Governing Magazine/March 2002 FEATURE: GARDENS WHOSE GARDEN IS IT? Community gardens can help turn neighborhoods around. It's their very success that threatens them. By Vanita Gowda The only formal thing about the Joseph Daniel Wilson Memorial Garden, on 122nd Street in the middle of Harlem, is its name. Everything else is casual--almost ramshackle. The ground is bare, with sparse patches of grass. Discarded tires and a bathtub serve as makeshift planters. In the middle of the plot stands a straw scarecrow so delicate it would intimidate only the most nervous of birds. A 4,000-square-foot community garden built on four abandoned lots six years ago, Wilson might not sound like anything to brag about. But it plays an important role in the life of the neighborhood. It's a safe place for children to spend time. In recent months it has been the site of an experimental play, and environmental lessons for elementary school students. It hosted a Sweet 16 birthday party. The gardeners at Wilson are busy looking for ways to make it an even more valuable resource in the future. But as they do that, they also worry that it may not have a future. The city of New York plans to sell or develop 131 of the more than 700 sites within the city limits currently housing community gardens. Wilson is one of them. An injunction filed by the state attorney general has put the proposal on hold, and state and city officials are clashing over how to proceed. But the end result is far from clear. It is a scenario that is playing out these days in urban areas all across the country. Cities need development, and there is more commercial demand for good sites than there has been in a long time. Neighborhoods, on the other hand, want open space, and they are willing to fight for it. Somehow, those two demands have to be reconciled. Although many community gardens are privately owned or part of organized initiatives, the vast majority are located on unused public land, in neighborhoods where transportation to larger parks is scarce, and where few safe meeting places exist. It is usually land on which no one has wanted to build anything for decades anyway. The empty lots in the vicinity of Wilson Memorial Garden were long written off as trash dumps and meeting grounds for drug deals. Creating a community garden on one of these parcels of land is a challenge, but it is not the hardest part. What is really difficult is keeping the bulldozer away when the neighborhood starts to revive. In some cities, including New York, public trusts have bought land in order to preserve community gardens. But against the pressure to develop, these are rather modest weapons. In arguing for elimination of hundreds of New York's community gardens over the past few years, the administration of then-Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani insisted that many of the buildings erected on former garden sites would be used for much-needed low-income housing, besides bringing in retail business and taxpaying market-rate apartment dwellers. For New York and other big cities trying to make up budget shortfalls, the potential tax revenue and gains from development on garden lots are simply too tempting to pass up. The current mayor, Michael Bloomberg, is willing to go further than Giuliani in making a commitment to affordable housing on the garden sites. But he is not backing off the effort to develop them. Community gardeners argue that cities such as New York are being shortsighted, that safe public space is just as vital to the future of their neighborhoods as new business. "Not enough cities recognize that parks are a form of development," says Sally McCabe, outreach coordinator for Philadelphia Green, a community gardening activist organization. "It's just not a built environment." The current notion of community gardens dates back to the first half of the 20th century. During the Depression, the federal Works Progress Administration established community gardens to provide jobs; unemployed workers were hired to maintain the land. During both world wars, the federal government encouraged civilians to consume homegrown vegetables so that commercial produce could be sent overseas to troops. At one point during WWII, plots of land known variously as "relief," "liberty" or "victory" gardens were producing more than 40 percent of the fruits and vegetables consumed in the United States. But while those gardens were seen as a source of both physical and economic sustenance, few envisioned that they would be used as playgrounds, classrooms or picnic sites. The current generation of community gardens, says Patricia Hynes, professor of environmental health at Boston University, fulfill "civic purposes in the broadest sense. They create beauty, create security and create neighborliness." San Francisco's Garden Project, founded in 1984, uses community gardens to provide a wide variety of social services. The city employs welfare recipients and job-seeking parolees to grow organic fruits and vegetables that are sold to local markets and to some of the most expensive restaurants in the Bay area. Columbus, Ohio, requires juvenile delinquents to spend a specified number of hours per week maintaining a local public garden. Philadelphia Mayor John F. Street is using community gardens to combat decay in the city's most troubled neighborhoods. Philadelphia has more than 30,000 vacant lots and an aging housing stock that will likely lead to many further teardowns. Street ran in 1999 on a blight-abatement platform, promising to clean up the abandoned lots, and his administration has encouraged community residents to garden any unused land they want to reclaim. After a garden is established, residents can apply to a city program that donates land to public trusts. In this way, Philadelphia proposes to create permanent gardens that will be overseen by community residents rather than the city bureaucracy. New York, however, has a different problem. While it has more than 700 city-owned community gardens, some of them dating back to the 1960s, it also has developers envisioning much more intense uses of the land, especially land in Manhattan, including the Joseph Daniel Wilson site. Of the 2,922 units of housing planned by the Bloomberg administration for garden sites, nearly half--1,308--will be located in Manhattan. Local gardening groups protested, and state Attorney General Eliot Spitzer intervened on their side. Last summer, after the city council signed off on development plans, a state court granted an injunction requiring the city government to complete a review of the environmental impact of the proposed construction. The city is battling the injunction and still hopes to sell some of the lots before the year is over. The city accuses garden activists of being insensitive to the need for low-income housing; the activists say their views are being misrepresented. The city, says Aresh Javadi, director of a group called More Gardens, "makes it sound as if it's housing versus gardens. That's wrong. It's both housing and gardens." As it turns out, developers aren't the only ones interested in bidding for these properties: The Trust for Public Land entered the game three years ago, after plans were announced to auction off the first wave of community gardens. The Trust launched an intensive fund-raising campaign along with an organization known as the New York Restoration Project, started by actress Bette Midler. Together, the two groups raised more than $4 million to purchase lots. They now own more than 100 of the gardens, and are attempting to establish three independent borough-based nonprofits to run and maintain them. Further fundraising is underway to create an endowment for future maintenance and equipment purchases. It will not be easy, however, to use this strategy in other places. By the time neighborhood revival has proceeded far enough to attract developer interest in a parcel of land, the land is usually too expensive for neighborhood residents and local nonprofits, few of which can raise money on the scale of the Trust for Public Land. "It's not a tenable approach for cities and gardens across the country," says Hynes. "There aren't enough Bette Midlers." She suggests that in lieu of raising money to buy community gardens, residents work with city planners to ensure that the housing built to replace them contains its own open-space components. Neighborhoods can make their concerns clear and then negotiate a deal with the city in exchange for cessation of hostilities, all long before the lots are put up for sale. Overall, according to Hynes, residents should be "proactive" rather than "reactive" when it comes to protecting their strips of green land. In Harlem, Cynthia Worley is working her way through the negotiation process right now. Worley has been involved with Wilson Memorial Garden since the days when it was a rubbish-strewn vacant lot, and she is hoping the city will allow it to continue in some form, although she expects that the size will be greatly reduced. What Worley knows for sure is that since she first began to clean up the land in 1995, the garden has stayed clean. Drug dealers have moved on. Mothers who do not want their children walking several blocks to a city park are comfortable sending them to play in the garden. Neighbors have been introduced to one another, and there is interest in a fledgling block club. Planting flowers and a few trees changed residents' perception of the land as well as their interactions with each other. Losing the garden, Worley fears, will cost the neighborhood not only open space but the social connections that have been created. Her ultimate nightmare is that it might return to being a haven for drug dealers and crime. Worley is convinced, in fact, that the very existence of green space in the midst of urban asphalt can be the crucial element in community revival. "Once this land became a garden," she says, "it was a far more respected place." ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright 2002, Congressional Quarterly, Inc. Reproduction in any form without the written permission of the publisher is prohibited. Governing, City & State and Governing.com are registered trademarks of Congressional Quarterly, Inc. http://governing.com