New York City’s community gardeners petition for legal protections
“Access to green spaces in Black and Brown communities is limited,” James said. “To protect our community let’s open up our parks and gardens to be learning spaces as our children navigate our new normal.”
By David Brand
Queens Daily Eagle
November 20, 2020
Excerpt:
New York’s 550 community gardens provide vital patches of green squeezed into the concrete cityscape, but their minders have few rights to the land they maintain, harvest and open up to their neighbors. A coalition of 52 community gardeners have petitioned to change that.
They have partnered with the New York City Community Garden Coalition and the environmental law organization Earthjustice to urge the Parks Department and other city agencies to grant the gardens legal protections by designating them as Critical Environmental Areas, or CEAs.
CEAs were created under the New York State Environmental Quality Review Act, but there are just two in New York City — Jamaica Bay in Queens and Ridgewood Reservoir on the border of RIdgewood and Bushwick, Brooklyn. The state’s Department of Environmental Conservation makes the CEA designations.
The coalition specifically asks the Parks Department to recommend designating 40 gardens as CEAs over the next six months. They also request that Parks conduct a yearlong review of every other community garden on city-owned land and recommend CEA designation for additional qualifying gardens as well.
Parks Department spokesperson Dan Kastanis said the agency is reviewing the petition.
New York City’s community gardens are concentrated in predominantly low- and middle-income Black and Latino communities of Northern Manhattan, Central Brooklyn and the South Bronx, according to a Parks Department garden site map. Local residents there have turned vacant lots into flourishing farms, in spite of generations of disinvestment by the public and private sector.
