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Hall Monitor: Land Plan Part 2 - Urban farmers worried that city's vacant land plan won't meet their needs
This post is part of a series on the Nutter administration's long-awaited and soon-to-be-announced comprehensive policy on how it will dispose of city-owned vacant land.
Hall Monitor: Land Plan Part 2 — Urban farmers worried that city's vacant land plan won't meet their needs
This post is part of a series on the Nutter administration’s long-awaited and soon-to-be-announced comprehensive policy on how it will dispose of city-owned vacant land. Click here for an overview; for more, check back on Naked City and follow Hall Monitor Isaiah Thompson on Twitter.
The city has yet to release its finalized plan for how it will dispose of — sell, give away, lease, etc. — the massive inventory of vacant land it owns. In December, however, the city did circulate a draft proposal (a copy of which City Paper obtained) to various stakeholders that laid out various proposed policies and uses for vacant land — among them “urban gardens” and “community gardens.”
But those mentions didn't do much to convince Philly's urban farmers — in fact, many were left more worried than before.
As we noted in our “Vacant Land Issue” last summer, the relationship between the Nutter administration and urban farmers has been a somewhat-tortured one. On the one hand, Nutter has promoted green space, healthy food access, and the creation of more urban farms on vacant or unused land. On the other hand, the administration has shown a particular reluctance to sell land at reduced prices for farming or grant farmers the long-term leases that urban farmers say they need to succeed and draw investment.
In early December, a draft of the proposed vacant land policy was circulated on the Philadelphia Urban Farmers’ Network (PUFN) list-serv.
While it did mention “urban gardens” and “community gardens,” it make no mention of commercial urban farms, in fact specifying that individual gardeners could use the land only for “non-commercial gardening purposes,” and that community gardens could be used only for “personal or group consumption, donation, or sale that is incidental in nature,” – all of which flew in the face of those seeking to create a business model out of urban agriculture.
That wasn't the end, either: the draft policy said that the required “Urban Garden Agreement” would last just one year at a time, and that the City and the gardener may terminate [the agreement] at any time, with or without cause,” and that the city would “use reasonable efforts to avoid terminating the urban garden agreement between April 1 and November 1.”
Land might be leased for gardening, in other words: but not for commercial use, only for a year at a time, and with no promises that the land wouldn't be taken back should a developer come along — even, perhaps, in the middle of the growing season.
A coalition of urban farming supporters including the Philadelphia Urban Farming Network (PUFN), the Food Organizing Collaborative (FORC), the Philadelphia Food Policy Advisory Council (appointed by Mayor Nutter in 2011), held meetings to collect input.
On December 22, the coalition presented the city with a seven-page list of concerns, among them:
—That “there is a need for a more transparent public process and more community engagement in the development of vacant land policy.”
—That the policy had failed to take into account market farming
— That the city's insistence that gardeners immediately have liability insurance was unrealistic.
— That the city's proposed one-year lease was untenable and that “three years with a three-year renewal option is the absolute minimum lease term appropriate for vegetable production. This takes into account the investment necessary for lot cleanup and clearing, testing for and remediation of toxics, soil building, and infrastructural needs, as well as the time it takes for a project to be sustainable from organizational, financial, and community building standpoints.”
On January 12, the coalition sent another letter.
The Managing Director's Office, did speak with City Paper on Tuesday about the forthcoming vacant land policy — but declined to comment after CP obtained the earlier draft and inquired about various details, including the urban farmers' concerns.
Deputy Managing Director Bridget Collins-Greenwald wrote in an email that “We have no comment at this time as this is not the final policy document.”
Councilwoman Maria Quinones-Sanchez, who has been involved in many discussions of the forthcoming policy, says she simply doesn't know whether or how the language on urban gardening might have changed since she last saw it.
Meanwhile, Amy Laura Cahn, who runs the Garden Justice Legal Initiative out of the Public Interest Law Center, and who was heavily involved in the discussions, says that she's hopeful that the city's taken her coalition's input into consideration in the soon-to-be-unveiled plan — but that all she and the city's budding and would-be urban farmers can do right now is guess, too, and wait.
Of course, by the time they get an answer, it'll may have the mayor's signature on it. And that, they point out, is what worries them.
But whatever plan in unveiled, says Cahn, "In developing, as other cities like Baltimore and Seattle have done, their pilot projects, this is a great opportunity for more public input."
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