Garden Leave

City Issues Final Order of Eviction for Elizabeth Street Greenspace

This weekend may be the public’s last change to visit a verdant Lower Manhattan oasis. The administration of Mayor Eric Adams has served the Elizabeth Street Garden with a final eviction notice. This legal document notifies the operators of the non-profit public space that they have two weeks to vacate before the City takes legal possession and begins demolition.

“We know not everyone wants to save this green space,” City Council member Christopher Marte (who opposes the closure) said in a statement. “The division created around it has been intentional and can bring out a lot of ugliness.”

The site, a publicly owned lot north of Spring Street that connects Elizabeth and Mott Streets at mid-block, has been the focus of a decade of controversy that began with the 2014 announcement by the City’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) that it planned to create permanently affordable housing for low-income seniors there. Since 1991, the half-acre parcel has been maintained as a de facto park by local residents, who have come to regard it as a treasured amenity. Critics of the plan were unappeased by a compromise vision that included both affordable housing for seniors and a new (albeit smaller) public garden, which would shrink from approximately 20,000 square feet to roughly 6,700 square feet.

After the plan to create a senior housing complex, to be known as Haven Green, was made public, local residents who wished to preserve the garden mobilized and eventually filed several lawsuits to halt the project. The prospect of stopping the plan with litigation faded in June, however when the State’s highest court upheld a prior, lower court ruling by finding, “the Court’s role is not ‘to weigh the desirability of any action or choose among alternatives,’ but to ensure that ‘agencies will honor their mandate regarding environmental protection by complying strictly with prescribed procedures and giving reasoned consideration to all pertinent issues revealed in the process.’”

On the heels of this decision, the City also received approval from a different court to evict the Elizabeth Street Garden from its space in September. That second decision enabled the eviction notice sent to the garden last week,

Even as legal options dwindled, a grassroots coalition of several thousand Lower Manhattan residents and activists pressed on politically, with a letter-writing campaign and multiple rallies. But City Hall remained unmoved.

“Our fight to defend and expand affordable housing is just as important as our fight to defend and expand parks and gardens,” Mr. Marte said. “For years, we’ve been working with Elizabeth Street Garden and its thousands of neighbors and supporters to identify other public sites where more affordable housing could be built. The City’s response has been to say they’ll build there, and on the garden.”

“It’s time for our City to reckon with the fact that pitting these two essential parts of life against each other will only create more and deeper problems,” he continued. “What’s become clear when we organize to defend Elizabeth Street Garden is that the City isn’t actually interested in building affordable housing. We’ve identified private development sites that, without intervention, will be 100 percent luxury apartments. But, if we transfer the funding and housing subsidy currently tied to the garden’s destruction to these sites instead, then we can save the garden and build more affordable housing where there’d otherwise be none.”

The current proposed design for Haven Green calls for 123 units of affordable senior housing, along with publicly accessible open space. The apartments will be set aside for low-income and extremely low-income seniors, including 30 percent for formerly homeless seniors. These terms are set to apply for at least 60 years, with financial conditions — such as a balloon mortgage payment at the end of this term, along with expiration of the project’s tax exemption — that are designed to “structurally incentivize and ensure extension of affordability far beyond the initial regulatory term,” according to the non-profit developers.