While the wealthy residents who displaced most of East Island's original settlers may think they run the place—and they're mostly right—the remaining descendants of those original settlers aren't entirely without power or influence here. It is these less affluent residents who perform important labor such as landscaping, infrastructure maintenance, garbage collection, and to some degree even urban planning, and by exercising some discretion on exactly how and when they perform these tasks they can encourage change in small but significant ways. Furthermore, many of them work in the households of the richer East Islanders as aides or servants, and to some degree have the ears of their employers and can nudge them toward certain courses of action.

All of this would be of limited effectiveness and perhaps tend to cancel out if all these people were disconnected and just independently pursuing their own agendas... but that's not the case. Certainly not all the poorer residents of East Island are in cahoots, but there is an organized group that calls itself the Planters that do meet to discuss their plans and coördinate their efforts. The name of the organization references both the fact that their ancestors planted many of the trees and other foliage that still grows in East Island and their own desire to plant the metaphorical seeds of their aspirations for the neighborhood. Just how much effect the Planters actually do have on the events and evolution of East Island is difficult to measure, but it's likely much greater than their moneyed neighbors guess.