Jordan Engel
Good fences make good neighbors, so the old proverb goes. That particular phrasing is attributed to Robert Frost’s 1914 poem, “Mending Wall,” in which Frost asks his neighbor to explain why fences make good neighbors, highlighting a belief so deeply ingrained that it goes unquestioned. Without fences and private property rights, the prevailing thought is that natural self-interest will destroy any shared resource.
This idea was further popularized by Garrett Hardin’s 1968 paper, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” wherein he concluded that commons – shared property or resources managed by its users (“commoners”) for the collective benefit – must either be controlled by the government or else privatized. The process of privatizing and erecting fences on common land is historically known as enclosure, and it was in part through this process that large cities dominated by private land ownership grew in the early modern period, as commoners were forcibly removed from their commons and into wage labor in cities across Europe and beyond.
Despite this history, commons have long been woven into the urban fabric. Shared courtyards were the architectural basis of the very first cities in Mesopotamia. They can be found in traditional neighborhood design throughout the world, from the fareej of the Arab world, to the egalitarian apartment compounds of Teotihuacan. Communal gardens were fashionable in 18th century Copenhagen and 19th century London, the latter famously admired as being “like little private villages” by Hugh Grant’s character in Britain’s smash-hit film, “Notting Hill.” The urban commons are, globally, not that uncommon.
There are far fewer examples of urban commons in the US, where they’re thwarted by a cultural predisposition towards individualism and a legal system designed to protect private property above all else. Indeed, the country’s very foundations stem from the failure to recognize the legitimacy of Indigenous-managed commons, enabling the settlers to claim lands deemed “terra nullius.”
A large portion of America’s urban commons emerged in the same time and place: 1920s New York City, where developers were conducting backyard experiments with commoning on an unprecedented scale. New York has long required rear yard setbacks of 33 feet, leaving most blocks with a 66-foot-wide undevelopable center. Most of these yards are fenced off and neglected by homeowners, landlords, and tenants – their narrow dimensions limiting their uses, and their tall fences shading most of the potential growing area. Since the mid-19th century, architects have repeatedly criticized New York’s backyards, described in 1893 as ”a dreary monotone of gray board fences, ash and garbage barrels, slop pails and clotheslines.”
The inspiration to transform these liminal spaces came from the Garden City movement emanating from England. The movement’s founder, Ebenezer Howard, sought a solution to the commonly perceived issues of the Victorian city: overcrowding, social disparities, pollution, and lack of green space. His seminal 1898 book, “To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform,” outlined a vision for self-contained communities balancing the best aspects of town and country. In just a few short years, garden city ideas were being implemented in new communities from Letchworth, England to Forest Hills, Queens. However, with their low density, curvilinear street design, and reliance on personal transportation, these early garden cities lacked many key aspects of what we now consider good urbanism.
Macdougal-Sullivan Gardens. Credit: Leslie Garfield Real Estate
In the heart of New York City, with its street grid and robust transit system, implementing garden city principles couldn’t avoid the city’s more urbanist context. One of the first to embed Howard’s ideas in the urban core was a businessman and housing reformer named William Sloane Coffin. In 1920, he bought an entire block of 22 three-story row houses in Greenwich Village and redeveloped them as affordable housing for “writers, businessmen, artists, actors and musicians.” Macdougal-Sullivan Gardens, as it came to be known, not only helped establish the Village as an affordable bohemian enclave, but also formed one of New York’s first backyard commons. Coffin removed the fencing between the houses, creating a 40 feet by 200 feet shared space comprising a broad lawn, a playground, and a flower garden. The commons is bounded by small private yards on each side abutting the back of the row houses. The homes were sold to the residents along with a share in the backyard commons, which was put under the protection of the resident-run MacDougal Sullivan Gardens Association, along with rules such as prohibiting tall walls or hedges between the commons and the private yards. Neighbors organized various committees – a greens committee, a parent committee, and a resident-run nursery school. Children who grew up in the early days of Macdougal-Sullivan Gardens were immersed in a close-knit community. In the winter, the lawn was intentionally flooded to create a skating rink. The commons was maintained by the community, who celebrated an annual Digging Day each spring to plant the garden and gather for a potluck.
Around the same time, socialite Charlotte Hunnewell Sorchan purchased a block of 21 row houses uptown, tore down the rear fences, and convinced many of her friends to move in, creating the upscale Turtle Bay Gardens. The common garden, complete with fountains and statuary, was put under the protection of property restrictions agreed to by all but one owner who built a tall brick wall between the private yard and the commons. When that owner sold the house in 1947, the new owner dismantled the wall and voluntarily placed the property under the restrictions. By 1983, the original restrictions had been renewed four times with little adjustment. Other elite backyard commons were renovated into historic blocks of row houses at Sutton Square in Midtown East, now home to the official UN Secretary General’s residence, and Jones Wood Garden, one of the Upper East Side’s few remaining low-rise blocks.
Across the river in rapidly developing Queens, the concept was being applied in two new neighborhoods. In Jackson Heights, 10 separate apartment complexes, each occupying a full block, were built between 1921 and 1925 incorporating backyard commons, coining the phrase “garden apartment.” The first of these was Hampton Court, consisting of 11 six-story buildings surrounding a one-acre shared garden. The design allowed for dense, middle-class housing near the subway while simultaneously providing its residents with a refuge filled only with the sounds of playing children during the day and crickets at night. The Hampton Court commons continues to bring neighbors together, playing host to annual Easter egg hunts and trick-or-treating on Halloween.
In 1924, the urban commons experiment reached its most ambitious undertaking in Sunnyside Gardens, a 77-acre neighborhood of 1,200 moderately-priced row houses built around 14 verdant backyard commons linked by a network of pedestrian paths. The 1,000-foot-long blocks are each divided into three commons to facilitate more close-knit neighborhood relationships. The project was conceived in part by the social philosopher Lewis Mumford (who would himself become a longtime resident of Sunnyside Gardens, joining a community of radicals that earned the neighborhood the nickname “the maternity ward of the Greenwich Village”) and was developed by a team that included William Sloane Coffin. From the street, the row houses meld with the surrounding city, but inside the commons there’s little indication that Midtown Manhattan is a mere three miles away. The private backyards open up into broad expanses of nature that are today filled with fields of flowers, shared children’s toys and sports equipment, and community compost piles.
In the ensuing century, backyard commons proved to be an effective neighborhood typology in both practical and social terms. In practical terms, its design encourages sharing, and all the economic and environmental benefits that come with it. And socially, it encourages the kinds of interactions that are vital to fighting the growing epidemic of isolation and loneliness. Sociologist Rebecca Adams says that the necessary conditions for making close friends are “proximity; repeated, unplanned interactions; and a setting that encourages people to let their guard down and confide in each other,” which she says is why so many people meet their lifelong friends in college. In this way, backyard commons act as an all-ages analog of the college quad.
Private deck in the Elm Court garden apartments in Jackson Heights. Credit: Brown Harris Stevens
Another reason for their success is the privacy gradient from the public street to the semi-public commons, the semi-private back patio or yard, and finally to the private home. In New York, where backyards with even the tallest fences are always in view of upstairs neighbors, few offer complete privacy. Still, even semi-private yards are highly valued places for retreat in dense cities with small homes. Research by Danish urbanist Jan Gehl found that private yards exactly 10.6 feet deep strike the perfect balance between privacy and community, being shallow enough to allow for neighborly conversation and deep enough to allow for retreat when desired.
The absence of this privacy gradient is one of the reasons private parks like Gramercy Park don’t work as well: the exclusive garden is surrounded by public streets but the public remains locked out. When the fences came down around London’s many private parks during World War II (under the pretext that the iron was needed for the war effort), it was celebrated as an act of democratizing the public sphere by George Orwell. London’s backyard commons, however, remained gated, as it was recognized their configuration was better suited to the commons than public parks.
Visibility into the commons is another important design element. Surrounded by residences, with more “eyes on the street” (or rather backyard), the commons offer more security. Even when New York’s crime rate was peaking in the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, none of its backyard commons elected to re-install fences as a security measure. This community trust is especially vital for the safety of children and the elderly. Urban commoners often note the freedom their children have to play outside without supervision, knowing they are safe from car traffic and that help is always nearby if needed. “Sometimes they will disappear, but you know they are in someone’s house,” remarked Macdougal-Sullivan Gardens resident Alba Clemente.
Macdougal-Sullivan Gardens in the 1940s. Credit: NY Times
The built-in community provided by backyard commons, along with the commons itself, has kept many young families from leaving the city for a big yard in the suburbs. This need for outdoor space was exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Manhattan’s 0-4 year old population shrank 14% while suburban counties like Rockland, Putnam, and Orange all saw an uptick. Outside of pandemics, the urban exodus continues as jobs and amenities move to the urban periphery and core cities are losing their advantage.
Providing an alternative to suburbanization was on Lewis Mumford’s mind when he envisioned Sunnyside Gardens as a demonstration in livability both in affordability and sociability. It was because of their affordability that the social aspects of these spaces worked. As wealthy buyers, attracted by the exclusive-sounding “secret gardens,” gradually moved in and priced out the intended middle-class residents, the social connections began to decay. The many wealthy celebrities who have called these backyard commons home – from Anna Wintour and Richard Gere in Macdougal-Sullivan Gardens to Katherine Hepburn and Mary-Kate Olsen in Turtle Bay Gardens – don’t like to mingle. Richard Gere even went so far as to plant a tall privacy hedge between the commons and his yard, but it was “unceremoniously chopped down by the other residents” for violating the rules.
Today, these commons adjoin some of the city’s most coveted addresses. Prices have reached as high as $12M in Macdougal-Sullivan Gardens, $13M in Jones Wood Garden, $14M in Turtle Bay Gardens, and $25M in Sutton Square. Even in the somewhat less-glamorous Queens, the promise of backyard commons is financially out of reach for most. The high cost of these homes shows there is ample demand for this type of housing, but a far too limited supply of it.
The enormous popularity of the backyard commons did not translate to their broad adoption throughout the city. Buying an entire block of houses is hopelessly expensive, and few know their neighbors well enough to even discuss the idea of sharing their yards. For the latter, however, there have been a few notable exceptions. One was Bleecker Gardens, which was formed in 1929 when poet Mark Van Doren convinced 13 of his West Village neighbors to tear down their rear fences. Another came in 1983, when parents Timothy and Sealy Gilles sought permission from their neighbors in Park Slope, Brooklyn to connect their yards and make it easier for their children to play together. The fences remained in place, but unlocked gates were added allowing passage between the yards, a project which was accomplished in just a couple weekends. With a shared treehouse and communal raspberry bushes, another parent on the block described the arrangement as “a little slice of how every child should be able to grow up – with freedom to roam in nature, and easily accessible playmates.” Gilles advised, “If someone were to want to do this [in their own community], then I would say, just reach out to your neighbors one by one.” That’s exactly what a garden designer named Bill Fidelo later did in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, successfully convincing neighbors to let him connect their three yards in a massive woodland garden. It’s an idea that continues to arise independently, demonstrating an enduring interest and innate appeal in the commons.
Bleecker Gardens. Credit: Brown Harris Stevens
With the passing of a century since the heyday of backyard commons, it may finally be an idea whose time has come. Today a new wave of residential commoning is happening thanks to the popularity of cohousing – a form of intentional community that, like backyard commons, is defined by roughly 15 to 40 private homes clustered around a community-managed central common area, joined by pedestrian paths. Urban commons of this configuration go by many names: backyard commons, community greens, cohousing, pocket neighborhoods, and in the UK, communal gardens. While the term cohousing didn’t exist in 1920, the early residents of Macdougal-Sullivan Gardens were effectively practicing it. Like backyard commons, cohousing maintains a balance between privacy and community, but includes more formal and informal social structures to ensure the community remains vital. Cohousing residents often end up sharing weekly meals, sharing tools (an oft-repeated principle in the cohousing community is “Everyone doesn’t need their own lawnmower”), sharing amenities (community hot tubs are a popular one), carpooling, bulk purchasing food, and organizing child- and elder-care, achieving a much richer culture of mutual aid and general conviviality. They often, though not always, share a common house with amenities like guest rooms, a community kitchen, laundry facilities, space to hold birthday parties, and a mail room for secure package delivery, which also functions as a key place for those critical repeated, unplanned social interactions.
Cohousing has been likened by some to the off-grid communes of the 1960s. It’s also been compared by older generations to that nostalgic past where people left their doors unlocked and kids ran around outside. Some cohousing communities market themselves as such, describing the experience as “like a traditional village” and a “return to the best of small-town communities.” Despite the romanticism, cohousing has more pragmatic roots. The earliest cohousing communities in Denmark and Sweden were developed by working women in the 1970s to share the tasks of childcare and cooking while fighting for gender pay equity. It’s possible the early Danish cohousers were inspired by Copenhagen’s 18th century common courtyards.
Cohousing is distinct from co-living, in which residents typically share bathrooms and kitchens. In the US, where people are simultaneously desperate for community and scared to death of it, cohousing proponents frequently emphasize this difference. Because cohousing, with its private homes, is situated on the more mainstream end of the intentional community spectrum, research suggests there is broad interest in it across the US political spectrum. The idea was introduced to the United States by architects Katie McCamant and Charles Durrett in the 1980s, and quickly spread. Today, there are 165 established cohousing communities across the US, with many more in the formation and construction stages.
Most cohousing communities are new-build developments, but one of the first cohousing communities in North America required no construction at all. N Street Cohousing in Davis, California started in an existing 1950s suburban subdivision, pioneering what is now commonly known as retrofit cohousing. Since 1986, when the first two backyards were joined, the community has grown slowly, house by house, removing fencing and integrating the backyard landscaping with shared paths and gardens through the commons. Initially, shared meals were hosted at residents’ houses until moving into a garage for a couple years and eventually into a house the community adapted to their needs. Today it stands at 19 private houses and a shared common house which hosts monthly meetings, regular community meals, parties, numerous neighborhood events, music nights and more.
N Street Cohousing. Credit: Dr. Graham Meltzer
With embodied carbon from construction accounting for up to 50% of a building’s total lifetime emissions, the greenest building is the one that is already built, and yet building cohousing from scratch is the most prevalent approach among even the most eco-conscious groups. The relative scarcity of retrofit cohousing might stem from the misconstrued assumption that cohousing design is significantly different from that of standard American housing. That’s not necessarily the case, physically or even legally. Physically, many neighborhoods have “good bones” for retrofit cohousing, especially pre-war, medium-density urban housing without backyard garages. That describes most of New York’s 217,000 row houses, which account for roughly a quarter of the city’s residential housing stock, with the densest concentrations in Brooklyn. But retrofit cohousing isn’t just limited to row houses: Jackson Heights and N Street demonstrate that backyard commons can also thrive in blocks of apartment buildings and detached houses. While many blocks are larger than the cohousing standard of 15 to 40 households, a possible solution lies in Sunnyside Gardens’ design strategy of dividing a large block into multiple smaller commons.
Legally, while new-build cohousing usually adopts condominium or cooperative structures, retrofit cohousing utilizes more diverse frameworks including development corporations, community land trusts, joint easements, limited liability companies, and tenancy in common. N Street Cohousing is none of those; instead, each lot in the community remains privately owned. The only legal structure at N Street comes from work they did with the city of Davis to rezone the block as a Planned Development. This process resulted in new zoning regulations that included property deed restrictions against permanent construction in the backyards, such as fences, easements allowing neighbors to traverse the backyards, and modifications to side and front yard setback easements to facilitate the addition of “attached” second units to the original houses. It surprisingly appears that ownership structures of the urban commons, whether privately, publicly, or collectively-owned, are of little importance to their long-term management, as long as adequate social structures are in place.
Retrofit cohousing communities like N Street represent the “lighter, quicker, cheaper” approach to urban commoning. In new-build cohousing, members typically face a multi-year process of building membership, and contributing finances towards buying land while living elsewhere, largely limiting its adoption to those with existing housing equity. The planning process requires the community to develop expertise in finance, law, design, and construction, or hire outside consultants and developers. Retrofit cohousing, meanwhile, doesn’t involve developers, requires no land acquisition, and the potential members are just existing residents. With fewer obstacles, retrofit allows for testing the cohousing lifestyle without making major commitments. It’s not surprising then that backyard commons in New York were trialed in existing housing at Macdougal-Sullivan Gardens before being applied to new construction at Sunnyside Gardens, or that the first new-build cohousing in North America, Muir Commons, was built just 3 miles down the road from N Street which tested the cohousing form 5 years earlier. Due to the less prohibitive demands on personal resources, retrofit cohousing communities tend to be younger and more racially and economically diverse. They also tend to have more renters; Only half of N Street’s members are homeowners, but all are full participants in the consensus-based management of the commons.
In dense cities like New York where most renters live upstairs and yards can only be entered from ground-floor units, commons can provide transformative access. The equity aspect is especially salient in gentrifying neighborhoods like Bed-Stuy where predominately white tenants pay a premium for exclusive yard access, and heighten neighborhood tensions when their yards function as little more than dog relief areas. In contrast, Jackson Heights, the New York neighborhood with the least amount of public green space per person, has addressed this dynamic by ensuring all residents of garden apartment complexes share equal access to the commons. Most blocks have at least one gap between buildings, providing entry from the street to the backyard. If that entrance includes a locked gate, providing keys to upstairs tenants would help achieve the goal of a city where everyone is within a 10-minute walk to a green space. Currently 1,355,000 New Yorkers live further than that from their nearest park.
Access to nearby green space isn’t just a matter of recreation, it can also save lives. On average, each summer, approximately 350 New Yorkers die prematurely due to the effects of hot weather, mostly in un-air-conditioned homes. Proximity to shady green spaces, particularly those where individuals feel at ease and can engage with neighbors, significantly reduces this risk. These green areas entice people to leave their overheated apartments, providing a cooler and potentially life-saving refuge during extreme heat conditions. The evidence of backyard commons’ cooling credentials can be seen in Sunnyside Gardens and the Jackson Heights garden apartments, which are roughly 4°C cooler than their surroundings on average thanks to increased vegetation and less pavement. With a shortage of land to develop new urban parks, backyard commons represent a feasible way to fill the green space gap.
It should be noted, however, that parks and commons serve different functions, and one is generally not a substitute for the other. Parks are government-managed and available to everyone, but come with a long list of prohibited uses from picking fruit to pitching a hammock. Even picnicking was banned for much of Central Park’s early history, at a time when urban green spaces were seen as places for passive appreciation of nature rather than active recreation or cultivation. Commons, meanwhile, are generally managed and used only by their commoners, but as long as there’s community consent, they’re free to do anything that’s legal to do on private property. As such, most of the 1920s backyard commons are designed for more park-like passive use compared to today’s retrofit cohousing in which the commons typically host vegetable gardens, fruit trees, picnic tables, playgrounds, fire pits, tool sheds, hot tubs and chicken coops.
Another group standing to benefit is the disability community. Much of the housing stock is inaccessible in older cities like New York, where only 32% of units can be entered without stairs, most of which are in expensive new luxury buildings. The slope required for a compliant ADA ramp means there simply isn’t enough room to install a ramp in the front of many older residential buildings. But with access from the street to the back door via the backyard commons, these buildings would have space to build ramps in the back, providing accessibility to people with mobility impairments, parents with strollers, and more. A group of independent living advocates has even proposed linking backyard commons with an accessible, car-free public right of way benefiting not just disabled neighbors, but the entire community. They suggest that cities create a system of “accessibility land swaps” – “In exchange for permission to add inaccessible square footage to their homes, owners would have to grant a portion of their land for disabled access and common use.”
Urban commons also have the potential to serve not just their residents, but the broader environment. Thirty years ago, the New York Times asked of the backyard commons, “How much of a public stake is there, anyway, in what is really a private amenity?” Today, the public stake is substantial. Facing environmental challenges from inland flooding, combined sewer overflows, and urban heat island effect, cities like New York are trying to fit green infrastructure anywhere they can find space in a land-scarce city where the pressure to build housing is strong – parks, schoolyards, public housing campuses. But the Department of Environmental Protection has recognized that it can’t achieve its mandated green infrastructure goals by focusing solely on public spaces. The largest category of open space in most cities, private yards, happens to be both protected from the pressures of future development (unlike community gardens on vacant lots) and drastically underutilized. New York City already provides financial incentives for installing green infrastructure on private property through the Resilient NYC Partners program. This initiative stems from the NRDC’s 2016 recommendations to establish a new grant program to incentivize private property owners to retrofit their properties with green infrastructure by providing them with direct financial benefits in addition to covering the direct costs of green infrastructure. The grants can be used to build rain gardens, plant trees, and remove impervious surfaces on properties that are at least 50,000 square feet – a size requirement that effectively excludes every residential backyard except for backyard commons. More than 70% of NYC is covered in impervious surfaces, including the majority of the backyards on many blocks, and while paved streets are important to the functioning of the city, paved yards are nonessential. As commoning and green infrastructure share a goal – depaving yards and incorporating them into a greener landscape – Resilient NYC Partners could provide direct financial benefits towards the cost of establishing backyard commons, while encouraging property owners by protecting their properties from flooding and lowering their insurance rates.
Cohousing communities could add another layer of community resilience by incorporating a common house that also functions as a community resilience hub. Resilience hubs are equipped to support residents by facilitating communication, distributing resources, and reducing carbon emissions before, during, and after emergencies. New York is currently devising a strategy to establish a network of these hubs, equipped with backup power, reliable climate control, charging stations, and refrigeration. A cohousing common house inherently fulfills many of these roles and more. Just as achieving green infrastructure goals requires collaboration with private property owners, a network of resilience hubs could benefit significantly from public-commons partnerships with cohousing communities to implement measures like shared emergency power and sustainable energy solutions. This approach acknowledges that, just as everyone doesn’t need their own lawnmower, not everyone needs their own backup generator or battery energy storage system, which can be both costly and impractical for individual households.
Cities are best, Jane Jacobs said, when they are created by everybody. Commoning opens the range of possibilities for grassroots, community-driven innovations like community composting, neighborhood events, outdoor art, and even starting businesses. In 2009, for example, Cincinnati’s Enright Ridge retrofit cohousing community hired a farmer to grow organic produce in the neighborhood’s backyards and neglected lots, and started a CSA (community-supported agriculture) with 65 shares feeding the neighborhood and beyond. Each commons holds the potential for countless micro-experiments, allowing for flexibility, resilience, and diversity in approaches to problem-solving and community development.
Enright Ridge residents harvesting their backyard community garden. Credit: Cincinnati Magazine
The proliferation of the urban commons means a more polycentric city, creating more focal points of activity, more unique places, and distributing decision-making authority across various levels, in line with participatory planning objectives. In cities where creating and designing places is mostly a top-down endeavor, governing the commons is an exercise in grassroots democracy, or what Sherry Arnstein would call “citizen control.” Cohousing communities often practice a system called sociocracy, a governance approach where residents use consent-based decision-making and circle structures to ensure an equitable distribution of power and foster a sense of ownership and community in the management of the commons. Kevin Wolf, co-founder of N Street Cohousing, attributes the community’s success to the adoption of a modified consensus process whereby the person(s) blocking a decision have to organize separate meetings to attempt to work out a compromise. If no compromise is reached, a two thirds majority can override a block. In almost 40 years, the community has never needed to vote because people become reasonable when they need to find one third of the voting members to join them to stop a proposal. Social frameworks such as these are the commons’ defining radical quality, as it builds community power backed by a shared land base.
Retrofit cohousing presents a potential path to commoning, and all its benefits, even in New York, even today. New York’s precious few backyard commons have faced many risks. Some have been lost to enclosure, like Cambridge Court in Jackson Heights, which was foreclosed and “subdivided into a warren of barbed-wire fences, dusty parking lots, garbage heaps and weed trees.” Others have been lost, spiritually if not physically, to gentrification, like how Macdougal-Sullivan Gardens’ community cohesion began to dwindle after new, wealthy residents disbanded their committees and decided to hire landscapers rather than gathering for their annual spring clean up. And a Sutton Square resident described their backyard commons as “this incredible garden that residents hardly ever use,” suggesting that affluent buyers often value the prestige of the commons more than their communal aspects.
The continued existence of the remaining urban commons depends on policy and organizing. To prevent enclosure, cities could adopt measures similar to those in Davis, California, where N Street Cohousing secured the permanent protection for their backyard commons by acquiring planned development status. Discussing the city as a commons, Matteo Lepore, mayor of Bologna, Italy, observed: “Commons aren’t just something we protect, but also what we invent.” In the case of New York’s backyard commons, protection and invention might go hand in hand. Countering the gentrification of the commons might call for the YIMBY (yes in my literal backyard) approach of simply establishing more commons, balancing the scales of supply and demand so they are no longer red-hot luxuries snatched up by a class of people too wealthy to consider sharing a lawnmower with their neighbors.
Commoning remains particularly challenging in New York, where few cohousing communities exist due to a state law known as the Martin Act which gives the Attorney General broad power to regulate, among other things, individuals pooling financial resources for real estate. But there are signs of change in the legal system. In 2022, Governor Hochul signed a law facilitating the conversion of small apartment buildings to cooperatives with just 15% resident approval. One lawyer supporting the bill was Erica Buckley of Nixon Peabody. When asked about the viability of a potential law to similarly allow neighbors to establish backyard commons with the approval of 15% of a block’s property owners, she responded that the Martin Act wouldn’t apply to common gardens. Backyard commons might be considered a “syndication” under the Syndicate Act, though there are no rules or regulations to guide this type of transaction. Like new-build cohousing, any neighbors seeking a formal legal structure for backyard commons would likely have to go to the state attorney general, adding expensive legal filings to the process. However, nonprofit-driven initiatives are exempt from that requirement, highlighting a need for 501c3 support. In 2000, former Macdougal-Sullivan Gardens resident Bill Drayton founded a such a nonprofit called Community Greens to provide resources and support to communities interested in backyard commoning across the US. The organization is no longer active, but achieved noted success in Baltimore, where local and state laws were amended to allow the gating and greening of back alleys for common use by adjacent properties.
The tragedy of the commons, it turns out, is not inevitable. Nobel Prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom spent years examining how communities around the world managed commons such as fisheries, forests, irrigation systems, and grazing lands. Through her observations, Ostrom identified a set of principles that successful common pool resource management systems tended to exhibit. They all, for instance, have clearly defined boundaries, develop their own rules, and participate in collective decision-making processes. Interestingly, these principles align closely with those of cohousing, suggesting that the key to establishing and governing urban commons may lie in the social practices of commoners and future commoners – neighbors organizing, sharing meals, and participating in collective dreaming. Ultimately, successful commons depend on the strength and solidarity of their communities.
Jordan Engel is a Spring ‘ 24 graduate of the MUP program at Hunter, with a concentration in sustainability. His background ranges across urban agriculture, green building, and transportation. He can be reached at linkedin.com/in/jordanengel1.
