The South Bronx Isn’t Falling for Fresh Direct’s Dirty Trucks
Grist
By Suzanne Jacobs
The company wants to bring 1,000 new trucks to the neighborhood, which is already home to high asthma rates and heavy industry.
Another day, another tale of social and environmental injustice.
This one takes us to the South Bronx, where residents are trying to keep Fresh Direct, a popular food delivery service, from setting up shop in their neighborhood and flooding their streets with delivery trucks.
The company, currently based in Queens, dispatches trucks full of high-end groceries to residents in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Delaware. In 2012, it announced plans to move its warehouse to the South Bronx, a densely populated, low-income neighborhood in New York’s poorest borough, and as a preemptive “You’re welcome!” promised to bring with it up to 1,000 new jobs (that don’t pay very well). Company reps also told the borough president that it would give at least 30 percent of those jobs to local residents, although they’re not legally bound to that.
