From The Next City: “Mapping Tool Aims to Keep Public Spaces Public” by Oscar Perry Abello
Such as the Stanton Building in Sara Roosevelt Park!
“Paula Segal, founder of 596 Acres…“The truth is, we’re in a city, most of our infrastructure and our assets are shared — the subways, the roads, the sidewalks, the water, something like 30, 40 percent of all housing in the city is some form of cooperatively owned. … privately owned property can start to seem like the real outlier.”
“Residents…have long been organizing around many of these assets. …Common Cause and the other NYCommons partners started to see a pattern in the organizing [of] … public assets.
Susan Lerner: “We started thinking about the fact that all of these separate challenges had similar underlying policy issues that have to do with how does government think about commonly owned, shared assets.”
“…NYCommons went to 10 neighborhoods…where they knew people were organizing. Lerner:..“[we found] a tremendous amount of energy in all five boroughs” for sharing best practices and connecting with others doing similar work…
NYCommons picked three neighborhoods for pilots, and provided them documentation, workshop facilitation and other resources to begin developing a tool kit. …The Sara D. Roosevelt Park Community Coalition was one of the pilot sites.
“The coalition’s current focus is a former recreation center, currently used as a systemwide parks storage facility, smack dab in the middle of a well-used area of the park. “We’ve been having a conversation about this building since 1994,” says Webster.”