Protect NYC Public Land for the Common Good
Daily News
By: A. Mychal Johnson, Edward Garcia and John Krinsky
What do unofficial parking lots for police officers’ private cars, an abandoned former drug treatment center started by the Black Panthers and Young Lords, and illegal dumps have in common? They’re all on property owned by New York City — which is to say, by all of us as the public. But there’s little accountability or planning in its use. And when the city decides to repurpose it, it sells it cheap to private, for-profit developers.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Instead, the city should put its underutilized public property into trust with nonprofit community organizations that can develop the affordable housing, recreational and commercial space that communities, and especially communities of color, need. Such a shift would begin to repair harms that land-use policy has historically inflicted on Black and Brown communities and give New Yorkers a say in the life of the neighborhoods in which they live
This year, Mayor de Blasio appointed a Racial Justice Commission to recommend changes to the City Charter that address systemic racism, to be put before the city’s voters. The commission should heed the call of housing and neighborhood groups and propose a charter reform that would affirmatively direct public land to local nonprofits, like Community Land Trusts, for permanently-affordable housing and other neighborhood-led development.
Why is city-owned property a racial justice issue?
