Community Gardens in Urban Spaces

Community gardens have become a topic of considerable heated discussion lately over their appropriate use. I’d like to take a deep dive into what community gardens are for and how to best view them among other broader solutions in urban spaces.

Let’s make it clear community gardens do not directly address food insecurity by themselves, as they simply can’t provide enough calories and nutrition per acre in most cases. Combating food insecurity and food deserts is a much larger project that requires initiatives such as local food banks and food pantries, ready-made meal distribution programs like Meals on Wheels, government benefits like SNAP and WIC, subsidies for fresh food stores and vendors such as NYC Health’s Green Carts program, and creating new local Farmers Markets. Community gardens can help organize local support for these solutions to food insecurity as well as foster a love of gardening and fresh vegetables.

Ideally, community gardens should function as open public spaces, akin to parks, with plots available for reservation or rental. These gardens play a crucial role in educating people, particularly kids, about how food is grown and gets to their dinner table. Access to gardens, especially in schools or publicly owned spaces, fosters a love for fresh vegetables at an early age, helping kids embrace healthy eating habits that stick into adulthood.

A major concern associated with community gardens is soil contamination, often prevalent in empty lots. Remedying this issue usually involves removing and replacing approximately two feet of topsoil, and being careful about the cultivation of root vegetables (carrots, beets, turnips, etc.) and leafy green vegetables (lettuce, cabbage, kale, etc.) which are the highest risk foods from soil contamination. The use of raised beds filled with clean soil can also effectively mitigate the problem. It is important to note that vegetables, whether from a garden or a grocery store, should always be thoroughly washed at home to remove any potentially contaminated soil on their surfaces. Pollution and contamination, whether in soil, water, or air, are also broader city-wide issues that require coordinated efforts at the local, state, and federal levels to clean up as much land as possible.

Community gardens can also serve to revitalize disinvested neighborhoods by repurposing vacant lots. In doing so they can help build community and make neighborhoods more pleasant, help to reduce illegal dumping and other quality of life crimes, as well as raise nearby property values. However, using community gardens to block housing development is an issue, and shouldn’t be allowed. This mostly highlights the major flaws we continue to have in local zoning and development regulations that allow any motivated group to block or delay development. This is solved by reforming local zoning and permitting processes to allow residential development by right so that new homes can be built.

Ideally community gardens should be on publicly owned land and/or managed by nonprofit organizations.

In cases where community gardeners have occupied abandoned land, it raises separate issues related to how we best manage abandoned lots. Cities should actively pursue strategies to acquire and repurpose all type of vacant and abandoned land, such as establishing land trusts for housing or parks. Implementing land value taxes, as is planned for the city of Detroit, can incentivize the development of unused land over the long term and reduce the number of vacant lots in the first place.

Improving squatters rights through shortening the period for adverse possession laws will also allow abandoned properties to more quickly change ownership. For example adverse possession takes 10 years in Pennsylvania but only 5 years in California.

There is the issue of private, exclusionary gardens that do not engage with the community, and frankly I don’t like these. But if it is privately owned land and they can’t block other adjacent developments, it is their right to keep it private. To truly address this, it is important to establish more publicly owned community gardens for those that are interested in the hobby of gardening but lack access.

Community gardens play a valuable role as transitional spaces, transforming vacant land into greenery. Their positive impact can be maximized by promoting public access and encouraging educational initiatives, while also fixing zoning and land ownership laws that create major conflicts. By recognizing the importance of community gardens and taking steps to enhance their effectiveness, we can create thriving urban spaces that benefit both individuals and communities as a whole.