This month, Mayor Bill de Blasio unfurled a $130 million initiative to fix 35 long-neglected little parks, mostly one-acre blacktop lots in underserved neighborhoods. As part of the plan, the administration also began to tackle the notoriously dysfunctional capital-spending system for parks, which can waste four years before getting around to creating even a simple dog run.
All good news.
Still, the mayor’s announcement was partly a downer: Fixing 35 small community parks is nice. But it doesn’t go nearly far enough.
Parks should be a no-brainer for Mayor de Blasio. A quarter of New York’s residents, most of them poor, live far from any park. Parks in the least affluent neighborhoods are in bad shape because their residents lack political clout. Those communities shouldn’t be dumping grounds for polluting facilities like bus depots. City Hall should be an equalizer.
If the last few decades have proved anything, it’s just how much the city’s welfare depends on green space. During the 1970s, when New York teetered on the edge of bankruptcy, parks were left to ruin. Today, cities around the world are remaking public spaces to address climate change, health and economic growth. They envy New York’s high-profile sites like Central Park, Brooklyn Bridge Park and the High Line, which attract millions of visitors a year and reap tourist dollars for the city’s coffers.
At the same time, those headline parks have obscured the critical roles that neighborhood parks play. They absorb storm water, store carbon and lower ambient temperatures. They boost real estate values. They get people out of their apartments, not least during heat waves, playing a part in the fight against obesity and diabetes. Most important, they just plain make people happy.
They also cost a fortune. The city has many other needs. Washington used to pay for parks, just as it once paid to construct public housing. Now community groups, conservancies and business districts are supposed to pick up the slack. As Mark D. Levine, a Democratic city councilman from Upper Manhattan who is chairman of the parks committee, points out, less than 1 percent of New York City’s budget goes toward parks, a fraction of the percentage that cities like Los Angeles, Seattle and Chicago devote to them. Chicago and Seattle have taxes just for parks.
Politicians love ribbon-cutting ceremonies, so they cook up schemes for capital improvements like the 35-community-parks initiative. But New York City has nearly 2,000 parks, and their maintenance isn’t glamorous — it’s hard to summon the news media to show clean public toilets or pulled weeds — and the Parks Department sorely lacks enough full-time gardeners, plumbers and security guards.
That’s something that the mayor needs to address. Instead, he used the community parks announcement to score cheap political points, which critics rightly jumped on.
The mayor chastised his predecessor, Michael R. Bloomberg, for favoring marquee parks and ignoring ones in underserved neighborhoods, prompting Veronica White, a former parks commissioner under Mr. Bloomberg, to note that the Bloomberg administration poured $5 billion in capital investments into parks, most of which were in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island. Mr. Bloomberg also added 850 acres of parkland to the five boroughs, she pointed out.
And it was Mr. Bloomberg who, before leaving office, set aside $80 million of the $130 million in Mayor de Blasio’s plan for those same neighborhood parks.
That said, with a massive capital backlog, the cumbersome parks bureaucracy and too few resources for maintenance, hundreds of parks go untended for decades. I recently stopped by the decrepit playground at the Seward Park Houses, the public housing project on the Lower East Side, a classic example of demolition by neglect. Ignore a park long enough, and it will either be beyond repair or need to be rebuilt from scratch. Those 35 small parks were picked from among more than 200 others in poor areas around the city that fit the same bill.
To fix all of them could cost $1 billion, which is to say nothing of the needs of medium-size parks like St. Mary’s in the South Bronx and Betsy Head in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, and bigger ones like Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens.
Those parks speak directly to the mayor’s ambitions and should be a higher priority. Mr. de Blasio would do well to take up the call by Mr. Levine and groups like New Yorkers for Parks to raise the parks budget for maintenance.
Instead, he still at least pretends to entertain the knuckle-headed demand of State Senator Daniel L. Squadron, a Democrat, that private park conservancies fork over money for public parks lacking patron saints. The idea put parks equity on the front burner. But it punishes successful, beloved parks; robs Peter to pay Paul; and flunks Philanthropy 101, alienating the more affluent New Yorkers the mayor needs to enlist.
Never mind that few conservancies, Central Park’s aside, have much money to begin with — or that the $44 million raised privately toward Central Park’s $57 million annual budget is $44 million the city can devote to other parks. The Central Park Conservancy already sends crews to help maintain parks in Harlem. And even before the mayor announced his community parks initiative, the conservancy had put together a program to share skilled gardeners with 10 parks across the city.
Conservancies can provide expertise the city lacks. Extorting cash from them is a distraction that misses the big picture.
There isn’t enough money to fix all the parks that need fixing. Mr. de Blasio shouldn’t demean the Bloomberg legacy but build on it, leaving his own mark by opening up more schoolyards after hours, refurbishing public housing playgrounds and green spaces, ensuring that great parks accompany the subsidized housing that is the mayor’s priority, and inviting private sponsors to adopt neighborhood parks.
I was glad to learn that officials at City Hall have shown interest in the Brooklyn Strand, a potential public-private venture that its supporters dream might turn into Brooklyn’s version of La Rambla in Barcelona. The idea is to unify a patchwork of parks meandering from Downtown Brooklyn toward the Brooklyn Bridge into a buzzy new promenade, the booming borough’s green, glittery centerpiece.
It’s a concept that was raised more than a year ago, before Mr. de Blasio took office, by a coalition of Brooklyn nonprofit development groups, which enlisted the excellent Claire Weisz, a partner at WXY, the New York architecture firm. The plan dovetails with the sort of pedestrian-friendly place-making that a young generation, returning to cities, views as essential.
Cities that thrive will follow this generation’s lead. Balancing urban design innovation with equity is not easy, but the two are not mutually exclusive. New York’s mayor shouldn’t still be fighting the last election.
He should be beating a path toward a greener city.