Officials and residents push Mamdani to save $650M Hunts Point pollution fix

Some city officials and South Bronx residents are pressing Mayor Zohran Mamdani to bring back a stalled $650 million project meant to cut diesel pollution at the Hunts Point Produce Market. The agreement collapsed after the produce operators, who run the market as a cooperative, objected to how the planned facility was designed.

No wholesale produce market in the country is larger, and as much as 60% of the city’s produce passes through it. Cold storage there relies on up to 1,000 refrigerated trailers with diesel engines that never shut off. A release from Gov. Kathy Hochul’s office earlier this year said each trailer’s daily emissions equal those of 330 truck trips on the Cross Bronx Expressway.

What the Hunts Point market plan would have done

Then-Mayor Eric Adams announced the modernization last year after years of planning and negotiation. Two new buildings would have replaced four existing warehouses, and the market would no longer have needed the diesel trailers. Several hundred million dollars from Albany and Washington had been lined up to pay for it.

Mamdani has signaled that version is finished. During a radio interview, he said Adams officials rushed the deal and that the plan in its current form “is not one that’s moving forward.” He added that the city still hopes to electrify or otherwise update more of the market.

City Comptroller Mark Levine ranks the project among the most important economic development efforts in the city. “For a lot of reasons, we cannot let this fail,” he said. In his view, a modern American city should not accept a fleet of diesel trailers idling day and night as its way of chilling food.

Asthma Alley and South Bronx air quality

Few urban areas in the United States are poorer than the South Bronx. Its air ranks among the worst in New York City, and respiratory illness is common there. Exhaust from the trailers, from the trucks serving the market and from traffic on the Cross Bronx Expressway feeds the pollution behind the area’s nickname, “Asthma Alley.” About one child in five in the area develops asthma.

Kayla Tolentino, 26, was standing near the Hunts Point subway station. She works at the social services group BronxWorks and was diagnosed with asthma at six weeks old. Elaine Cruz, 69, got her first inhaler prescription roughly a decade ago and said the air feels thick. Jason Johnson, 39, was back visiting his old neighborhood and sat outside a bodega on Hunts Point Avenue. Asthma has been with him since age 7, and four years ago he moved upstate so his children could breathe cleaner air. He said he is always congested when he comes back and wants the mayor to act quickly.