Clean and Green in NY. Meet Battery Park City.

Imagine yourself in a modern green riverside community with sleek, energy efficient buildings, lush, pesticide-free parks, excellent schools, clean streets, cooperative composting programs, and sustainable systems everywhere you turn. No, you're not in Norway. Look again. You're in Manhattan. Yes, overcrowded, cutthroat, dirty, impersonal New York City. Battery Park City, in fact, a landfill neighborhood that juts out into the Hudson on the southern- most tip of the island. Over the past decade, starting long before sustainable communities were being planned or even thought about, this plot of property has developed into a model of urban sustainability. It's all thanks to the Battery Park City Authority, a partnership between New York City and State, which has indeed put its authority to good use by forging relationships with commercial and residential developers under one condition: that every new structure implement the highest level of sustainable technology. Now, Battery Park City boasts the highest concentration of green buildings of any neighborhood in the country. In this video, we meet Battery Park City’s activist leaders and learn about the neighborhood's famous buildings, including the Solaire, the nation's first sustainable high-rise residential structure, as well as its beautiful parks (maintained with neighborhood compost, chemical-free), green schools, and program that gives surplus revenue back to the city to fund affordable housing. We also learn how something called a heliostat can make it sunny even when you're in the shade. Next to a skyscraper. In New York City. To coin the Authority's catchphrase, Who Knew?