The decades-long dispute between the city and the city’s community gardeners, represented by State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, came to a long overdue close this week. The city agreed to preserve about 500 community gardens, while selling others in order to have built on them more than 2,000 apartments, meaning an increase next year of about 20% over the normal production of city-sponsored housing. After Mayor Giuliani sought to sell some 700 gardens to the highest bidder, Mr. Spitzer responded in 1999 with a suit to stop the action, which had been held up in court since. This decision resolves all pending legal actions and allows many of the lots on which the gardens exist to be sold, presumably to developers. The irony is that the same forces that agitate for more city-sponsored low-income housing are the same ones that have pushed to maintain these gardens as a defense against gentrification.

This story began at a garden at Bowery and Houston, planted in 1972 by a group calling itself the Green Guerrillas. They are still active today. Their garden attracted much press and encouraged others to begin similar projects. In 1978, in the depths of the fiscal crisis, unable to handle plots which had reverted to the city, the city launched Operation Green Thumb to make city-owned vacant lots available as gardens for $1 a year. At the time there were more than 20,000 vacant lots at New York. This was intended as a leasing program, but eventually the city took on a role in the development and maintenance of the gardens, and the program began to have a semi-permanent feel, no small thing in a city in which rent control is still ostensibly a temporary, emergency measure requiring periodic renewal almost 60 years after the end of the war during which the program began.

In a 1998 issue of the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s journal Cityscape, Jan Rosenberg tells the story of one of the gardens begun in the 1970s. It was started by Franklin Garrett, who translated the skills needed in forming a community garden into becoming a community housing developer. Along with a major developer, Schnee & Sons, he built some 194 units of low-income housing. It was in-fill housing, meaning new units on blocks of houses where there are vacant lots or properties deteriorated beyond repair. Such projects were undertaken at Fort Greene and Crown Heights. This is all by way of saying that in the view of many, the best gardens and their custodians for a time played a valuable role in the revitalization of an economically devastated city.

But the agreement between community groups and the city was not intended to be permanent. The city is no longer in a state of fiscal despair, and Mr. Giuliani let it be known that he intended to turn the lots over to the highest bidders, who were unlikely to be urban gardeners. Mr. Bloomberg has now made that ambition a reality. While the plan will maintain many gardens, the good news is that more than 150 parcels are slated for private development, largely of low-income housing. An argument has been made, not convincingly in our view, that the community gardens were a public service at a time when the city was in despair and decay. In any event, we are coming off of a decade of strong growth, and the gardeners are more than ever an impediment to progress and stand athwart urban values, among which are density of people and housing and the need for free market development.