Zohran Mamdani and President Donald Trump had a surprisingly chummy meeting in the Oval Office last week, especially after Trump had described Mamdani during the New York City mayoral campaign as a “100 percent Communist lunatic,” a “total nut job,” and a “Jew hater.” A reporter asked the mayor-elect, often depicted in the press as a class-baiting socialist, if he thought Trump was really a “fascist.” In the awkward moment that followed, Mamdani had barely time to respond before Trump interrupted in a jovial fashion, assuring him that it was “okay” to call him one. Mamdani acknowledged that he did, while Trump relieved the tension by laughing it off.
During the meeting, the two New Yorkers from the polar ends of the political spectrum discussed immigration, real estate and crime, zoning laws, and utility costs, and agreed on one issue that is one of the president’s passions: They both want to build more in New York City. As Trump told reporters while he sat behind his desk, with Mamdani standing behind him, “Some of his ideas really are the same ideas that I have. We agree on a lot more than I would’ve thought.”
New York’s next mayor has made housing the centerpiece of his political identity, promising to unleash the public sector to build affordable homes that the private market has failed to build. Affordable housing is a major problem all over the country, but especially in New York. A controversy over one garden spotlights a broader policy question—whether urban planners can deliver both housing and ecological health in an era of climate stress. Or will New York and other American cities continue to trade one public good for another?
Like President Trump in his past as a real estate developer building glass skyscrapers, Mamdani is facing serious opposition to his desire to replace green space with residential housing. Consider his quest to construct public housing for elderly on the site of the Elizabeth Street Garden—a whimsical pocket of Manhattan filled with neoclassical statues, pear trees, and rosebushes. In one of his final official acts to block his path, on November 3, after Mayor Eric Adams had already stepped down as a candidate but one day before the election, he quietly designated the garden as parkland “permanently.” Now, Mamdani will need the approval of the State Legislature to construct housing on the site. Building housing for the unhoused was one of Mamdani’s campaign promises. When Adams’ decision came to light, Mamdani expressed his annoyance: “It is no surprise that Mayor Adams is using his final weeks to cement a legacy of dysfunction and inconsistency.”
Adams countered that his decision was about “protecting his legacy.” Yet, in pursuing this cause, he is doing an about-face. Adams, too, once tried to bulldoze the garden to build housing for low-income seniors. He lost to a fierce coalition of neighborhood activists.
It’s easy to see both sides. The city’s affordable housing shortage has reached crisis proportions—more than 91,133 people sleep in the main New York City shelter system, and 25 percent of renters spend more than half their income on housing. Yet green space, too, has shifted from luxury to necessity. Trees and gardens cool the air, clean the lungs, and soothe the mind. Environmental justice advocates rightly insist that a healthy city requires both roofs and roots. But as real estate prices soar, New York’s leaders are pressed into what feels like an unforgiving binary—homes or habitats, people or plants.
As real estate prices soar, New York City’s leaders are pressed into what feels like an unforgiving binary—homes or habitats, people or plants.
It doesn’t have to be that way. There was a time when common green spaces were part of everyday urban life. In colonial New England, villagers foraged, grazed animals, and gathered wood on the green and in shared forests. Commons provided the material cornucopia that powered essential common law rights to food, fuel, and shelter. When commoners moved to cities, they brought these practices with them—transforming waste ground and food scraps into fertile soil for small gardens. Shared land served as the foundation for civic infrastructure that we hold dear today. Before it became a jewel of the elite in the 1850s, sections of Central Park were once a patchwork of green shantytowns, built by working people who grew food and raised animals on “wasteland.” The same was true of Hyde Park in London, Rock Creek Park in Washington, DC, and the Fenway in Boston.
As a historian, I look to the distant past, but you don’t have to go too far back in time to see the service of urban greenspace. In Washington in 1950, the US Department of Agriculture counted more than 2,000 hogs and 74,000 chickens, long after laws had banned both types of animals from the city. As late as the 1950s, in cities as different as New York, Washington, Cleveland, Detroit, and Memphis, large numbers of working people relied for subsistence on their backyard gardens and on food grown on roofs and balconies. Home-grown provisions saved people money to pay rents and mortgages. In 1940, some of the poorest neighborhoods of Washington, east of the Anacostia River, where 94 percent of the population was Black, had some of the highest rates of homeowner occupancy, second only to the high-income DuPont Circle neighborhood. The green lungs of our cities were born not of wealth, but of necessity.
In the decades that followed, regular people, not business or city leaders, held cities together during economic downturns. They cleaned up unregulated dumping and generally kept their neighborhoods from descending into a scene from Planet of the Apes. In the 1970s, as New York City teetered on the brink of bankruptcy, developers abandoned buildings, and landlords torched their properties for insurance money. New Yorkers stepped in to claim the ruins.
By 1990, neighbors in all five boroughs, but especially on the Lower East Side, the Bronx, and Brooklyn, turned vacant lots into an estimated 800 community gardens. (In the 2000s, Mayor Rudy Giuliani sought to auction off many of the garden lots, but protestors saved most of them.) In the same spirit, in 1991, Allan Reiver—a scavenger of forgotten art and architectural fragments—leased several lots on Elizabeth Street to save them from becoming a parking lot. He filled them with plants and sculpture, creating the lush, eccentric sanctuary that stands today.
The real question is not whether to preserve one garden, but how to reclaim the idea of the urban commons. For the last 100 years, New York City’s shared spaces have been shaped not by the people who live in them but by the infrastructures built to move them—or exclude them.
In the 1940s, Robert Moses, the “master builder” who never held elected office, remade the city for the automobile. His parkways to Long Island’s beaches, deliberately engineered with low overpasses, barred buses and thus working-class visitors. His web of expressways gutted neighborhoods from the Bronx to Red Hook in the name of progress, displacing hundreds of thousands of working poor to house the middle and upper classes. He famously declared that “a city without traffic is a ghost town.” Moses’ ghost lingers in the grid: nearly a quarter of New York’s land area is devoted to streets and parking lots. Each car registered in the city effectively enjoys one and a half parking spaces, while the city’s human residents scramble for housing. Streets and parking lots, devoted to moving and storing cars, are the commons of our age.
“To change a community, you have to change the soil.”
But the era of the city-as-parking-lot is ending. In 2010, the Environmental Protection Agency launched the “Green Streets Program,” encouraging communities to redesign streets with gardens, bioswales, bike paths, and permeable pavement, a green infrastructure that naturally manages stormwater, reduces pollution, and creates more resilient and healthier communities. Mamdani’s proposal for high-speed bus lanes, pedestrian walkways, and the transformation of parking lots into public housing promises to turn New York toward a viridescent horizon. As the city is reconfigured with fewer cars, New Yorkers could, as in the past, take it further, transforming the new wastes (pavement) into a blooming bounty. Curbside gardens could replace idling cars. Parking lots could be transformed into orchards and community plots. Major avenues could be reborn as edible forests of fruits, nuts, herbs, and flowers, as the famed “Gangsta Gardener” Ron Finley has been doing in South Central Los Angeles. “To change a community,” Finley says, “you have to change the soil.”
Cities in Europe are already showing what that might look like on a large scale. In the past two decades, the socialist mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, has replaced more than 50,000 parking spaces and hundreds of car lanes with parks, bike paths, and tree-lined promenades. The banks of the Seine, once choked with traffic, are now a riverfront park. And Parisians appeared to be fully supportive of the transformation. Earlier this year, they voted to ban cars from an additional 500 streets. Nitrogen dioxide levels that once sat in the red zone have fallen into the green.
Amsterdam is doing the same. So is Copenhagen, where a devastating 2011 flood led engineers to rip up asphalt and replace it with wetlands, ponds, and rooftop gardens to absorb the next deluge. London, improbably, is reintroducing beavers to help manage stormwater—and in the process, Londoners are learning how to care for and live with beavers.
These European projects configure civic infrastructure differently. Climate infrastructure, equity infrastructure, and survival infrastructure are what students of urban planning study today. The impasse between the former and future mayor over the Elizabeth Street Gardens is a false conflict. Climate adaptation and social justice are not competing priorities. They are two sides of the same project—a new vision of the urban commons visible in Mr. Mamdani’s campaign plan to turn 500 asphalt school yards into 500 neighborhood green spaces. “When we stand up and say that we have an agenda to transform our city schools, to renovate 500 public schools, to build 500 green schoolyards, to create thousands of union jobs, to transform 50 schools into resilience hubs, and to prioritize those that have long been forgotten,” he told a Nation reporter, “that is an agenda we are willing to fight for. That is an agenda we are willing to defend.”
Kate Brown is the Distinguished Professor in the History of Science at M.I.T. and author of Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present, and Future of the Self-Provisioning City, which will be published in February by Norton.
This post has been syndicated from Mother Jones, where it was published under this address.