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…
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