Use public land for common good

What do unofficial parking lots for police officers’ private cars, an abandoned former drug treatment center started by the Black Panthers and Young Lords, and illegal dumps have in common? They’re all on property owned by New York City — which is to say, by all of us as the public. But there’s little accountability or planning in its use. And when the city decides to repurpose it, it sells it cheap to private, for-profit developers.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Instead, the city should put its underutilized public property into trust with nonprofit community organizations that can develop the affordable housing, recreational and commercial space that communities, and especially communities of color, need. Such a shift would begin to repair harms that land-use policy has historically inflicted on Black and Brown communities and give New Yorkers a say in the life of the neighborhoods in which they live.

This year, Mayor de Blasio appointed a Racial Justice Commission to recommend changes to the City Charter that address systemic racism, to be put before the city’s voters. The commission should heed the call of housing and neighborhood groups and propose a charter reform that would affirmatively direct public land to local nonprofits, like Community Land Trusts, for permanently-affordable housing and other neighborhood-led development.

Why is city-owned property a racial justice issue?

The city came to own much of its property through decades of policymaking that has disproportionately harmed majority Black and Brown neighborhoods. In the mid-20th century, under Robert Moses’ leadership, the Committee on Slum Clearance targeted, condemned and acquired Black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods for mega-projects like Lincoln Center and the Cross-Bronx Expressway that were not for the people they displaced. Sometimes it took more property than it was able to develop, and has held it ever since. Then, in the 1970s and 1980s, as redlining, job losses, suburbanization and the fiscal crisis took their toll, New York took title to more than 100,000 units of vacant and occupied housing from financially burdened homeowners and landlords. Often, the city managed this housing stock poorly and tried to return it to the private market only for the housing quickly to fall back into arrears.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the city transferred many residential buildings to nonprofits to run as affordable housing. But in the last 25 years, it has increasingly turned to for-profit developers to develop land and housing. This has often given developers land cheaply — even for a dollar — and subsidizes their profits, while generating very little housing affordable to the people who live in, or were displaced from, neighborhoods targeted for development. In many cases, the city lets property sit idle unless a for-profit developer wants it.

A core problem is that in general, the City Charter requires the municipal government to dispose of its property to the highest bidder. This shuts out neighborhood residents from a chance to control their fate.

In hearing after hearing across the city, the Racial Justice Commission has learned of inequities in public land and wasted opportunities the city has to use it for desperately needed, deeply affordable housing and other community needs.

Meanwhile, Black and Brown communities across the city have spent years planning for change. Residents in East New York and the Northwest Bronx, for example, have identified dozens of lots where apartments could be developed to house some of the more than 120,000 New Yorkers who enter the homeless shelter system every year. These lots are instead used as parking lots for police cars or as illegal dumps.

In the South Bronx, residents completed a multi-year, community-driven feasibility study to convert the 10-year vacant, city-owned Lincoln Detox building into a community center providing health, education and arts programming in one of the most disenfranchised areas of the city. Residents have also spearheaded a Mott Haven-Port Morris Waterfront Plan for public land where the city has disproportionately sited and subsidized waste transfer stations, fossil-fuel power plants, and diesel truck-intensive businesses producing a deadly mix of air pollution and inequality.

Requiring the city to transfer public land to accountable, mission-driven community organizations would be game-changing for efforts like these. The city could no longer warehouse precious public land for for-profit developers or reserve the most difficult-to-develop properties for nonprofits. It would have to turn property acquired through decades of depredation and neglect into real benefits for long-displaced and harassed communities.

Justice demands that public land be for the public good and that policy repair, not reproduce, the harms of the past.