New York's community gardens creating tension once more

Community gardening is a well-known term and idea in New York City thanks to the much-publicized opposition between former Mayor Giuliani and members of the New York City public, who brought a lawsuit to have the gardens protected. The issue was eventually resolved when Mayor Bloomberg replaced Giuliani and introduced the Garden Settlement of 2002.

Community gardening is, essentially, a practice whereby local residents, of areas in which land belonging to the city has fallen into disrepair, come together to tend the land and turn it into a functioning public garden, park or small farm. It is based on a communal effort by members of a local community and it was this which advocates saw as being under threat from developers wanting to purchase the land from the city.

Under the agreement, 500 community gardens were preserved while many others would be used to build 2000 apartments, which reflected an increase in public housing production by almost a fifth.

“Our hope is that this satisfies everybody to the extent that they can be satisfied,” Bloomberg told New York City news media at the time and his comments were well-received by many of the garden advocates who’d sued the city. They acknowledge the deal was not perfect, but added, with witty catch-phrases that “perfect is the enemy of the possible”.

The legal battle revealed in stark contrast the competing desires facing residents of New York City: a longing for green open spaces and a long-running need for more low-income housing to alleviate over-crowding and inner-city decline. At times, the fight got nasty with Giuliani attempting to categorize the protestors as communist-inclined hippies, just as they hit back calling the city government oppressive and against nature.

Protestors descended on City Hall dressed as vegetables and the mayor vehemently insisted that what they were fighting for was an ideal world, which was unattainable.

“If you live in an unrealistic world then you can say everything should be a community garden,” Giuliani famously told New York City news media in 2000.

Bloomberg and attorney general Eliot Spitzer, who had brought his own lawsuit against the city, eventually resolved the melee and so ended the Garden Wars, but tensions are mounting again as the Garden Settlement of 2002 is about to expire.

When the settlement expires around 500 community gardens dotted around New York will lose their legal protection from property developers, who will then be able to bid on them at auction and purchase them for the development of more housing blocks.

Garden activists have begun warming up their war machines already, it was recently reported in New York City news media that a group of protestors delivered boxes of freshly harvested produce to the steps of City Hall in a move aimed at raising awareness of the potential and feasibility community gardens hold.

“We're here today because we love the community gardens, and we have a simple message for New York City: Protect and preserve the community gardens for our children and for our children’s children,” proclaimed Benjamin Shepard, who is a member of the activist group Time’s Up!, which seeks to have the Garden Settlement made permanent.

“A green New York City will reduce global warming, and will be a model global city. The simplest way to keep New York City green is to preserve the community gardens,” he added, to the cheers of his fellow activists. Time’s Up! is not alone in its call, Green Thumbs, Green Guerillas, the Trust of Public Land and number of other organisations are either campaigning to have the law extended or have made plans to protect as many gardens as possible through fund raising and purchase.

There are around 600 community gardens operating in New York, many of them are owned by the Parks Department and the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, but many are unprotected, not owned by any trusts or organisations and shielded only by the law which will eventually expire.

Advocates argue that the benefits of community gardens are many; shared space, a recreational area for the community, a space in which to grow food locally and a center around which awareness and advocacy can grow, thereby reducing social and political apathy in society.

Opponents of community gardens point out that they can become the domain of a select few, a cliché, so to speak, of hardcore environmentalists and nature advocates and that the utilization of the land for community gardens makes little economic sense considering the benefits that development and construction would bring.

In an editorial in the New York Times, a New York City news provider, a columnist appealed to the emotive and symbolic significance of community gardens, “City planners understand that the future of cities depends on greening them. So do the gardeners, hard at work on their plots, and so do all the rest of us who stop to admire the softer, greener geometry of a midsummer garden in the midst of this hard-edged city”.