Guest post by Donald Brennan, My Home Brooklyn
Back in 2007, Mayor Bloomberg announced his plan to make sure every New Yorker lived within a 10-minute walk of a park. Three years later, the New York University Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy has found that, at least in Manhattan, we’re getting further away from that goal, according to the New York Times.
While 93.7 percent of Manhattan’s housing units sat within a quarter mile of a park before 2000, only 70.2 percent of them do now; new construction, it seems, is further away from green space. And green space is as coveted an amenity as restaurant-quality stoves and open floor plans, not to mention good for your physical and mental health.
Luckily, things aren’t so grave in Brooklyn. In fact, we’ve made improvements. “In 2000, only 82.4 percent of Brooklyn units were within a quarter mile of a park, versus 91.2 percent in 2008,” they write. We can thank Brooklyn Bridge Park for part of this increase, which in the end will add 65 acres of parkland to the landscape.
As developers, we’re sensitive to the desire to be near green space, which is why many of our efforts focus on neighborhoods close to it. For us, the decrease in green space, and its link to new construction, confirm our approach, to renovate and reinvent older housing stock which tends to have those three all-important things going for it: location, location, location. In this case, location means close–closer than a 10-minute walk–to a patch of green.
This is not surprising. Bloomie has never met a developer or unnecessary building project he didn’t like. Of course, Brooklyn Heights has a beautiful new park (and don’t get me wrong, I think it’s fabulous), while those not quite as wealthy don’t get such things. Could there have been space set aside for a small park at the rail yards along with affordable hosuing? Sure. But how would that benefit Bruce Ratner?
Maybe the ratios used to calculate required open common space (ie parks) should be adjusted (up in this case) for developments of a certain size and/or for those that are being undertaken with tax payer dollars. Open space in this dense urban environment is an amenity that is increasing in value as every new building goes up.