City of Yes is a city of cement

In an unprecedented move towards expanding affordable housing across the city, Mayor Eric Adams announced the approval of his City of Yes plan on Thursday, Dec. 5, in what the mayor’s office calls “the most ambitious update to NYC’s zoning code since 1961.”

The three-part plan addresses housing opportunity, economic opportunity and carbon neutrality. City of Yes aims to address the latter with electric vehicles, installing solar panels and utilizing wind energy, but it doesn’t say anything about green spaces or addressing our outdated sewer system.

Past floods in NYC have proven devastating and fatal. If the city works to build 80,000 units of affordable housing over the next 15 years, what will that look like for our green spaces? The Bronx already suffers from the highest asthma rate in the country due to a high concentration of buildings and consistent transportation of commercial trucks in and out of the southern tip of the borough.

“How Parks and Green Spaces Can Improve Your Health” -- a paper written by two North Carolina State University professors -- writes “[greenspaces] provide a variety of ecosystem services by improving air quality, regulating temperature and attenuating impacts of severe weather, all of which impact our health as well.” 

Before City of Yes was approved, Bronx Community Board 8 was already up in arms about a private company building at 3110 Henry Hudson Park and removing several trees in the area to make way for construction. While the CB8 area is protected by the Special Natural Area District (SNAD) -- created in 1975 to preserve unique natural features by requiring City Planning Commission review of new developments and site alteration on primarily vacant land – not all areas of the city share in this protection.

Removing trees and paving over soil and grass, will only further sink us into the thick of the concrete jungle. The word jungle serving only as a tongue-in-cheek pseudonym. 

“What’s happening is we have all this water falling on a landscape that used to be pervious, the water could sink into the soil, but now we have cement,” Jennifer Cherrier said, associate director for Integrated Water Research at the Science and Resilience Institute and a professor at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center where she teaches Earth and Environmental Sciences.

Cherrier further adds our storm drains and sewer systems have been designed for an older city and cannot properly bear the burden of the added infrastructure and the hundreds of thousands of people it brings. 

With Hurricane Ida claiming the lives of 13 individuals in 2021, addressing the outdated sewer and drainage system of NYC has been a focus since then. But it is far from fixed. The city’s own environmental protection agency stresses the importance of green infrastructure to “collect stormwater from streets, sidewalks and other hard surfaces before it can enter the sewer system or cause local flooding.”

Knowing this information, how could the implementation of green spaces and a proper sewer system, be superseded by the addition of more cement, more people and less flora? Seems like the city is putting the cart before the horse. 

And yes, the housing crisis is real, and homelessness is rampant, with New York City reaching its highest levels of unhoused individuals since the Great Depression, according to the Coalition for the Homeless.

People need homes, but what good is a home if it adds to the carcinogens in your air? What good is a home surrounded by metal and cement that traps heat in already record-breaking hot summer days? What good is a home if you drown on your way there?