Working For Jobs

Fueled by the recent fascination with all things DIY, community gardening — like brainstorming clever uses for Mason jars and eating like a caveman– has been popular lately. But on a large plot in inner city Baltimore, gardeners have been working the land for almost 25 years. The Duncan Street Miracle Garden, a lush rectangle crisscrossed by grape arbors and trellises, sits in a desolate patch of East Baltimore where 44 rowhouses once stood. On a recent spring day, the blue sky was visible through the empty shells of neighboring buildings and birdsong competed with police sirens.

“I call it ‘God’s little acre,’” says garden manager Lewis Sharpe, 74. The garden is in fact nearly an acre, and it owes its existence to a core group of dedicated gardeners. In 1988, with Baltimore in the throes of the crack cocaine epidemic, a local men’s group cleaned up what had become a dumping ground after the city razed a stretch of crumbling rowhouses. The gardeners then convinced the city to close the alley to traffic. Decades later, it is dotted with trees, including a mulberry that Sharpe likes to nap under, and row upon row of flower, fruit, and vegetable plants.

A few — the “fruit cocktail tree” and the “strawberry tree” — do sound vaguely miraculous. But the biggest miracle is that the garden is here at all.

A chain link fence surrounds the plot, though it does nothing to thwart the rats, the garden’s worst pests. Instead, it was built some years back to deter a two-legged nuisance: drug dealers. “At one time they was running through here with police chasing ‘em,” Sharpe says. “Now they ain’t got time to go over the fence. They go around it.”

Sharpe joined the farm in 1989, and as founding members passed away or began to garden less, he became its self-appointed manager. He — like famous Milwaukee urban farmer Will Allen — grew up on a farm, in his case in rural Virginia. “During the summer, grandma got us up at 6 a.m. and gave us a hoe or a shovel,” Sharpe says. “We’d go out there and cut the rows, put the seed, put fertilizer down.”

Health problems have kept him from retiring to his ancestral home, so Sharpe has done the next best thing: create an urban facsimile. “It keeps me busy,” he says simply.

In Baltimore, at least, his work fills a unique niche. Sharpe and his fellow green thumbs — there are about 10 — grow much more food than they can eat, so roughly half of the produce goes to local soup kitchens and neighborhood residents. (Sharpe also plants string beans outside the fence for passersby to snack on.) Moveable Feast, a local organization that helps homebound HIV/AIDS patients, has a plot here, as does a neighborhood Baptist church.

Buy-in from organizations like these will likely help the garden to survive in the future, as will participation by younger generations. Anita Stewart-Hammerer’s children have been gardening at Duncan Street for five years, since they were 5 and 8 years old, respectively. “I met Mr. Sharpe at the garden and we hit it off,” Stewart-Hammerer says. She worked in community development for a local organization at the time. “He said to me, ‘I’m gonna make a farmer out of you.’” Stewart-Hammerer is now Sharpe’s right-hand woman, responsible for the paperwork — applying for grants, soliciting donations — that keeps the gardeners in mulch, tools, seed, and plants. (It costs all of $20 to rent a plot for a year.)

Devoted gardeners and some nonprofit support have sustained Duncan Street over the years, but until recently it was living on borrowed time: There was nothing stopping the city from selling the land and evicting the gardeners. Then, in 2010, Baltimore Green Space, a local land trust, purchased the garden from the city for $1 per lot. The trust — which owns three other spaces, including a horseshoe pit — protects the garden from the vagaries of absentee landlords, developers, and the city, if not the ills of the neighborhood.

Land insecurity is a perennial (ahem) problem for urban gardeners. In 2006, after more than a decade, one of the largest urban farms in the country, South Central Farm in industrial Los Angeles, was bulldozed by a developer who wanted to build a warehouse there. Sharpe gazes out over the many species he favors that take years to produce: figs, asparagus, apples, grapes. “We don’t have to worry about that anymore,” he says.

“It’s a much easier sell to a city to say ‘It’s a win win, just give it to us for a dollar,’” says Baltimore Green Space founder and Executive Director Miriam Avins. “Instead of looking at, you’re not going to be getting taxes from this piece of land, think about how it improves property values around it.”

That could be one of the ironies here: Some research has shown that community gardens improve property values [PDF] and lower crime rates, which could, paradoxically, lead to development.

The land trust will be there to protect the garden should that happen, however, and it seems like a distant threat in this stretch of East Baltimore. In any case, Avins says, community gardens like Duncan Street often serve as an organic (a-a-ahem) remedy for a problem that should never have existed. “A lot of our neighborhoods don’t have green space,” she says. “It’s kind of like people are retrofitting their neighborhoods with what should have been there.”

Though there’s always plenty of work to do at Duncan Street, that hasn’t stopped Lewis Sharpe from hatching grander plans. He has adopted at least a dozen neighboring lots from the city — under the program, residents steward a piece of land for a limited time — in order to make sure the grass is mowed and litter picked up. And he’s gardening another swathe of vacant land that borders Duncan Street. As he says of his love for watermelons, “I don’t like a little bit of something. I like a lot.”

Filed under: Cities, Food

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On the equinox, March 20, a mostly forgotten sliver of a city neighborhood, where Goldeneyes and Coots fly low and fast along the river, the stalks of last season’s brush still steeped in snow, hummed with the celebration of the season’s unfolding.

They gathered along the water’s banks, cutting back old growth, repairing paths and railings fashioned from tree branches. And when the day’s labor was done, the local chorus, calling themselves the Bullfrogs, sang songs bidding farewell to winter with a rousing cheer to spring.

This is life among the Riverbank Neighbors, ages 0 to 90, so named because of their close proximity to the once-shunned North Branch of the Chicago River and the life they’ve built around it. In one breath, they are both a throwback and the future, recalling a time when community thrived, often centered around the local landscape. Their recapture of life writ small and meaningful makes the art of porch sitting seem regal, a wooden step, a throne.

After his mother slipped down the muddy bank during a walk in 1994, Pete Leki took to clearing the thicket of weeds and gnarly trees hiding the ribbon of water long shunned because of its stink and ugliness. It was as if a curtain lifted — Well what have we here! — and for the first time, this mix of working class and upwardly mobile neighbors saw light bounce off the river.

Leki, an elementary school science teacher whose house is a mere stone’s throw from the river, built steps from discarded concrete and flagstone, fashioning railings from old tree branches. He posted bills about brush clearing around the neighborhood. A few turned into many. Together they shored up the bank, terracing the new soil to prevent erosion. Naming themselves Riverbank Neighbors, they began celebrating a day’s work with potlucks along the bank. Afterward, the Bullfrogs would sing a cappella — a bit of The Talking Heads or Sly and the Family Stone.

Old brush was replaced with native plants and trees: hazelnut and American plum, blue fruited dogwood, button bush. Rows of gooseberry bushes now yield fruit for pies and jams. Beavers have returned to the water, along with turtles and fish. Fox and Black-crowned Night Herons, Red-breasted Grosbeaks and Great Horned Owls. Each house, it seems, has a canoe or kayak.

Alan Ehrenhalt, author of The Lost City, a study on the decline of communities in the U.S., says Riverbank Neighbors reflects a shift. Nature — parks and forests, farms and gardens — historically have been at the core of community. Today’s environmental concerns, such as climate change and mass extinction, increase the desire for people to live in more tightly knit communities. The swelling use of social media, he adds, is actually drawing people closer to where they want to meet in person.

In Chicago, the Riverbank Neighbors have set up a system of borrow and barter as a means to stay out of the big box stores. And they’ve created a fun, illustrated guide to keep them off the marketer’s map, titled How to Disappear.

Fridays mark the Walk Around, when many Riverbank Neighbors open their homes at the dinner hour and are visited by other neighbors who make their way from house to house, eating a bit of the meal, often grown in their own gardens, at every stop. There’s a requirement, however, that before moving on to the next home, guests and hosts must throw on some music and dance. Leki says the most recent tunes included some hip-hop, a Cajun waltz, and bits of classic rock.

On the first weekend day following an equinox, neighbors will gather and form a circle either outside or in someone’s house, and a member from each family tells what has transpired in their lives over the closing season — deaths, joy, achievements, birth. They will also go over their precise river management goals for the seasons ahead, detailing work to be done throughout the year.

At Waters Elementary School, where Leki teaches, the river’s history is taught in second and sixth grades and it includes study along its banks. Recently, the students met cellist Yo-Yo Ma, as part of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Rivers Festival, in which they celebrate great musical works centered around rivers. The kids sang a song they wrote about the river:

Long time ago, I think,
Indian kids could swim and drink
Now when kids come down to play,
A sign there says to stay away….

Rivers, the CSO stresses, are “forever intertwined with our past, present and future.”

The story of a day when Leki stood on the school roof, his students fanned out below, is now part of neighborhood history. With maps at his feet detailing the original location where the Chicago River once flowed, he directed students on the asphalt below. One by one, they lay colored circles on the blacktop, creating a colorful path where the ribbon of water used to be.

Word of the Riverbank Neighbors has spread. It’s common, Leki says, for people from outside of the hood to show up at a river event and say, “We’re not from the neighborhood, but we’d like to join in.” And they’re welcomed. People are hungry for community, Leki explains. “We no longer value the idea of ‘staying.’ Transiency has become the norm,” he says. “So we’re happy when they come to visit.”

Filed under: Cities, Living

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There is one thing no gardener wants to hear: “Don’t plant this spring.” But that’s the word Angela Stanbery-Ebner received in February while plotting out the year’s crops at her garden in urban Cincinnati. No tomatoes this year, no chard, no selling at the farmers market, no community-supported agriculture operation run by neighborhood youth for low-income families.

Stanbery-Ebner’s garden, known as the Eco Garden, isn’t your standard backyard fare. It’s an agricultural oasis in a Cincinnati neighborhood better known for its crime than its heirloom carrots. Unfortunately for the Eco Garden, it doesn’t own the land on which it sits, the city does. This year, as part of its initiative to encourage urban development — known as CitiRama — the city started eyeing it for housing.

When the gardeners got the news, “we were basically devastated,” Stanbery-Ebner says. Out went the emails, an online petition, and calls to the city council in an effort to save one of the most vibrant corners of a rough-around-the-edges neighborhood.

The Eco Garden had been operating since 1998 in a neighborhood called Over the Rhine — the Rhine being a nickname for the canal separating the neighborhood from downtown Cincinnati. The area is home to historic buildings, a farmers market, breweries, and in 2006 boasted the highest crime rate in the city, according to city council documents. In the garden, local kids learned to grow food, manage a community-supported agriculture operation, and handle customer accounts.

Angela Stanbery-Ebner and her husband Luke got involved the educational programs in 2004, fresh out of art school at the University of Cincinnati. Six years later, when the nonprofit managing the garden folded, the couple took over, rolling it into their own nonprofit called Permaganic in a nearly seamless transition. “We were basically able to shut down operations for the month of August, then some of the kids came right back to the program again,” Stanbery-Ebner says triumphantly.

“I just love it,” says Janice Williams, a nearby resident. “When you walk past it, you see all these beautiful foods.” Williams’ grandson Robert started interning at the garden a few years ago and immediately took to it. “We call him the ‘tiller of the ground’ because he has such a knack for growing things,” she says.

Now Robert has a garden at home, too. He rises early to harvest and get produce ready to sell at the farmers market. The fresh food they have at home is a big bonus, says his grandmother, and now Robert, who is 18, is taking his 12-year-old sister, Mary, to the garden as well. She says she loves growing strawberries and kale. The only downside to gardening? “Getting dirty,” she says — “but it’s worth it.”

As the city’s development plan was originally proposed to the Ebners, all that would have been lost. You don’t just pick up 15 years of soil development — an entire miniature agricultural ecosystem — and plop it down in a new spot. Stanbery-Ebner notes that Permaganic also had grants and donations for garden improvements scheduled for 2013.

It’s not that the Ebners are opposed to urban development, Stanbery-Ebner says. But some development “doesn’t always match with the values of the existing community.”

Her flood of emails to supporters got results. She showed up at a city council committee meeting with 22 supporters and an online petition hit 292 signatures. “Really quickly, what we saw — which was pretty amazing to us, we’ve never spent time on promotions — immediately people started pulling together,” she says.

Permaganic found a champion in councilmember Laure Quinlivan. Quinlivan filed a motion with the city arguing that “as the longest-running urban agriculture program in Cincinnati, Eco Garden has substantially added to the quality of life in Over the Rhine by expanding residents’ access to fresh local produce, and providing training programs for hundreds of local teenagers.” Quinlivan’s motion required that the Eco Garden be incorporated into future development on the site and also asked the city to find an additional place where the garden might expand.

Quinlivan says that, like Stanbery-Ebner, she’s not opposed to housing development in the urban core. She just didn’t feel that the CitiRama backers were considering all the impacts of their proposal. “The smartest thing we can do is incorporate green [within city development],” she says.

On March 12, the city council’s Livable Communities committee voted with Quinlivan’s motion. And this week, Stanbery-Ebner says she received notice that the CitiRama would be held on another plot of land instead.

So planting begins this spring as planned. Stanbery-Ebner says this year’s crops include greens, herbs, several varieties of heirloom tomatoes, and a host of other fruits and veggies. The interns can return, the shoots can sprout, the tomatoes can grow — and this time, Over the Rhine is in the news for something other than its crime stats.

Filed under: Cities, Food

View full post on Grist

There is one thing no gardener wants to hear: “Don’t plant this spring.” But that’s the word Angela Stanbery-Ebner received in February while plotting out the year’s crops at her garden in urban Cincinnati. No tomatoes this year, no chard, no selling at the farmers market, no community supported agriculture operation run by neighborhood youth for low-income families.

Stanbery-Ebner’s garden, known as the Eco Garden, isn’t your standard backyard fare. It’s an agricultural oasis in a Cincinnati neighborhood better known for its crime than its heirloom carrots. Unfortunately for the Eco Garden, it doesn’t own the land on which it sits, the city does. This year, as part of its initiative to encourage urban development – known as CitiRama – the city started eyeing it for housing.

When the gardeners got the news, “we were basically devastated,” Stanbery-Ebner says. Out went the emails, an online petition, and calls to the city council in an effort to save one of the most vibrant corners of a rough-around-the-edges neighborhood.

The Eco Garden had been operating since 1998 in a neighborhood called Over the Rhine — the Rhine being a nickname for the canal separating the neighborhood from downtown Cincinnati. The area is home to historic buildings, a farmers market, breweries, and in 2006 boasted the highest crime rate in the city, according to city council documents. In the garden, local kids learned to grow food, manage a community-supported agriculture operation, and handle customer accounts.

Angela Stanbery-Ebner and her husband Luke got involved the educational programs in 2004, fresh out of art school at the University of Cincinnati. Six years later, when the nonprofit managing the garden folded, the couple took over, rolling it into their own nonprofit called Permaganic in a nearly seamless transition. “We were basically able to shut down operations for the month of August, then some of the kids came right back to the program again,” Stanbery-Ebner says triumphantly.

“I just love it,” says Janice Williams, a nearby resident. “When you walk past it, you see all these beautiful foods.” Williams’ grandson Robert started interning at the garden a few years ago and immediately took to it. “We call him the ‘tiller of the ground’ because he has such a knack for growing things,” she says.

Now Robert has a garden at home, too. He rises early to harvest and get produce ready to sell at the farmers market. The fresh food they have at home is a big bonus, says his grandmother, and now Robert, who is 18, is taking his 12-year-old sister, Mary, to the garden as well. She says she loves growing strawberries and kale. The only downside to gardening? “Getting dirty,” she says – “but it’s worth it.”

As the city’s development plan was originally proposed to the Ebners, all that would have been lost. You don’t just pick up 15 years of soil development – an entire miniature agricultural ecosystem – and plop it down in a new spot. Stanbery-Ebner notes that Permaganic also had grants and donations for garden improvements scheduled for 2013.

It’s not that the Ebners are opposed to urban development, Stanbery-Ebner says. But some development “doesn’t always match with the values of the existing community.”

Her flood of emails to supporters got results. She showed up at a city council committee meeting with 22 supporters and an online petition hit 292 signatures. “Really quickly, what we saw – which was pretty amazing to us, we’ve never spent time on promotions – immediately people started pulling together,” she says.

Permaganic found a champion in councilmember Laure Quinlivan. Quinlivan filed a motion with the city arguing that “As the longest-running urban agriculture program in Cincinnati, Eco Garden has substantially added to the quality of life in Over the Rhine by expanding residents’ access to fresh local produce, and providing training programs for hundreds of local teenagers.” Quinlivan’s motion required that the Eco Garden be incorporated into future development on the site and also asked the city to find an additional place where the garden might expand.

Quinlivan says that, like Stanbery-Ebner, she’s not opposed to housing development in the urban core. She just didn’t feel that the CitiRama backers were considering all the impacts of their proposal. “The smartest thing we can do is incorporate green [within city development],” she says.

On March 12, the city council’s Livable Communities committee voted with Quinlivan’s motion. And this week, Stanbery-Ebner says she received notice that the CitiRama would be held on another plot of land instead.

So planting begins this spring as planned. Stanbery-Ebner says this year’s crops include greens, herbs, several varieties of heirloom tomatoes, and a host of other fruits and veggies. The interns can return, the shoots can sprout, the tomatoes can grow – and this time, Over the Rhine is in the news for something other than its crime stats.

Filed under: Cities, Food

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A new, seven-acre urban “accelerator farm” taking root on Chicago’s south side will soon grow one of the Windy City’s most needed crops: farmers.

Called South Chicago Farm, it will be the seeding ground for Farmers for Chicago, a recruiting program announced today by Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Growing Power, the Milwaukee-based urban farming organization founded by MacArthur Award-winning urban ag luminary Will Allen. The three-year, tuition-based farm becomes part of the city’s new “incubator network” through which the city is making land available for farmer training. Emanuel, who unveils the network plan today, says getting farmers on the land is the next big step toward building a strong, local agriculture system.

The farm site, located across the street from a former steel plant, includes walking trails and an adjacent plot that will hold community gardens for 100 local families overseen by Growing Power.

Erika Allen, Chicago and national projects director for Growing Power (and Will Allen’s daughther), says that while the city is making huge advances in developing urban agriculture, there simply aren’t enough farmers to grow the food that Chicago needs. Detroit, Cleveland, New York, and other cities that are working to build local food systems are also feeling the farmer drought.

Growing Power has been a leader in the urban ag movement nationally and operates eight farms throughout Chicago. Erika Allen says 6 to 12 farmers will be chosen for the program, with farming beginning on small parcels as early as May. When in full operation, Farmers for Chicago will school 100 farmers annually.

To start, Farmers for Chicago will only take applicants with prior farmer training who submit a business plan. The program will help these emerging growers launch their own businesses by providing not just the land, but also technical assistance, shared tools, seeds, and access to local markets. Allen says the program provides participants with three years of support, earned income, and rights to lease and farm the land long-term.

Tuition will go toward operating and lease costs. Allen estimates tuition will be $200 a month during the first year, then dropping as they advance in the program. Scholarship funds will eventually be available for economically challenged students. Produce grown at the site will help bring fresh food to local neighborhoods as well as small, local retailers moving into the healthy food arena.

Training and incubator farms will further advance Chicago’s goals for urban agriculture by not only creating a local food supply, but they will also teach marketable job skills including hoop house construction, food processing, compost production, and both retail and wholesale sales. Via the incubator network, farmers will be able to graduate to city-owned land, helping to make use of hundreds of vacant lots created by disinvestment and economic blight.

The city owns 15,000 vacant city lots. However, it takes the work of one farmer to care for a quarter acre of land. And it costs the city $250,000 to get a half acre of city land prepared to farm. The cost includes new soil, compost, fencing, and adding a water supply.

The training and incubator network will be made up of more than 15 acres of land throughout the city, including the new South Chicago farm and established urban farms run by Angelic Organics, Growing Home, Heartland Human Care Services, the Washington Park Consortium and the Chicago Botanic Garden. Several more will be added next year. Heartland is currently developing the 2.6-acre Chicago FarmWorks in Garfield Park, a work-training farm creating jobs in urban agriculture. The Chicago Botanic Garden, through its Windy City Harvest system, is preparing the new 1.7-acre Legends Farm, also an incubator, in the city’s Grand Boulevard/Grand Crossing neighborhood.

The network further deepens the city’s commitment to urban agriculture and providing healthy food for residents. In 2011, a new urban agriculture ordinance went on the books and late last year, Emaneul announced the formation of an urban farm district on the city’s south side. Last month he set an agenda to get Chicagoans eat healthier.

Peter Strazzabosco, deputy commissioner for the Chicago Department of Housing and Economic Development, says no other city in the country is working so hard to provide city-owned lots for farming use. Last November, the city announced the formation of a large, South Side urban ag district, making it one of the most comprehensive plans in the country.

The mayor’s support for farming in Chicago is creating not only awareness among residents about healthy eating and possible new job growth areas, it is also garnering national attention. What sets Chicago apart, says Dave Snyder, program manager at Chicago FarmWorks, is the will behind its urban ag movement.

“It has cultural support from the mayor all the way down to tiny little block clubs,” Snyder says. “But what people don’t realize is that Chicago has a long, long history of both gardens and farms within the city. We had the Slum Busters (south side neighbors who planted gardens as a way to beautify their communities) of the ’80s and 90s who were doing this thing before anyone even thought of it. And it underpins the culture we have today.”

Of Chicago’s evolution into urban farming, Snyder says the transformation is casting the city in a different light.

“To be certain, Chicago is going to be a very large urban ag hub. I can’t think of another place where city government is turning over land for farming,” Snyder says. “The commitment is real and it’s a thriving and diverse scene. Chicago has this reputation of being segregated. Yet, last week I went to a community garden summit and when I walked in there was the most diverse group of people you could ever imagine.”

Filed under: Cities, Food

View full post on Grist

A new, seven-acre urban “accelerator farm” taking root on Chicago’s south side will soon grow one of the Windy City’s most needed crops: farmers.

Called South Chicago Farm, it will be the seeding ground for Farmers for Chicago, a recruiting program announced today by Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Growing Power, the Milwaukee-based urban farming organization founded by MacArthur Award-winning urban ag luminary Will Allen. The three-year, tuition-based farm becomes part of the city’s new “incubator network” through which the city is making land available for farmer training. Emanuel, who unveils the network plan today, says getting farmers on the land is the next big step toward building a strong, local agriculture system.

The farm site, located across the street from a former steel plant, includes walking trails and an adjacent plot that will hold community gardens for 100 local families overseen by Growing Power.

Erika Allen, Chicago and national projects director for Growing Power (and Will Allen’s daughther), says that while the city is making huge advances in developing urban agriculture, there simply aren’t enough farmers to grow the food that Chicago needs. Detroit, Cleveland, New York, and other cities that are working to build local food systems are also feeling the farmer drought.

Growing Power has been a leader in the urban ag movement nationally and operates eight farms throughout Chicago. Erika Allen says 6 to 12 farmers will be chosen for the program, with farming beginning on small parcels as early as May. When in full operation, Farmers for Chicago will school 100 farmers annually.

To start, Farmers for Chicago will only take applicants with prior farmer training who submit a business plan. The program will help these emerging growers launch their own businesses by providing not just the land, but also technical assistance, shared tools, seeds, and access to local markets. Allen says the program provides participants with three years of support, earned income, and rights to lease and farm the land long-term.

Tuition will go toward operating and lease costs. Allen estimates tuition will be $200 a month during the first year, then dropping as they advance in the program. Scholarship funds will eventually be available for economically challenged students. Produce grown at the site will help bring fresh food to local neighborhoods as well as small, local retailers moving into the healthy food arena.

Training and incubator farms will further advance Chicago’s goals for urban agriculture by not only creating a local food supply, but they will also teach marketable job skills including hoop house construction, food processing, compost production, and both retail and wholesale sales. Via the incubator network, farmers will be able to graduate to city-owned land, helping to make use of hundreds of vacant lots created by disinvestment and economic blight.

The city owns 15,000 vacant city lots. However, it takes the work of one farmer to care for a quarter acre of land. And it costs the city $250,000 to get a half acre of city land prepared to farm. The cost includes new soil, compost, fencing, and adding a water supply.

The training and incubator network will be made up of more than 15 acres of land throughout the city, including the new South Chicago farm and established urban farms run by Angelic Organics, Growing Home, Heartland Human Care Services, the Washington Park Consortium and the Chicago Botanic Garden. Several more will be added next year. Heartland is currently developing the 2.6-acre Chicago FarmWorks in Garfield Park, a work-training farm creating jobs in urban agriculture. The Chicago Botanic Garden, through its Windy City Harvest system, is preparing the new 1.7-acre Legends Farm, also an incubator, in the city’s Grand Boulevard/Grand Crossing neighborhood.

The network further deepens the city’s commitment to urban agriculture and providing healthy food for residents. In 2011, a new urban agriculture ordinance went on the books and late last year, Emaneul announced the formation of an urban farm district on the city’s south side. Last month he set an agenda to get Chicagoans eat healthier.

Peter Strazzabosco, deputy commissioner for the Chicago Department of Housing and Economic Development, says no other city in the country is working so hard to provide city-owned lots for farming use. Last November, the city announced the formation of a large, South Side urban ag district, making it one of the most comprehensive plans in the country.

The mayor’s support for farming in Chicago is creating not only awareness among residents about healthy eating and possible new job growth areas, it is also garnering national attention. What sets Chicago apart, says Dave Snyder, program manager at Chicago FarmWorks, is the will behind its urban ag movement.

“It has cultural support from the mayor all the way down to tiny little block clubs,” Snyder says. “But what people don’t realize is that Chicago has a long, long history of both gardens and farms within the city. We had the Slum Busters (south side neighbors who planted gardens as a way to beautify their communities) of the ’80s and 90s who were doing this thing before anyone even thought of it. And it underpins the culture we have today.”

Of Chicago’s evolution into urban farming, Snyder says the transformation is casting the city in a different light.

“To be certain, Chicago is going to be a very large urban ag hub. I can’t think of another place where city government is turning over land for farming,” Snyder says. “The commitment is real and it’s a thriving and diverse scene. Chicago has this reputation of being segregated. Yet, last week I went to a community garden summit and when I walked in there was the most diverse group of people you could ever imagine.”

Filed under: Cities, Food

View full post on Grist

Last year, the New York Times put Oakland at No. 5 on its list of “the 45 places to go in 2012,” citing the city’s bars, restaurants, art, and music. The Huffington Post called the city “the coolest new kid in the country.” City officials sent out a press release and made a banner for City Hall celebrating these new honors.

“Oakland is on the rise as a national leader in green building, technology, and international trade. And we’re a nationally acclaimed center for dining, arts, and entertainment,” Mayor Jean Quan said last May, on the occasion of the city’s 160th birthday. “It is why those of us who live here, love our city.”

Notably missing from the city’s PR materials was the fact that Oakland hit No. 5 in another national ranking last year: the FBI’s list of the most violent cities. Oakland saw 131 murders in 2012, a 22 percent increase from the previous year, and a 43 percent rise in burglaries.

While the rest of California is rebounding from the recession, Oakland is struggling with crime, mismanagement, debt, and continued fallout from the mortgage crisis. The city’s police department is under federal monitoring, and millions spent on expensive consultants, most recently former LAPD and NYPD police chief Bill Bratton, have done little to challenge the status quo.

And yet many in Oakland’s growing “creative class” are in denial. Asked to comment about the problems for a recent story in Bloomberg, Doug Leeds, CEO of Ask.com, which moved to Oakland in 2004, was dismissive:

“We certainly read the stories and we see the figures increasing, but on a daily basis, we come to work and we don’t feel the impact of it,” Leeds said. “We don’t see crime tape on the streets, we don’t see chalk outlines of people, there aren’t bullet noises.”

That’s nice for Leeds, but, though he apparently doesn’t see it, Oakland is also in the midst of a housing, education, and employment crisis. It’s going to be hard to solve these problems if the new, well-to-do residents don’t acknowledge they exist, and even contribute to making them worse.

Leeds and other new residents don’t generally feel the impact of crime and other problems because most of the victims are poor people of color in the ’hoods. Meanwhile, the new young tech workers enjoy the bars, restaurants, and galleries, many of them rising up right around Ask.com’s downtown HQ. If the influx hasn’t solved Oakland’s problems, it has at least displaced them to some extent.

But while companies like Ask.com have brought some jobs and downtown revitalization to Oakland, tech workers priced out of San Francisco and real estate speculators helped drive an approximately 20 percent increase in average apartment rental costs for large multi-unit buildings between 2011 and 2012.

The housing shortage is particularly intractable because, for all its talk of being progressive, sustainable, and green, much of Oakland’s established political machine is invested in the status quo. During his stint as mayor of Oakland from 1999-2007, California Gov. Jerry Brown pushed to bring 10,000 new residents — young professionals, mainly – to the downtown area by building new housing and apartments. He met fierce opposition from property owners and preservation advocates who argued that “Manhattan-like” buildings — even four- and five-story ones — would obstruct views and throw shadows.

At a housing conference in Oakland last week, Brown described the scene: “Until I was in local government, I’d never confronted the phenomenon of ‘not in my backyard,’” Brown said. “It’s amazing that people show up at City Hall and protest every single project. They bring in hundreds of people and because City Hall only has a certain capacity, they fill it up. I would marvel at those meetings; they were a micro universe of unreality.”

Brown was building for the creative class, not poor Oaklanders, but the reaction to his new downtown condos may well have screwed everybody. After Brown’s departure, Oakland downzoned large portions of its downtown area and transportation corridors, outlawing just the kind of dense, transit-friendly development that might have helped assuage the housing crisis at a critical time — and the kind of “green building” the mayor champions.

“People mostly agree on the nice things they’d like to see happen to Oakland. But folks aren’t willing to extend enough trust to make it happen,” Oakland planner Chris Kidd told me. “Call it the lingering legacy of Urban Renewal. Nobody has been able to cobble together a comprehensive, positive viewpoint about what infill urbanism can do for Oakland.”

These problems are hardly specific to Oakland. They’re the product of decades of national and state policy and popular neglect. But it’s telling that a city that seems like it should be getting this right — a place dominated by progressive politics and a strong sustainability ethos — is getting it so wrong.

So what is there to do? And where does the responsibility for a city lie? An influx of the creative class doesn’t necessarily create an urban renaissance, but it doesn’t need to be an urban disaster, either.

“These newly arriving creatives and young professionals have a right to be here and an influx of capital in a poor city shouldn’t be spat upon,” says Lukas Brekke-Miesner, program coordinator for the youth development organization Oakland Kids First. “That said, I believe firmly in a brand of citizenship that asks folks to invest in a community, to earn the privileges and freedoms that the community affords. In Oakland, that means helping us transform the devastating effects of violence, poverty, and education, without pushing people out to do so.”

In the wake of a recent murder during a monthly downtown art fair, Brekke-Miesner helped to launch a project called “Respect Our City.” Organizers are selling $10 T-shirts emblazoned with the project’s slogan in glow-in-the-dark ink for prime nighttime visibility. Each sale ensures that a young Oaklander receives a free one if he or she signs a pledge to be peaceful and positive.

“Our goal here is to spread positive messaging that focuses on our collective ownership of this city, and therefore our responsibility to care for it,” says Brekke-Miesner. ”These steps are just the beginning of larger efforts we are organizing to bring arts [to poorer neighborhoods] east of the lake, create jobs for youth, and ensure that youth are stakeholders in all these efforts.”

And what could the techies, designers, and academics do to support this work? “If the creative class leveraged their social capital to help us deal with these issues, then I think you could make a strong case for this demographic being the lifeblood of the city,” Brekke-Miesner told me. “As it is, I think much of their potential influence is wasted.”

Perhaps it is idealistic to think that these new refugees from San Francisco and Silicon Valley will take up with the longtime locals and fight for affordable housing, better schools, job training, and living wages. But what’s the alternative? As the recent shooting demonstrates, the creative class can’t paint over these entrenched problems, nor can it wall itself off from the city surrounding it.

True community revitalization for Oakland will be led by those who see the problems, who hear the gunfire, and by those who demand not only a better life for themselves, but for their neighbors, too.

Filed under: Cities

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Urban Adamah/Berkeley, CA

Urban Adamah, based in Berkeley, CA, is a three-month intensive residential leadership training program for young adults ages 21-31, that integrates urban organic farming, social justice work and progressive Jewish living and learning. Twelve Urban Adamah Fellows are selected each season to operate an organic farm and educational center, intern with community organizations addressing issues at the intersection of poverty, food security and environmental stewardship, and learn an approach to Jewish tradition that opens the heart and builds joyful community. Applicants do not need any farming for Jewish knowledge to participate. Fellows come from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences. We are looking for individuals who are most likely to leverage the gifts of the program to make positive change in their own lives and in the world.

Spring 2013: March 3 — May 27
Summer 2013: June 9 — Aug 30
Fall 2013: Sept 9 — Nov 22

Admissions to the fellowship are rolling. Applications will be reviewed as soon as they are complete. Please visit our website for more information and to fill out an application.

To apply: http://urbanadamah.org/…fellowship/how-to-apply/
For more information: http://urbanadamah.org/

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Shortly after being nominated to one of the top posts in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in 2009, Ron Sims declared, “President Obama has … challenged his Cabinet to prepare for the age of global warming. Success can only come if we transform our major metropolitan areas.”

Ah, those were the days! The following year, the Tea Party would sweep into the House of Representatives. In 2011, Sims, who held a major elected role in the Seattle metro area before his stint in D.C., would retire to Washington state, missing his family and frustrated with the slow pace of change in the nation’s capital.

Today, roughly two years after his return to the West Coast, Sims says he sees progress. Before he went to HUD, as the county executive of King County, Wash., he led the effort to prepare the region for the unavoidable impacts of global warming and worked to weave public health concerns into planning decisions. “We realized that we could predict life outcomes of children, health outcomes of adults, by the zip code they live in,” he says. “If you have a park a quarter mile from your home, your children are not going to be obese. If it’s a half mile away, you begin to see the early signs. But if a park is a mile or more away from a residence, obesity will be a problem. How a neighborhood is designed determines health outcomes.”

As deputy secretary of HUD, responsible for the agency’s day-to-day operations, he worked to bring this awareness to decisions at the federal level, arguing for housing, transportation, and environmental policies that emphasized dense, walk- and bike-friendly development rather than car-centric sprawl. And while these efforts hit roadblock after roadblock, Sims says there has been a shift in thinking in Washington, D.C. That, combined with economic and environmental realities, he says, is reshaping American cities.

Here, Sims talks about his work in Washington, D.C., how the bill is coming due for suburban sprawl, and why he believes we may see riots in inner cities.

Q. How much progress has President Obama been able to make on urban policy issues, given the roadblocks put up by Republicans in Congress?

A. There’s a lot of silo breaking. For example, the collaboration between the EPA, the U.S. Department of Transportation, and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Republicans in the House have attempted to put barriers to that, but you know, the fact is, the staff still meet, so there’s a culture created among how you look at urban areas.

Q. Why is this kind of collaboration so important?

A. If you look at default rates [on home loans], the biggest cause for a default in the United States was transportation costs. It often amounted to 42 percent of [the household’s] income. It was higher than the mortgage cost, which was 34 percent of income. And then you add energy cost, which varied often between 25 to 28 percent. So all you had to do was have one person [in the household] go half time [from a full-time job], and it was over.

We’ve got to look at communities and look at, how do we have people working more closely to their homes, and how do you put shopping and other things closer to people’s homes? Because people were driving distances for soccer games, distances to shop, distances to work, and you’re basically burning up a lot of money.

Now there’s another factor. From a public health aspect, we can tell you that if you’re in a car with a one-hour commute — one hour in, one hour out — we can tell you what your heart-attack risk is, based upon your race. And it’s really high no matter what race you are, right? Cause it’s not healthy. There’s an absolutely predictable health consequence.

Q. One of the main ways the federal government can affect these types of transportation and health costs is through transportation policy — but Republicans seem bent on keeping the focus on highways rather than improving mass transit or walking and biking infrastructure.

A. HUD and EPA, working with USDOT and the departments of Agriculture and Interior, worked in a collaborative process on the transportation bill. A lot of that got taken out [of the bill in Congress]. But you can’t build a modern transportation infrastructure using an old model. It just doesn’t work. You simply are not gonna build any more highways in major metropolitan areas because they become cost-prohibitive. You can’t tear out hospitals and schools and neighborhoods in order to expand a freeway.

The reliance on the gas tax is also part of the discussions. I have a hybrid, right? It gets 42.8 miles to the gallon. So I get to use roads much more cheaply than my son, who’s in a Highlander that gets 28 miles per gallon. My next cars, though, will either be electric or even more fuel-efficient, as will his. So that gas tax dives. The only solution is going to be a toll or another mechanism. [Transportation Secretary] Ray LaHood talked about actual miles driven — requiring locators on cars and seeing what roads I’m on and what time of day, and have that as a [basis of] payment.

Q. So you and I look at that and we see a system that will attach the true costs to driving and sprawl. But there are some who see tolls and per-mile fees as part of the “war on the suburbs.”

A. Well it’s not a war on suburbs. You know, here’s what happens. We had dense cities, and people said, “I want a better quality of life so I’m moving to the suburbs.” But every time we move away, growth never pays for itself. When you look at the infrastructure — whether it’s for water or for roads, electricity, police, fire — all that stuff costs money. So it is subsidized by areas that already have their infrastructure put in place. And that’s how most suburbs grew. Suburbs had free lunches. And what’s happened now is, the true bill for that is now arriving.

So you look at a place like Washington, D.C., where people tended to move farther and farther and farther away. You take a look at those highways, and go wow, when the true bill comes, this is gonna be an ouch. So people will begin to move into the city, because at least they’ll be home at a reasonable time. Their jobs will be nearby. And people will begin to say, “My life is better. I’m not on the highway.”

Q. We’ve seen some of this — people moving into downtown areas — but many American cities are in rough shape. You’ve even mentioned the possibility of riots.

A. Oh, I think they’re gonna happen. It’s unavoidable.

Q. What do you see out there that makes you think riots are inevitable?

A. We have the largest group of people who are chronically unemployed for a longer period of time than we’ve ever had in our history. Unemployment hit communities of color the second year of President [George W.] Bush’s administration. And we have never in this country faced the issues. You can only hang so long — “What are you doin’ today, man?” “Just hangin’.”

These riots will occur not because of something the president’s gonna do in terms of direct policy. It’s gonna be something that all of a sudden fires up people in a big, big way. It’s gonna be a law-enforcement issue, probably, and then, boom, it’ll be the match on the flammable substances.

Q. Riots in 1968 were the beginning of the end for cities like Baltimore. Anyone who could get out of the city did. If we do see riots again, what happens then?

A. You want to avoid those, because there’s no good side to them. You can’t have cities that look uninhabitable, undesirable — you just can’t.

Q. If you could push one policy initiative in the next two to four years to make a difference for America’s cities, what would it be?

A. Chronic unemployment — that’s gonna be really important. Dealing with climate change and adaptation from an urban level is gonna be critically important. I’d probably choose those two first. There’s ways to implement both: If a city’s going to adapt, it’s gonna rebuild itself or redesign itself.

These look like challenges that are overwhelming. They’re not. They’re opportunities — opportunities to be smarter than ever. And urban mayors, urban electeds, people living in urban areas, and the business community in those urban areas are gonna have to be out of their silos, talking about common visions and purposes, and driving the change. I think we can do that.

Filed under: Cities, Politics

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Urban Adamah/Berkeley, CA

Hello again,
I work with this amazing program and am so excited to announce that we are now accepting applications for all of our 2013 Fellowships!
Please take a peak at the details bellow. And of course, please pass it on to your friends too! Young farmers are everywhere!

Jewish Urban Farming Fellowship

Urban Adamah, based in Berkeley, CA, is a three-month intensive residential leadership training program for young adults ages 21-31, that integrates urban organic farming, social justice work and progressive Jewish living and learning. Twelve Urban Adamah Fellows are selected each season to operate an organic farm and educational center, intern with community organizations addressing issues at the intersection of poverty, food security and environmental stewardship, and learn an approach to Jewish tradition that opens the heart and builds joyful community. Applicants do not need any farming for Jewish knowledge to participate. Fellows come from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences. We are looking for individuals who are most likely to leverage the gifts of the program to make positive change in their own lives and in the world.

Spring 2013: March 3 – May 24

Summer 2013: June 9 – Aug 30

Fall 2013: Sept 9 – Nov 29

Admissions to the fellowship are rolling. Applications will be reviewed as soon as they are complete. Please visit our website for more information and to fill out an application.

www.urbanadamah.org

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