But in the last year the 22-year-old South Los Angeles resident has planted community gardens, cleaned up abandoned industrial sites and learned how to install solar panels.
"Not knowing where I was going to sleep at night, the last thing in my head was going green," Harris said recently as he helped weatherize a 75-year-old stucco home near Lincoln Heights. "It was never something that was taught and it was never something that I did."
Harris is one of 200 local residents taking part in an innovative program designed to help bridge a green divide. Many residents of low-income neighborhoods say they've been left out of the environmental movement and that clean-tech businesses are avoiding urban neighborhoods while they pitch green advances elsewhere.
"There's a tendency to not seek out communities like these," said Jeffrey Richardson, chief executive of solar installer Imani Energy Inc., one of the few companies that have been actively working on projects in South Los Angeles. "There's the idea that people here don't get it, don't want to get it and can't get it when it comes to green."
That frustration has given rise to an "environmental justice" movement encouraging homegrown, grass-roots industry.
There have been some successes in recent years. Green roofs and urban gardens have started to bloom on dilapidated buildings and parking lots across the country. In South Los Angeles, blighted sites such as an old bus maintenance yard are being converted into urban wetland parks.
But "greening the ghetto," as some advocates call it, has sometimes been a tough sell.
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