Good urban planners know that, in order to create cohesive neighborhoods and healthy local culture (and, even more importantly, in order to preserve the environment), cities must value density and use their land efficiently – particularly if they want to create enough housing to meet demand. That’s why most planners find golf courses so repugnant. Sure, they’re nice for the Donald Trumps of the world, but they take up so much space and accommodate so few users at a time that – relative to a basketball court, or a pizzeria, or just about anything – the overall public benefit afforded by the land amounts to virtually zero.
According to the New Yorker’s Malcolm Gladwell (whose anti-golf stance is a rare redeeming quality), the average course can hold “one golfer per 120,833 square feet.” So how can golf courses afford to stay open, given the cost of property in the city? Well, they can’t, really: they operate under public ownership, or if private, they survive according to a property tax model whereby states calculate the land’s value specifically as a golf course, without estimating what it would be worth in its “highest and best use,” which would take into account the price that, say, a residential developer might pay for it.
Golf courses aren’t as big a problem in New York as they are in Southern California, but the city still has 18 of them. The Marine Park Golf Course, for example, occupies 773 acres of Brooklyn real estate. As Mayor de Blasio and City Council initiate one neighborhood rezoning after another – Bushwick is next – in order to facilitate the construction of new residential high-rises that’ll supposedly resolve New York’s housing crisis, it’s worth noting how much land in the city sits essentially vacant: spaces that, if opened to new development, wouldn’t trigger avalanches of gentrification and displacement, because there’d be nobody there to displace.
And what if I told you that there’s another land use category that’s even worse than golf courses – areas that take up just as much space but offer even less utility? There is such a thing, though most people are too polite to say so: I’m talking about cemeteries.
Get rid of the graveyards
Nearly half of New York City households are “rent-burdened” (meaning that more than 30 percent of their income goes to rent) – it’d be difficult to overstate how hard the average New Yorker has to work in order to carve out a tiny sliver of the Greatest City in the World™ for himself. In a crowded metropolis where 60,000 living individuals have no place to call home, does it make sense to give over permanently any parcel of the city that could be used for housing to someone who died in, say, 1831?
New York City needs green space, but graveyards, like golf courses, are parks that the public can’t really use. In the former case, anyone can walk in, but for want of recreational opportunities, few would choose to. Some graves receive visitors; many more have outlasted their visitors.
In a perfect world, mourners would be able to visit the deceased without traveling far from home, even if they happen to live within a competitive real estate market. Already, however, that world doesn’t exist. New York’s cemeteries, like those of many of the world’s major cities, are filling up fast, and the price of the remaining plots keeps them out of reach for most families. New York is America’s most expensive city for burials: in 2015, Gothamist reported that the last two vacancies for the dead in all of Manhattan – a pair of family vaults at New York Marble Cemetery in the East Village – cost $350,000 each.
City Council, tacitly recognizing that New York’s 303 square miles of land have become too dear to make space for the dead, stopped approving new cemeteries decades ago. But in death as in life, well-heeled New Yorkers will continue to lay claim to more and more of the city’s precious real estate until all the existing graveyards meet capacity, while the Big Apple continues to expel most of its other inhabitants upon expiration, if not earlier.
Do the corpses already installed within the Five Boroughs possess a right to eternal peace, regardless of the needs of the city’s living? It seems to depend on whose corpses we’re talking about. Tourists still visit Alexander Hamilton’s headstone on Wall Street, but New York has never had qualms about paving over the resting places of the indigent. Mass graves (called “potter’s fields”) once occupied the sites of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel and Washington Square Park. Parkgoers in Greenwich Village tread upon the bones of 20,000 paupers every day.
In the mid-1800s, overcrowding in Manhattan’s graveyards prompted the creation of “rural cemeteries” (most famously Green-Wood) out in the countryside, where there was plenty of room for the dead. The trouble is that the countryside of 1840 is now Brooklyn and Queens: central urban neighborhoods that possess concentrations of economic activity and opportunity to which many people would like to have access. The countryside has moved elsewhere, and once again, so perhaps should the dead.
The legalities
In New York, all cemeteries operate as nonprofits and don’t pay property taxes – which is how Green-Wood, without producing much revenue, manages still to occupy a swath of land larger than the entire adjacent neighborhood of Windsor Terrace. But law doesn’t guarantee their permanence: the New York City Administrative Code details the process by which the city, having acquired the title to a cemetery, can remove its dead and relocate them, as long it has provided public notice (in two newspapers) and gained the permission of the local branch of the New York Supreme Court.
According to the Administrative Code, reinterments must take place within the county where the preceding exhumations took place, or in a county with which it shares a border (this may require a revision eventually). That means that New York City can’t ship its dead out to Montana. But not all land within the New York metropolitan area has equal use value.
Since about 1870, taxpayers have funded a mass grave on uninhabited Hart’s Island in the Bronx for city residents whose families can’t afford burials. The Department of Corrections offers a ferry to the public potter’s field three times a month, demanding reservations in advance. Considered an ignominious resting place by some, Hart’s Island really should be a model: we all should be willing to get out of the way once we’re gone. Hart’s Island already houses a million souls, but there are plenty of untouched islands in Jamaica Bay, too small to warrant bridges, where other kinds of development appear unlikely.
Of course, there’s a political question here: would New Yorkers ever allow their public officials to carry out such a plan? New York may have been a rough place in the 19th century, but in a civilized society, aren’t the dead sacrosanct? Who would let the city build on top of Grandma?
Maybe I’m crazy, but I perceive a possible upside to the largely unseemly way in which America seems recently to have shed its pieties. A few years ago, for instance, it would have seemed impossible that a U.S. president of either party could have an extramarital affair with a porn star, pay for her silence, and retain the unwavering support of the Christian right. Maybe the concerns of America’s Moral Majority were never real, but hardly anybody feels compelled even to pretend anymore. They seek only their own advantage; any capitulation to moral rectitude would slow them down in battle.
In New York, the battle is for cheaper rent. I think there are few niceties – such as the undisturbed dignity of the dead – that we wouldn’t sacrifice for it. Sometimes the pragmatic attitude is the right one.
That said, New York’s aforementioned “housing crisis” is really a misnomer. It is in fact an affordability crisis. True, the city hasn’t built enough housing in recent years, but more significantly, much of the housing it has built has gone unused: the New York Times reported in September that, of the 16,200 condos constructed since 2013, one quarter remain unsold. Who knows how many more, purchased as second or third homes for the rich or simply as financial investments, stay empty night after night?
If we adopted an approach to housing that prioritized getting people into homes instead of generating profits for the real estate industry, we might build more wisely instead of simply building more: increased supply doesn’t help much if it’s not supplying what we need, and so far, we haven’t had the courage to look beyond the market for supply. If we demolish a cemetery for the sake of more luxury condos, it won’t be a win for anyone except the cruelest YIMBYs.
I still think we should demolish them. At the southeastern end of in-demand Bushwick, Evergreen Cemetery holds hostage 225 acres directly beside the L, J/Z, and A/C trains. What is it doing there?
Someday, when New York truly has run out of space, we’ll have to do something about this, and when we do, perhaps the lingering sense of impropriety over our disrespect for the dead will compel us to make something good out of something “bad”: not another Hudson Yards-style monstrosity but a pleasant, walkable, green community where ordinary people can live in comfort and afford to pay the rent. Starting from scratch, we’d have a chance to do it right.
