NY community gardens threatened by plans for affordable housing

New York

APART from a colourful hand-painted sign, there is little to suggest that the Mandela Community Garden in Harlem, a lot piled with pieces of pavement and bounded by graffitied walls and a chain-link fence, is a garden at all. The volunteers who pulled up the concrete had made plans for the spring, however: to pepper the dirt with wildflower seeds, make sculptures from the rubble and turn the lot into a verdant little oasis.

But those plans were dashed when the volunteers recently learned that their patch of earth was one of more than a dozen community gardens that the city said would be razed to make way for the construction of affordable housing, part of Mayor Bill de Blasio's expansive plan to address the city's housing shortfall.