The city’s Parks Department is laying the groundwork to purchase up to 61 mostly vacant, privately-owned lots in Brooklyn and Queens for new parks in areas with a lack of green space.
Parks officials in late April filed an unusual request with the Department of City Planning for approval to potentially purchase 38 parcels in Brooklyn and 23 sites in Queens from private landlords with plans to develop those spaces into new parks. The proposal is part of an $80 million effort by the Adams administration to expand New Yorkers’ access to green space, particularly on relatively small or irregularly shaped lots that may be better suited to small parks and playgrounds over new housing, according to the Parks Department. The Adams administration says it want 85% of New Yorkers to be within a 10 minute walk of a park by 2030.
The properties, which are owned by a mix of small landlords, are clustered in East Elmhurst, Jackson Heights and Corona in Queens, and Cypress Hill and East New York in Brooklyn — all communities of color with fewer park spaces than most city neighborhoods. Most of the lots are relatively small, between 2,000 and 20,000 square feet and are empty, or are home to parking lots, auto body shops and warehouse buildings that would be demolished and converted into parks, if the agency receives approval from planning officials and the City Council.
The Parks Department said it developed the list of lots with officials at the Department of Housing Preservation and Development so that it’s only pursuing sites both agencies believe make more sense to build parkland on instead of housing. Those reasons could be because a parcel is far from mass transit, unusually shaped or is small and may not produce many units, according to Howard Slatkin, the executive director of the Citizens Housing and Planning Council, who has over two decades of experience at the city’s planning and housing agencies.
“It’s always a matter of balance. There’s no absolute best use of land that trumps all other uses,” said Slatkin. “No one’s built housing on this land, it’s relatively inexpensive and we can purchase it for a neighborhood amenity, and that supports more housing in the neighborhood overall.”
Most of the lots are relatively small, but there’s one big exception: a sprawling more than 223,000-square-foot parking garage on 23rd Avenue in East Elmhurst. The site is just south of LaGuardia Airport and is currently zoned for commercial uses.
City property records list the lot’s owner as GWL 23-85 87th LLC, which records show is managed by Garden City, New York-based property management company GTJ Management, LLC. GTJ did not immediately return calls for comment.
To date, the Parks Department said it has not initiated talks to purchase lots with the properties’ owners, and that it first wants to get the greenlight from city planners that the sites can be used for green space before it starts negotiating to make deals. The Parks Department declined to share how much it has budgeted to spend on purchasing the would-be park land. The agency also declined to share a timeline of when it hopes to ink deals with property owners.
The approach, said Slatkin, is a novel one for the Parks Department that will put it in a better negotiating position when it does approach property owners because the agency will have dozens of possible lots it can pursue instead of approval to just go after one or a few sites.
Some parks advocates say they support the initiative but that they are skeptical of the Adams administration building new park spaces when they argue more staff and funds should be directed to the Parks Department to better care for existing green spaces.
“I would never say, no, don’t build new parks. We need new parks,” said Ganser, “but at the same time, we don’t have enough resources to take care of new parks, we’re going to see the exact same situation: which is parks that are deteriorating, not getting maintenance, and simple problems becoming very big and much more expensive.”
