Smack dab in the middle of North Brooklyn’s industrial zone lives a breezy, green oasis called Kingsland Wildflowers—a manmade meadow overflowing with flowers and succulents, overlooking New York City’s largest sewage treatment plant on one side and a noisy scrap metal yard on the other. This unexpected green space spans the roof of Broadway Stages, and it is where New York’s leading urban environmentalists gathered Monday, June 24 to share their passion and knowledge at an event called Green Roofs: Changing the Landscape of NYC.

Thanks to the passage of the Climate Mobilization Act on April 18, more rooftop green spaces like Kingsland Wildflowers—aptly named “green roofs”—will appear throughout the city, as per Bushwick’s City Councilmember Rafael Espinal’s bill requiring all new buildings to have 100 percent sustainable roofs in the form of green roofs, solar panels, or some combination of the two. “This shouldn’t be an either-or, this should be a both-and,” said Elizabeth Adams, Legislative Director for City Councilmember Steve Levin, at the event.

This bill and others like it, enacted on May 19, has many in the real estate industry wondering how these new regulations will affect them and what the costs will be. Marni Majorelle of Alive Structures, a Greenpoint-based landscaping company that specializes in designing and constructing green roofs throughout New York, decided to host the Green Roofs event to address some of these concerns.