This story is part of our series on community gardens. There are hundreds of community gardens in the New York City area and we're telling some of their stories. We'll end the series on Sept. 8 with a live broadcast from Hattie Carthan Community Garden in Bed-Stuy on WNYC. Listen on 93.9 FM or wnyc.org.
Housing insecurity threatens many New Yorkers. At the same time, a lack of access to green spaces, nature, and fresh fruits and vegetables can adversely affect a community's quality of life.
Tight restrictions on available land — especially in Manhattan — can occasionally lead to a tense push and pull between providing housing and access to green spaces, which are vital to creating healthy and livable neighborhoods.
Vicki Been was New York City's commissioner of Housing Preservation and Development under Mayor de Blasio, and is now a professor with NYU's Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy. Magali Regis is a New York City Community Garden Coalition board member.
They both joined WNYC’s "Morning Edition" host Michael Hill to discuss the role of green spaces and community gardens in New York.
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Michael Hill: Thank you both for joining us this morning. The tension — perceived or real — is long-standing. Mayor [Rudy] Giuliani put all the city's community gardens up for sale for developers a quarter of a century ago, and similar pushes have happened across mayoral administrations. To both of you: Why do you think this conversation comes back time and time again? Vicki, if you would go first, please.
Vicki Been: So one of the problems that New York City has is that it has a decreasing amount of land available for development in general. So the pressure on how we use our land continues to increase. And so, there's tension between all kinds of uses of land, but especially between community gardens and affordable housing,
Magali Regis: To give you a little bit of history, landlords had abandoned their buildings in poor neighborhoods during the 1970s fiscal crisis. The properties became part of the city, and neighborhood residents transformed these to gardens. And Giuliani had very strong and often controversial opinions, and made very strong statements that got amplified by the press. So that's why a lot has been written about it, and it persists.
The city is juggling a housing crisis among senior citizens, migrants and their families, and single adults, just to name a few. Vicki, where is housing needed in the city, and how much of it?
Been: Housing is needed in every neighborhood across the city. Look, the problem with trying to set a number is that the number of houses that are needed, the number of apartments that are needed, will vary with market conditions with what's going on in terms of things like the migrant crisis. The administration has announced that it wants to provide 500 thousand new homes — not all affordable, but 500 thousand new homes — over the next 10 years. And that's a very realistic need.
Vicki, is that easier to achieve now that we're kind of post-pandemic and there are so many vacant office buildings in the city?
Been: Certainly, there is hope that we can convert some of those vacant or almost vacant office buildings. It's easier said than done, unfortunately. First of all, it does require regulatory change, and that regulatory change did not come in the last state legislative session. The city has proposed legislative change, or rezoning, but it has to be passed. The other thing is that not all office buildings turn out to be easy to convert. They were built for huge technology and they're often very, very difficult and expensive to convert.
Regis: We need some creative and innovative solutions to try to make that happen because keeping them empty year after year, especially since people are not going back to the office, we have to find a way of occupying these buildings with housing without attacking our gardens.
The best example of this tension between housing needs and green space accessibility is the current plan to replace the Elizabeth Street Garden in Little Italy, with mostly affordable housing for seniors. Despite a decades-old fight by garden advocates against this, the city is moving ahead with it. Vicki, do you have a sense of why the city approved this spot to bring more housing into the area considering the level of resistance?
Been: Yes. And with full disclosure, I was commissioner when that decision was made, so bear direct responsibility for that. Look, the Lower East Side has a critical housing need and especially a need for its senior residents. There's very little empty space on the Lower East Side. The Elizabeth Street Garden is not one of the city's recognized community gardens; it was always scheduled to be developed as affordable housing and as senior housing. They're very, very important. But the only way to reduce this tension is to have broader plans about how we're going to house the people who need to be housed and provide green space and community gardens.
Magali, tell me, when community gardens challenge plans for redevelopment, how likely are they to win that fight?
Regis: When you've nurtured something for 20, 30 years? It's really hard for us to give it up. Yes, we need housing. But a lot of these same seniors have told us that this is their only park. A lot of our gardens that were on housing land, they were transferred by the sheer will of these politicians during the Bloomberg administration, to the Department of Parks and Recreation, so it is possible to take a garden that's on [city] land and move it to parks.
That leads me to this question, really for both of you. But Vicki, if you would go first. How do you strike a balance where the folks who are living there don't have to walk 10, 12, 14, 15 blocks to enjoy green space?
Been: It's a constant balancing act. But again, I think we have to really focus on how do we use the land that we already have put some development on. That may mean that you need to allow two extra stories on buildings that go up.
Magali, your response to that, please?
Regis: We have 500 gardens in the city, we should be seeking a lot more. Our landmass is 0.1% of the landmass in the five boroughs. So it's really an insult to tell us that they need our gardens to put housing on when there are so many more available — either existing buildings or truly empty lots. That has to be done through legislation and innovation. So we are a drop in the bucket. Why are they attacking us?
Vicki Been is with NYU's Furman Center and Magali Regis is a board member of the New York City Community Garden Coalition. Thank you for this great conversation.
Correction: Due to a misstatement by Vicki Been, this transcript has been updated to correct the number of new homes targeted for construction by the city.
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