Hate That Vacant Lot in Your Neighborhood? Turn It Into Something Great

Perhaps you’ve seen an abandoned lot in your neighborhood or wondered who owns it or what your city or town is doing with the unused land it controls. Well, others who have felt the same way are doing something about it. Over the last decade, interest in community-led initiatives to turn neglected space into a shared resource—for housing, for growing food, for recreation—has ballooned. But it’s never quite as simple as taking donated equipment and throwing up a raised bed in a vacant plot. "It was blood, sweat, and tears," says Alexis Foote, who spent the last decade working toward community control of waterfront property in New York City. Dwell spoke to Foote, along with Queen Frye of the R. Roots Garden in Minneapolis and Darren Cotton of The Tool Library in Buffalo, New York, about how they’re transforming spaces in their neighborhoods into collective assets and asked them to share any advice they have for people hoping to start a similar project themselves. "You gotta bring your community with you," says Foote, "and you gotta fight, fight, fight."

ReAL Edgemere Community Land Trust, New York City

Alexis Foote says it was seeing vacant lots in the middle of a homelessness crisis in New York City that motivated her to get involved with creating and maintaining a community land trust (a nonprofit organization that develops land for community use) in her neighborhood. As a teenager, Foote bounced around the foster-care system in and around Harlem, and spent five years without a home herself. In helping to develop a land trust in an area where vacant land is snapped up by real estate developers and turned into luxury housing, she says, "I’m fighting generational homelessness for my kids."

Foote lives in Far Rockaway, Queens, more than an hour’s subway ride from Manhattan. The area was devastated in 2012 by Hurricane Sandy, which washed away homes and caused $65 billion in damages across the region. But whereas other parts of the Rockaways redeveloped their decimated waterfronts into parks and new housing relatively quickly, parts of Far Rockaway, like Edgemere, lagged behind.

A massive chunk of the empty land in the neighborhood belonged to the City of New York. But Foote says she initiated the process by speaking to others in her area about the blocks of abandoned lots: "I started reaching out to church leaders and government officials," she says. "Like, listen—What are your plans for these lots? There’s nothing out there."

Along with Zakhia Grant, Foote founded a board that would later become known as the ReAL Edgemere Community Land Trust. In 2021, New York City opened applications for plans to develop other lots in the community, and Foote and Grant filed one. The duo engaged a handful of urban design and legal organizations to refine their proposal. It was accepted by the city as part of a community land trust initiative, and the organization, which is in the process of being registered as a formal nonprofit, will use city funding to turn 119 empty lots in the Rockaways into 130 affordable housing units and commercial space for local businesses—along with open space in floodplains to prevent a repeat of previous disasters.

"This is not a corporate America structure, and it’s gonna run very differently."

—Alexis Foote, ReAL Edgemere Community Land Trust

For Foote, the work of community development is important, but she’s also thrilled to have wrestled the empty lots from speculators and other extractive real estate forces: Anyone doing work like this should be resilient and persistent, she says, "because they’re gonna have big people with big pockets trying to shut them out."