Sharron's room is small but filled with light. The bed is made, everything is clean and neat, a teddy bear the only sign that a teenager lives here. Sharron is 16 and soft-spoken. She only recently moved into this room at Inwood House on East 82nd, where she will stay until she has her baby.
Inwood House is a residence for pregnant teens, one of four in the city. But these young women are not here for a brief detour from their lives while they have their babies and then return back to their families. The girls in residence at Inwood House have themselves been in foster care for years, twenty percent of them for a decade or longer. Perhaps their parents died of AIDS, were incarcerated, lost custody or simply decided they couldn't cope.
As soon as the city finds out a teen in foster care is pregnant, they are transferred out of their foster homes and into a maternity residence, a requirement to insure that they are given the support they need during pregnancy. Indeed, a New York Presbyterian Hospital study in the 1980's found babies born at Inwood house were much healthier, with fewer pre-term births and low-weight births than babies of teen mothers seen at community clinics.
Nevertheless, it is yet another shift for these teens who finding themselves pregnant are then thrust into one more temporary home, living with 35 other young women.
"I thought it was going to be bad," admitted Kim, a 20-year old who has been at Inwood House since January. "But they help us a lot -- with placements and school and parenting classes." And, most important to Kim, she found the staff trustworthy. "When I have problems, I can speak to someone and I know it will stay with that person."
Sharron, was also fairly comfortable with her new surroundings. "I like the independence, " she said. "I like having my own room, and being able to come and go as I please."
Asked what the hardest part was in their present living situation, Tamara, 16 years old, spoke right up: "Being pregnant!"
PREVENTING TEEN PREGNANCY
The United States has the highest teen pregnancy rate of any industrialized nation, according to a report by the Campaign to End Teen Pregnancy. Four out of ten young women become pregnant in the U.S. at least once before they reach the age of 20. While the teen birth rate has declined nationally by 18 percent since 1991, New York still ranks number 42 among the 50 states in teenage pregnancies.
Citywide, the figures for the last two years available from the New York City Department of Health show a 9 percent reduction (from 13,020 to 11,793 teen births), although the teen birth rate actually increased in Queens and Staten Island.
What can we do to prevent teen pregnancy? Plenty, thinks Gladys Carrion, Esq., Inwood House's Executive Director. "We need to prepare adolescents to be successful adults," she suggests. "They need job training, schools that work, and more mentoring to give them significant adults in their lives.
"We need more programs to help adolescents who have experienced violence become whole again," she continued. There is a correlation between adolescents who have witnessed violence and teen pregnancy.
"And we need to help families be whole so they don't have children going into foster care" she said. "Ninety percent of the children in foster care are not there because of abuse, but because of neglect, which translates into poverty. What are we doing to eliminate poverty?!"
INWOOD HOUSE
Inwood House, originally located in the Inwood section of the city, was founded in 1830 as The Magdelen Society with funding from church women, their friends, and a $100 contribution from the city. In addition to the maternity residence and a Mother/Baby Foster Care Program, Inwood House has a Young Father's Program that works with young men on what it means to be a father. "It's not just about child support," explained Ms. Carrion. "It's about becoming a caring parent."
They also run Teen Choice, a coed pregnancy prevention program going into 14 junior high and high schools in the city, and Project Straight Talk which reac hes out to 5th grade boys about their responsibility with pregnancy prevention.
There is a school on the premises at Inwood House, a computer lab, parenting classes, writing workshops, an internship program, and just plain fun: on the day we visited, a trip was in the making to Virginia Beach.
"These girls hear over and over about being a parent now and having to be responsible," said Kathleen Clark, Development Director at Inwood House, "but they are also still teenagers, and they need recreation and art and music."
DETERMINED TO BE THE BEST MOTHERS
Although social workers at Inwood House explore all options with the young women, including terminating the pregnancy or putting their babies up for adoption, very few are interested in these alternatives.
"There is real peer pressure not to go with adoption or abortion," explained Ms. Carrion, "and that can make it difficult for any of the girls who may not want the baby." The predominant attitude is ÔI'm going to be the best mother there is.' Coming out of foster care themselves, they tend to feel ÔI'm not going to do to my baby what was done to me.'
Unfortunately, some of the young women do eventually lose their babies to the system and repeat that cycle.
Between 120 and 140 pregnant teenagers go through the Inwood House residence in the course of a year, having their babies and then, very often, waiting months for a new placement in foster care.
At present there is a terrible shortage of foster homes that will take in a mother and her baby. While they wait, the young women return to Inwood House and leave their infants in a nursery at the hospital, visiting daily.
"It's not easy to find families to take in these girls," said Ms. Carrion.
One sign of improvement is a recent contract awarded Inwood House by the city's Administration for Children's Services to almost double the Mother/Baby Foster Care. Inwood House will also open up several Mother/Baby group homes, as part of this contract, and has already established an office in Jamaica, Queens, offering teen parents follow-up assistance including parenting classes and help with independent living skills.
We may all shiver when we hear of yet another report of youth and violence, with young people as the victims as well as the ones committing the violent acts. Why can't someone do something, we ask? And officials answer by offering yet another violence prevention program.
But many of these programs, even some of the best-known, simply don't work.
According to an article this month in the New York Times ("Scared Straight Takes a Detour; Despite National Recognition, the State Cuts Back Program, Saying It's 'Not Effective'" ), the Scared Straight program that brought adolescents into prisons for a first-hand feel of the realities of prison life has not reduced violent crime among adolescent participants. In fact, some research indicates it may increase it. The Times story reports that New Jersey is phasing out the program.
In New York, however, it is still "up and running," according to the Department of Correctional Services in Albany. All that's different is its name, Youth Assistance Program.
This is not the only program still in existence that apparently does not work in preventing youth violence. A report by the National Institute of Justice on the subject includes:
This report, updated in July 1998, and based on a review of more than 500 crime prevention program evaluations, measured reductions in delinquency, juvenile crime, youth gang activity, youth substance abuse, and other high-risk factors related to youth violence. While a program may have other beneficial effects, as surely a summer jobs program does, it is only rated here on the basis of preventing youth violence.
What does work? According to Dr. Gerald Landsberg, Director of the Institute Against Violence at NYU, early identification can make all the difference. "Many kids at risk could be identified in pre-school or elementary school by their bullying or aggressive behavior," explained Dr. Landsberg. "But there is little intervention at that age. By the time they become adolescents, the behavior is well ingrained."
Programs that do prevent violence, according to Dr. Landsberg, include:
"But there's not a single magic bullet, like a polio vaccine, that will prevent violence," cautioned Dr. Landsberg. He recommends multiple intervention methods: mentoring, conflict resolution programs, parenting workshops. "The more you do, the greater the exposure to these programs, and the earlier the better, the more likely it will be to have an impact."
The National Institute of Justice study listed all the programs mentioned by Dr. Landsberg as either promising or proven to work, as well as a few others including:
Efforts aimed at reducing domestic violence would also reduce youth violence, according to a report by the American Psychological Association. A child that sees a parent of family member abused is more likely to see violence as a way to solve problems and likely to abuse others.
"Children are more aggressive and grow up more likely to become involved in violenceÑeither as victimizer or victimÑif they witness violent acts," according to this 1997 report.
Heavy exposure to violence on television and in other media was also listed as an influence: "When violence and sexual aggression are combined in the media, in song lyrics, in computer games, and in the vernacular, the message of violence (including sexual assault) is reinforced."
Lynda Sounds Off:
According to Dr. Landsberg, there are few resources devoted to violence prevention programs. "In New York State, it's lousy. There is no systematic source of funding. Individual schools may or may not have a program in place," Landsberg explained. "The Board of Education has not made it a priority. Instead the emphasis is on metal detectors or security guards."
Even teacher training is lacking in terms of violence prevention. The United Federation of Teachers has a training program for teachers dealing with potential violence in the classroom. "It's an excellent training," said Landsberg, "and yet it is not required for new teachers by the Board of Education or by individual schools. How can this be, wonders Landsberg, when teachers can exacerbate or help the problem.
What's needed is a commitment by policy makers to violence prevention programs that work and a move away from spending so much on jails and prisons. "The issue is not having the money," says Dr. Landsberg, "but where the money is spent."
The AIDS menace has shifted ground over the years in New York. Now it is affecting people of color.
The majority of people living with AIDS in New York are people of color. African-Americans are eight times as likely to have HIV as whites, and Hispanics are more than four times as likely to have the virus. Heterosexual black and Latina women's rates are the worst of all. Yet awareness of the danger is slow to penetrate. The Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC), founded in 1981 to combat the AIDS epidemic among gay and bisexual, mostly white and middle-class, men, now has a clientele that is mostly people of color.
Ron Johnson, Director of Public Information for GMHC, just got back from a trip to Africa, where the AIDS epidemic rages among heterosexuals, and has already left 10 million children orphans. He knows of the dangers of heterosexual transmission well, and speaks of the special peril facing minority populations.
"From day one, AIDS disproportionately affected blacks and Latinos," Johnson says. "They suffer from higher infection rates, and develop full-blown AIDS at higher rates" than white populations.
The reasons for this are manifold. First, says Johnson, prevention messages were not targeted to the black and Latino communities. "There was some racism involvedÑthe same attention was not afforded them. There was also discrimination against substance usersÑyou don't have people advocating to save the lives of substance users. And when a heroin addict dies, that's not news."
In addition, Johnson noted, many gay men of color don't identify or think of themselves as being "gay." "Sex" is something you have with a woman; you "mess around" with men. Denial, drug use, the cultural stigma of homosexual behavior in "macho" society, and racism and neglect in the larger society have combined to create a terrible problem in preventing and treating AIDS in minority communities.
But the fastest-growing rates of all are not among gay or bisexual men, but among young women of color. According to Johnson, "there is a very serious problem with teenage girls. Their rates of infection are higher than among the teenage boysÑthat suggests they're not having sex with their peers, they're having sex with older, infected men." And stark statistics show that AIDS is the leading cause of death for black women from ages 25 to 40. "Heterosexual transmission surpassed drug use as the infection source for women 3-4 years ago."
A big problem, he says, is the myth that heterosexual men can't get AIDS from women. "They firmly believe it. Also, there are numbers of closeted bisexual men in the black and Latino community." To make matters worse, he adds, it is often difficult for black and Latino women to negotiate matters of sex with men, such as condom use.
GMHC is approaching the problem directly, both by offering its array of prevention, treatment, and counseling services to minorities, and by reaching out to the black and Latino communities in the city. Soul Food targets black gay men, and Troyecto PAPI is a prevention program for Latinos. GMHC also has a youth initiative that works with young people of color, teaching them about prevention and risk factors, improving their judgement. All these programs work to build the participants' self-esteem and sense of community.
GMHC programs targeting the minority communities in the City have provided AIDS educational programs for the past five years, and client services such as case management, free meals, nutritional counseling, short-term mental health counseling, child care for women, group counseling, and home visits by "Buddies."
Gail Sounds Off:
The one group that has not been strongly or directly addressed by government or private agencies in the war against AIDS is heterosexual men. "No one is talking to heterosexual men," says Johnson. "That's been my pet peeve for 14 years!" Why aren't they? "No one wants to tackle the resistance."
Yet the example of Africa, where the AIDS virus nearly always transmitted by heterosexual contact, and men most certainly get the disease and die of it, is a clear warning that more attention must be paid to debunking the myths that straight men can't get HIV from women or from young women. Men need to be educated about their responsibility for not passing the infection on to others. And everyone needs to learn about risk factors, dangerous behavior, prevention measures, and treatment options.
As long as there are at-risk groups who deny their vulnerability to the disease, there will be a reservoir of the virus among us. Luckily, AIDS is hard to contract, and prevention is very effective. But effective prevention will mean a change of attitude in all the population at risk, which is all of us.
The number of young people serving time in adult prisons more than doubled between 1985 and 1997, according to a new report by the U.S. Department of Justice. In 1997, 7,400 kids under the age of 18 were sentenced to adult prisons, up from 3,400 in 1985. The increase occurred while juvenile arrests rates fell. Minors still make up less than 1% of the adult prison population.
The Justice Department attributes the increase to a wave of state measures making it easier to try juveniles in adult court. Every state now has at least one provision to transfer juveniles to adult courts. New York State's 1978 law was the first and its provisions are among the toughest in the country. Along with only two other states - Connecticut and North Carolina - New York tries every defendant over the age of 15 in adult court.
Younger kids are also tried in adult court for a range of violent crimes, from possession of a gun on school grounds to murder. The most recent available data shows that in 1996, 1,628 New York State offenders under 18 began serving sentences in adult prisons.
In addition to the 7,400 young prisoners cited by the Justice Department, there are 9,000 children 17 and younger sitting in pre-trial detention jails with adults. Nancy Rosenbloom of the New York Legal Aid Society said the number of NYC minors being held before trial is continuing to increase even while juvenile arrests are going down. The City Department of Correctional Services declined to say how many juveniles are detained on Rikers Island. Rosenbloom estimated the number at several hundred.
Holding juveniles with adults while they await trial is bad public policy. Young people, unlike adults, are often arrested in groups, peripheral parties to a youth crime. As a result, there are typically several kids among those arrested who are eventually freed without charge, or acquitted. "They've gotten a lot meaner, they've learned a lot about crime - and they're back on the street," observed Vincent Schiraldi, director of the Washington-based Justice Policy Institute. New York City should immediately develop alternatives to Rikers Island for kids awaiting trial.
Peggy J. Farber is freelance journalist specializing in children's issues. Her reporting on conditions of NYC children has appeared in City Limits Magazine as well as on National Public Radio.
A building collapses in Williamsburg, several workers are hurt and one man dies. (12 Workers Buried Alive: One Dead in Brooklyn Construction Horror.) A few weeks later, five Times Square restaurant employees are overtaken with fumes, and a man dies.
The common thread in both of these tragedies: the victims were low-wage immigrant workers.
"Immigrant status forces people into compromising positions," commented Benjamin Sachs of the Workplace Justice Project, a new area of focus for the community-based group Make The Road By Walking in Bushwick, Brooklyn. "They take jobs that are not safe or work for wages that are illegal: less than minimum wage or over 40 hours a week without overtime pay.
"Immigrants are more vulnerable to exploitation," explained Sachs, "because of the threat, either vague or explicit of INS action. This is a real threat if they are undocumented. But even if they are documented, it is still a threat, because they are often not sure of their status and the consequences of standing up for their rights."
Sachs gave the example of one man who wanted to file for unemployment benefits, but he was reluctant to do so because he was unsure of whether, if he went to the Wage and Labor Board to file a claim, the INS would stop him from bringing his daughters over.
"The language barrier is also significant," said Sachs. And yes, he added, there is a measure of racism on the part of employers and unions.
About twenty-five people have walked into the newly-formed Workplace Justice Project seeking help over the last three months, many of them newcomers to this country,. "Usually people wait until they lose a job before coming to us," said Sachs.
Sachs explained that the bad economic situation often forces immigrants to stay in unfair or unsafe labor situations. According to figures about the Bushwick community, where the majority of residents are immigrants, the average per capita income is $6,687; over 40 percent of the residents live below the poverty line, and the unemployment rate is 20 percent.
In exchange for legal assistance, the Workplace Justice Project asks participants for an oral job history and to participate in a Workplace Rights Discussion.
One man who walked through the door seeking help was Raul Soria, a 44-year-old man from Peru who has been in the US for six years.
"I arrived here like a lot of people," said Raul, through a translator, "with illusions, plans and projects." In Peru, he studied accounting and had his own business. His plans included finding work and enrolling in business courses. Six years later, after a string of low-paying restaurant jobs with unfair wages, unsafe practices and long hours that left no time for study, Raul is disillusioned.
Because of the language barrier, the only work he was able to get was as a dishwasher. In his first job, and every one that followed, Raul was paid minimum wage and expected to work between 40 and 70 hours a week without overtime pay. He knew he was supposed to get time and a half after 40 hours. He knew the law, but he also knew he had to pay his rent and send money to his wife and son, so he couldn't risk getting fired.
"It is illegal to fire someone for demanding legal wages," said Benjamin Sachs, "but it happens all the time."
Significantly though, as Raul Soria's work history makes clear, not demanding your rights doesn't necessarily ensure job security either.
In July 1995, Raul started working for the Gloucester Restaurant on 50th Street between Park and Madison. His salary was $350 a week for 40 hours, but after five or six months, the owner, Peter Skeadas, started paying him only $150, for the same amount of time. According to Raul, he was made to work with sewage water from the basement up to his ankles, and required to work overtime even while earning less money. If he didn't, he was told, he would be fired.
In June 1998, Raul was hired as a dishwasher at La Boheme on Minetta Lane, by the owner for $270 week and was told his hours would be 5:30 to 11:30, six days a week. In reality, he often worked until 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning, but he received no overtime pay. He was also asked to do extra work, cleaning the exhaust and appliances with toxic chemicals, a job usually done by a special contractor. Raul left and sought help from the Workplace Justice Project. With their assistance he confronted his former boss and told her "you violated my rights; you owe me money."
According to Benjamin Sachs, "sometimes the employer pays, sometimes they don't. Usually they don't. But it was an incredible experience for Raul to confront her. He was great. And we're going to continue to fight until we get the wages," Sachs promised.
Of course, it's not enough just to enforce minimum wage and overtime. "The real answer to ensure progress is by organizing," said Sachs. "These issues don't just impact immigrants," he said. "Immigrants are more vulnerable and face additional issues. But they have the same rights under the employment laws as all citizens do; even undocumented immigrants have these rights. If an employer could ignore employee laws for immigrant workers, then that would be a huge incentive to hire immigrant workers and exploit them."
Lynda Sounds Off:
ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNERS SET-UP FOR FAILURE: In June of this year, New York State will require all high school students to pass a Regents Language Arts Exam in order to graduate. These new standards will be particularly hard on English Language Learners
"This year alone, over 6,000 English Language Learners may be kept from graduating because they aren't able to pass a test for which they have not been adequately prepared," said Margie McHugh, Executive Director of the New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC) in a presentation before the New York State Assembly's Task Force on New Americans, and Subcommittee on Bilingual Education.
NYIC recommendations include additional English Language instruction, certification of ESL teachers, funding for resources like technology and textbooks, increased parent involvement, appropriate testing, and the delay of implementation of the English Language Arts Regents for English Language Learners until the Class of 2004.
"We know these children can succeed if they are given the time and opportunity to do so," said Ms. McHugh.
Over 150,000 students in the City and over 200,000 in the State are English Language Learners. How can we set a standard for excellence for our children without helping them to reach it? Immigrant students as a rule have lower drop-out rates and higher graduation rates than non-immigrants
The Topic: "Social Services" are all the ways the City and State provides support and assistance to those citizens who lack the means to obtain basic necessities
The Context: Rendering services to NYC citizens is a mammoth undertaking -- requiring time, money and considerable human resources. Huge caseload numbers and understaffed agencies leave the City overburdened and underprepared. Add the occasional scandal or tragedy to the mix, and the ensuing politics bring additional stress to the system. The result? The City is struggling to provide the most basic level of service, even to its neediest clients. And the debate about the best way to remedy these problems continues, perhaps indefinitely....
The Topic: "Social Services" are all the ways the City and State provides support and assistance to those citizens who lack the means to obtain basic necessities
The Context: In 1997, the Social Service departments and agencies received almost 20% of the City's total budget appropriations. Rendering services to NYC citizens is a mammoth undertaking -- requiring time, money and considerable human resources. Huge caseload numbers and understaffed agencies leave the City overburdened and underprepared. Add the occasional scandal or tragedy to the mix, and the ensuing politics bring additional stress to the system. The result? The City is struggling to provide the most basic level of service, even to its neediest clients. And the debate about the best way to remedy these problems continues, perhaps indefinitely....
Open Space Research
What would your neighborhood look like if vacant lots and abandoned buildings became green space? What percentage of parks does it have compared to other communities? Are there wetlands or wildlife areas that ought to be protected? For the first time, the comprehensive and detailed information needed to make these determinations is available to anyone with access to the Internet. The New York City Open Space Information System Cooperative (OASIS) has created an interactive mapping and analysis tool of New York City's open space resources. The site builds upon the new aerial photo-images of the five boroughs used in the basemap recently created by the city Department of Information Technology and Telecommunication, as well as detailed land use information on each tax parcel in New York City. It incorporates data from numerous city, state, and federal agencies, as well as community garden sites identified by the Council on the Environment for New York City.
The site, www.oasisnyc.net, allows users to create land use maps or aerial photo views by borough, neighborhood, community board or zip code, and to zoom into those maps to see details, such as vacant lots, more closely. Zoning and ownership information can also be obtained for each parcel. The site also provides land use statistics by community board or borough. Overlays show wetlands, as well as population density and income levels from the 1990 census. More informational layers are planned, including environmental problem sites and neighborhood tree data. There are inaccuracies, which is to be expected in a project this large using not always up-to-date information from government agencies, but users can help by providing corrections and updates through a feedback link.
OASIS was created through a collaborative effort of more than 30 government agencies, nonprofit organizations, academic institutions and private companies, led by the U.S. Forest Service. The New York Public Interest Research Group's Community Mapping Assistance Project (CMAP) is the primary architect of the web site.
Bloomingdale Woods: Wetlands or Not?
The effort by environmentalists on Staten Island to stop the construction of ball fields in eastern Bloomingdale Park received another setback. The environmental group, Protectors of Pine Oak Woods, believes the forested natural area has far more extensive wetlands than the state has delineated. In March, however, the group's appeal of the state Department of Environmental Conservation's decision not to map the wetlands in the park was denied by Freshwater Wetlands Appeals Board. Protectors wants to see ball fields located in other less environmentally sensitive areas, locations they also say would be a lot more practical and cost-effective than a forested, hilly park with scattered wet areas that was originally protected for its natural values. There is tremendous pressure from sports groups and local politicians to build the $12 million recreation complex to provide much-needed playing fields for youth sports in south Staten Island. A final Environmental Impact Statement on the project is due to be released in mid-April. Protectors is conducting its own wetlands mapping workshops at the park this spring. For information, contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
Governors Island tours
Free walking tours of the former Coast Guard base in New York harbor are being offered this spring and summer. The tours include the island's two historic forts, which, along with 20 acres of surrounding land, were declared the country's newest national monument by President Clinton just before he left office. Last year, Mayor Giuliani and Governor Pataki agreed on a plan that would make the island a new public space, with educational facilities, a conference center, and parkland. But the federal General Services Administration is planning to sell the rest of island this year, unless legislation or negotiation by state to purchase the land is successful. The tours run on the following Wednesdays, from 10 a.m. - noon: May 2, July 11, August 1, and September 5. There will be a June 6 tour from 2-4 p.m. To register, email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
Anne Sounds Off
In a recent Op-ed piece in the New York Times, Kenneth T. Jackson, professor of history at Columbia University, discusses what New York City needs to do to capitalize on the last decade's population increase, reflected in the 2000 census. He credits a sharp decline in crime as well as the excitement and crowds - "bustling sidewalks, outdoor restaurants and funky galleries" - with bringing young professionals back into the city. Yet, he says, "if New York....is to return to the glory of its past, then average men and women must choose to remain in the city after they have children." How to get them to do that? His solution is to improve the schools, which is obviously critical. But then what? Professor Jackson leaves out something that is essential to making the city more livable. What else do people seek when they move to the suburbs? A little bit of nature, lawns and shady streets for kids to play on, ball fields and pools and tennis courts. New York City lags behind most major cities in usable park acreage and recreational facilities per capita. To keep families in the city, we need to make an investment not only in the schools, but also in our parks and playing fields. We need to bring more green into the heart of the city.
Anne Schwartz is a freelance writer specializing in environmental issues. Previously, she was the editor of the Audubon Activist, a news journal for environmental action published by the National Audubon Society, and an editor at The New York Botanical Garden.
High Line Park photo by David Berkowitz, used under a Creative Commons license.
NEW YORK — The extraordinary greening of New York City over the past decade is part of — and inspiration for — a nationwide urban parks revival that has been growing over the past two decades.
In a sign of the movement’s strength, some 870 people from 200 cities and 21 countries gathered earlier this month for the Greater & Greener urban parks conference, co-sponsored by the City Parks Alliance and the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation.
“Just about every city has one or more major park projects under way,” said Peter Harnik, director of the Center for City Park Excellence at The Trust for Public Land, which researches park best practices and benefits, and maintains a database on U.S. city park systems.
Driving this momentum is an evolution in the way parks are viewed: Once relegated to the sidelines, an amenity that could be dispensed with in tough times, parks are now seen as central to a city’s quality of life by public officials, civic leaders and citizens.
“It feels like parks have come into the public consciousness,” said Catherine Nagel, executive director of the City Parks Alliance, the conference co-sponsor.
One measure of this, she said, is the diverse roster of people who attended the conference, the fourth presented by the alliance.
The previous events attracted mostly park professionals and advocates. But this year, there were mayors, real estate developers, health care professionals and advocates, corporations, philanthropists and landscape designers and planners.
Further evidence of the reach of the urban parks movement is a new commitment by the National Park Service to better connect inner-city residents with its urban national parks.
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, in his keynote speech, used the occasion to announce the formalization of a partnership between the National Park Service and the city parks department to manage Jamaica Bay’s 10,000 acres of city and federal parkland.
The concept of a park is broadening, too.
“Parks are less isolated pockets of greenery and more a part of the urban infrastructure,” Nagel said.
Europeans have a much more expansive view of parks “as public spaces between buildings — the green glue that holds a city together,” said Helle Søholt, co-founding partner and managing director of Gehl Architects in Copenhagen.
But you don’t have to look further than Madison Square Park or Times Square, where pedestrian plazas have staked out turf formerly occupied by cars, to get a feel for that idea.
Here are four trends in urban parks from this year's conference:
With a growing body of research showing that access to outdoor open space and recreation improves physical and mental health, many sessions focused on ways parks can be designed or managed to fight obesity, improve education, and partner with social service agencies.
“Parks are as fundamental to health and well-being as a clinic or hospital,” said Dr. Daphne Miller, of the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.
Mickey Fearn, National Park Service deputy director for communications and community assistance, said parks are spaces for spontaneous outdoor play, as well as programs that connect young people to the outdoors and nature.
He also said they provide experiences that help young people, especially those living in disadvantaged inner city neighborhoods, succeed and participate in a “powerful way in their communities."
As an example, he cited Rocking the Boat, the South Bronx youth organization that teaches teenagers to build boats and involves them in conservation efforts along the waterfront in “an area where they didn’t even know had water.”
Space for new parks is scarce in many cities and neighborhoods. New parks are being built in unlikely places: elevated rail lines, reclaimed brownfields and even long-covered rivers that are “daylighted” and restored.
Conference participants got a look at some of New York City’s solutions for shoehorning parks into a densely built cityscape, including the park-in-progress at Staten Island’s former Fresh Kills landfill, the largest park to be built in New York City in more than 100 years, and one of the scores of schoolyards that have been transformed into student-designed community public space.
New York City, Philadelphia, and many other cities are making a major investment in designing green roofs, streetside swales, specially engineered tree pits and other natural systems to help address its sewage overflow problems after heavy rainstorms.
This green infrastructure soaks up and slows down runoff before it overwhelms the sewer system, while also adding more green space in the city.
Sessions on sustainable park design for creating parks that serve as buffers for climate change and for preserving biodiversity underscored a new focus on parks as ecological systems.
Even in a good economy, funding parks is a challenge. Finding innovative and equitable ways to pay for creating and maintaining parks was a major theme of the conference. Among the ideas explored were the establishment of conservancies and other forms of private funding, the role of developers in creating public space, partnerships with water and highway departments, and voter-approved dedicated funding.
Oklahoma City Mayor Mick Cornett spoke about his city’s investment of public funds for a multitude of civic and greening projects to breathe new life into a hollowed-out downtown, making it a place that attracts and keeps residents and businesses.
Since 1993, Oklahoma City voters have passed a series of penny sales-tax initiatives, the most recent to fund a new 70-acre central park, riverfront recreation, and biking trails, among other things.
In an interview in The Dirt, the blog of the American Society of Landscape Architects, he said: “We convinced people who live in the suburbs that the quality of life downtown is important….you can’t be a suburb of nothing.”
In his keynote speech, Mayor Bloomberg also stressed the economic growth that flows from investing in urban parks.
Speaking from a stage decorated to look like a pocket park — with the ubiquitous green portable cafĂ© tables and chairs, a bench flanked by greenery, and a bicycle — he noted the attraction of good city parks to everyone from a young person starting a career to a family raising children in the city to a business leader deciding where to locate.
“In a tough economy, we know it’s important to keep investing in what makes a city inviting to businesses and new residents,” he said. “The time to make the investment is tough times. The city walked away from its future during the 70s. We did not do that this time.”
With his 2007 sustainability blueprint, PlaNYC 2030, Mayor Michael Bloomberg brought New York into the vanguard of American cities in acknowledging the importance of green space to the city's long-term viability. The plan set a goal of putting parkland within a 10-minute walk of every resident, transforming streets into public open space and expanding the amount of "green permeable surface."
Although budget constraints have stalled some of the more ambitious park-building plans, the city has made significant progress toward many of these goals, particularly creating a more permeable city. This represents a sea change in the city's approach to managing stormwater pollution and could well be one of PlaNYC's most lasting effects.
Instead of building more tanks, tunnels and other expensive controls to prevent combined stormwater and sewage from polluting the harbor, the city is investing in green infrastructure. This approach uses advances in urban ecology and state-of-the-art hydrological modeling to create and manage a low-maintenance network of natural lands, plantings and permeable surfaces that can capture rainwater before it enters the sewer system.
The update to PlaNYC released in April details the steps the city has taken so far, as well as a number of new initiatives. A major component is the city Department of Environmental Protection's Green Infrastructure Plan released last fall. It proposes to invest $1.5 billion over the next 20 years in creating and maintaining green infrastructure, and to coordinate it into city road and other construction projects. According to the administration, adopting this approach would reduce overflows from the sewage system by an additional 3.8 billion gallons a year over what traditional controls could accomplish -- at a significantly lower cost.
Unlike the spending on new parks, the investment in sustainable stormwater management — which is funded by water and sewer fees — includes the cost of caring for plantings and other green elements, assuring their lasting effectiveness as well as the many other benefits they bring.
The city is under a consent order negotiated with the state Department of Environmental Conservation to reduce discharges of untreated stormwater and sewage into the harbor. Because the order specifies the construction of specific projects, the state would have to approve any green modifications to the plan. But if the state approves, the new approach could launch a wave of greening that will last long past the Bloomberg administration and make the city a national leader in innovative stormwater management.
Today it is hard to imagine Manhattan as an island of gently rolling hills and forests laced with abundant springs and streams, or to envision bears and wolves roaming Brooklyn, as the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Welikia project has discovered in its quest to understand the city's original landscape and ecology. Except for a swath of forest running through Staten Island, shards of marshland around the harbor and other remnant natural areas, the original landscape of New York City has been largely obliterated.
Buildings and asphalt now cover so much of the land that some 80 percent of the city's surface is impermeable. To replace the natural systems that once absorbed and filtered rainwater, over the decades engineers built a vast infrastructure to collect, store and treat the water that pours off roofs, parking lots, sidewalks and streets. In most parts of the city, this runoff, which picks up pollutants from the streets, goes into the same sewer pipes as the wastewater from toilets, dishwashers, showers and kitchen sinks.
After investing $6 billion since 2002 in upgrading its wastewater storage and treatment plants, the city can, for the first time, handle the 1.1 billon gallons of sewage residents generate daily, and raw sewage is no longer routinely discharged into the waterways. As a result, the harbor is cleaner than it has been in more than 100 years.
This traditional stormwater management moves water as quickly as possible off the land and holds it in tunnels and tanks until it can be treated and discharged into waterways.
But when it rains -- and in some areas of the city all it takes is a tenth of an inch -- the volume of wastewater overwhelms the treatment plants. Every year, around 30 billion gallons of sewage mixed with polluted runoff still flow untreated into city waters in what is known as "combined sewer overflows" or CSOs. Some places along the waterways experience such overflows 40 to 50 times a year. Almost a third of the city’s 274 public access points to the waterfront are within three city blocks of a sewage outflow pipe. Because of this, the city often must shut beaches following heavy rains.
To help address this problem, many cities in the U.S. and other countries, including Philadelphia, Chicago and Portland, Ore., have pioneered an ecological approach that harnesses or replicates nature’s ability to soak up and store rain water.
Even before PlaNYC, New York City was using natural systems to handle stormwater in the 10,000-acre Staten Island Bluebelt. By preserving streams, ponds and wetlands in 16 drainage corridors, all but one in the southern part of the borough, the Bluebelt handles nearly 36 percent of the island's stormwater -- at a savings of tens of millions of dollars compared to the cost of conventional storm sewers.
The task could be more difficult in most other parts of the city. In these densely built areas, capturing stormwater at its source involves hundreds or thousands of small-scale installations. These include green and blue roofs, in which vegetation or flow control devices prevent water from draining off too fast; enhanced tree pits and street plantings that catch and hold runoff underground, allowing it to seep out and water the plants; manmade small wetlands in parks and along roadways; backyard rain barrels; and porous paving that allows water to soak into the earth.
For years, suggestions that the Department of Environmental Protection consider using green infrastructure to address the runoff problem "fell on deaf ears," said Larry Levine, a senior attorney in the Natural Resources Defense Council's water program. "When the original PlaNYC came along, it was the first point at which the city really started to look seriously at these sustainable stormwater management approaches."
PlaNYC spurred the city to make sustainable stormwater management a priority in capital projects for the first time. The plan launched an interagency task force to help agencies share best practices and work together to identify upcoming projects in areas that would benefit from green infrastructure and assess which would be most feasible and cost-effective. Many staff had been waiting a long time for this opportunity and the funding. "Immediately there was an interest from within the agencies to add green elements to their projects," said Department of Environmental Protection spokesman Farrell Sklerov.
The Department of Environmental Protection is collaborating with the parks and transportation departments and other city agencies to build dozens of pilot projects, including green roofs, bioswales (narrow vegetated ditches that capture and filter runoff), and enhanced Greenstreets that capture stormwater runoff in addition to rainfall. Researchers are monitoring representative sites in order to make the designs, materials and plantings more effective.
The updated PlaNYC notes that some of the pilot projects have already led to new standard designs for bioswales and enhanced tree pits that can be used in most Department of Transportation and Department of Design and Construction road reconstruction projects.
The city also is modifying zoning codes and creating financial incentives for incorporating green infrastructure in private development. Zoning amendments require new commercial parking lots to include interior plantings and sidewalk trees, and new developments to plant street trees and, in lower density areas, sidewalk landscaping.
As a next step, the city plans to tighten existing requirements for stormwater management on all new development and redevelopment projects, as well as at construction sites. It will look at ways to charge landowners for runoff, using credits as incentives for them to reduce impervious surfaces.
Other initiatives focus on creating design guidelines for city agencies to set consistent standards for green infrastructure. The parks department has been incorporating stormwater capture into park and playground design for some time, including a wooded wetland complex in Canarsie Park and the 2010 reconstruction of Robert Venable Park in Brooklyn. The department is now developing ways to implement the best practices for designing and constructing sustainable parks that it developed with the Design Trust for Public Space.
"The pendulum has swung, and it's not going to swing back," said parks commissioner Adrian Benepe. "The people who work for us are now part of a generation that sees sustainable design as being part and parcel of landscape design."
PlaNYC 2.0 also promises an updated version of the Street Design Manual, which includes a chapter on using and maintaining green infrastructure, street trees and other plantings.
Providing the underpinning for much of this is the Department of Environmental Protection's NYC Green Infrastructure Plan. It calls for a combination of green infrastructure, increased capacity from fully cleaning the existing sewer system and the most cost-effective of the traditional controls specified under the consent order.
In addition to incorporating stormwater capture into public construction projects, the plan looks to community participation. For the last two years, the department has providedgrants to private property owners, businesses, and not-for-profit organizations to develop innovative green infrastructure.
The plan aims to stop runoff from 10 percent of the city's impervious surfaces in the 13 watersheds with combined sewer overflows. In addition to saving money and reducing pollution, planting vegetation and adding green space will beautify the city and clean and cool the air. The agency estimates that implementing the Green Infrastructure Plan would provide as much as $400 million to New Yorkers in reduced energy costs, improved health and increased property values.
"You get a tremendous bang for your buck with investment in these green infrastructure approaches, beyond what you can get from building concrete holding tanks that serve only one function," said Levine.
In turning to green infrastructure, the Department of Environmental Protectionis challenging long-term orthodoxy about stormwater management, said Commissioner Cas Holloway at a March community presentation in Brooklyn. "It required a huge cultural shift at the DEP," he said. "We have a lot of engineers who like building in concrete and steel and are good at it."
It is impossible to predict how many of the initiatives in PlaNYC 2.0 will continue past the Bloomberg administration, especially in today's climate of fiscal constraint.
Already, the city has slowed the timeline for creating the eight new flagship parks announced in the original PlaNYC, raising questions of how many will eventually be built.
Protecting the city's remaining wetlands and natural areas so important for water quality, flood protection and wildlife habitat remains a challenge, given constant development pressures and a lack of funding for land conservation. So far, the city has protected just nine of the 89 properties its Wetlands Transfer Task Force recommended for transfer to the parks department in 2007.
The city has already committed $187 million over the next four years to begin putting the Green Infrastructure Plan into action. The city is now seeking approval to fully implement the plan under its consent order with the state. This will require a great deal of further analysis and refinement, said Levine. "There are a lot of challenges and a lot of work for the city to fully develop this green infrastructure vision in a way that will take root citywide over the long term.”"
The plan offers tremendous potential to codify an ecological approach to planning in the city and make it a much greener place. If the plan is approved, said Sklerov, "it will be part of the fabric of the DEP's efforts going forward."
"Green infrastructure is the wave of the future," said Bram Gunther, chief of forestry, horticulture and natural resources group at the parks department. "That’s how any city that’s interested in sustaining itself and its public health over time has to view its urban planning."
Anne Schwartz, in charge of the parks topic page since its inception in 1999, is a journalist who specializes in environmental issues.