Read an Excerpt from “The Greenlining of Staten Island” by Patrick D. Nugent
Though it was once home to the world’s 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, 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—but 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 greenlining. In this excerpt from the introduction, he discusses this term and the rise of housing scarcity.
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 “wooded slopes, marginal swamps, and small farms” of the borough’s “vanishing agricultural frontier.” A correspondent for Country Beautiful, Mitchell set out to eulogize a recently deceased flower farmer. After touring several dozen farms on the island’s South Shore, the journalist and nature photographer turned a critical eye toward what he described as “the exploding metropolis.” Farmlands once responsible for “the largest strawberry crop east of the Mississippi” were now “drowning in an ocean of poisonous air,” 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, Mitchell noted, by the explosion of highways and houses set off by the construction of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge beginning in 1959. “Some farmers insist the unabated flow of foul air across their land is an affront to their status as citizens,” Mitchell explained as he toured Herbert Gericke’s organic farm. “Don’t tell me about discrimination against races,” Gericke cautioned while pointing to a patch of melons burned over by sulphur-dioxide fog. “I 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’t discrimination, what is?”
As Mitchell’s article illustrates, residents of Staten Island were some of America’s earliest and most committed environmentalists. Their fierce loyalty to place and unique proximity to both industry and open space left Staten Islanders skeptical of the mid-century planners and politicians Mitchell mockingly dubbed “prophets of progress.” 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’s 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 renewal, transportation, parks, housing, and metropolitan governance.
Today, Staten Island is celebrated as both “the Borough of Parks” and “the Greenest Borough”—preserved 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 “the Bluebelt.” If the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge spelled doom for Staten Island’s farms, it also unleashed a wave of environmental activism that transformed the political and ecological landscape of the borough and city (figure 1.1).
Figure 1:1 Staten Island’s city, state, and federal parklands alongside ecological zoning districts, 2024. Map by Washington College Geospatial Innovation Program.
By the mid-1970s, a powerful bipartisan network of borough residents, planning advocates, and politicians mobilized an ecologically focused, privately oriented, and colorblind approach to land-use planning that was highly effective at preserving both biodiverse habitats and low-density housing districts. Such strategies—including ecological zoning, public-private park management, conservation easements, and environmental litigation—also 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 greenlining 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 environmentalism (figure 1.2).
Greenlining, however, was more than just a set of environmental policies. It was also a political order that brought right-and left-leaning residents together in a time of fiscal crisis and political fracture. It encompassed a political 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 development, opting by the mid-1970s for an array of tools more narrowly focused 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’s large proportion of white, home-owning residents a means of protecting both local ecosystems and single-family-housing values.
This compromise left a mixed legacy. If greenlining proved relatively effective 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 pollution 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’s dense North Shore from its ecologically zoned southern districts as “the Mason Dixon Line.” 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.
Figure 1.2: Left: A map of Staten Island’s nonwhite residents as a percentage of district population in 2010, revealing an inverse relationship between ecological zoning and racial diversity. Right: Staten Island’s ecological zoning districts, created by the City Planning Commission in the 1970s and 1980s, compared with districts redlined by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) in 1938, revealing that historically disadvantaged 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.
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The history of greenlining parallels the rise of housing scarcity in American cities. In the same years that Staten Island’s 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 payment. Renters have fared no better—rental vacancies in New York City are at their lowest levels since 1968, with over half the city’s residents plowing more than 30 percent of their paychecks into housing.
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 economic development, as both small storefronts and larger firms are less likely to locate—much less innovate—in sparsely populated neighborhoods. Ecologically speaking, low-density neighborhoods are a threat to our environment 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.
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 developers, 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 twentieth 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’s 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.
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 address housing scarcity. Indeed, this movement has proven itself to be far from fleeting—as 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 Americans 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’s low-density neighborhoods will be a long, complex, and highly combustible one that blurs traditional party and ideological lines and brings together unexpected bedfellows.
Patrick D. Nugent is the Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr. Director of Civic Engagement at Washington College’s Starr Center for the Study American Experience, as well as assistant research professor in the Department of Political Science.
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Excerpted from The Greenlining of Staten Island by Patrick D. Nugent. © 2026 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.