Idea Bank for New York City's Chief Public Realm Officer: Imagining a Broad, Equity-Enhancing Role for Creating Access to Public Space

By executive order on February 16, 2023, New York City Mayor Eric Adams created the position of the City’s Chief Public Realm Officer to promote a more centralized and coordinated approach to public realm policy, and appointed a chief strategy officer from his own staff, Ya-Ting Liu, to fill this position. This Article argues that the City should view the role of the Public Realm Office expansively and proactively to help achieve meaningful, equity-enhancing progress in stewarding public space. The authors, former students and a faculty member of CUNY School of Law’s Land Use and Community Lawyering seminar, offer a constellation of ideas for consideration. These include opening up and greening vacant spaces, even for temporary use, while simultaneously urging approaches to address the paradox that adding green infrastructure to environmentally degraded areas often imposes the side effects of gentrifying them, elevating land values, drawing in new residents, and driving out the very community members who should have benefited from the initial improvements.

The ideas developed here also discuss the benefit of enhancing support—both financial and logistical, including through the donation of public land—for the expansion of community land trusts (“CLTs”) that function outside of the speculative market. Lastly, this idea bank offers proposals for using the public realm to enhance digital equity.