Desperate to block FreshDirect’s move to their corner of the South Bronx, Mychal Johnson and his neighbors decided to turn to someone they hoped would help them take on the popular grocery delivery service and its political supporters. Their battle had become one of the most divisive in the Bronx in years, pitting promises of economic development against fears of lost quality of life.
So on a sweltering day last July, Mr. Johnson rang the bell at the Hunts Point office of Majora Carter, whose work as an environmental activist fighting for the South Bronx had earned her fame and fortune, including a prestigious MacArthur “genius” fellowship. Because she had started her career fighting truck traffic, he believed she would share their concerns about traffic and pollution from the relocated fleet of delivery trucks.
But as he waited on the sidewalk to ask for her help, an office worker opened the door just wide enough to tell him to put his request in writing. More than a week passed after Mr. Johnson and his group, South Bronx Unite, sent an e-mail inviting Ms. Carter to meet. Then the answer arrived. She would be happy to meet — for her usual rate of $500 for new clients.
“That was really a blow,” Mr. Johnson said. “Here’s this person who has won quite a few awards for being an environmental activist, and here we have some real environmental concerns, and we can’t even have a meeting without getting a template response with a price tag attached.”
Not long after, Ms. Carter was hired by FreshDirect to make the company’s case to the community.
The story of Majora Carter, 46, is one of the best known in the South Bronx. The youngest of 10 children, she grew up in Hunts Point and later emerged as a fierce defender of its residents against urban blights like truck traffic and garbage dumps. Smart and passionate, with a high-wattage smile for the cameras, Ms. Carter was soon touring the Arctic with former President Jimmy Carter, hosting a Peabody-winning public radio show, and commanding tens of thousands of dollars in speaking and consulting fees.
Ms. Carter’s meteoric rise also made her a polarizing figure. Many former allies and neighbors say that Ms. Carter trades on the credibility she built in the Bronx, while no longer representing its interests. They say she has capitalized on past good deeds in the way that politicians parlay their contacts into a lobbying career, or government regulators are hired by the companies they once covered.
“You can’t have it both ways,” said Eddie Bautista, executive director of the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance. “Either you’re an honest broker and accountable to the community, or you’re working for a business interest and accountable to that.”
In a phone interview, Ms. Carter insisted that she had never stopped working to support the South Bronx. She said she would have supported FreshDirect even if she was not paid, saying that she had never been anti-business and that the company would create jobs, provide access to healthy foods, and promote local food-based businesses. “I thought that ultimately they would be able to provide a net benefit to the community,” Ms. Carter said.
She addressed the criticism by ticking off some of her many honors and noting her status as a “thought leader.” Her husband, James Chase — who tends to Ms. Carter’s public image as a vice president of her consulting firm — called charges that she was financially motivated “revolting.” Nothing has highlighted the division over her legacy like the continuing battle over FreshDirect. The planned opening of a new headquarters for the company in the Bronx escalated from a not-in-my-backyard campaign to an acrimonious debate over how to help an area struggling with high rates of unemployment, obesity, diabetes and asthma.
State and city officials promised the grocer a $128 million package of cash and tax breaks to move to a vacant site on the Harlem River Yard from a location it had outgrown in Queens, in an effort to keep the company from accepting subsidies to move to New Jersey. The announcement brought about immediate protests and eventually a lawsuit accusing FreshDirect and city officials of systematically understating traffic problems and other effects.
Class implications idled near the surface: FreshDirect had become a hit with Manhattan residents who paid a premium to have their groceries dropped off at their doors, but it did not serve most of the Bronx, including the very streets where the government-subsidized headquarters were planned. (The company eventually expanded deliveries to the rest of the borough and introduced a program to accept food stamps, both of which it said were planned.)
The criticisms even extended personally to Ms. Carter. Neighbors had long gossiped that she spent more time at her husband’s 1,500-square-foot, rent-stabilized loft in TriBeCa than at her own home in Hunts Point. That only changed, they said, shortly before she was hired by FreshDirect.
FreshDirect, which plans to move to the Bronx by 2015, entered into a one-year contract with the Majora Carter Group last August. (Neither Ms. Carter nor FreshDirect would disclose the amount of her contract.)
“Majora has been instrumental in introducing FreshDirect to the South Bronx community,” John Leeman, chief marketing officer for FreshDirect, said in a statement. “She’s helped us raise awareness about our plans to create jobs, increase food access, and move to a green transportation fleet among other things.”
Ms. Carter was once a person whom companies feared. A graduate of the Bronx High School of Science and Wesleyan University, she got started in community organizing at the Point Community Development Corporation, a respected nonprofit group in Hunts Point. Known for charming supporters and opponents alike, she relished the spotlight, unlike many of her fellow organizers who preferred to stay in the background. Her courtship of the news media helped bring new visibility to environmental injustices faced by poor communities.
In 1999, Ms. Carter was at the center of a community campaign to defeat a proposed waste transfer station in Hunts Point, which residents feared would result in more diesel truck traffic. At a meeting, she shouted at members of another community group, South Bronx Clean Air Coalition, for supporting the proposal: “You are accepting money from them and playing their community partner.”
“The ironies are just breathtaking,” said Mr. Bautista, who witnessed that confrontation. “The very thing she accused them of, she’s doing the same thing now. Talk about coming full circle.”
Ms. Carter explained that her opposition to a waste transfer station that would have overburdened the South Bronx with trucks hauling garbage did not compare with the advantages now being offered by FreshDirect. “That’s a very simplistic way of trying to look at a complex situation and, again, net benefit,” Ms. Carter said.
After founding Sustainable South Bronx, a nonprofit group focusing on work force development and environment, Ms. Carter won a prestigious $500,000 grant in 2005 from the MacArthur Foundation, which called her a “relentless and charismatic urban strategist who seeks to address the disproportionate environmental and public health burdens experienced by residents of the South Bronx.”
A few years later, Ms. Carter parlayed her newfound celebrity into a for-profit consulting company, the Majora Carter Group. Her company Web site says it is focused on creating green jobs and shows a long list of awards and honors, including being named among the “100 Most Intriguing Entrepreneurs” by Goldman Sachs last year.
“She put the Bronx on an international stage,” said Ruben Diaz Jr., the borough president, who bestowed a citation of merit in 2011.
As Ms. Carter’s reputation suffered among some of her old supporters, who said she had an irritating tendency to overstate her contributions, others insisted that she has been misjudged.
Stephen Ritz, the dean of students at Hyde Leadership Charter School in Hunts Point, said that Ms. Carter mentored his students and used her contacts at the Hunts Point market to help him secure a weekly donation of 1,500 pieces of fruit to the school. “I think there’s a lot of jealousy,” Mr. Ritz said. “It’s much easier to run your mouth than run a business.”
Since signing with FreshDirect, Ms. Carter has linked the grocer to a half-dozen groups like Health People, whose executive director, Chris Norwood, applauded Ms. Carter for forging public-private partnerships to benefit the local economy.
But the work has also eroded some of her connections. Her relations with the Point, where she got her start, have soured. And Sustainable South Bronx, the group that she founded and led until 2008, is now supporting South Bronx Unite, which is leading the effort to block FreshDirect’s move and has emerged as her most vocal critic.
