COVID-19 Amplified the Dangers of Green Space Inequity. Now What Can New York Do About It?

Even on an unseasonably chilly weekday, Jackson Heights’ Travers Park is alive.

Most benches are occupied by older adults sitting on their own, perhaps taking refuge from their daily routines. The small lawn is overrun by a crowd of people with leashed dogs, forming some kind of massive playdate; the sounds of owners loudly scolding their over-excited pets blend well with the shouts of the kids on the playground. A boy emerges from one of the neighboring buildings on 34th Avenue with a basketball in hand, eyes set on a group of kids already stationed near the court. It’s clear that despite its small size, this two-acre park has something to offer to all of its residents, be it a space to burn energy, socialize, or be alone.

On the other side of town in Manhattan, Gramercy Park is also two acres- but size is where the similarities end.

Gramercy’s private park has been controversial for years. Should a clueless visitor stumble across it hoping for a picnic spot, the park’s high-tech gates and aggressively sharp wrought-iron fence send a clear message. Thus, Gramercy Park rarely hosts more than a few people at a time. Even on a beautiful day, you’ll find the majority of its visitors walking its bordering sidewalks, never setting foot inside.

In the densest city in America, Gramercy Park’s two acres are limited exclusively to the wealthy residents of its surrounding buildings. And even those who hold the coveted $350 keys are subject to a laundry list of behavior restrictions once inside. It’s a stark contrast to the experience of residents in the city’s lower-income, nature-starved neighborhoods.

Jackson Heights is one such example.

The famously diverse neighborhood is one of the most lacking in park space per capita, with about 2 square feet of park per resident. Its main park, Travers Park, was only improved with the addition of a grass lawn in 2019.

“Our council district is second to last in park space per capita in the entire city, and that’s unacceptable considering what a diverse and immigrant populated neighborhood this has become,” says Henry Mei, a college sophomore and lifelong resident of Jackson Heights. “I think it’s very telling that the initial epicenter in New York City of the COVID-19 pandemic was also a space that severely lacked green space.”

Mei grew up in the neighborhood and attended school on 34th Avenue, long before the open streets program and the Travers Park expansion, Jackson Heights’ two major green space improvements.

“In hindsight, there weren’t a whole lot of places I could go to when I was in middle school with my friends without having to spend money,” he says. “I don’t want the same thing for future generations of kids here in Jackson Heights.”

Low-income and non-white communities tend to suffer the most from insufficient parks. Proximity to quality green space has significant impacts on the wellbeing of an urban resident. Living close to a well-maintained, well-funded park can improve mental health and contribute to physical fitness. Quality green space can also protect its residents from a variety of today’s urban threats, including poor air space, climate change, and the urban heat island effect. Such threats often disproportionately impact those already struggling communities.

With the need for parks equity made clearer than ever in the wake of the pandemic, there’s been a push for change. Where city resources have fallen behind, citizens and advocacy groups are trying to fill in the gaps with their own petitioning and planning, especially in the South Bronx and Jackson Heights, each developing their own resident-headed green space projects.

But even with citizen groups doing the initial work, the city’s aid is necessary for progress. Mayor Adams’ budget negotiations are the center of attention among the city’s parks right now, with many groups advocating for him to allocate $1 billion to the Parks Department. If approved, the city could see an unprecedented year of progress in green spaces.

Impact on Residents

This green space imbalance manifests in a few different ways. Some neighborhoods have access to high quality parks, but insufficient overall park space per capita, such as Manhattan’s Chinatown. But even if a community has adequate park space per resident, it doesn’t mean that that park space is quality green space; such is the case in Brownsville, Brooklyn, where the parks are mostly comprised of asphalt playgrounds and flat, poorly-maintained grass. The two issues even intersect in a few areas, such as Jackson Heights and the South Bronx, where communities are both deficient in reasonable park space and stuck with poor quality, mostly asphalt parks.

Access to nature is crucial to a person’s psychological wellbeing. Even simply having a plant in your home can relieve feelings of stress. This is especially true in a dense urban environment like New York, where most people don’t have a yard or easy access to a large, natural area. Parks exist to supplement this need for nature, and have positive impacts on almost every aspect of an urban resident’s wellbeing.

Studies have shown that a couple of hours spent in nature each week can significantly improve mood and relieve stress. In general, residents living close to green space experience lower rates of anxiety, depression and even cardiovascular disease. Living near a park often promotes physical fitness and lessens obesity.

But parks also tend to help in times of crisis. The growing threat of climate change is only now beginning to really impact the city. The torrential flooding that rocked the city last year was just one example.

“We have had flooding where the lake overflowed and the water flowed out of the park and into residential areas,” says Howard Goldstein, senior ecologist at Prospect Park.

He says when it comes to floods, Prospect Park benefits from its large area and thousands of trees. But those neighborhoods with poor park quality and swaths of asphalt don’t have those same benefits. Overcrowding is common in city parks, but especially those areas. Even Prospect Park struggles with its impacts.

“There are just challenges associated with an urban park that services so many millions of people a year,” says Goldstein. “We try to direct the public onto designated walking areas to prevent compaction, which exacerbates flooding because if the soil is too compact, the water can’t go anywhere.”

The height of the pandemic also proved the importance of quality outdoor spaces. Parks provide an escape from home and work, and a community space for residents. These escapes were important to adults, but critical to young children forced to suppress their energy and sit in front of a computer all day.

“I’m a teacher, so I see everything through the children’s perspective,” says Tracy Laumenede, a first-grade teacher in Jackson Heights. “I’ve always wished that my students could have more space and more access to nature, more space to move around, exercise and play, everything.”

A family neighborhood, Jackson Heights hosts around eight public schools and 22% of the population is under 18. Its already below-average park space is made up mostly of small, asphalt playgrounds for kids, and to many locals, it’s just not enough.

“During the pandemic, it was just heartbreaking to think about. Even seeing them on Zoom, knowing that they had nowhere to go, nowhere to play,” says Laumenede. “I think that that convinced all of us even more how much we need space in Jackson Heights.”

What Jackson Heights lacks in parks, it attempts to make up for in some areas with greenery on streets, sidewalks, and courtyards. But some park-starved areas don’t even have that; their sidewalks are barren and concrete.

The South Bronx in particular lacks sufficient park space, quality green space, and tree-lined streets. The city has used the peninsula for industrial developments for years, but aside from a few attempts to make up for the loss of park space for the rebuilding of Yankee Stadium, residents have seen little improvement.

“At Mill Pond Park, you’d see people crammed up next to each other just to get into that space to recreate or have barbecues,” says Mychal Johnson, a resident of Mott Haven and co-founder of South Bronx Unite, a non-profit organization advocating for better quality of life in the South Bronx. According to Johnson, the area’s major green space, St. Mary’s Park, is too small for the dense population surrounding it and often too crowded. Residents are forced look for nature elsewhere.

“We’ve had some traffic fatalities from folks trying to traverse the truck route to get to Randall’s Island,” he says. “It just shows how dire folks are for green space.”

The South Bronx is also plagued by high levels of air pollution, dubbed “Asthma Alley” due to high rates of asthma caused by the nearby expressway’s traffic fumes and rampant industrial pollution. Poor air quality can mitigated by a higher tree population and more green space in general.

“We’re shouldering so much burden industrially and environmentally, but don’t have any balance of nature that we need to have healthier lives,” says Johnson.

Progress and Current Projects

Unable to wait years for agonizingly slow progress, New York’s more neglected residents are often left to make change themselves. According to Johnson, South Bronx Unite was created because of the city consistently failing to properly aid the South Bronx with major problems like food deserts, air quality, and lack of park space, and instead choosing to approve more industrial projects. In one case, Johnson and other residents lost a space they had been fighting to make an urban farm on to a new, 500,000 square foot Fresh Direct warehouse that cost the city over $100 million. It was a slap in the face for residents already sharing too little green space.

“We have one park to serve 91,000 people in our community,” says Arif Ullah, executive director of South Bronx Unite. “We have other, what the city considers to be, parks. But these are not open green spaces. These are asphalt parks, and they just end up contributing to the urban heat island effect and exacerbate the health conditions in our community.”

New York suffers considerably from the urban heat island effect. Aggregate surfaces like concrete and asphalt absorb and amplify heat in warmer seasons, making urban areas significantly hotter on average than nearby suburban and rural counterparts. Residents living by a park or on a well tree-lined neighborhood are somewhat protected from the heat, but New York’s low-income areas tend not to have much tree cover. Factor in a lack of quality green space, and the summer heat becomes dangerously inescapable.

The Million Trees project, launched in 2007 by the Bloomberg administration, aimed to populate trees within at-risk neighborhoods. The very first tree was planted by Bloomberg himself in Morrisania, a neighborhood of the South Bronx.

The initiative was effective. 220,000 trees were planted on streets alone. But not all areas continued to receive care for their trees after the movement was over, and the Bronx was left with more than the community and its advocacy groups could handle on their own.

“A good number of those trees did end up dying,” says Ullah. “Young trees need to be cared for, need to be stewarded. I’m sure that it resulted in increasing the tree canopy overall, but it also resulted in a lot of empty tree beds that are now just collecting trash.”

Tired of relying on the city to fix their green space, South Bronx Unite has begun formulating the future itself with a landmark waterfront plan. The Mott Haven-Port Morris Waterfront plan aims to create a large green space along the southern waterfront, capable of serving over 100,00 people. If completed, the park could be life-changing for residents of the South Bronx.

“That waterfront park would serve as a pollution mitigation measure as well as a first line of defense against flooding during extreme weather events,” says Ullah.

But the waterfront can’t commence construction until the DEC greenlights the plan, despite having already been designated “high priority” several years ago. South Bronx Unite and DEC officials met in early 2022 and toured the site.

“We feel hopeful that their visit and just being in touch directly with them will translate into some action,” says Ullah. “We have the plan and we’re ready to go. We just need the political will and the funding for it.”

Across town, Jackson Heights’ community is making its own progress in the fight for green space. As the pandemic raged in early 2020, Jackson Heights’ central 34th Avenue was partially closed to vehicles and converted to a daytime open street. The move has since been made permanent, but some residents wish to take it further.

“We want a space that works for people of all ages,” says Henry Mei. “You see that here on the open street and that’s what we want to build on with the linear park.”

As well as growing up in Jackson Heights, Henry Mei is a co-founder of Friends of 34th Avenue Linear Park, a group of local residents advocating to permanently convert the streets into a park. Founded in May 2021, they have rapidly gained support from the community and recently received an official design plan from the DOT. Tracy Laumenede is a member as well, having joined a few months after its formation.

“We’re really happy because our local council member, Shekar Krishnan, and a couple of other local electeds have signed on in support,” says Mei. “I think they’re willing to make it happen.”

Krishnan is the chair of the City Council Parks Committee and creator of the Five Point Plan for Parks, an ambitious initiative to mend the city’s green space equity gap. However, the plan relies heavily on the ongoing budget negotiations with Mayor Adams, whose current stance on the budget is only half of the $1 billion that advocates are pushing for.

“Dedicating one percent of the city’s budget to operate and maintain the city’s parks would help all parks equitably, not just the larger ones in each borough that receive the bulk of the attention and resources,” says Councilwoman Sandra Ung, representative of District 20 in Queens and another member of the Parks Committee.

“For example, one aspect of the Five Point Plan for Parks is ensuring new or upgraded playgrounds in every ZIP code every five years,” she says. “Those are improvements that have a real impact at a micro level in local communities.”

Funding and Challenges

While citizens can (though probably shouldn’t have to) make some progress themselves, they must still rely on the city for permanent change. A consistent problem in parks is funding. Those in high-income areas with private funding are able to supplement their own employees and upkeep in times of economic strain, but public parks are often left behind, and some areas go years without much-needed progress.

Manhattan and Brooklyn’s flashier parks are visibly better maintained than others, boasting pristine, colorful flowerbeds, amenities like ping-pong tables and large dog runs, and ample staff to clean up park-goers’ litter. Those benefits are thanks to private funding, primarily private donations and conservancies. Conservancies have become a desirable model for parks across the U.S. in recent years, due to the mix of private and public funding ostensibly being both beneficial to the city and allowing the park more financial flexibility. But in New York, the model hasn’t worked out well for parks unable to have conservancies.

“The deal that was had with the city was that this private money would come into the parks because we’d have these conservancies, and then the Parks Department would have the ability to focus its resources on other parks,” says John Surico, a journalism professor at NYU who has covered parks extensively, and a scholar in residence for the Institute for Urban Parks. “A big criticism is that the Parks Department hasn’t really gotten their side of the bargain. They still have a limited budget.”

The Institute for Urban Parks partnered with Central Park to launch the Central Park Climate Lab early this year. Surico says it aims to gather research from Central Park itself about climate impacts and mitigation tactics, then to expand to include more NYC parks and eventually, other cities.

“This is the reason why the Climate Lab was formed,” he says. “Because public parks that are smaller don’t have resources to do this.”

Struggling for funds, parks are forced to cut corners in many aspects. In their book Who Cleans the Park?, authors John Krinsky and Maud Simonet found that paid, trained staffing is often substituted for unpaid volunteering, court-ordered community service, and welfare programs. Fewer consistent and skilled laborers means parks suffer damages in many areas- notably, eroded pathways, overgrown weeds, worn-down playground equipment, and poorly maintained restrooms. Areas already deficient in park space then have to live with lower park quality overall.

But a higher yearly budget might change that. Should the desired budget be granted by Mayor Adams this year, the Five Point Plan offers a hopeful high-speed solution to the park quality problem via a first-ever Parks Construction Authority.

“Capital projects in parks are notoriously costly and take a long time to complete, which results in costs overruns,” says Councilwoman Ung. “A Parks Construction Authority that oversees all capital projects in city parks would streamline and simplify the process to finance and complete capital projects, not only more efficiently, but hopefully at a lower cost. It could also tap into other forms of financing, such as low-interest loans.”

Improving existing city parks won’t be enough for areas that need more space in general, though. New parks are a crucial step in solving the park inequity problem, but of course, land isn’t always easy to find in New York.

“One strategy is to just repurpose publicly held land into park space,” says Carter Strickland, director of the New York Trust for Public Land. “That can include dead end roads or better use of NYCHA open space- NYCHA campuses are mostly open space, but they’re often behind fences. Or there’s open schoolyards, and if we make those better and open up access after school hours, then you’ve got a park.”

Green space inequity is not a simple, one-time fix, and the problems don’t end when a new space is opened or a park is revamped. Parks require maintenance on all levels. As negotiations currently stand, Mayor Adams’ budget remains at $500 million to fund over 1,600 parks, which would severely hinder the success of the Five Point Plan.

Problems loom from the outside as well. In widely-desired New York, any improvement to a low-income area invites the threat of gentrification. Vulnerable communities that need improved green space could also be priced out of their neighborhoods by rising rents due to that green space making the area more desirable to gentrifiers willing to pay more.

There is no easy way forward for the parks of New York. Citizen-headed progress seems to be the new norm, and plenty of residents are fired up and ambitious, but they still need the city’s help to make their ideas a reality.

“If there are champions, particularly on the local, city government level, it’s easier to implement some of these changes,” says Ullah. “There’s a lot that can be done by policymakers.”