Gotham Gazette

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Opinion

Imagining a DeCentral Park


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Bikers in Central Park (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)


The past year has taught us all just how valuable outdoor space truly is, and how much our current cityscape is sorely lacking. Nearly 20% of New Yorkers, almost 1.5 million people, are not within walking distance of a park. But there is a solution right before our eyes, a hidden “Decentral Park” in our city’s streets.

Open Streets, Open Restaurants, and pop-up bike lanes have turned our conception of how we can and should use our streetscape on its head. As our street grid makes up 27% of the land in New York City, it’s about time that we look for ways to use those precious square feet to give the most benefit to the most people. By reclaiming just a fraction of our on-street parking spaces to make pocket parks, we can transform our curbs from unsightly storage into much-needed community hubs and green space.

Although the city is currently home to more than 2,300 parks, they are unevenly distributed. Lower income areas and communities of color, neighborhoods like the South Bronx, Jackson Heights, and Crown Heights, are among those with the least amount of land devoted to public space. Affluent, and often whiter, neighborhoods have not only greater access to parks, but also more park space in total: according to the Trust for Public Land, average park size in wealthy neighborhoods is 14 acres, while in poor neighborhoods it is just 6.4 acres.  

We all benefit from parks, and a decentralized network of small parks throughout the five boroughs will help level this playing field – literally. While marquee greenspaces like Central Park or Flushing Meadows-Corona Park offer flagship destinations for New Yorkers and visitors alike, the power of small parks is underrated. Research shows that exposure to even small amounts of green space and nature can reduce stress, and that access to communal space helps build interpersonal relations and supportive social networks. Providing parks within access of every New Yorker will make us a healthier and happier city.

There are 3 million on-street parking spaces in New York City. By exchanging just 10% of these parking spaces for pocket parks, we can immediately create universal park access. The city’s current definition of a parallel parking spot is 8.5 feet deep by 24 feet long – which means that in each spot, there is over 200 square feet of potential public space right in front of us. That alone is bigger than some of our apartments, but together it could amount to over 1,300 acres of public space, more than one-and-a-half Central Parks in our citywide DeCentral Park.

Pocket parks can take a variety of forms, and we have to look no further than the existing Street Seats program as a starting point for potential designs. Different models can include tables, chairs, and benches, others can include more active play equipment, and still more could be home to community gardens or other greenery. These parks can and should be as varied and diverse as our communities themselves, and implementation must include community visioning to ensure that they are empowering spaces, not imposing ones.

You would be hard-pressed to find a more heated point of contention in New York than parking, and challenging the status quo will not be easy. But in this debate, we can actually look to one of history’s biggest proponents of urban automobiles for guidance. New York’s most complicated character, Robert Moses, despite all his many faults, shrewdly understood the importance of parks, famously noting “as long as you're on the side of the parks, you're on the side of the angels; you can't lose.” Indeed, a recent Transportation Alternatives survey found that 84% of New Yorkers support more space for children to play, and 83% support more trees and greenery, even if either would mean less parking.

Ironically, Moses’ work of slicing and dicing our city over the 20th century has left us with a built environment where the predominant urban feature is parking, not parks. But the point behind this message is to think about what we gain, not what we lose. In the next decade, as autonomous vehicles begin to rise and as reforms like residential parking permits and congestion pricing take shape, we’ll ultimately see a decreasing demand for private car storage. How we reclaim and make use of our public space will be the defining issue of our city’s next chapter – and starting with parks means that we’re starting off on the right foot.

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Ben Guttmann is a former candidate for City Council, member of Queens Community Board 2, co-founder of marketing agency Digital Natives Group, and adjunct lecturer at Baruch College. Twitter: @guttmann.

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This Year’s Mayoral Campaign Can Contribute to a Healthier, More Equitable Food System for New York City


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Healthy food help (photo: Jeff Reed/City Council)


On February 9, nine of the more than 30 candidates for New York City Mayor participated in the Mayoral Food Forum 2021, a discussion of the future of food policy in the city. Candidates who joined the event included Eric Adams, Shaun Donovan, Kathryn Garcia, Ray McGuire, Dianne Morales, Scott Stringer, Jocelyn Taylor, and Maya Wiley. Eleven New York City food organizations*, including the CUNY Urban Food Policy Institute, which I direct, sponsored the event. More than a thousand people used Zoom to watch the lively and spirited discussion, moderated by Errol Louis of NY1. Questions addressed food insecurity, low wage labor, urban agriculture, school food, and other topics.

I had also served as one of the organizers of the previous Mayoral Forum on Food Policy on July 17, 2013, during the last “open” mayoral race. That one, moderated by New York University nutritionist Marion Nestle, had featured candidates Sal Albanese, Bill de Blasio, John Catsimatidis, Christine Quinn, and Anthony Weiner. Again more than a thousand people participated—in person in those pre-pandemic days—and 76 organizations sponsored the event.

Reflecting on these two experiences eight years apart led me to ask how food policy and the food movement have changed in the last eight years and what these changes hold for the future of food policy in our city. Some advances were obvious. This year’s crop of mayoral candidates seemed more knowledgeable on food policy than the 2013 field. They spoke proficiently about SNAP enrollment, school food, the use of eminent domain to expand urban farms, and the need for more staff for the Mayor’s Office of Food Policy. All agreed that shaping food policy was an important mayoral responsibility and that using municipal authority to make the city’s food system more equitable should be a priority.

What explains their greater sophistication? First, it reflects the success of food activists in the last decade. Food and social justice activists have won free school lunch for all city school children, new policies to protect urban gardens and farms, eased rules for enrolling in SNAP, more attention to city procurement of school and other institutional food, and higher wages for food workers. The ongoing struggles of parents of school children, anti-hunger organizations, young people fighting predatory marketing of unhealthy food, low wage food workers, and others have shown public officials, the media, and ordinary eaters that food matters and that urban food policy is part of poverty policy, anti-racism policy, education policy, health policy, and more. Another indicator of this greater attention to municipal food policy is the Mayor’s Office’s soon-to-be-released 10 Year Food Plan for New York City, an important tool for monitoring progress that was recently required by law.

Sadly, another great educator on food policy has been the COVID-19 pandemic. Hunger and food insecurity have increased sharply, many low wage food workers face unemployment and unsafe working conditions, many New Yorkers struggle daily to find healthy affordable food. Who could miss the fact that our city’s food system and policies have not been strong enough to deal with this crisis?

A comparison of the two mayoral forums also showed that some issues have yet to move front and center to the mayoral agenda. At the 2021 forum, while several candidates talked about the importance of healthy food, none mentioned that diet-related diseases like diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and some forms of cancer are now the leading cause of premature death and preventable illness in New York City and the nation and a leading cause of the wide inequities in health between Black and Latino New Yorkers and whites and between low- and higher-income populations. To make more substantial progress in improving the health of New Yorkers, closing income and racial/ethnic gaps in health, and lowering the exorbitant cost of health care, we must make improving the nutritional quality of New Yorkers diets a high priority.

Second, while the candidates did talk about making healthier food more available and affordable—an important goal—none discussed the equally important goal of reducing the availability and promotion of unhealthy food. As long as publicly-subsidized (through agricultural and tax policy) fast food, soda, and highly-processed food are more available and cheaper than fruits, vegetables, and other healthier products, New Yorkers will find it hard to make healthy choices. What city policies could contribute to that goal? Can city government play a role in protecting New York City’s children from the relentless marketing of Pepsi, Coke, McDonalds, Kellogg’s, and others? These are questions the next Mayor should be ready to answer.

Finally, the candidates in the mayoral forum this year, as in 2013, were reluctant to take on the elephant in the room of food policy -- the industrial food system that is remarkably efficient in producing, distributing, and marketing the diet that is sickening New Yorkers as well as the nation and world. Until New York City begins the challenging task of creating a food system whose priority is getting healthy, affordable food to every resident rather than making profit for transnational food giants, it will be difficult to address the deep problems of our food system.

Of course, New York City can’t make this transition alone. But with the state and federal government, with the labor, environmental, women’s, Black Lives Matter, and other movements and with the millions of New Yorkers who struggle to get the tasty, delicious food that will support their own and their children’s and grandchildren’s well-being, we can move forward. The covid pandemic and economic crisis present a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to advance this goal but only a mayor with a vision for a different kind of food system can help New York City chart that course.

Let’s use the next months to give the candidates the knowledge and strength they need to take on that task and the coming years to create the groundswell of public pressure to make New York City the national leader for a healthier, more equitable and sustainable food system.

[Read: Democratic Mayoral Candidates Offer Ideas for Addressing Food Insecurity]

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Nicholas Freudenberg is Distinguished Professor of Public Health at the CUNY School of Public Health and Director of the CUNY Urban Food Policy Institute. The opinions in this column are his own.

*Sponsors of the event were Hunter College NYC Food Policy Center, the NY Covid-19 Food Coalition, City Harvest, the CUNY Urban Food Policy Institute, Equity Advocates, Food Bank for NYC, Hunger Free America, UJA-Federation of NY, LiveOn NY, United Way of NYC and the Laurie M. Tisch Center for Food, Education & Policy at Columbia University

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The Health of Our Cities Depends on DACA, and a Path to Citizenship for Dreamers


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DACA supporters (photo: John McCarten/City Council)


President Biden has taken steps to make the lives of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients better by introducing a bill that has expedited a pathway to citizenship for them. While preserving and even fortifying DACA is a necessary immediate step, merely restoring the program’s initial provisions is no longer enough. What we owe DACA recipients is what we owe all immigrants who have contributed to our country: a pathway to permanent residency or citizenship so they can plan a future without fear. Their security and well-being are essential to that of all of us. That is why New York City and cities all across the country are excited to support the Biden-Harris Administration’s Dream Act and U.S. Citizenship Act, which will create such a pathway to citizenship for all of our immigrant communities.

Throughout the Trump administration, the repeated assaults on the DACA program took a significant toll on 700,000 DACA recipients, or “Dreamers,” and their families. Now, despite President Biden’s Executive Order to strengthen the program and a federal court overturning the Trump administration’s bad faith effort to stop the program entirely, DACA still remains in legal limbo. On December 22, U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen in Houston held a hearing in which Texas and eight other states sought to end DACA, and the case is ongoing. Advocates have warned that Judge Hanen’s future decision may be “the worst court decision since the program was created.”

Dreamers play a key part in this pandemic workforce. Over half-a-million DACA-eligible individuals across the country are currently classified as essential workers, with 62,000 working in healthcare alone. If you get sick with COVID-19, there is a chance your nurse or medical assistant could be a Dreamer. Moreover, through their earnings Dreamers power our metro areas, growth that will be much needed to combat the economic impact of COVID-19. Each year DACA and DACA-eligible recipients contribute $4 billion to federal, state, and local taxes, however, they are unfairly excluded from federal benefits like financial aid, social security, or Medicaid.

Thankfully, though, it is not just the Biden administration that supports DACA, but a large political cross-section of the American public. Seventy-three percent of voters want legislation that protects Dreamers from deportation, and 72 percent support a pathway to citizenship. We are encouraged that Senators Dick Durbin and Lindsey Graham reintroduced the Dream Act in the Senate. Yet Dreamers are still made to live on borrowed time, and as such, Dreamers are not able to fully achieve their fullest potential despite their great contributions to the only country they call home.

Consider the difference in establishing a secure life would make for Escarleth Fernandez, who has lived in New York City since kindergarten. Escarleth’s Bolivian parents brought her to the U.S. at age four in search of a better life for their daughter, like the countless immigrants before them. Last year Escarleth graduated from Hunter College, where she majored in media studies. She is passionate about medical technology and currently works as a research assistant in hematology and oncology at Weill Cornell Medicine, supporting patients who are starting cancer drug trials. Successful as Escarleth is, she nonetheless rightly balks at the notion that Dreamers’ worth is defined by their elite career paths. “People want to homogenize us, saying that we’re all going to be doctors, lawyers, or engineers,” she said, “but that’s not a fair expectation.”

What hinders Escarleth from pursuing a master’s degree in public health, however, is her ever-tenuous DACA status. And that makes it harder for her to invest in her future, especially if it requires careful planning and considerable amounts of money to pay for grad school. Even taking out an education loan is tricky; DACA recipients are prevented from applying for much of the traditional federal aid necessary for someone like Escarleth, who is a first-generation college student and whose family’s income cannot afford the hefty grad school price tag. With private student loans, her interest repayment rates would be prohibitively high, given that DACA students are considered “high-risk borrowers” as a result of their impermanent immigration status.

Experts predict it may take New York City a decade to emerge from the pandemic-induced recession. Imagine how much better our communities and economy would be if we helped Dreamers like Escarleth to pursue their dreams. Equipped with her master’s, she would be ready to serve when we face our next public health crisis.

Dreams are not restricted to those with citizenship. With legislative reform like the Dream Act and U.S. Citizenship Act, the 117th Congress has the opportunity and responsibility to provide permanent protections to those in our immigrant communities that are long overdue. The health of our city’s future depends on it.

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Bitta Mostofi is Commissioner of New York City’s Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs. On Twitter @bittamostofi of @NYCImmigrants.

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