This summer, after years of bitter conflict, the Elizabeth Street Garden permanently prevented the construction of 123 units of environmentally friendly, affordable, supportive housing for low-income and homeless LGBTQ seniors. The Garden wasn’t driven by malice. No, the Garden was battling for beauty. It was battling against the evil of its own dispossession. And it won.
NIMBY opposition to housing resists critical self-reflection. The Garden’s supporters, most of whom have either never known hunger or forgotten its severity, painted their demands as a call for bread and roses: why transform a green space when you can build more housing somewhere else? They presented themselves as stalwart community members defending against an onslaught of sinister developers. They claimed a Garden legacy stretching back 200 years. And they believed themselves, because in the Garden the world is timeless and perfect. In the Garden, people are beautiful and built of stone and cannot starve and need no shelter from the open air.
But outside the Garden, Councilmember Margaret Chin saw a fenced-off, city-owned lot ripe for affordable homes, and a private art gallery leasing that lot for personal storage. That was in 2012. Then the struggle begins. In 2013, friends and family of the gallery owner gather support from volunteers to make the lot regularly accessible to the public for the first time. Meanwhile, the city moves forward in soliciting development proposals for affordable housing. In 2017, a ragtag team of millionaires, political insiders, and hack artists turns the volunteer operation into an official nonprofit corporation. A month later, the city settles on development plans for the affordable housing. They include environmentally sustainable construction standards, senior support services, and preserved public open space. It takes two years to get those plans through proper review with support across the whole of Manhattan and unanimous Council approval. The Garden uses litigation under environmental law claims to delay for more than five years. In 2024, New York State’s highest court overwhelmingly sides with affordable housing. The Garden initiates litigation in Federal Court under the Visual Artists Rights Act to stall for another year. The delay pays off in the appointment of the Adam’s administration’s final shadow mayor: former Giuliani-era ghoul Randy Mastro, the same man now leading litigation against Mamdani’s pied-a-terre tax. Almost immediately upon appointment, Mastro transfers ownership of the Garden site to the Parks Department. Despite a court action and a Mamdani campaign promise, ultimately, a settlement is reached. Homes will not be built in the Garden.
In some ways, the final settlement was not a total defeat. Rather than opening sporadically for an hour or two, the Garden agreed to remain open year-round from 8am-8pm. As for affordable housing, contingent on the preservation of the Garden, Councilmember Christopher Marte agreed to upzoning plans that would allow for the creation of more than 620 affordable units on different sites. According to the Garden’s advocates, the sites selected for upzoning will yield ten times as much housing as the Garden site would have. Of course, Marte, an archetypal NIMBY, can choose not to follow through with the upzoning agreement. Even if he does, there will still be 123 fewer homes than there could have been. That’s all to put aside the urgency of the issue. The Garden homes were ready for shovels in the dirt. The agreed upon units—though also necessary—hope to complete pre-construction community review in 2028. In other words, the review processes the Garden site completed in 2019 will be completed for the alternative sites almost a decade later at the earliest. People die waiting that long. We need hundreds of thousands of additional homes now for the struggling residents of this city. In the years to come, we will need hundreds of thousands more. And we need the 123 homes that will not be built, though we were ready to build them.
The Garden’s battle against the low-income housing plan advanced on two fronts: the first procedural delay; the second public perception. Both were instrumental in delivering the Garden its victory. The issue of veto points captured by private interests preventing the delivery of needed public services is not new, and here the timeline of events speaks for itself. We identified a site for affordable housing in 2012. By 2026, we failed to build it. Elsewhere, this publication has written about how mechanisms initially intended to protect public goods are used against the delivery of those very same public goods.
What’s remarkable here is how wealthy and powerful private interests convinced so many of their heroism. The Garden aligned itself with historic preservation and community character while younger than the city’s first Trader Joe’s. It demanded that we consider the lack of nearby green space in the community district when Sara D. Roosevelt Park was two blocks away. It decried that developer investment would hurt affordability in NoLITa, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the wealthiest city in the world.
The narrative tools the Garden used are not unique to the Garden, though their deployment was particularly egregious. As members of the political left—a tendency that should clearly advocate for the needs of the disempowered many over the privileged few—we must remain aware of these tools. Aesthetic concerns can serve to downplay material necessities. Next time historic preservation or community character are raised as issues, we must consider whether they come at the expense of people’s lives. And although the welfare of existing residents is certainly important, we should consider whether the actions we pursue promote affordability for potential future residents as well as current ones. Houses never built are homes denied. And while residents of SoHo celebrate their slice of Eden, surviving seniors in shelters and on streets will have to keep dreaming of what our city denies them.
