Gotham Gazette

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Opinion

Invest in City Parks to Improve Our Public Spaces and Save the Environment


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(photo: @RiversideParkNY)


Parks are an essential part of any city’s infrastructure. Getting into nature at an urban park lowers stress, eases depression, and fosters happiness. Parks help build community - people get out and meet each other, kids play together, mothers talk, residents meet neighbors.

Parks are particularly invaluable in New York City, the nation’s most densely populated city. And we are fortunate to have so many parks to enjoy! More than 81% of New Yorkers are within walking distance of public green space. New Yorkers are visiting city parks in unprecedented numbers. The city’s parks get more than 100 million visitors a year.

More than just places to commune and recreate, these greenspaces are also one of the city’s most valuable environmental assets. They provide clean air, help mitigate climate change, connect residents with nature, and provide habitat for wildlife.

Parks are a major source of the city’s urban tree canopy. That canopy removes 1,300 tons of pollutants from the atmosphere and stores 1.2 million tons of carbon per year. Trees are vital for mitigating the urban heat island effect and can lower air temperatures by up to nine degrees, cut air conditioning use by 30%, and reduce heating energy use by a further 20-50% -- all of which help decrease climate-changing emissions.

The city’s parks and trees also contribute to our resiliency, capturing almost 2 billion gallons of stormwater runoff each year.

The New York City Parks Department manages 30,000 acres of land, about 14% of the city. Sadly, Parks receives less than 1% of the total city budget, leaving our greenspaces at risk.

This is shameful. While New York spends $178 per capita on its parks. Minneapolis spends $233, and Washington D.C. spends $270.

The average city park has not seen a major renovation for more than 20 years. According to a Center for an Urban Future report, there are cracks in virtually every retaining wall in city parks, deteriorating bridges, toilets that flush directly into waterways, drainage systems that can’t handle the runoff from even a gentle rainfall, and myriad other problems. Managers can’t do any kind of systematic planning and major infrastructure projects are often put on hold for years.

Inadequate funding for proper maintenance has also led to a rise of invasive species in parks. Just over a year ago, invasive beetles were found in Prospect Park that cut off the supply of water and essential nutrients to trees.

The great irony of all of this is that New York’s parks are iconic. Central Park and Prospect Park are routinely found on top parks lists.

That’s why NYLCV has joined the Play Fair coalition with New Yorkers for Parks, DC 37, and more than 100 other groups. Play Fair is a multi-year advocacy campaign for parks and this year, we are calling for increasing the Parks Department budget by $100 million for better maintenance.

This investment could ensure that the city’s natural forests will begin to receive the proactive care they need to remain healthy and resilient in our changing climate. Maintenance workers would have the resources they need to protect our trees from invasive species and maintain the trees we need to absorb carbon and air pollution.

It would go a long way towards fulfilling the goals of the 25-year Forest Management Framework for the restoration and conservation of the city’s hard-working natural forests, for which NYLCV has been advocating.

Investing in maintaining our parks will make New York City more sustainable, improve resiliency, and conserve nature. It’s time we Play Fair for our parks.

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Julie Tighe is President of the New York League of Conservation Voters (NYLCV), the only non-partisan, statewide environmental organization in New York that takes a pragmatic approach to fighting for clean water, healthy air, renewable energy, and open space. On Twitter @julietighe17 & @nylcv.

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We Can’t Effectively Plan for Climate Change without Real Community Dialogue and Long-term Planning


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(photo: Paige Polk/Mayoral Photography Office)


As we march toward a new climate reality, are we leaving the public behind? The New York City Panel on Climate Change’s (NPCC) 2019 report, released on March 15, offers a sobering new lens known as the Rapid Ice Melt scenario: the metropolitan region could experience 9.5 feet of sea level rise by the end of the century. That’s six inches short of the height of a regulation basketball hoop.

The real ‘March madness’ spilling into April and beyond is that we have barely any plan or resources to adapt our broader metropolitan region and, most important, effectively educate and engage the public about the financial, environmental, and social tradeoffs that will become increasingly necessary as waters rise. These are hard conversations. But they are also an opportunity to engage in a dialogue about how we will shape our cities for generations to come.

In this discussion, process and communication matter. Mayor de Blasio’s surprise roll-out on March 14 of the Lower Manhattan Coastal Resiliency project, which features a precedent-setting plan to infill up to 500 feet of the East River to protect the Financial District, echoes cautionary tales of two other disputed plans that have fallen short of the kind of public engagement necessary to succeed.

A substantially updated and fast-tracked proposal for the resiliency of Manhattan’s Lower East Side and the aborted Long Island City Amazon campus reveal an unwelcome common thread: big ideas that carry great importance for the economy, environment, and resilience of our city require understanding, buy-in, and a sense of how they fit into a plan for the larger whole, before they are presented to the public.

Questions remain about the details of alternatives for the Lower Manhattan Coastal Resiliency project, not to mention what follows. Does our city of water become a city of levees? What about equity? And are we setting a damaging standard for environmental impacts?

It is hard not to consider the ghosts of past land use decisions that we have made, that have led to our present predicament: Water Street, Canal Street, Pike Slip, areas long since filled in to support our growth. Without a full understanding of (and say in) the trade-offs, it will be hard for the public to feel comfortable with a presumed conclusion.

Adapting to climate change is increasingly not just a choice about strategy, but about what fundamental changes to our coastal cities we are open to. All options should be on the table, but the public needs to see the iterations that got us to this point. These are first steps that will ricochet across land use decisions throughout New York City and beyond.  

These are also decisions that require long-term plans, funding, and supporting governance frameworks that span beyond electoral cycles. Even if a Rapid Ice Melt scenario is not realized, the more modest sea level rise projections will mean that the Financial District, Coney Island, Rockaway Beach, Red Hook, the Historic Navy Yard, the Port of Newark, and the New Jersey Meadowlands, to mention a few, will all be under water daily by the end of the century if no action is taken. The questions expand: what is the future that we want, who will pay for this change, and how equitably will resiliency measures be distributed? We’re in this together.

New York is not alone of course. Miami, Norfolk, New Orleans, and scores of other coastal cities nationally and globally face these realities. But few rival New York City’s indomitable force of economy, innovation, and diversity. If we can’t do it here, this begs the question: can we do it anywhere?

While there was virtual radio silence greeting the release of the NPCC report, more than 1 million students across the nation and around the world walked out of class to express a serious statement about a need for real action to address our future. Those whose lives will be most affected by climate change get it.

We must address a true national emergency, together, and come to conclusions, together. As we consider bold steps forward, we must be informed by science, and organize robust and real public discussion to address the urgency. Can we talk?

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Roland Lewis, President and CEO, and Kate Boicourt, Director of Resilience, are leaders of the Waterfront Alliance. On Twitter @OurWaterfront.

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The Business Imbalance is Bad for the City


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(photo: Michael Appleton/Mayor's Office)


The political imbalance in New York City between business and “anti-business” forces is becoming untenable.

What is happening here has been in the works for many years and was not difficult to predict. Rising income inequality and the perception of a corrupt ruling class brought us the Tea Party movement, Occupy Wall Street, and the 2016 presidential candidacies of both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.

As the nation gears up for the 2020 presidential race, rhetoric pitting “corporate interests” against “the people” is once again front and center. And this is cascading down to our local politics in a way that risks damaging our city’s economic potential.

“Business” has become such a bad word that some elected officials have shunned accepting campaign donations or even attending meetings and events that might suggest an affiliation. And public policy debates are increasingly premised on the notion that business is an adversary and somehow acting in nefarious ways.

We must not continue down this path at the local level.

The business community is a pivotal constituency in New York City’s continued success. For example, the real estate industry has a huge stake in keeping the city humming if for nothing else than because their assets are inextricably linked to the city’s prosperity. Employers here want New York’s quality of life to remain high so their best employees don’t move to other cities. Why wouldn’t we want them to be at the table?

Drowning out the voices of business enables the loud voices of an influential few to drive public policy – without adhering to the will of the many. Pushing out Amazon – which had support from a majority of New Yorkers to locate a new campus here – is a “prime” example. In that instance, several high-ranking elected officials refused to even meet with the company. Two-thirds of New Yorkers agree that the loss of Amazon, its projected 25,000 jobs, and its tens of billions of dollars in expected tax revenues is bad for our city.

Now there’s another issue that is playing out in a similar way.

The state currently allows restaurants in New York City to pay waiters $10 per hour, so long as tips ensure that the employee is earning at least the minimum wage (now $15 per hour) at the end of the day. It’s called the “tip credit,” and it enables restaurants – which often have notoriously low profit margins – to reduce their labor costs. Surveys show that tipped workers end up earning $25 per hour, on average, when tips are included. Some make even more.

The issue should be a no-brainer. Indeed, the vast majority of restaurant owners and their wait staffs want to maintain the current system. (When Maine phased out its tip credit in 2016, thousands of servers led the successful fight to restore it because their paychecks were diminishing.) But a well-funded contingent of celebrities and misinformed activists are trying to drown out these voices in order to eliminate the credit in New York – and sadly, it seems to be working.

Some elected officials are repeating inflammatory talking points, namely that waiters are somehow not earning the minimum wage under this system. That would be of paramount concern to me, as well, were it not absolutely false. Yet no one seems to be listening to the facts, so unwilling they are to believe that employers and their employees could actually be on the same side of an issue.

New York City loses when policy debates adhere to this ‘business versus anti-business’ divide, particularly when the business side is assumed to be biased and dismissed as a result. I am certainly not advocating for pay-to-play politics, which is unethical, illegal, and at odds with the development of smart public policy. We need robust, thoughtful solutions that will move New York forward, remembering that we all believe in a better, stronger city for the future.

This requires public servants to engage with all parties and then make determinations based on all of these points of view. If we don’t maintain that balance, and base decisions on facts and impartial analysis, poorly-informed public policies will increase – and New York City will be worse for it.

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Jessica Walker is President of the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce. On Twitter @jessinharlem & @ManhattanCofC.

 

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