Tim Bonham says, in effect, "Put your money where your mouth is!"
This helps explain why there isn't a property ownership stipulation in
our country's constitution. If only people with serious money can have
gardens, then perhaps only people with serious money should have
museums, schools, hospitals, parks, highways, armies, and so on, and the
rest of us can move to Canada or jump off the nearest cliff.
Jennie Heiser wrote to remind me that "in some neighborhoods these
gardens serve the basic function of actually filling and/or extending
the food supply/budget for seniors and immigrants and poor people --
some of whom fall into all three categories."
The rationale that produces and maintains our parkways and other green
assets also encourages private property ownership: we use our
government's assets to promote the general welfare. My general
suggestion is that there are values beyond capital assets and I suggest
that there is a balancing act among "highest and best use" notions that
can't be defined entirely in monetary terms.
Community gardening is a vital part of our city's life and needs to have
a more robust and sustainable presence at the planning table. "Robust"
means changing the ground rules about land use to include gardens as a
permanent civic good - upgrading from ephemeral/interim land use as the
only possible option to a consideration of interactive green space as a
desired aspect of development. "Sustainable" means picking up Barb
Lickness' list of management needs and moving to methods of financing,
ownership, insurance, and physical maintenance that are at least as
egalitarian in their prospect as that much-battered term "affordable"
that we apply to housing development.
The Troy Gardens project in Madison, WI combines both housing and
gardening in a large-scale "affordable" wholly-owned variation on a land
trust theme. Our public housing also has the existing capacity to
accomplish this joint goal and indeed there are two large gardens and
some more modest plots here and there including I should imagine
individual gardens in scattered site housing that are indistinguishable
from planted areas in private hands. The challenge comes when
contemplating thousands of people who live in private rental housing
where continuity of participation is at issue and where there is no
"bottom-line" incentive for the private owner to make land available or
to have any insurance liability for that matter.
This is not a simple question and we've certainly danced around it for
the 33 years I've been in Minneapolis. But just as cyclists now have
access to publicly owned physical assets and greatly improved standing
as a desired civic presence - why not get real about gardening?
Fred Markus Horn Terrace Ward Ten
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