No Protection for Community Gardens In Crown Heights Housing Market

By Alysha Webb

Photo Credit: Alysha Webb

On a busy avenue in Crown Heights, community members drove along the street, reggae music hummed from their radios. A willow tree at the Imani garden swayed its nimble branches, waving at the passersby.

Lydia Schmidt, the City’s Chickens Trainer at the Imani gardens, was handing out petitions one day when an older woman said she used to play beneath that willow tree when she was a little girl.

Now, the gardeners and community are faced with a grim reality: the willow tree, and the garden, may not be around for residents to enjoy any longer.

“The tree is kind of a landmark of the neighborhood,” said Schmidt.

Crown Heights, a once affordable neighborhood has, along with much of New York City, experienced steep increases in property values. With some apartments doubling in price in 2015, residents have been forced from their homes. In response, Mayor Bill DeBlasio proposed a plan to build affordable housing on vacant lots; nearly 20 are occupied by community gardens.

The Imani gardens may be razed and replaced with affordable housing units, in pursuit of this policy. However, the Imani 2 lot, which holds the willow tree and chicken coop, was sold to a private developer.

Two years ago, Catherine Hall, Chief Operating Office and Senior Vice President for the New York Restoration Project, received a call from the judge about the Imani 2 garden. It turned out that when the large, fenced-in lot had been donated by the city, it was comprised of three separate lots, one of which belonged to a neglectful non-for-profit, eventually causing taxes to pile up.

No one could track down the owner so the city held an auction, and the roughly 20-by-100-foot lot was purchased for $365,000 dollars. “We weren’t going to bid for it, we don’t have that kind of money,” Hall said. But now that the space is sold, Hall is concerned about the community losing an invaluable green space.

At Imani, fresh produce is grown and sold at discounted prices while at Imani 2, a large chicken coop provides affordable eggs and educational programs. The large willow tree stands at the center of Imani 2 on the lot that was purchased.

Children in the city aren’t exposed to nature in the same way as children in suburban neighborhoods and they don’t have a true concept of a wholesome diet, said Schmidt, so the garden has served a vital need as a source of fresh foods. Schmidt sells eggs and vegetables on a sliding scale to any community member who’d like to stop by during open hours. Toward the end of summer, the Imani garden staff also hosts a Lobster fundraiser and welcomes the community to harvest. This year, they had to cancel the fundraiser due to the ongoing legal disputes.

Lance Freeman, Professor of Urban Planning at Columbia University, said gardens are a great way to build stronger neighbor relations. “That’s one of the more important things that will be lost,” he said. Freeman feels that in the case of Imani 2, the city is privileging the market over community and it is going to rub people the wrong way.

Petitions to save Imani have been circulated but nothing has influenced the city’s course. According to Kenneth Gould, Professor and Director of the Urban Sustainability program at Brooklyn College, the act of removing the community garden is an attempt by realtors and the city to further destabilize the neighborhoods.

According to the New York City Census Bureau, as of 2013, the single largest ethnic group in Crown Heights was Caribbean, a community that values gardening. “If you go through a West Indian neighborhood what used to be lawn or ornamentals in people’s front yards are now gardens, that’s part of the culture,” said Gould.

Another important element of the garden is that it uses chicken manure to clear to soil of toxic led. Jean Augustave is from Haiti and has lived in Crown Heights for over 30 years. He is a religious gardener.

Augustave said that in Haiti, there are no toxins in the soil so gardening isn’t as much of a challenge. Now, he buys soil from the Home Depot every year for his personal garden so the produce grows healthily. Teaching communities how to clean the soil is another vital service provided by the garden.

Greg Anderson, the Urban Agriculture Manager at Just Food, which partners with Imani garden to teach lessons on raising chickens and gardening, said the gardens are a space where neighbors can learn from each other. “If the city just auctions off the place than that seems to violate the spirit of people coming together,” said Professor Freeman.

Professor Gould feels that Mayor DeBlasio should step in. “You’re telling people they can have so called affordable housing or your can have a green space and a sense of community, but you can’t have both. Housing and green space, that’s something that only people in Brooklyn Heights get to have. These communities have to trade one for the other.”

“The community gardeners were the first to tell us the sale went through,” said Hall. The members will use the existing space, even if the willow tree is cut down and development starts. Their philosophy is close to Jean’s: “God bless me but he didn’t give me all the blessings for myself. You’ve got to give some to somebody else too.”