Beyond Community Gardens
July 3, 2018 8:08 AM Subscribe
In this excerpt from “The Empty House Next Door,” author Alan Mallach challenges cities to reimagine vacant properties into pocket parks, urban farms and other green space as a permanent commitment to sustainable infrastructure. The Green City
In the Michigan countryside, you see little woodlots here and there in the patchwork of the landscape, and as a kid who grew up in that area I can tell you that most of those pretty little woodlots are there because in this part of the world that is what you get when you don't mow, and those trees are hiding the foundations of old barns and a buncha junk that some farmer threw out, 50 years ago.
Well the vacant lots in Detroit are the same soil and climate and similar past history, as those woodlots in the countryside. The only difference is, they are next to a road instead of out in the back 40.
If they plant some trees that are carefully selected native/hardy/fast growing species, and put down seeds for something besides poison ivy, then they can grow to be little forests, a little quicker and a little more attractively, even if no one maintains them, and little forests are nice, whether or not there are bricks amongst the tree roots. And the new forest will be nicer to live next to in 50 years if it is more maples and elms and locusts, than if it's all boxelder and chokecherry and tree of heaven. Invest a little in cleanup and/or maintenance if they can, but even if they can't, they can do a little better and over time nature will take over a lot.
Is it perfect? No. But it doesn't take a lot of investment to have something that will get nicer instead of ickier.
posted by elizilla at 9:46 AM on July 3, 2018 [8 favorites]
Well the vacant lots in Detroit are the same soil and climate and similar past history, as those woodlots in the countryside. The only difference is, they are next to a road instead of out in the back 40.
If they plant some trees that are carefully selected native/hardy/fast growing species, and put down seeds for something besides poison ivy, then they can grow to be little forests, a little quicker and a little more attractively, even if no one maintains them, and little forests are nice, whether or not there are bricks amongst the tree roots. And the new forest will be nicer to live next to in 50 years if it is more maples and elms and locusts, than if it's all boxelder and chokecherry and tree of heaven. Invest a little in cleanup and/or maintenance if they can, but even if they can't, they can do a little better and over time nature will take over a lot.
Is it perfect? No. But it doesn't take a lot of investment to have something that will get nicer instead of ickier.
posted by elizilla at 9:46 AM on July 3, 2018 [8 favorites]
Great post, thanks. I am all for this, particularly when there is a strong component of neighborhood initiative and direct action involved, as at Prinzessinnengarten in Berlin, or, given a slightly different space and set of uses, el Campo de Cebada in Madrid.
(See also Brooklyn's fantastic 596 Acres project, and, decades before that even, the extensive history of largely Puerto Rican community gardening on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.)
posted by adamgreenfield at 10:01 AM on July 3, 2018 [2 favorites]
(See also Brooklyn's fantastic 596 Acres project, and, decades before that even, the extensive history of largely Puerto Rican community gardening on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.)
posted by adamgreenfield at 10:01 AM on July 3, 2018 [2 favorites]
I was sort of . . . . around the periphery of the Re-Imagine Cleveland movement back in '08/'09, and IIRC it was inspired/influenced by similar ideas and practices in Europe, especially countries or areas that had formerly been centers of heavy industry. There was some serious enthusiasm for the idea simply because of the housing crash & recession, which hit parts of Cleveland especially hard and resulted in lots of decrepit vacant houses and other buildings on top of our already existing problems with vacant decrepit industrial & retail buildings (thanks to decades of white flight and the collapse of heavy industry in the US (for a variety of well-know reasons.)) The idea has lost some steam here, probably because the housing market has (somewhat) stabilized, and because there's been greater emphasis on developing new properties on old lots, but there are still plenty of cool little gardens/green areas scattered around the city, and I think there are a couple more added every year.
does very little to fix the problem of shrinking populations.
I mean, that was kind of the point - rather than the government or property owners hanging on to decaying buildings in the hope that any day now these cities will return to their early-20th-century population peaks, it was time for everyone to accept that people may not be coming back, and to figure out what to do with these decaying hulks.
they could subsidize community banks to lend to marginal buyers, they could give the land away to the next door neighbors so they could have side yards, they could encourage urban farming (as in animals, not crops)
As per the article, these are all things that have been or are being tried. "Pocket parks" is a simple headline shorthand.
They could give the houses away to marginal buyers before they get so bad they have to be demolished.
One catch with this idea - and this may be a unique Cleveland thing - is when there are no home or building inspections unless the building is being sold, you are doing major renovations, or building from scratch. (I mean, you might get cited if you've got unsafe steps, but nobody from the city is going to go poking around your foundations to see if your house is about to fall over.) So lots of buildings are in a more-or-less constant state of decay even when they're occupied, and the city has no idea until the property gets abandoned, by which point it's too late.
Plus another affect of the housing recession and crash was that scrappers would gut vacant houses of all possibly valuable metal insanely quickly. Literally a house would go from "rough but salvageable" to "nothing left but the studs and scraps of drywall" overnight. There was no way for the city to keep up with that.
Unless they are bizarrely equally distributed (they are not) they do very little for storm water diversion, and the level of pollution reduced is overstated
You may be right about that - I have no real idea - but again a lot of the impetus behind this idea is a sort of mitigation of the worst harm; is it safer for the neighborhood and better for the environment to have a half-wild "unkempt lawn" or an about-to-collapse unsalvageable building full of who-knows-what kind of toxins? Given the choice, why not try "unkempt lawn"?
posted by soundguy99 at 10:11 AM on July 3, 2018 [2 favorites]
does very little to fix the problem of shrinking populations.
I mean, that was kind of the point - rather than the government or property owners hanging on to decaying buildings in the hope that any day now these cities will return to their early-20th-century population peaks, it was time for everyone to accept that people may not be coming back, and to figure out what to do with these decaying hulks.
they could subsidize community banks to lend to marginal buyers, they could give the land away to the next door neighbors so they could have side yards, they could encourage urban farming (as in animals, not crops)
As per the article, these are all things that have been or are being tried. "Pocket parks" is a simple headline shorthand.
They could give the houses away to marginal buyers before they get so bad they have to be demolished.
One catch with this idea - and this may be a unique Cleveland thing - is when there are no home or building inspections unless the building is being sold, you are doing major renovations, or building from scratch. (I mean, you might get cited if you've got unsafe steps, but nobody from the city is going to go poking around your foundations to see if your house is about to fall over.) So lots of buildings are in a more-or-less constant state of decay even when they're occupied, and the city has no idea until the property gets abandoned, by which point it's too late.
Plus another affect of the housing recession and crash was that scrappers would gut vacant houses of all possibly valuable metal insanely quickly. Literally a house would go from "rough but salvageable" to "nothing left but the studs and scraps of drywall" overnight. There was no way for the city to keep up with that.
Unless they are bizarrely equally distributed (they are not) they do very little for storm water diversion, and the level of pollution reduced is overstated
You may be right about that - I have no real idea - but again a lot of the impetus behind this idea is a sort of mitigation of the worst harm; is it safer for the neighborhood and better for the environment to have a half-wild "unkempt lawn" or an about-to-collapse unsalvageable building full of who-knows-what kind of toxins? Given the choice, why not try "unkempt lawn"?
posted by soundguy99 at 10:11 AM on July 3, 2018 [2 favorites]
Given the choice, why not try "unkempt lawn"?
Might be a slight tilt towards 'unkempt lawn' on that front, but empty lots become havens for trash and especially old tires.
posted by The_Vegetables at 11:55 AM on July 3, 2018
Might be a slight tilt towards 'unkempt lawn' on that front, but empty lots become havens for trash and especially old tires.
posted by The_Vegetables at 11:55 AM on July 3, 2018
True, but (depending on the city & neighborhood), so does pretty much any flat surface. Decayed buildings have even more health and safety hazards, and, IMO, look worse. And it's usually easier for city workers to clean up trash and tires from vacant lots.
Of course, sometimes this all doesn't work out the way one might hope . . . Speaking of tires on vacant lots, the location of my employer's former warehouse was next to a large vacant lot and some of the local residents took a whack at a home-grown beautification project where they took the dumped tires, painted them yellow, and set them along the edge of the lot with flowers planted in them. Which was a fine idea, only these trash planters kept getting pulled up and thrown away by city workers on their quarterly cleanup.
posted by soundguy99 at 1:20 PM on July 3, 2018
Of course, sometimes this all doesn't work out the way one might hope . . . Speaking of tires on vacant lots, the location of my employer's former warehouse was next to a large vacant lot and some of the local residents took a whack at a home-grown beautification project where they took the dumped tires, painted them yellow, and set them along the edge of the lot with flowers planted in them. Which was a fine idea, only these trash planters kept getting pulled up and thrown away by city workers on their quarterly cleanup.
posted by soundguy99 at 1:20 PM on July 3, 2018
I genuinely like the idea, and would happily vote for and spend money on it. But, most of the community gardens I've met are thoroughly unpleasant. And, given the list price of real estate nearby, they generate the most expensive produce grown outside of Antarctica. (That land can be "worth" so much and yet remain unsold for decades is a much stranger concept. But, that's a hard one to solve.)
The San Pedro Garden is beautiful and vibrant. . . but it isn't really a public space. It's a yard for people who don't have one at home. Which is neat, but very different from a park. People's Park is genuinely a public space, but it isn't even remotely abandoned land. It takes semi-annual protests to keep it from becoming a revenue-generating multi-story parking structure. All the less famous ones I've met look enticing from a distance, but usually leave me feeling sad up close. They're neither wild nor cultivated, but instead live in the same depressing, half-abandoned state as the buildings they replaced. And they've usually got fences around them to keep people out.
Which isn't to say they're a bad thing. I'd rather walk past rows of wooden planters with last year's rotting zucchini crop than crumbling building with boarded up windows. However, I'd far rather see dense, modern housing, either subsidized or directly administered by the city. I realize there's no causal connection between growing zucchini in the abandoned lot next door and our massive local housing crisis. . . but, it's hard to really believe it.
Turning some abandoned lots into actual city parks, on the other hand, sounds pretty good.
posted by eotvos at 1:25 PM on July 3, 2018 [1 favorite]
The San Pedro Garden is beautiful and vibrant. . . but it isn't really a public space. It's a yard for people who don't have one at home. Which is neat, but very different from a park. People's Park is genuinely a public space, but it isn't even remotely abandoned land. It takes semi-annual protests to keep it from becoming a revenue-generating multi-story parking structure. All the less famous ones I've met look enticing from a distance, but usually leave me feeling sad up close. They're neither wild nor cultivated, but instead live in the same depressing, half-abandoned state as the buildings they replaced. And they've usually got fences around them to keep people out.
Which isn't to say they're a bad thing. I'd rather walk past rows of wooden planters with last year's rotting zucchini crop than crumbling building with boarded up windows. However, I'd far rather see dense, modern housing, either subsidized or directly administered by the city. I realize there's no causal connection between growing zucchini in the abandoned lot next door and our massive local housing crisis. . . but, it's hard to really believe it.
Turning some abandoned lots into actual city parks, on the other hand, sounds pretty good.
posted by eotvos at 1:25 PM on July 3, 2018 [1 favorite]
Is it perfect? No. But it doesn't take a lot of investment to have something that will get nicer instead of ickier.
Do you know what activities wooded/overgrown areas get used for in poor neighborhoods? Tire dumping is the least of it.
I hate to sound anti-green space, but this approach does not deal with the basic problem, which is that cored-out populations need to shift together to redensify residential areas where possible and then find lower-density purposes to reallocate former, unsustainable neighborhoods to. (Hopefully in a juster and more respectful manner than "the young white people take over an increasingly crowded downtown where the streetlights work and 911 actually shows up while the rest of the city continues to suffer for lack of basic services.") Just converting vacant land to green space means perpetuating the present set-up, in which the tax base does not support services throughout the far-flung, half-vacated neighborhoods.
I feel people don't always viscerally sense the depth of the problem here. Consider this neighborhood in Detroit. Look at all the blank space between buildings. Not all of it signifies an abandoned lot, but a lot of it does. (Check out this street view.) And this neighborhood is actually reasonably close to downtown; there are pockets of actual prosperity as you move west down Lafayette.
Where there's no demand for real estate, green space is an expense, not an addition to the tax base. I have never yet seen urban farms that were anywhere near cost-effective except for boutique products selling to an extremely niche market. Community gardens are a good sight better than abandoned lots when property values are low and serve functions beyond the overproduction of zucchini, but they aren't a large-scale solution to depopulation. Well-maintained pocket parks are good for neighborhoods to have, but, again, there's a limit on how much they can be scaled if there's no budget to maintain them. There just seems to be a lot of economic wishful thinking here.
(Also the phrase "legacy cities" puts my back up but I'm willing to admit that may just be a personal problem.)
posted by praemunire at 12:37 AM on July 4, 2018 [1 favorite]
Do you know what activities wooded/overgrown areas get used for in poor neighborhoods? Tire dumping is the least of it.
I hate to sound anti-green space, but this approach does not deal with the basic problem, which is that cored-out populations need to shift together to redensify residential areas where possible and then find lower-density purposes to reallocate former, unsustainable neighborhoods to. (Hopefully in a juster and more respectful manner than "the young white people take over an increasingly crowded downtown where the streetlights work and 911 actually shows up while the rest of the city continues to suffer for lack of basic services.") Just converting vacant land to green space means perpetuating the present set-up, in which the tax base does not support services throughout the far-flung, half-vacated neighborhoods.
I feel people don't always viscerally sense the depth of the problem here. Consider this neighborhood in Detroit. Look at all the blank space between buildings. Not all of it signifies an abandoned lot, but a lot of it does. (Check out this street view.) And this neighborhood is actually reasonably close to downtown; there are pockets of actual prosperity as you move west down Lafayette.
Where there's no demand for real estate, green space is an expense, not an addition to the tax base. I have never yet seen urban farms that were anywhere near cost-effective except for boutique products selling to an extremely niche market. Community gardens are a good sight better than abandoned lots when property values are low and serve functions beyond the overproduction of zucchini, but they aren't a large-scale solution to depopulation. Well-maintained pocket parks are good for neighborhoods to have, but, again, there's a limit on how much they can be scaled if there's no budget to maintain them. There just seems to be a lot of economic wishful thinking here.
(Also the phrase "legacy cities" puts my back up but I'm willing to admit that may just be a personal problem.)
posted by praemunire at 12:37 AM on July 4, 2018 [1 favorite]
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And the cities act like they have little control over what goes on these spots, but that's not really true. They could limit zoning height in other parts of the city to encourage development here - they could subsidize community banks to lend to marginal buyers, they could give the land away to the next door neighbors so they could have side yards, they could encourage urban farming (as in animals, not crops) or probably dozens of things I can't think of. They could give the houses away to marginal buyers before they get so bad they have to be demolished.
I also disagree with the author that these should be permanent city expenditures - as if throwing in a tiny unkempt lawns solves anything - they are useless ornamentation - as most in the suburbs know because every building gets a lawn even when it makes no sense.
Unless they are bizarrely equally distributed (they are not) they do very little for storm water diversion, and the level of pollution reduced is overstated -as lawns & crops often gets fertilizer that turns into runoff into streams. You are basically trading one type of pollution for another.
I don't mean to sound so argumentative - where neighborhoods lack .5-1 acre parks (very common), then the cities should be banking this land to become real parks.
posted by The_Vegetables at 9:02 AM on July 3, 2018