Jackson Heights Church Green Space Stalemate Tests $30 Million Parks Push Citywide

Even the smallest parcels of land in New York City can become battlegrounds in the wider struggle to balance green space, development, and community life.

On a muggy July morning in Jackson Heights, Queens, a sliver of turf—less than a fifth of an acre—has become the object of outsized local rancour. There, adjacent to the tidy brick façade of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, sits a plot that today hosts the innocent detritus of childhood: a plastic slide, a miniature basketball hoop, and the breezy laughter of pre-schoolers. Yet these benign sights belie a bruising dispute now entangling politicians, lawyers, and the Episcopal Diocese of Long Island, with ripples unsettling the city’s ambitions well beyond this corner of Queens.

The latest skirmish began when local officials and advocates, alarmed by the area’s scarcity of green space, pressed for the land’s conversion into a public park. Councilmember Shekar Krishnan has led the charge, urging the church to sell to the city and touting both funds and bureaucratic short-cuts as never before—Jackson Heights, he claims, is teetering at the bottom of the citywide per-capita parks ladder. The case is urgent, he reckons, given that parks shape urban health, cool neighbourhoods, and offer balm against the relentless thrum of city life.

But as is so often in New York, land is not merely a pawn to be repurposed at the behest of well-meaning officials. Church leaders, facing the bleaker end of diocesan balance sheets, argue for a more remunerative path: a sale to developers, or perhaps sheltering a new charter school, both of which promise brisk cash infusions. The Diocese, mindful of fiscal imperatives, contends it is being strong-armed into opposing its financial self-interest—a stance few nonprofit boards would envy.

The standoff has, predictably, drawn more than local squabbles. New York State’s Attorney General, Letitia James, whose office polices the sale of religious real estate, now reviews the matter with a lawyerly gravitas. Her involvement portends the complexities when ecclesiastical sovereignty and communal aspiration collide on the fraught stage of urban land use. Even the “Vital Parks for All” initiative, Mayor Eric Adams’ $30m pledge to transform “vacant, underutilized and abandoned lots” across five boroughs, now looks less like a sprint and more a marathon strewn with procedural potholes.

At root, Jackson Heights dramatizes what planners call park poverty: only three percent of its land is devoted to parks, markedly below the city’s already paltry average. For residents, the dearth is keenly felt—generations jostle for air and elbow room, and civic leaders decry the health inequalities that follow. Even with Council Speaker Adrienne Adams securing $3m for the purchase in the coming fiscal budget—and Krishnan pledging an additional $1m—the church remains unmoved.

That resistance speaks volumes not just about church finances, but also about the tangled priorities of urban stewardship. On one hand, public parks bring diffuse benefits: shade trees, play spaces, cooling effects, and a faint promise of conviviality. On the other, a quick sale might underpin the financial viability of a storied institution or allow for educational innovation—a charter school could, after all, serve hundreds over its lifespan. Both cases carry weight, yet highlight how the calculus of neighbourhood improvement is rarely straightforward.

For City Hall, the affair threatens to turn a flagship policy into a cautionary tale. Mayor Adams and the Parks Department promised to sidestep the usual years-long land use ritual in favour of “extraordinary measures”. Yet, if a mere fifth of an acre stalls for months—culminating in legal review and recrimination—the prospects for rolling out new parks in more complicated circumstances seem tepid indeed. One imagines what awaits in neighbourhoods with deeper market appetites or murkier property titles.

Competing interests, common ground

Zooming out, New York’s spat is not unique. From London to Los Angeles, cities grapple with the arithmetic of green space and the alchemy of negotiation. In San Francisco, a bitter fight over a church parking lot in the Mission District yielded a modest park only after a protracted sit-in and municipal subsidies. Across the Atlantic, clergy in Hackney faced condemnation for selling glebe land to luxury developers—but their coffers, like those of their Long Island counterparts, were dreadfully thin.

Globally, the pressure points are converging. Religious institutions have long functioned as accidental stewards of urban green, inheriting plots when cities were less crowded and property less dear. Now, shrinking congregations and swelling land values pull those missions in opposite directions. Governments, though often well-intentioned, seldom compensate at market rates, and even the best-funded park initiatives usually trail behind commercial offers. Add procedural scrutiny—such as that wielded by New York’s attorney general—and the path from vacant lot to verdant refuge is rarely smooth.

All told, we are left with a familiar urban paradox: grand visions for equity and livability, juxtaposed with the parochial logic of property and purse strings. Parks are unambiguously good; so, too, are solvent institutions and vibrant schools. Yet, in the absence of a nimble, well-resourced acquisition program—or better, a rethink of land stewardship itself—conflict will remain the city’s default setting whenever idle ground comes into play.

New York, to its credit, has made some progress. The de Blasio administration invested over $500m in the “Community Parks Initiative” between 2014 and 2021, upgrading more than 60 sites. But those wins required years and occasional political brinkmanship. The Adams administration’s Vital Parks plan, unless accompanied by both checkbook and legal deftness, risks being waylaid by the very thickets it vowed to clear.

It would be easy to scold either side: the church for seeking lucre, the city for overpromising. But such posturing misses the nub of the dilemma. Urban land is finite, and cities—ours above all—must juggle needs both immediate and generational. Encouragingly, the bruising debate in Jackson Heights hints at an engaged, if quarrelsome, polis. The modest plot might yet become a shared green; or it may host academic ambition. Either outcome, if won openly and above board, is preferable to impasse.

In the end, Jackson Heights’ tiny tract is emblematic of larger tensions threading through New York: ambition versus realpolitik, preservation against progress, parochial interest checked by public scrutiny. Why should it be easy? In a city that crams nearly nine million onto 300 square miles, every square foot is, and always will be, fought over. ■