Abstract
Elizabeth Street Garden (ESG) in New York City may be demolished to make room for Haven Green, an affordable housing complex, to ease the city’s housing crisis. The potential destruction of the park has resulted in significant backlash and a decade-long legal debate that has prevented a final decision from being made [2]. It is imperative that the city government helps guarantee the rights of citizens to safe and affordable shelter. However, it is inherently unethical to sacrifice environmental rights, sustainability, and a cherished community space when alternative solutions for affordable housing are available.
Introduction
Elizabeth Street Garden (ESG) is a small community park that was established during the 1990s in the neighborhood of Nolita in New York City. Before the 1990s, the city-owned lot was undeveloped and the vacant space was rented to Allan Reiver, a gallery owner across the street [2]. Reiver turned the lot into a flourishing garden and filled it with sculptures, fountains, benches, and other objects from his gallery. The lot quickly became a park and turned into a vibrant community center with regular visitors and scheduled events. A decade ago, the city took interest in reclaiming the lot to create a housing development. This has thrown the future of the Elizabeth Street Garden into uncertainty.
Public parks have a long history in New York, taking off in the mid-19th century during an era of social reform movements. These green spaces were implemented in response to poor living conditions and overpopulation, aiming to provide fresh air, nature, and a sense of community to city inhabitants [3]. These parks were democratic in nature as well, as they were non-privately owned and acted as rare spaces where all citizens could gather and enjoy leisurely activity. Public parks remain crucial to New York City as they improve air quality, biodiversity, and flood control, as well as mitigate emissions, urban heat, and global warming [4]. Parks also improve community member trust, well-being, generosity, altruism, and health while decreasing stress, aggression, and loneliness [5]. The important role parks play in their communities explains why plans to demolish the Elizabeth Street Garden for Haven Green have caused an uproar [2].
The Haven Green Project
Haven Green, an apartment complex with affordable housing, office space, and luxury shopping, will provide 123 apartments for the elderly. Fifty of these apartments will go to elderly individuals experiencing homelessness amid the current NYC housing crisis [6]. Spokespeople for the development describe it as LGBTQ friendly and have made it clear that it will still offer 16,000 feet of open space in conjunction with the courtyard of the building next door. Groups such as Habitat for Humanity are deciding how the space will be used, already planning to include a vegetable garden and public art [6].
Haven Green and Elizabeth Street Garden illustrate the tension between preserving land for green spaces and using it to address the urgent need for affordable housing in New York City’s inflated housing market. As both carry inherent community value, evaluating the situation from a consequentialist ethical perspective requires a cost-benefit analysis of each scenario.
On one hand, New York City housing commissioner Adolfo Carrión Jr. is fiercely convinced that the housing provided by Haven Green would be significantly more important for community well-being than a garden [2]. It is easy to understand his perspective, as these affordable housing units would guarantee housing for a considerable sum of elderly individuals. While Carrión Jr. suggests that he appreciates the importance of sustainable development and public parks, he is understandably fixated on the housing crisis [2].
NYC’S Housing Crisis
Urban landlords, especially in New York City, are severely oppressing tenants. Over the last two decades, rent has more than doubled while wages have remained largely stagnant. Rent burdens – the percentage of income tenants put toward housing – reflect this.
Today, the average rent burden of a New Yorker stands at an unrealistic 50% or higher, meaning that even with full-time jobs, most residents cannot afford stable housing [2,7]. To make matters worse, the current rental vacancy rate stands at only 1.4% [2]. Undoubtedly, there is a dire need for the type of rent-controlled housing that Haven Green would provide. The benefits of this scenario include basic human rights to safety and shelter for elderly New Yorkers, as well as jobs for the workers employed in the included shops and office space.
However, New York is already taking alternative measures to secure and expand affordable housing. This summer, Mayor Eric Adams signed an executive order directing municipal agencies to seek out potential properties that could be repurposed as housing [8]. The city has made it clear that it is on the hunt to provide more housing to its residents. The mayor’s office communicated that it had no plans to eliminate any parks as a part of the order, but that it will act on any land within the city’s control that has even the remotest potential to provide affordable housing [8]. As a city-owned lot, where does Elizabeth Street Garden stand? Is ESG only entitled to rights if it is classified as a park?
ESG’s Dilemma
The housing commissioner has claimed that Elizabeth Street Garden is a tenant on a site that was always intended to be reclaimed by the city. Yet, it is important to question why the protections placed on other, surrounding parks are not being applied to the garden [2, 8]. Elizabeth Street Garden and other famous parks in New York City are identical in community and environmental value, different only in their legal and zoning classifications [9]. There is an implied and inherent moral standing of parks, which the mayor’s office has used to justify preserving them from destruction, yet the same moral value has not been ascribed to Elizabeth Street Garden.
While the mayor’s urgent efforts to build housing in all areas possible are valiant, it has been proven that building on city-owned land will not be sufficient to alleviate the extreme housing shortage [2, 8]. Hundreds of thousands of homes are needed in the New York area just to address the housing dilemma, much less meet the mayor’s goal of building 500,000 new homes by 2032 [2]. More efficient and long-term solutions for the issue are required, rather than destroying or repurposing valuable parcels of city land such as Elizabeth Street Garden.
The issue is a matter of consequentialism. The ethical dilemma lies in varying opinions about which set of consequences for each course of action are more important, or perhaps less detrimental. But who decides which consequences are the most important?
Utilitarianism & Rights Approach
The utilitarian ethical framework argues that the consequences which positively impact the greatest number of people are the most important. While the exact number of people who benefit from the presence of Elizabeth Street Garden is impossible to closely estimate, it is far greater than the hundreds who would benefit from Haven Green’s apartment units. Hundreds of thousands of individuals living in Soho and Nolita directly receive a free public area for leisure. Additionally, the millions of New Yorkers residing around the area indirectly receive improved air quality and reduced heat inflation. New Yorkers also benefit from the altruistic and prosocial behaviors that public parks directly promote [5]. The significant impacts of parks on well-being suggest that the area has potential for greater public good as a green space rather than as apartments.
Utilitarianism’s focus on achieving the greatest amount of public good is intrinsically tied to preserving the greatest number of human rights. To use a rights-based lens to analyze the ethicality of preserving ESG and building affordable housing elsewhere versus the ethicality of demolishing it, the rights of those impacted must be examined. In the first scenario, universal rights of health and leisure are preserved, while the rights of the elderly are potentially jeopardized due to inequitable access to affordable housing. While affordable housing can be developed elsewhere, it could potentially take several years for changes in zoning and construction to take place.
In the latter scenario, Haven Green would immediately help guarantee senior citizens’ rights to safe, affordable housing and greatly improve their quality of life [10, 11]. However, the rights of individuals in the neighborhood, individuals in the city, and even individuals across the planet are infringed upon. By losing Elizabeth Street Garden, the broader public loses access to nature and community space and must endure an increase in air pollution and temperature. It is imperative that citizens can claim the right to healthy living conditions from their government. Green spaces, such as Elizabeth Street Garden, have been scientifically proven to improve health and reduce the negative health effects associated with living in cities, such as air pollution [5].
Environmental Ethics
The rights approach leads us to environmental ethics. Environmental ethics and biocentrism highlight intrinsic value for all natural elements and position nature as equal to humans [10]. Both frameworks emphasize the benefit and value of preserving the natural world when possible [10]. Taking Elizabeth Street Garden as an example, this ethical approach would argue that one must consider the rights of the environment itself. As a home for plants and animals, it possesses rights based on its own intrinsic value, beyond what it can provide for humans.
Reflecting this train of thought, sustainability has become one of the key focuses and defining pillars for ethics in civil engineering. The American Society of Civil Engineers’ code of ethics has an entire section dedicated to the natural and built environment, with specific principles centered around engineering’s impacts on the natural world and enhancing the quality of life for humanity [12]. Civil engineers demonstrate that sustainability and nature should be prioritized, rather than sacrificed for development. In other words, the beneficial consequences of development do not outweigh the detrimental consequences of harming the environment.
When designing and executing buildings in urban environments, civil engineers are urged to maximize green spaces when they are able to. Typical construction materials in cities such as concrete and dark gray asphalt collect significant amounts of heat, causing the densest urban areas to experience the highest temperatures [13]. These large areas generating higher than normal heat over time greatly contribute to overall rising temperatures and climate change, underscoring the importance of mitigating dense urban development with greenery [4, 13].
Parks and trees not only provide cooling and shade, which helps reduce heat-related illnesses, but also act as drain systems that absorb water and help protect from major flooding [13]. As early as 2016, New York City began planning to build resilient waterfront parks to help protect the city from flooding damage [4]. Parks also provide valuable air filtration and help reduce the effects of city pollution, again highlighting why green areas have become such an important focus for civil engineers in building self-sustaining cities. While short term preservation of rights is important, long term environmental consequences carry more weight and need to be prioritized. A planet whose conditions become inhospitable for humans is undoubtedly the greatest threat to an individual’s rights and well-being.
Sustainable Development: Mixed-Use Buildings
Therefore, multiple ethical frameworks reveal that destroying Elizabeth Street Garden would pose more ethical harm than good to the NYC neighborhood it occupies, as it is an inherently valuable entity that benefits a community. However, the unethicality of the garden’s demolition in this case should not dismiss future commercial or residential development in other locations.
A key grievance cited in arguments against Haven Green is that the new building would include office space and luxury shopping in addition to affordable housing [1]. Defenders of the garden are convinced that these additions, rather than affordable housing, are the underlying motivation behind the project. It is difficult to disagree with their concerns, as office and retail space on the edge of Nolita and Soho is certain to bring capital benefits to stakeholders.
This makes it crucial to develop mixed-use buildings in contemporary cities, especially ones such as New York. The extremely dense and occupied landscape of these cities requires civil engineers to construct tall buildings with multiple functions, a very sustainable process for both inhabitants and the environment, as they take up less space on the ground [13]. Mixed-use buildings not only help preserve the environment by being more conservative with land, but they are also more effective in terms of construction and material costs. They help cities save money, allowing funds to be better spent elsewhere. Mixed-use buildings provide an ethical approach to commercial and residential development as they preserve the rights of all.
City planners should aim to mesh multipurpose buildings with sustainability, much like Haven Green had planned for [9]. Civil engineers should always look to feature plants and other greenery through the use of greenhouses, rooftops, or balconies [13]. In this way, cities might continue to offer both housing and green spaces.
Ethical Development of Green Haven
Both as an affordable housing project and a mixed-use building, Haven Green should not be dismissed entirely. Instead, it should be carried out at an alternative site, such as the Hudson Street location proposed by the ESG nonprofit. The lot in question already meets the zoning requirements and would allow for 350 total units of affordable housing in comparison to 123 planned to fit in the ESG lot. This would provide a much greater quantity of affordable housing units, preserve more green space, and benefit the New York City community overall.
This case study demonstrates how cities often unfairly pit sustainability and affordable housing against each other, especially when vulnerable populations are involved. Engineers must focus on finding ways to accommodate both, not sacrificing one for the other. As engineers look to the future, building multi-functionally and up, rather than out and across, should be the main goals to prevent further unethical destruction of environmental areas like Elizabeth Street Garden.
By Greta Hoffmeister, University of Southern California, Viterbi School of Engineering
About the Author
At the time of writing this, Greta Hoffmeister was a senior at the University of Southern California interested in exploring the intersection between civil engineering and social justice.
Further Reading
When a Developer Comes for Your Little Neighborhood Park
An extensive look at the battle in NYC to protect ESG
Public land swaps with wealthy developers benefit rich more than needy
Nashiville’s fight to protect their parks from wealthy developers
The Secret to Good Health May Be a Walk in the Park
Explores how parks boost physical and mental health
References
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