City Officials Will Save 27 Brooklyn Community Gardens -- but Pave 4 More

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BED-STUY, BROOKLYN — Twenty-seven community-run gardens in Brooklyn, built on land owned by the NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) — and in danger of being replaced by affordable-housing towers — will be handed over to the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation (NYC Parks) for preservation, city officials announced just before the New Year.

Four more of Brooklyn’s community gardens, though, didn’t make the cut, according to an interactive map created by City Limits, a local news site.

City Limits lists the to-be-closed locations as: New Harvest Community Garden in Bed-Stuy, El Jardin del Pueblo in East New York and two gardens situated among affordable-housing developments on West 20th Street in Coney Island.

“We feed the community,” Abdul Muhammad, a longtime gardener at New Harvest told City Limits.

“This is prime real estate,” Muhammad said. “As far as we’re concerned it’s a done deal.”

Gardeners from one of the plots that was saved, Bed-Stuy’s 462 Halsey Community Garden, wrote on the garden’s Facebook page: ”We’re very happy and relieved to announce that 462 Halsey Community Garden is being transferred to the Parks Department. This provides us much more security.”

However, they added of their peers who didn’t make the cut: “We will stand in solidarity with them until their gardens are safe.”

In all, across the city, around 36 community gardens will reportedly be saved by NYC Parks and at least another nine destroyed by HPD to make room for more affordable housing — many of them in East Harlem.

Officials involved with the decision told City Limits that HPD desperately needs the land hosting these nine gardens to address the affordable-housing crisis in NYC, and that gardeners from each destroyed site will be given the option to relocate.

For a full recap of HPD’s announcement and its implications, read the City Limits report.