Public Garden vs. Affordable Housing: A Court Rules for Housing

The Elizabeth Street Garden in Manhattan is a popular space where people can do yoga, attend poetry readings or amble outdoors among roses and daffodils and sculptures of lions. It is also a rare, publicly-owned site that the city thinks is a perfect spot to put dozens of affordable apartments in one of the wealthiest parts of the city.

There has not been room for both.

A fight over whether to keep the garden or build the housing has dragged on for more than 10 years. But on Tuesday, the housing plan — at least for now — prevailed.

A New York appellate court cleared the way for a 123-apartment development for lower-income people over the age of 62 and their families, overturning a lower-court ruling that had stopped the project after opponents sued.

Adolfo Carrión Jr., the city’s housing commissioner, called the ruling a “huge win.”

“The fight over this land highlights how difficult it can be to build affordable housing, especially in neighborhoods that offer strong economic opportunities,” he said.

Joseph Reiver, the executive director of Elizabeth Street Garden, a volunteer-based nonprofit that manages the upkeep of the land and filed the lawsuit in 2019, said he was “very disappointed” in the ruling, adding that the group’s lawyers were reviewing the decision. He said the group would seek permission to appeal the case to the state’s highest court.

“We continue to seek a solution that achieves more of the needed housing while preserving Elizabeth Street Garden for the community,” he said. “This solution is possible without any destruction.”

As New York City continues to grapple with a dire housing shortage, the fate of the garden has become yet another conflict among New Yorkers over which parts of the city to preserve and which to rebuild to make room for a growing population.

Mr. Reiver’s father, Allan Reiver, is credited with creating the garden from a derelict and overlooked lot, which is between Elizabeth, Mott, Prince and Spring streets. Allan Reiver died in 2019. The garden’s supporters see it as a unique, tranquil open space in one of the densest urban areas in the nation.

But in recent years, city officials and advocates for more housing seized on redeveloping the garden as an opportunity to build needed affordable housing. All of the units will be aimed at people earning less than $60,000, including some reserved for people who were formerly homeless.

Proponents of the project note that developers plan to keep about 6,600 square feet of the site as an outdoor garden.

They said resistance to the plan epitomized the “not-in-my-backyard” mentality typical of many higher-income areas.

The lawsuit, filed as a challenge under state environmental laws, also came to reflect how environmental regulations have increasingly been used to fight development of new housing.