The wooden shed in a community garden in north Manhattan isn’t just for storing rakes, hoes, and shovels.
It also played a small role in fortifying New York City against devastating storms that flooded its streets and buildings and overwhelmed its sewer system.
Rainwater rolls down the corrugated iron roof of the warehouse into a white pipe that connects to a large plastic tank. Setup, was installed last year at Community garden mobilizes change in Upper Manhattan, suffers up to 2,000 gallons of stormwater per year that would otherwise flow through the city.
“The water just ran away from us,” said Adem Clemons, 41, a financial technology engineer who is currently drizzling rain-catch on tomatoes, squash, peppers and rosemary in his garden.
New York’s network of more than 550 community gardens has long served as a haven for apartment dwellers, providing space to grow fresh vegetables and enjoy the sun and fresh air. Increasingly, they also became residential outposts in the city’s flood control efforts.
Many have added rain gardens and biological walkways (grooves with vegetation designed to absorb water), and collected water from sheds, gazebos, pergolas, and even the roofs of buildings. neighbors with a “rainwater collection system” like the one installed at Mobilization for Change.
According to Earthjustice, an environmental law nonprofit, an estimated 165 million gallons of storm water is removed from the city’s streets and sewers each year because of community gardens. 2016 analysis published in a Science magazine.
Supporters like Earthjustice pushing for greater recognition of gardens’ ability to divert rainwater, especially after last year Hurricane Ida caused flooding that left New Yorkers dead trapped in basement apartments, paralyzed streets and neighborhoods, and flooded subway stations.
Mike Rezny, assistant director of green space at GrowNYCa nonprofit that has worked with community gardens to build 115 stormwater collection systems since 2002.
However, the city also needs impervious surfaces, including affordable housing. While both rents and extreme weather appear to be increasing, government officials, as well as housing and environmental advocates, are making a delicate balancing act to prioritize both.
“It’s not a stoppage of development and certainly not a stoppage of affordable housing,” said Alexis Andiman, senior attorney for Earthjustice. “It’s about realizing that if you cover every green space with development, you’re going to have communities that are truly uninhabitable.”
Situation at Pleasant village community garden in East Harlem illustrates the tensions that can arise between housing needs and the environment. It dates back to 1978, when residents decided to remove rubble from a site where buildings had burned down. They then throw “seed bombs” or mud packs containing the seeds, said Kim Yim, the garden’s president.
Today, it has 60 members tending to apple, pear and peach trees, growing vegetables in 40 individual plots, and collecting eggs from the chicken coop. Members place native pollinators to absorb rainwater that runs down the street. During the pandemic, they composted more than 10 tons of leftovers from the vicinity.
But this fall, they will have to move away from part of the garden on city-owned land overseen by the Department of Housing Development and Conservation, so they can build affordable housing there. “We should not choose one initiative or another,” Ms. Yim said. “They shouldn’t be pitted against each other because both are necessary.”
City officials say there is a great need for affordable housing in that neighborhood and that the new building will include measures to reduce stormwater runoff because the area is prone to flooding.
In an effort to protect the thriving community gardens, more than 70 groups have city officials petitioned to designate green spaces as “critical environmental areas” under state law.
The campaign grew out of a student project at the Pratt Institute, where Raymond Figueroa Jr., president of the New York City Community Garden Alliance is a member of the faculty. Figueroa sent half a dozen graduate students to community gardens across the city in 2019 to conduct interviews and collect data.
Mr. Figueroa said of the expedition’s findings: “Wherever there were planting beds, compost and trees were raised, that contributed significantly to the garden’s ability to absorb and retain water.
City parks officials — who oversee the majority of community gardens through their GreenThumb program — acknowledge that gardens are an important part of New York’s green infrastructure. “They are a small, but powerful resource in the portfolio of our stormwater management efforts across the city,” said Jennifer Greenfeld, deputy park commissioner for environment and planning..
But not everyone agrees that community gardens should be labeled environmentally important areas. According to park officials, there is currently only one such designation in New York City, and it refers to the entire area: Jamaica Bay and its tributaries, tidal wetlands, and adjacent areas. close. The officials argued that community gardens under the parks jurisdiction were protected from development under city regulations, adding that none of the gardens were part of the GreenThumb program. closed for the past five years.
Amy Chester, executive director of Rebuild by Design, a nonprofit organization recently released a report on the importance of “Turn the concrete jungle into a sponge.” This can be as simple as placing bins in the backyard to collect rainwater that can be reused to water plants or wash cars for more ambitious projects like retrofitting schools and office buildings with green roof.
“We need to turn all of our surfaces in public areas into water-absorbing spaces,” Ms. Chester said. “There are so many things that we can do.”
In Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood, Walt L. Shamel . Community Garden Collects rainwater from the roof of a nearby brown rock, which is channeled into a 1,000-gallon tank. When the tank is full, the overflow will be transferred to a biological tank with astilbe plants, violets and grass.
“We are repaving – and repaving – a lot of cities,” said Zachary Schulman, 41, a photographer and member of the gardener. “This is a place where water can enter the soil.”
Many of the gardens are the result of community organizing in the 1970s and 1980s, when residents gathered together to salvage dilapidated, abandoned lots, like the site that became the Easy Village in East Harlem, to make their neighborhoods better and grow food in difficult times, Mr. Figueroa said.
This spirit continues to this day, with many gardeners fighting to overcome decades of pollution and the adverse environmental impacts of development, often in low-income neighborhoods. , where residents have limited access to the park. “Community gardeners do not accept environmental injustices and poverty as determining their fate,” he said.
But Mr Figueroa stressed that active gardeners – many of whom are growing food to save money so they can pay rent – also want more affordable housing. There are creative ways to do both, he says, such as developments that feature common areas with gardens or roofs that can be used to grow fruit and vegetables.
It seems some city officials are coming to terms with the need to balance environmental concerns with housing needs. Over the past eight years, 36 community gardens managed by the city’s housing authority have been transferred to the GreenThumb program, where they are more protected from development. Another 50 community gardens in subsidized housing are also being added.
At the Change Advocacy Community Garden, rainwater collected from the shed filled watering cans for months. The rainwater collection system was installed by GrowNYC at a cost of $15,000, funded through a grant. Four buckets have also been set up to collect rainwater.
All of this has made life easier for gardeners, who used to have to run hoses across the street to get into the fire hydrant at least a couple of times a month. Now they only have to do it when the rainwater runs out.
“It’s convenience,” said Cara Scafani, 46, a supply chain manager. “And it knows we’re using water that might be in the sewers.”
