NYC mulls deal to end Elizabeth Street Garden legal battle by handing builder city-owned lot

A decade of litigation over a garden, and the city's answer is to just hand the developer a different plot of public land to make the lawsuits stop. That's not a resolution, that's a payout. If you're keeping score, Elizabeth Street Garden stays put, the affordable housing project that was supposed to go there presumably still needs a home, and now taxpayers are out another parcel at 22 Suffolk St. to grease the wheels. Nobody actually won here. The city just found a way to stop losing in court.

This is what happens when a city spends ten years unable to make a decision and call it done. Somewhere along the way this stopped being about a garden or about housing and became about making the litigation go away, cost be damned. A city-owned lot handed over as a "consolation prize" is a nice way of saying the taxpayers are subsidizing a settlement because officials couldn't manage a planning fight without it eating a decade and multiple administrations.

None of this is really about whether green space in Lower Manhattan matters, or whether the housing was needed. It's about a permitting and land-use process so slow and so litigious that the fastest way out is to just give away more land. New Yorkers should ask why a project that could have been decided with a straightforward public process instead took ten years and ended with the city sweetening the deal with property nobody was fighting over in the first place.

If this is how New York solves land disputes now, expect more of it. Give the city bureaucracy enough time and enough lawsuits, and eventually it just starts handing out real estate to make the noise stop.