We Need Housing — and Green Spaces, Too

There is a beautiful garden tucked away on a quiet, tree-lined street in Manhattan’s Little Italy. There are rows of flowers, bushes and trees, lush, abundant and slightly wild. There is a balcony you might imagine Romeo climbing. There are stone balustrades, lions, one with climbing vines adorning his face, a sphinx, various other statues and a copy of a Hermes medallion from late antiquity. People come here to read, to sit quietly, to simply let time pass. 

The Elizabeth Street Garden is one of the few places remaining in New York City that is not under the sign of Moloch. The great parks — Central Park, Prospect Park and others — are places accessible to all, outside of the regime of commerce and hustle, but even some of our new green spaces, like the High Line and Little Island, are little more than theme parks for tourists. 

The quirky, beautiful, art-filled space on Elizabeth between Prince and Spring is the creation of long-time neighborhood denizen and outsider artist Allan Reiver, who leased a blighted city-owned site in 1991 and created a unique place filled with greenery, architectural elements and neoclassical statuary from his collection as an antique dealer; a work of art in its own right. It is among the truly great places in the city. Co-created and now led by Reiver’s son Joseph, it is kept open by an army of volunteers. It should be designated a New York Landmark. 

Across New York, there are many such spaces that began as neglected city-owned parcels and are now small, calm, green spaces. By the 1980s, over 1000 vacant lots were turned into community gardens. In the 1990s, Rudy Giuliani aimed to sell them off to developers. Many of them still survived and are now formally recognized by the city’s Parks Department. Elizabeth Street Garden happens to be unofficial.

Instead of preserving this small, eclectic wonder, the City has decided to destroy it. The Garden has been in a life-or-death struggle with the Housing Preservation Department for over a decade. After 12 years of strenuous efforts to keep the garden alive, it is hanging by a thread, under threat of imminent eviction. It might soon make way for a mix of affordable housing for seniors, retail and office space in its place. 

The City Council’s insistence on pushing the project through in spite of Community Board objections, contentious town halls and tens of thousands of citizens petitioning for a reprieve has been a civics lesson in the failure of the democratic process at the local level. The City has stubbornly portrayed the choice as one between two desirables: affordable housing and green space. The problem with this framing is that the garden is not an empty lot waiting to be filled. It is already filled, with things both man-made and natural that people have come to love and rely on. 

That Little Italy is one of the most green-space-starved neighborhoods in Manhattan makes its elimination even harder to justify. The Soho/Little Italy neighborhood where Elizabeth Street Garden is located has an open space ratio of .13 acre per 1,000 residents (6 square feet per resident), compared with the City’s open space planning goal of at least 2.5 acres per 1000 residents (109 square feet per resident). But even if affordable housing is a greater priority than “green space” — though these values are hard to place along a linear scale in one of the densest parts of America — it still doesn’t follow that the garden needs to be destroyed. We don’t just look at buildings, concluding they should be destroyed, in neighborhoods starved for greenery. Similarly, we don’t weigh the pros and cons of destroying Central Park, or, for that matter, Collect Pond Park, a few blocks south of Elizabeth Street Garden, to make room for affordable housing. Especially when there are alternative sites available, truly empty lots — which has been the case all along. Nevertheless, the City prioritized building on this site, over the other sites which it now says it will someday also build on. 

Still, one might wonder if, despite all this, the imperative to build more affordable housing at a time when rents are punishingly high and vacancy rates are at 1.4% just might outweigh the neighborhood’s sentimental attachment to this magical space. The “abundance agenda,” gaining traction in policy circles, calls for bold action on housing, for very good reasons. Still, it is not true that we should therefore build absolutely everywhere we possibly can. A great city needs both affordable housing and spaces of contemplation, such as parks and gardens. There were widespread objections, even from some YIMBY types, to erecting a tall tower that would deprive the Brooklyn Botanic Garden of precious sunlight. As the great intellectual and artistic ferment in Tribeca, Soho, Greenwich Village and the East Village in the ‘60s shows, creative life needs both. In a neighborhood and city steadily losing its edge and character, we must hang on to places that make life worth living here, while also providing enough places to live here. 

When Jane Jacobs opposed and successfully fought Robert Moses’ plan to run a “Lower Manhattan Expressway” through Greenwich Village, Soho and Little Italy 60 years ago, she didn't merely avert catastrophe for Downtown Manhattan and win a local, although hugely important and consequential battle. Through her advocacy and her wildly influential book “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” she popularized the idea that city life is not reducible to abstract categories like “affordability,” “green space” or “recreation.” A real city, she argued, grows through density, yes — but also through preserving community and belonging, idiosyncrasy and beauty. She understood that city planning is at its best when it disrupts the organic life of the city as little as possible, and when it doesn’t set priorities like housing against gardens. We need a city that can hold both.