{"id":291395,"date":"2026-07-09T14:34:40","date_gmt":"2026-07-09T14:34:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/291395\/"},"modified":"2026-07-09T14:34:40","modified_gmt":"2026-07-09T14:34:40","slug":"read-an-excerpt-from-the-greenlining-of-staten-island-by-patrick-d-nugent-the-chicago-blog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/291395\/","title":{"rendered":"Read an Excerpt from \u201cThe Greenlining of Staten Island\u201d by Patrick D. Nugent \u2013 The Chicago Blog"},"content":{"rendered":"

Though it was once home to the world\u2019s largest landfill, today Staten Island boasts thousands of acres of parklands, dozens of public-private conservation arrangements, and four ecological zoning districts. In The Greenlining of Staten Island<\/a>, Patrick D. Nugent details the political forces that gave rise to this wealth of greenery in a famously dense city. He demonstrates how postwar economic and political trajectories intersected in the 1960s with the rising consciousness of environmentalism to create a distinctive laboratory in Staten Island, where white communities and politicians heeded the rising call for the preservation of green space\u2014but often as a tool to maintain racial segregation. Ecological zoning, public-private park management, conservation easements, environmental litigation, and other strategies created a lush, discriminatory landscape. Nugent refers to these policies as\u00a0greenlining. In this excerpt from the introduction, he discusses this term and the rise of housing scarcity.<\/p>\n

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In the spring of 1962, open-space advocate and future National Geographic editor John G. Mitchell drove southwest on Victory Boulevard from his single-family house on the North Shore of Staten Island to the \u201cwooded slopes, mar\u00adginal swamps, and small farms\u201d of the borough\u2019s \u201cvanishing agricultural fron\u00adtier.\u201d A correspondent for Country Beautiful, Mitchell set out to eulogize a recently deceased flower farmer. After touring several dozen farms on the is\u00adland\u2019s South Shore, the journalist and nature photographer turned a critical eye toward what he described as \u201cthe exploding metropolis.\u201d Farmlands once responsible for \u201cthe largest strawberry crop east of the Mississippi\u201d were now \u201cdrowning in an ocean of poisonous air,\u201d Mitchell wrote. With thirty-two nearby industrial plants billowing pollutants across Arthur Kill Channel, borough farmers now picked through stunted apples, scorched squash, and singed primroses. Thousands of tons of hydrocarbons had also been unleashed, Mitch\u00adell noted, by the explosion of highways and houses set off by the construc\u00adtion of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge beginning in 1959. \u201cSome farmers in\u00adsist the unabated flow of foul air across their land is an affront to their status as citizens,\u201d Mitchell explained as he toured Herbert Gericke\u2019s organic farm. \u201cDon\u2019t tell me about discrimination against races,\u201d Gericke cautioned while pointing to a patch of melons burned over by sulphur-dioxide fog. \u201cI came out of the house couple years back and the whole place looked like someone had gone over it with a blowtorch. . . . Now if that isn\u2019t discrimination, what is?\u201d<\/p>\n

As Mitchell\u2019s article illustrates, residents of Staten Island were some of America\u2019s earliest and most committed environmentalists. Their fierce loyalty to place and unique proximity to both industry and open space left Staten Is\u00adlanders skeptical of the mid-century planners and politicians Mitchell mock\u00adingly dubbed \u201cprophets of progress.\u201d If remote and resistant, however, Staten Islanders were nevertheless bound to New York City politics. As farmers like Gericke perceived, their environmental rallying cries competed with distant and diverse voices for scarce municipal resources and limited political will. Staten Island residents articulated their calls for environmental reforms in a cacophonous public sphere where America\u2019s fiercest and most defining mid-century political battles were hashed out. Like smog, ecological science and environmental rhetoric hung heavy over New York City planning in the mid-twentieth century, seeping their way into debates over civil rights, urban re\u00adnewal, transportation, parks, housing, and metropolitan governance.<\/p>\n

Today, Staten Island is celebrated as both \u201cthe Borough of Parks\u201d and \u201cthe Greenest Borough\u201d\u2014preserved by thousands of acres of parklands, dozens of public-private conservation arrangements, four ecological zoning districts, and a network of natural stormwater corridors known as \u201cthe Bluebelt.\u201d If the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge spelled doom for Staten Island\u2019s farms, it also unleashed a wave of environmental activism that transformed the political and ecological landscape of the borough and city (figure 1.1).<\/p>\n

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Figure 1:1 Staten Island\u2019s city, state, and federal parklands alongside ecological zoning districts, 2024. Map by Washington College Geospatial Innovation Program.<\/p>\n

By the mid-1970s, a powerful bipartisan network of borough residents, planning advocates, and politicians mobilized an ecologically focused, pri\u00advately oriented, and colorblind approach to land-use planning that was highly effective at preserving both biodiverse habitats and low-density housing districts. Such strategies\u2014including ecological zoning, public-private park management, conservation easements, and environmental litigation\u2014also helped cement the sprawling, segregated, and increasingly expensive housing landscape that took shape across the borough during this era. I call this nexus of policies greenlining. Like the study of redlining, understanding greenlin\u00ading illuminates how a racially restrictive landscape was cemented into place, in this case by environmental policy. It is not entirely coincidence, a history of greenlining suggests, that the mid-century demise of race covenants and federal redlining was quickly followed by the rise of modern environmental\u00adism (figure 1.2).<\/p>\n

Greenlining, however, was more than just a set of environmental policies. It was also a political order that brought right-and left-leaning residents to\u00adgether in a time of fiscal crisis and political fracture. It encompassed a po\u00adlitical streamlining of environmental politics in the mid-1970s that unified formerly oppositional factions in the arenas of land-use, housing, highway, and park planning. Between the 1960s and mid-1980s, liberals and moderates slowly shifted their environmental-planning priorities away from pro-density, racially liberal plans for urban renewal, clustered housing, and new town de\u00advelopment, opting by the mid-1970s for an array of tools more narrowly fo\u00adcused on ecological preservation and low-density housing. Such preservation policies distanced liberal environmentalists from their civil rights and fair-housing allies, while serving as a political olive branch between right and left, promising Staten Island\u2019s large proportion of white, home-owning residents a means of protecting both local ecosystems and single-family-housing values.<\/p>\n

This compromise left a mixed legacy. If greenlining proved relatively ef\u00adfective for preserving the biological diversity of central and southern Staten Island, it also allowed predominantly white, middle-class communities to thwart land-use policies that would encourage dense, diverse, and affordable neighborhoods. A brief examination of education, housing, health, and pol\u00adlution data over the second half of the twentieth century reveals that Staten Island was, and remains, a segregated landscape. To this day, many Staten Islanders refer to the interstate that divides the borough\u2019s dense North Shore from its ecologically zoned southern districts as \u201cthe Mason Dixon Line.\u201d If one wants to understand how segregation persists in metropolitan America today, the transformation of environmental politics between the 1960s and 1980s is a central and understudied explanation for these spatial inequalities.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Figure 1.2: Left: A map of Staten Island\u2019s nonwhite residents as a percentage of district population in 2010, revealing an inverse relationship between ecological zoning and racial diversity. Right: Staten Island\u2019s ecological zoning districts, created by the City Planning Commission in the 1970s and 1980s, compared with districts redlined by the Home Owners\u2019 Loan Corporation (HOLC) in 1938, revealing that historically disad\u00advantaged neighborhoods were largely excluded from ecological districts. New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) sites were largely excluded from the districts as well. Maps by Washington College Geospatial Innovation Program.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

The history of greenlining parallels the rise of housing scarcity in American cities. In the same years that Staten Island\u2019s broad environmental coalition turned their preferences for low-density neighborhoods into environmental-planning policy, housing starts across the nation fell behind population growth, a trend that has steadily worsened over the past five decades. Over those same decades, median home values have risen almost three times as much as household earnings, meaning that aspiring American homeowners must now save three times as long as they did in 1950 to afford a down pay\u00adment. Renters have fared no better\u2014rental vacancies in New York City are at their lowest levels since 1968, with over half the city\u2019s residents plowing more than 30 percent of their paychecks into housing.<\/p>\n

The costs of this exclusion are borne by everyone in the region. Low-density neighborhoods cost government agencies more money per capita to service with sewers, schools, roads, and parks. They also put a squeeze on eco\u00adnomic development, as both small storefronts and larger firms are less likely to locate\u2014much less innovate\u2014in sparsely populated neighborhoods. Eco\u00adlogically speaking, low-density neighborhoods are a threat to our environ\u00adment as they are less walkable, are less likely to be serviced by mass transit, and require more energy per housing unit to heat and cool.<\/p>\n

As this book will underscore, the current housing crisis in our nation is not a naturally occurring phenomenon, nor was it conjured up alone by greedy de\u00advelopers, municipal accountants, or bigoted mayors. Rather, it has been driven in large measure by a set of planning policies that modern environmentalists from both right and left have helped develop and defend. The same history of low-density housing exclusion that Greenlining documents in the late twen\u00adtieth century continues today as the red-tape and green lines of local zoning procedures empower particularly affluent, white neighborhoods from taking on their fair share of dense, affordable housing development critical to our nation\u2019s future. The long history of American housing exclusion has often been justified through the environment, a historical trend that became all the more sophisticated and unabashed as the rise of ecological science was folded into city planning policy.<\/p>\n

It is my hope that Greenlining informs and empowers the zoning reform movement, which has grown in popularity in recent years as it seeks to ad\u00address housing scarcity. Indeed, this movement has proven itself to be far from fleeting\u2014as both political parties articulate concerns over high housing costs and an increasing number of municipalities curb exclusive zoning policies. Then again, both major American political parties cater to millions of Ameri\u00adcans who prefer their green-lined, single-family-housing districts just the way they are. If the history of Staten Island offers any clues, the rising battle over America\u2019s low-density neighborhoods will be a long, complex, and highly combustible one that blurs traditional party and ideological lines and brings together unexpected bedfellows.<\/p>\n

Patrick D. Nugent\u00a0is the Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr. Director of Civic Engagement at Washington College\u2019s Starr Center for the Study American Experience, as well as assistant research professor in the Department of Political Science.<\/p>\n

The Greenlining of Staten Island<\/a> is available now. For a 30% discount on copies purchased from our site, use promo code UCPNEW at checkout.<\/p>\n

Excerpted from The Greenlining of Staten Island<\/a> by Patrick D. Nugent. \u00a9 2026 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Though it was once home to the world\u2019s largest landfill, today Staten Island boasts thousands of acres of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":291396,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[9,24,63,134,136,135],"class_list":["post-291395","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-staten-island","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-staten-island","tag-staten-island-headlines","tag-staten-island-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291395","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=291395"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291395\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/291396"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=291395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=291395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=291395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}