Returning to our Agrarian Roots:
A renaissance in urban
By Megan Truxillo
F
rom Seattle to New Orleans, cities are rediscovering the economic and social benefits of agriculture as an integral part of the urban landscape. The urban agriculture movement aims to shorten the distance from farm to plate, by weaving farms back into the communities where people live and work. The benefits of urban agriculture are numerous, at the top of the list, as far as sustainable development goes, is shortening the distance that food must travel to reach consumers. The shorter the distance, the less fossil fuel burned, the fresher the food, the more food security and the more money staying within the community. On average 6-12 cents of every dollar spent on food, goes to transportation costs. To real estate developers, urban agriculture or garden-
36
Sustainable Communities • MAY/JUNE 2011
ing can add to the market appeal of a property. To city officials, in-town agriculture is a great way to create jobs and improve nutrition in lower-income areas. And in declining cities, urban agriculture is a good use of vacant and abandoned land. Urban agriculture can also bring jobs and revenue to a community by creating a local food-based industry. Thanks to the “locavore” movement, made popular by Micheal Pollan’s bestseller Omnivore’s Dilemma, restaurants can charge a premium for local, organic products. City farm, an urban farm bordering the Cabrini Green neighborhood of Chicago primarily sells its produce to local restaurants. Sepia, a high-end restaurant in Chicago features City Farm produce. The restaurant “favor[s] local artisan growers” and charges around $30 a plate for such dishes.
Brooklyn Grange Farm in New York produces forty varieties of tomatoes, salad greens, herbs, carrots, fennel, beets and many other varieties of produce on a one-acre rooftop. ▲
agriculture
after Hurricane Katrina, when far-sighted New Orleanians saw the potential to turn vacant lots into beautiful gardens. NOLA Green Roots, a non-profit organization founded by Joe Brock in New Orleans, manages several community gardens. The organization started with the Mid-City Community Garden, turning a once-abandoned lot in mid-city into a producer of mustard greens, carrots, tomatoes, herbs, beans and eggs. The bounty is offered to community-members at a fraction of the cost of supermarket produce. In Queens, NY, Brooklyn Grange Farm operates a forprofit farm on a one-acre rooftop. Grange’s mission is to turn urban farming into a thriving and viable industry. The rooftop, over which Grange has a long-term lease, holds 1.2 million pounds of soil and hundreds of thousands of plants. The produce is sold at farmstands and to local restaurants. Rooftop farming, particularly in densely developed urban areas like New York, has the potential to take advantage of otherwise underutilized land in a city.
What is Urban Agriculture?
Photo courtesy Brooklyn Grange Farm, brooklyngrangefarm.com
Utilizing Urban Space The high cost of urban space is one of the predominant reasons agriculture has historically moved to rural and unpopulated areas. Urban agriculturalists have dealt with this, though, by creatively using unutilized or underutilized space in urban areas. The greatest potential for this new trend exists in cities with slow or no-growth, where vacant land is plentiful. But, even in thriving cities, unused spaces like rooftops provide prime real estate for urban farms and gardens. Greening blighted city spaces is an important benefit of using vacant or abandoned land for agriculture. This serves aesthetic purposes but also can raise property values in the area. New Orleans saw an upswing of community gardening
Although, urban agriculture can mean a few garden plots, a community garden and chickens in the yard, it can also mean a real working farm within city limits, with goods sold locally and exported. This March in Detroit, Hantz Farms, a subsidiary of Hantz Group, acquired 5 acres of blighted land around a warehouse in Detroit with the aim of operating a large commercial farm on the site. This property is the first acquisition, in what Hantz plans to be a large-scale conversion of blighted and abandoned land in the city to agricultural use. If Hantz can overcome city roadblocks, the farm promises to create hundreds of jobs for the Detroit unemployed, offer local produce to a city that does not even have a single grocery store chain within the city limits and free up police, fire and city services from serving and patrolling nearly abandoned neighborhoods. In the meantime, Hantz is landscaping and cleaning up the land to demonstrate to the city the potential agricultural conversion has. For the techies out there, urban agriculture can also mean an indoor “vertical farm.” A vertical farm at its simplest is a multi-story greenhouse. At its most high-tech, a vertical farm is a tightly controlled indoor farm, with water, humidity and nutrients precisely measured and sunlight excluded. MaY/JUNE 2011 • Sustainable Communities
>> 37
Photo courtesy PlantLab
Or, the problem can simply be a failure to address agricultural use, leaving urban agriculturalists to wade through endless red tape to open a farm or community garden. In Chicago, the city is in the process of remedying a zoning code that did not address agricultural uses within city limits. The lack of clarity hindered the development of community gardens and commercial farms because it meant extensive red tape to acquire the proper permits. The proposed zoning amendment would add commercial and community farming as allowed uses by right within certain zoning districts and provide specifics on allowed size and operations. The proposed Hantz operation in Detroit has been at a standstill for the last two years while city officials determine how best to incorporate agricultural zoning into the city code. The current code does not address agricultural uses, although many small com▲ Plantlab hopes to decrease the distance from farm to plate by building vertical farms munity gardens operate, albeit adjacent to, below and on top of grocery stores, as depicted in this artist’s rendering. technically illegally. The cities hangup stems in In the Netherlands, the Dutch research company Plantlab part from an existing law, Michigan’s ‘Right to Farm Act.’ The has been perfecting its version of the vertical farm for the law restricts the ability to bring a nuisance claim against an past ten years. In its research station, strawberries, yellow existing farm, leaving the city wary of allowing a large-scale peppers, basil and banana plants grow under LED bulbs. commercial farm into the city until proper zoning is in place. Water trickles to plants as needed, and all excess water is San Francisco recently amended its zoning code to alrecycled. The facility uses no pesticides and 90 percent less low gardening in all parts of the city and to allow produce water than outdoor agriculture. and value added goods to be sold on site in all zoning areas By the end of this year, the company plans on building a but residential. The addition of on site sales is important four level commercial-sized vertical farm in the Netherlands. for the financial viability of small urban farms, which often The company envisions vertical farms occupying city space produce too little produce to sell to grocery stores or even next to shopping malls, supermarkets and grocery stores, at farmers markets. providing fresh produce that travels a very short distance. Taking it a step further, Seattle’s comprehensive plan actually requires one community garden per 2,500 residents in an urban village or neighborhood. The zoning code in SeatZoning for Urban Agriculture tle is often cited as the most supportive of urban agriculture in the country. Like San Francisco’s code, gardening is alOne of the biggest hurdles facing urban agriculture is lowed by right in most parts of the city and sales are allowed restrictive land use and zoning laws. The problem can be an on site as well. Seattle’s code also supports keeping animals, outright restriction of agricultural uses within city limits, a result of years of creating non-mixed use communities and including chickens on urban properties. pushing agriculture outside of cities and suburban areas. Many cities are rewriting general plans and zoning laws
>>
38
Sustainable Communities • MAY/JUNE 2011
Photo courtesy SWA Group
Master Planned Community Incorporates 200 Acre Farm
▲ At The Farm at Bishop’s Bay, housing is clustered into a weave of farm belts that are maintained and harvested by the community.
For master planned communities, weaving community gardens or farms into the plan can increase the appeal of the community to homebuyers. In Wisconsin, the master-planned Community of Bishop’s Bay, 15 minutes outside Madison, will interweave 200 acres of farmland amongst the houses and other features of the community. The entire community, roughly 800 acres, is a mixed-use community, and will include single-family homes, multi-family complexes, schools, a main street downtown and recreation areas. The community won the National Association of Home Builder’s 2011 “On the Boards Community of the Year,” for its innovative design. “The design intent was to create a community within a community that integrates both natural features such as woodlands, prairies and agriculture landscape systems into a quilt work of development ‘patches’ or neighborhoods, respecting both the rolling Wisconsin landscape and local housing needs,” noted Sean O’Malley, principal of SWA Group, which did the site planning and landscape architecture. The cities of Middleton and Westport, the towns the community straddles, required the planners to incorporate a 200 acre agricultural set aside into the project. But, instead of pushing the agricultural set aside to the outskirts of the area, the design team incorporated it as a selling feature of the community. The farm is intended to put the community in context, since it is being planned in an agricultural area, but also was included in the design because it was something the team felt people wanted in their community, said O’Malley. The result is The Farm at Bishop’s Bay. In it, houses are set in circular clusters, surrounded by farmland. Homeowners in the area will pay homeowner’s fees to partially offset costs for operation of the farm and can take part in the farming and eating of the bounty. Also, local produce from the Farm may be sold at a farmers market in Bishops Bay town center, to the benefit of the homeowner association. Groundbreaking on the project is set for later this year, with a total build out of between five and ten years.
to embrace urban agriculture. However, even when a city decides to allow agricultural uses, there is still the question of how far to allow it to go. Not everyone likes the idea of a rooster crowing in their neighbor’s backyard, or a commercial farm taking over the vacant lot next to their property. But adding urban agriculture to the zoning code is actually good for both advocates of urban agriculture and those that are less enthusiastic because the zoning code both allows
the use and restricts it at the same time. When agricultural uses are added to the zoning code, it provides a place to define size limits, aesthetic rules and operational and safety requirements; providing rules and clarity for operators and for those that live within the vicinity of the operation. The San Francisco code, for example, requires compost units to be set back three feet from dwelling units and decks and fencing around a farm to be wood, ornamenMaY/JUNE 2011 • Sustainable Communities
>> 39
To learn more visit:
Photo courtesy Wikimedia
Brooklyn Grange Farm, brooklyngrangefarm.com City Farm, www.resourcecenterchicago.com Hantz Farms, www.hantzfarmsdetroit.com NOLA Green Roots, www.nolagreenroots.com Community of Bishop’s Bay, www.swagroup.com
▲ Slow Food Nation, a non-profit group dedicated to sustainable food production, created an edible, organic garden in front of San Francisco’s City Hall during the summer of 2008. The harvest was donated to local food banks.
tal or covered by plant material. The restrictive nature of zoning is a source of discord within the agricultural movement in Chicago. According to
the Advocates for Urban Agriculture, a non-profit coalition of urban agriculture enthusiasts, some of its members feel the proposed zoning in Chicago is unduly restrictive of size, operation and placement. Despite this, the group overall supports the zoning as a first step to the introduction and expansion of urban agriculture in the city. Like opening any business, having neighbors and the community on board is a crucial first step. Joe Brock of NOLA Green Roots says he does extensive community outreach before siting a garden, to ensure that the neighborhood is on board with the operation. Hantz farm, in its quest to acquire property in nearly abandoned neighborhoods ran into an unforeseen problem: once individuals in the neighborhood knew a farm might go into it, they did not want to sell their properties -- supporting Hantz’s assertion that members of the Detroit community want agriculture within the city limits. ❧
Housing’s Networking Event of the Year
Honoring NHC’s 2011 Housing Persons of the Year
Thursday, June 23, 2011 National Building Museum 401 F Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 5:30 p.m. Cocktails 6:30 p.m. Gala Program 7:00 p.m. Dinner & Networking National Housing Conference
40
p 202 466 2121
f 202 466 2122
Sustainable Communities • MAY/JUNE 2011
Sister Lillian Murphy, RSM CEO, Mercy Housing
Professor Nicolas P. Retsinas Senior Lecturer, Harvard Business School, Director Emeritus, Joint Center for Housing Studies
Visit the “Events” section at www.nhc.org for Gala tickets, sponsorship opportunities and more information