[Mpls] Community Gardens

[Corrie Zoll]

Over the past 5 years, Minneapolis has experienced a dramatic loss of community gardens.  Community gardening is an important tool for neighborhood stability and community interaction.  Losing gardens means losing public green space, neighbor to neighbor connections, neighborhood empowerment, direct access to nutritious food, and much more.  Community gardening movements in the United States are often a reaction to social crises, and so it would make sense that community gardening would decline during the period of increasing economic stability of the late 1990s.  Witness the dramatic reduction of the number of vacant residential lots in the city that occurred in response to the affordable housing crunch. Community gardens offer unique opportunities for community organizing, crime prevention, food production, cultural interaction, youth programming, community beautification, and addressing urban health issues.  I can describe these benefits in detail if you like.  Losing community gardens means losing the same set of opportunities. The development of affordable housing is understandably the single top priority for the mayor and for the city council.  Some individuals perceive a competition for space between community gardens and affordable housing development.  Approximately 50 community gardens currently operate on city or county owned property.  Even if every one of these lots were suitable for housing development (which is unlikely), the number of units of housing that could be developed in this space is smaller than the number of housing units in a single large housing development. Rather than hindering affordable housing development, community gardens make affordable housing more realistic by providing opportunities for urban dwellers (especially recent immigrants) to create a supplemental source of food and income. Making urban living and homeownership more affordable. Cities like Boulder CO, Petaluma CA, Worcester MA, Durham NC, Hereford TX, Norwich VT, Trenton NJ, and Toronto ONT have successfully combined community gardening with affordable housing development. Other cities have taken away community garden space in order to marginally increase affordable housing development and face considerable controversy.  These cities include Sacramento CA, Eugene OR, and New York City.  Again, I can offer more specific examples if you like. I believe that no more existing community gardens in Minneapolis should be taken until a comprehensive community gardening policy can be developed. And when an existing community garden space is taken, a suitable replacement should be found.  One example of this would be the Peace garden at Cedar & 94, a garden established to replace community garden space taken for development of LRT shops & yards.  I believe that the city of Minneapolis should include development of a set amount of community garden space per unit of affordable housing. I'm curious to hear the views of other list members Corrie Zoll Midtown Phillips (home to 8 community gardens this year)