Regional Planning
Passaic County, NJ
Summer 2024
In collaboration with PennPraxis and Keith Scheideler
The land near Ringwood, NJ has been Lenape homelands as long as the Ramapough Lenape have existed. After the signing of treaties such as the Treaty of Easton (1758) which ceded Ramapough land to the English, industrialization took hold in the region, and large swaths of land were purchased for mining and manufacturing.
After a long period of industrial activity, Ford Motor Company opened a plant in nearby Mahwah, and Ford contractors began trucking waste and paint sludge to dump down the mineshafts of Peters Mine and Cannon Mine, both of which were located in extremely close proximity to the Ramapough Lenape Turtle Clan community in Ringwood. The dumping continued until 1974, and the Mahwah plant shut in 1980.
Although it has been decades since the dumping occurred, the waste remains, and the resultant pollution has caused a slew of negative health outcomes for Clan members. Due to the extreme levels of pollutants which were then found present at the site, the EPA placed the Ringwood Mines on the Superfund program’s National Priorities List in 1983.
This story is widely considered a classic case of racial and environmental injustice. Our team set out to work with the Turtle Clan to build a proposal for a new community in nearby Tranquility Ridge, designing a community that would meet their spiritual and cultural needs.
Our team completed a set of detailed maps, showing site elevation, grade, exposure, and combined them into an overall suitability map to determine where the ideal locations for construction would be. We merged this with state information on setback requirements to complete a plan that would be compliant with all relevant laws.
I completed a study on HUD-funded projects, specifically targeting sustainable and resilient projects designed for Indigenous communities in the United States and Canada. The study also considered eco-friendly developments located in similar climates to our chosen site in New Jersey. I then used the approved floor plans and designs to develop and iterate upon a range of floor plans that would suit the Turtle Clan community and provide an appropriate amount of housing for the Clan.