Paula Segal moved into an apartment across from a vacant lot and couldn’t help but wonder about its evolution:
I talked to the old dudes on my block and asked what was up with the lot, and asked everybody else what was up with the lot. Eventually a lot of people had a lot of shards of a story of all these broken promises and a press conference that had happened ten years before. So I called a community meeting at the local school. Passed out flyers, worked with local organizations. A lot of people came, a hundred or so. It was pretty amazing. There was still a lot of pent up anger about a half-a-million-dollar project that never happened. There were a lot of people that had a lot of feelings about that big hole in their neighborhood.
And now it’s a big beautiful community garden and park called Myrtle Village Green. We’ve been open about a year. It’s a garden and there’s a dog run. People just had a wedding. There’s a little production farm that’s a CSA.1 Movies get shown on a wall. There’s a bunch of communal space, communal garden beds, individual beds, the kids from the elementary school have little beds that they grow—it’s just a shared space in a neighborhood that doesn’t otherwise have that.
And I got priced out of that neighborhood just before we got access. I don’t live there anymore.
Paula was born in the former Soviet Union in present-day Ukraine. Her family immigrated to Boston when she was eight years old. Her first memories of the United States were of supermarkets.
Really cheesy but it’s the truth.
She walks into the kitchen of her shared workspace in a loft around the corner from Wall Street. There are two men in an office next to Paula’s and one emerges to ask her if she knows anything about the broken dishwasher. It is four in the afternoon; Paula arrived only minutes ago and she is wondering aloud why two men waited for a woman to arrive so they could ask her to deal with the broken dishwasher. She lays into the man who slinks back toward his office, gently shutting his door on the way to his desk. I feel guilty by association, men, and offer to help wash the dirty dishes; Paula takes up the task herself and offers to make me coffee.
It’s late in the day, a last burst of heat hits the windows, and we sit in her office while the grounds settle in the French press on her desk. As we talk, Paula rests her hand on the touchpad of her laptop, ready to click at a nanosecond’s notice. Her eyes are mostly turned toward the screen, even while she is the one speaking.
She graduated from the CUNY School of Law, and emphasizes that her program of study, the social justice initiatives, was not originally structured as a law school but as a public interest school. “Law in the Service of Human Needs,” reads the mission statement of her alma mater.
Conversations with Paula seem to work better when there is sparring involved, not so much because she’s a lawyer but more so because she’s too smart to tolerate anyone who passively absorbs what she says. She wants questions, demands for elaboration—her brain is too sharp and too fast to go more than a moment or two without a challenge.
When she moved to New York twelve years ago, she picked her apartment, the one she was eventually priced out of, because of the twenty-four-hour hardware store in the neighborhood.
The lights were on at eleven at night and I thought, something about this feels safe. There’s always someone around. This must be a community. This makes sense.
When I ask her what gentrification means, her dark eyes, a bit perplexed, shrink under her brow. I try to figure out if the expression has to do with my question, or with something she’s just seen on her screen. She confirms it’s me:
I don’t use this word, gentrification, it doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t describe anything in the world. It’s a noun, right? So you should be able to point to something in the world. It’s a nebulous word that has to do with the movement of capital and increased land worth. But as far as dealing with the work on the ground, day to day, the issues are about displacement and about people’s quality of life and about the places they live.
I try not to use the word community either because—what does it mean? Does it mean the people that are there? Does it mean the people that are going to be there after you’ve elevated the land values? Or does it actually refer to the space?
In the process of getting access to Myrtle Village Green, we started working on other ways to get information about vacant public land. When we started, you had to buy the database for $300 a borough, updated every six months by the Department of City Planning. We really hammered the department because charging for this was illegal. We got tons and tons of people to send in freedom of information requests. Now it’s free.
We had to do a lot with the data to make it useful. The city thinks of its land in terms of uses and taxes, broadly speaking. But uses are defined in a very market-driven way. So “vacant” encompasses many things. There is no separate layer for city owned land. It’s just “not tax collecting.” So we had to do a couple of things. We had to manually remove all of the existing community gardens based on a community garden survey. We had to pull out all the nonprofit organizations that are getting tax abatements and have vacant land. The original map missed the MTA and other public-private entities, so we added them in as we learned about them. We also had to take out all the gutter spaces—all these spaces that are maybe two inches that run the length of the whole block, and places that don’t have street frontage. We actually looked at each parcel on Google Street View and on Oasis. We had to do a lot of manual cleanup on that first set of data before it made sense. And that got us closer to a better picture of what was going on, on the ground.
We figured out this map of all the vacant city land that’s not tax collecting. Our cutoff for the size of the space that we include is if you can’t stand in it, it’s not a space. If you can stand in it you might be able to do something. If you can stand in it and put your arms out—she does—it’s a space. You could grow something there.
I was invited to do something for the Ideas City Festival so I made a couple hundred of the maps with a friend of mine, Julius Samuels, and we handed them out at the festival. A bunch of people signed up for the mailing list and I was kind of like, “Whoa, people really want this.” So we started pasting the maps onto foam board and put out about ten on particular lots that we’d identified.
Then somebody named Eric Brelsford got in touch with me. He said, “I’m a computer programmer. Do you actually have this data that’s making up this picture? Because if you do, we could put it online.”
And I said, “Sure.”
And now Eric and I are the two employees of 596 Acres.
She smiles and sips on her coffee.
We turn data into information that people can use. So we are really focused on connecting people with resources and control of land use decisions. We put out a lot of print materials. We do workshops. If there’s a place that’s out of energy and isn’t working, we’ll go and have a meeting there. Getting angry in person is actually much more fulfilling.
She laughs.
The meetings bring in new people and we work out whatever fights have been happening on the block. When I host a meeting suddenly everybody’s getting along, everyone is recentered.
We started with Brooklyn and at this point we’ve mapped all five boroughs of New York City. Staten Island’s information is up but it’s password protected. People in Staten Island who we work with have it. But I feel like putting information on the internet first is creepy and I want to make sure that we can support people in neighborhoods and that we’re getting information to people in neighborhoods first.
A lot of people don’t have access to the internet. I know it seems like we live on the internet but, you know, that’s you and me.
The other way to look at our work is that we’re trying to sort of heal the scars of urban renewal.
In her current project, “Urban Reviewer,” Paula is studying 150 master plans, often called “urban renewal plans,” that were adopted by the city beginning in 1949. Most of the plans were carried out under the leadership of Robert Moses, who amassed colossal political power without ever holding elected office. Famously dubbed “The Power Broker” in Robert Caro’s 1974 biography, Moses served as the head of various public authorities from the 1920s to the 1960s, always taking the power with him by retaining control of development funds. Handling the money for public projects—parks, roads, bridges—allowed Moses to circumvent much of the legislative process. To say that he designed twentieth-century New York is not an overstatement—it’s hard to find a corner of the city free of his influence. Moses did not renovate old buildings—he demolished them. He prioritized private cars over public transportation and pedestrians. And his fingerprints are all over the urban renewal plans Paula is studying. The plans reveal Moses’s brutal, systematic approach: identify “blighted” or “obsolete” neighborhoods, clear them of existing buildings, and bring in new development, public and private. The people who lived in the “blighted” and “obsolete” neighborhoods never made the decision to identify their communities as such; instead, the city’s Committee on Slum Clearance made the designation.
In many cases, the urban renewal plans were begun but never completed; more specifically, the city often never made it past the slum clearance stage. So Paula is documenting the shocking overlap between the slum clearance sites—the bulldozed businesses and apartments and schools—and the 596 acres she identified in her exhaustive survey of vacant land. It turns out that much of the land that was cleared decades ago—land that was never developed or modernized, as promised—is still lying vacant. Or as Paula puts it:
Capitalism just didn’t do what it was supposed to do next.
It’s all about what people can actually do, right? And giving people the ability to build their own neighborhood. This is a very nerdy and direct way to take people’s rights to the city seriously and enforce them as rights. In a truly legal sense. People have the right to create their city. Especially in these spaces that are public spaces.
I really believe that people’s ability to make decisions about the spaces that they’re in is a kind of security that lets you take the next step in your life. The anxiety of having other forces making decisions for you is untenable.
So the spaces we work with are rather important because they’re for people that are in a neighborhood at a particular moment whether they’ve been there for thirty years or three months. They can acknowledge that they’re all there together and make decisions even if it’s about this bounded space. And it builds a political force with the people in the neighborhood across class, across race, all kinds of religious lines. It really is a way of taking control and reducing some of that anxiety and some of that anger that people feel.
At one site, someone had offered to set up a composting toilet, solar panels, electricity, and Wi-Fi, and they went back and forth and back and forth and back and forth, and ultimately they nixed the toilet because they were like, “We don’t want people pooping here.” They liked the solar panels and they liked the electricity. They want to show movies and they want to play music. But they nixed the Wi-Fi because they were like, “This is not that kind of space. We talk to each other here.”
All of the spaces where we’ve worked are constantly being created. They’re always public and that means that the process is always beginning again, every single time people are encountering themselves in that space. If that’s not the way it works the space stagnates.