In the middle of lower Manhattan, between the many shops and restaurants on Prince and Spring streets, lies Elizabeth Street Garden, a public park in New York City that serves as an outdoor recreational and educational space for members of the local community. Stepping off the busy streets of New York and into Elizabeth Street Garden feels like transporting into another universe. Filled with large green trees and ancient statues, this garden is home to many joyful children running around, tourists drinking their morning coffee, and locals passing through on their daily dog walks.
This is the way the park has operated for almost 200 years. But Elizabeth Street Garden may now be changing.
In October 2024, board members who represent the non-profit organization overseeing Elizabeth Street Garden were served with an eviction notice by government officials affiliated with the City of New York, which stated that the nonprofit had to vacate the property within just two weeks. The notice was the first step taken by the city to implement its plan to build over 100 units of affordable housing for seniors.
Although New York City undoubtedly needs more housing, this particular plan is inherently flawed. The affordable housing the city government plans to build is only required to remain “affordable” for 30 to 60 years before it can be converted to market-rate housing. As a result, the housing will not be affordable in a few decades, meaning the garden will have been abolished for no good reason.
Members of the Elizabeth Street Garden Board have proposed alternative sites for affordable housing, which would provide ten times more affordable housing units than what the city intends to construct. Building new housing at one of these locations would not only save the garden but would also provide housing for thousands of New Yorkers in need.
In addition to those sent by members of the Elizabeth Street Garden board, more than 400,000 community members and advocates sent letters to city officials urging them to save the garden by building the housing units elsewhere. Yet, city officials continued to insist that the entire space is crucial for affordable housing. In response, the garden committee filed a federal lawsuit in February 2025, which aims to protect the garden under the Visual Artists Rights Act (VARA).
Enacted in 1990, the Visual Artists Rights Act is a federal law protecting visual artists’ rights, including the right to prevent the destruction of their work. Though the garden is filled with various displays of creative and uncommon statues, which many similar public spaces lack, the unique angle with which members of the garden committee have chosen to protect the park – and, due to its importance to the environmental sustainability of New York City, the local environment itself – begs the question: why aren’t there more laws directly protecting our parks and communal spaces?
New York City serves as a prime example of the push dynamics between preserving nature, on the one hand, and creating architecture, on the other. The city is well known for its larger-than-life skyscrapers and office buildings, which play a crucial part in providing housing for the 8 million people who live in the city. At the same time, however, many have argued that a major factor that sets New York apart from other major cities is the existence of Central Park.
It appears the debate regarding where the true New York lies has morphed into one that pits housing vs the city. By “the city,” I am referring to everything that makes New York City New York City, whether that be its parks, historical landmarks, or museums. As the populations of many cities around the world continue to grow, policymakers, like those in New York City, are struggling to find efficient housing solutions that don’t adversely affect the cultural monuments, parks, and architecture that make their cities unique.
At the same time, the housing crisis has reached such an extreme in many parts of the United States that 22 of the nation’s most prominent housing providers sent a letter to former President Joe Biden in 2023 urging his administration to take immediate action to remedy the housing affordability crisis.
Another factor furthering this problem is the disparity between the growth in job supply relative to the growth in housing supply. For instance, between 2010 and 2023, the number of jobs in New York City increased by 22 percent, while the quantity of housing units increased by just four percent. Not only are there now more people in need of housing due to population growth and urbanization driven by the rise of jobs in New York City. These trends have also created a dynamic in which those who most need affordable housing are left with far less opportunities compared to those who benefit from such job growth.
Additionally, the root of this problem seems to be the way affordable housing is constructed in New York City, as the case of Elizabeth Street Garden underscores. There appears to be a feedback loop at play in which affordable housing is demolished so that the land where these units once stood can be used for other purposes, while parks and office buildings are simultaneously demolished so that they can be used for new affordable housing projects. Not only is this inefficient, expensive, and unsustainable; it is also adversely affecting our climate and the environmental sustainability of our cities.
It is also important to note that we seem to have a stronger aversion to destroying national parks, such as Yosemite, than we do to destroying urban parks, such as Elizabeth Street Garden. The notion that urban parks were created in response to the destruction of national parks–and that we can now destroy urban parks because national parks will remain preserved and pristine–is incredibly inaccurate.
Beyond the immense environmental ramifications of building new architecture, the demolition of existing facilities can be extremely harmful to our planet. Within just five years, for example, the City of Portland issued 1,199 demolition permits, which ended up equating to burning over 218 million gallons of gas or the equivalent annual emissions of over 460,000 cars. And this is just in one city! Furthermore, scientists have shown that parks can play a key role in conserving natural resources and maintaining healthy ecosystems, making the implications of their demolition even more harmful.
The environmental consequences of removing parks like the Elizabeth Street Garden would thus be severe, but this example simply marks the emergence of an even larger threat to parks across the country. The policies of the second Trump Administration, which have already resulted in mass layoffs of park staffers and many cancelled park leases, pose an unprecedented risk to parks across the country.
Due to these risks, concerned members of the American public have begun engaging with the National Park Conservation Association (NPCA) more than ever before. Contrary to Trump's proclamations, the association has noted that the reckoning of national parks is inherently un-American; as former President Theodore Roosevelt famously stated with regard to the Grand Canyon, it is better to “leave it as it is”.
Even so, many seem insistent on the idea that ruining nature to create new establishments is the most financially viable course of action. This line of thinking – that nature and economic growth cannot simultaneously coexist – seems to have spread everywhere as some sort of unproven fact. While economic growth might have to come at the expense of the environment in certain contexts, this notion is not an accurate blanket statement that can be applied to all parks and gardens. For parks in major cities specifically, this could not be further from the truth.
In New York City, urban parks create billions of dollars of benefits and savings each year, which significantly exceed the costs that agencies and institutions at the city, state, and federal level incur to maintain these spaces.
Beyond economic benefits–such as those that stem from culinary tourism, art, and street performances that take place in public spaces–communal areas can help improve the quality of peoples’ lives by enabling them to interact with one another, and they can induce higher levels of overall happiness and productivity. As a result, these communal outdoor spaces are not only vital for residents’ well-being, but also for their job performance, which helps increase economic output.
There are also multiple opportunities to repurpose buildings and facilities that are currently unoccupied and to build dense, vertical housing units rather than those that sprawl horizontally. While all construction impacts the environment, we can minimize harm by utilizing solutions that preserve history, culture, and nature, including key landmarks in New York City such as Elizabeth Street Garden.
Though Elizabeth Street Garden is an urban park, it serves as an example of the many communal spaces – in both urban and national parks – that provide crucial social, environmental, and economic benefits to the public. This connection is particularly relevant when considering that these public spaces are being demolished for private financial gain.
Beyond the specific social, environmental, and economic ramifications of destroying parks and gardens, the underlying question remains: why do we continue to feel comfortable treating nature as dispensable? As human beings, our lives are inherently limited to a finite amount of time, meaning we are essentially guests on this planet. Yet, we seemingly possess an unrivaled sense of authority over the many natural aspects of the world – including our parks and gardens – even though they have existed far longer than any particular person.
To counteract this all-too-common world view, our voices are more important than ever. If we want to prevent our environments from being continuously destroyed, it is our responsibility to use our voices and show we care by writing letters to city officials, visiting our gardens, and perhaps most importantly, appreciating them while we still can.