Where do NYC’s community gardens grow?

By Alex Nguyen

Perhaps it’s the hours spent playing Animal Crossing or it’s summertime and I long to touch grass, but I’ve been obsessing over the idea of building a garden lately. And thanks to my apartment’s non-existent space, community gardens look to be my best bet at growing an abundance of herbs and vegetables in the middle of this concrete jungle. So, where are the community gardens in New York City?

As of June 2023, there are 541 active community gardens across the five boroughs, according to the Department of Parks and Recreation. And with NYC being home to just under 8.34 million people, this means there are 6.5 gardens per 100,000 residents.

But they are not equally distributed across the city.

Brooklyn, the most-populous borough, has 238 active community gardens — close to half of NYC’s figures. And at the bottom of the group is Staten Island, which is also the city's least populous borough. It has seven active community gardens in total.

For the remaining areas, Queens is our outlier. Despite having close to 2.3 million people as NYC’s second-most populous borough, it has only 43 active community gardens. This means there are 1.89 active community gardens per 100,000 Queens residents — almost 3.5 times lower than the citywide ratio. One possible explanation I can think of is that Queens is more suburban than similarly sized boroughs, which allows more of their residents to have their own private garden.

Beyond the borough distribution, what fascinates me is the fact that there are dozens of ZIP codes with double-digit numbers of active community gardens. For instance, 11207 in East New York has 44 alone — the highest in the city. Running shortly behind is 10009 in the East Village — a storied neighborhood when it comes to community gardens — with 38 spaces. For comparison, three is the median number.

Are there similarities between these uber-green ZIP codes? I paired the community garden data with demographic information pulled from the US Census Bureau for each relevant ZIP code to learn more.

Among the top 10 ZIP codes, six of them are Brooklyn, three in Manhattan and one in the Bronx. More notably, the vast majority of them are in neighborhoods of color — in particular those dominated by Black and Latino New Yorkers. The main exception is 10009 in the East Village.

More than half of the city's total community gardens are also located in ZIP codes with median household income below $52,500. Most of the areas with double-digit numbers of gardens are similarly within this threshold.

These demographic trends are not surprising, as community gardens have historically been used as a tool by these communities to fight for food justice and security. And as many areas of the city are increasingly gentrified, there are concerns about how these spaces would be affected. But at the same time, some are also posing the question of whether these gardens contribute to gentrification themselves.

Check out my work for this story.