In January and March 1984, tentative agreements among lawyers for the Justice Department, the N.A.A.C.P. and the Board of Education were rejected by the City Council.

In March, members of the Council said they would not be able to provide the $18 million needed to put the plan into effect. The Council has to finance any desegregation plan.

When the suit was filed, there were 23,000 students in the system, 40 percent of them members of minority groups. Current figures show enrollment has declined 2,000 - a development some leaders in the city attribute to concerns that the court might impose mandatory busing as a remedy.

In the suit, the Justice Department said that 60 percent of the minority-group students in elementary schools were concentrated in six schools and that more than 75 percent of the minority-group students in the middle schools were concentrated in three other schools. The four high schools were also said to be easily identifiable by race.

The School Superintendent, Dr. Joan M. Raymond, said she believed the system today was greatly improved from the one taken to court five years ago.

''I venture to say,'' she said, ''that this system, as it exists today, would never have been brought to court.''

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JUDGE FINDS YONKERS HAS SEGREGATION POLICY (Published 1985)

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