Amidst New York City’s Green Dreams, Some Neighborhoods Feel Left in the Shadows
Growing up in Jackson Heights, Queens, Daniel Karatzas’s memories are dominated by images of games won and lost on narrow sidewalks, for lack of anywhere else to play.
Statutes of griffins loomed over them from either side of the black, iron fences, decorated with ornamented spear tips. Behind the fences, green grass, fountains and bushes of roses decorate the well-known garden apartments, which have a history of prohibiting sale to Blacks, Jews and immigrants.
More than sixty years later, green spaces are still rather a luxurious dream than reality for many in Jackson Heights and other parts of New York City, said Karatzas, who is now 64 and a real estate agent in Jackson Heights.
“There’s only so much you can do,” Karatzas said. “They can’t even build schools, let aside green space.”
Even though Jackson Heights is known for its garden apartments, residents only have two square feet park space on average per person. It’s one of the lowest scores for public green space in New York City. This places Jackson Heights alongside other neighborhoods such as Brownsville in Brooklyn and areas such as Hunts Point in the South Bronx. The common factor between these neighborhoods is that its residents are predominantly non-white and of lower income. Over the past few years, researchers have shown that these neighborhoods often suffer more from the effects of climate change, such as flooding and extreme temperatures. Green space can help decrease temperatures and damage from flooding. But increasing green space isn’t as straightforward in a city as dense as New York. When Prospect Park was renovated, researchers found that original residents moved away, due to increased rents.
The reasons for this difficulty can be understood through poor decisions in urban planning, said Ayushi Trivedi, 36. “What happened is that often policies lack intentional integration,” said Trivedi, who is a research associate specializing in gender equity within the World Resources Institute’s Center for Equitable Development, an international nonprofit organization focused on building climate-resilient communities. “And so a lot of policies unintentionally or intentionally made segregated spaces and left certain communities behind.”
Other experts, such as Jochen Albrecht, cite different reasons for the large disparities in green space enjoyed by different communities across New York City. Albrecht, 64, a professor of earth and environmental sciences at CUNY, said that residents aren’t always as willing to increase green space as one would expect. “When I look at Queens, there are so many gardens that are paved over or bricked over, they try to avoid green space although they actually have place to put it in their backyard,” he said. “It’s called cultural perspective.”
Residents of Jackson Heights decided to take action themselves to increase park space over the last years, which resulted in the expansion of Travers Park in 2019, and the creation of an Open Street Location, which was made permanent after the pandemic. Although these actions have contributed to park space, since both Travers Park and the Open Street Location predominantly consist of asphalt, the amount of green space barely increased.
Frank Panagiotapoulos, 47, who works as a city park worker said that the Open Street seems to be a compromise for not being able to integrate more green space. “The other parks are all concrete, there are no plants or greenery,” Panagiotapoulos added, in reference to Jackson Heights.
Josefina Bahamondes is optimistic. “It is a good opportunity to talk about global warming and how increasing the green spaces can create a neighborhood that can be more sustainable in the future,” said Bahamondes, 36, a teacher and resident of Jackson Heights. Bahamondes advocated for the Open Street Location. She said that now the positive effect of the Open Street on the community is so visible, it is time to start talking about increasing green space.
“We have this beautiful dream of changing the surface instead of asphalt in something that is more sustainable and that we would be less affected by intense storms,” Bahamodes said. “But for that you need to obviously work very hard.”
