Gregory Heller

Gentrification Threatens Community Gardens

The gardeners of the LES began, in most cases, as squatters. They seized abandoned property and improved upon it. It was not until 1978 that the city government recognized this method of community renewal and institutionalized it with the creation of the Operation Green Thumb program. Green Thumb, a quasi-governmental agency created with federal community development block grants, was empowered by the city to issue leases and oversee the management of community gardens city-wide (Martin, 1998; Raver, 1997; Schmelzkopf, p. 375). Under the Green Thumb Program, the city considers gardens an interim use of the land until a higher, more permanent use, such as housing development, can be found for the property. While many gardens sought and received Green Thumb leases, the city placed a moratorium on new leases in 1984 in response to the rebound in the real estate market. Evidence of this rebound is the number of properties in tax arrears for twelve quarters or more, which dropped from 324 in 1984 to 79 in 1985 (Smith, et al, p. 160). Even so, more gardens sprung up without official mandate (Schmelzkopf, p. 377).
Green Thumb was aimed at co-opting the initiative of the community garden movement. Continued participation and official recognition or permission were predicated on adherence to certain city-defined standards. Piven and Cloward recognized that such “Governmental programs for the poor are likely to diminish whatever collective political vitality the poor still exhibit�(p.25). The city used Green Thumb to bring the movement and its participants under control through co-optation and regulation. For example, under the Giuliani administration, the Green Thumb program and the Parks Department created a “Garden Report Card� to judge the value of gardens on subjective qualities such as garden-design and plant-choice in considering them for lease renewal or permanent status. The report card penalizes gardens for building structures like Casitas, small houses or shacks common in Latino gardens, while no such penalty exists for gazeboes. Growing vegetables like corn is also frowned upon, but grape arbors appear to carry no such penalty. Non-compliance with the rules, standards, and norms of the Green Thumb program can result in termination of a lease, eviction, and sale at public auction.
As Piven and Cloward pointed out, the assistance offered to those in need often comes at a price. There is a trade-off between government assistance or programs like Green Thumb and self-determination or autonomy. This raises the question of whether or not the express purpose of offering the assistance is to exert social control over the assisted. One can only hypothesize that the intended consequence of drawing the poor into government-controlled housing and community improvement programs is the social control of these same people. Some in the community gardens movement feel that if it were not, these government sponsored programs would permit the self-help efforts to continue unimpeded. Minor rules and regulations force self-help activists to act as supplicants to politicians and government agencies who determine their fate. Rules dictating acceptable garden design can be embellished to include rules against garden activities such as political rallies or other activities that challenge the city government.
The interim status of gardens was a non-issue while the real estate market was soft. At the end of the 1970s, there were more vacant lots than anyone knew what to do with. The burgeoning economy and housing market created strong demand for new housing construction in Manhattan. The LES was one of the only districts with undeveloped land that was conveniently situated near both downtown and midtown Manhattan.
As this demand grew in the 1980s and discussion of large-scale development resumed, particularly the planned LeFrak project on the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area, a mounting anti-gentrification force galvanized. An inter-racial coalition of low-income housing advocates mobilized forming the Lower East Side Joint Planning Council (JPC), and ultimately blocked the LeFrak project, a highly subsidized, predominantly middle-income and luxury co-op development with only a small percentage of low-income rentals.
The JPC went on to broker a deal with the Koch administration known as the Cross-Subsidy Plan. This plan divided the city owned properties in the district for disposition. The administration agreed to turn over many abandoned buildings to non-profit housing groups for low-income housing that would be financed through the sale of vacant lots for market-rate development. Despite its seemingly good intentions, the plan was flawed. Many of the vacant lots were not vacant, and many of the abandoned buildings were not abandoned.
The JPC sold-out the self-help gardeners and squatters pitting them against non-profit and market rate housing developers (Abu-Lughod, 1994, p. 313). The conflict between the self-help activists and the low-income housing community created a negative image of the self-help movement. Housing advocates framed the issue as one of affordable housing versus gardens or squats. The reality of the deal was that more gardens would be sacrificed for luxury or market rate housing then for affordable housing. Most of the proposed “new� affordable housing would actually be created by recycling the districts fast dwindling stock of abandoned city owned buildings.
The city pushed many of the lots and gardens in the district through the Universal Land Use Review Process (ULURP) before 1987, preparing them for sale to market-rate developers under the cross-subsidy plan. By the late 1980s, developers acquired site-control of many vacant lots and garden lots on which to build housing (Kannapell, 1995). The creation of the low-income housing through the Cross-Subsidy plan was largely dependant on the revenues generated by the sale of the lots. The Black Monday stock market crash and subsequent real estate bust foiled the program by temporarily reducing the demand for luxury housing. During the ensuing recession, residents transformed many ULURPed lots into gardens, and HPD did construct some new low-income housing around Avenue C during this time. These projects were financed with capital funds advanced against the future sale of city owned lots through the cross-subsidy plan. When the real estate market rebounded in the 1990s, and their sale became viable, many of the lots were thriving community gardens.