To plant or not to plant, that is the question.
Mayor de Blasio will finally get to add affordable housing by razing nine community gardens. But other greens will be preserved.
In his zeal to produce more affordable housing as quickly as possible, Mayor de Blasio will raze nine neighborhood community gardens in Harlem and Brooklyn that occupy city-owned land and replace them with 800 new low- and moderate-income units.
At the same time, de Blasio has bowed to community pressure and agreed to permanently protect 34 similar gardens throughout the city from any future bulldozing by transferring their land to the Parks Department’s Green Thumb program.
City Hall unveiled this preliminary plan Wednesday in a meeting with more than 50 leaders of the neighborhood garden movement. Those gardens sprang up on vacant city lots decades ago. Many became popular local oases of flowers, trees and vegetable patches. But during the Bloomberg and Giuliani eras, many were threatened with eviction to make way for new market-rate housing.
“I’m pleased with this plan,” said Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams. The city, Adams said, listened to community concerns and agreed to preserve most of the gardens in his borough.
And this time, it looks like the new units actually will be affordable to residents of the targeted neighborhoods — unlike recent de Blasio housing projects.
Alexander Cohn/for New York Daily News
Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams said he's pleased the city will preserve most of the gardens in his borough.
“Our starting assumption is our [city-owned] land is very precious, we don’t have much of it,” said Vicki Been, commissioner of Housing Preservation and Development.
The bulk of the units will be affordable to low-income families making less than $46,000 a year, Been said.
That will be especially true at the biggest of the nine sites: at Surf Ave. and W. 20th St. in Coney Island, which will produce about 330 units; and at E. 111th St. and Madison Ave. in East Harlem, with 300 units, housing officials said.
Both sites occupy a full city block, but the East Harlem one is especially attractive because it is only two blocks from Central Park, in an area where rental housing costs have skyrocketed.
The East Harlem site houses six of the city’s oldest neighborhood gardens and has been home for more than 20 years to a ball field community leaders built for the East Harlem Little League.