permaculture

[Saor Stetler <saor@ycbtal.net>]

   Why the nation's largest community garden must become a Wal-Mart
   warehouse


     Posted by Tom Philpott
     <http://gristmill.grist.org/user/Tom%20Philpott> at 2:56 PM on 07
     Mar 2006

The fate of LA's South Central Community Garden 
<http://www.southcentralfarmers.com/>, the largest of its kind in the 
United States, looks fairly straightforward: It sits on private 
property, and its owner wants to sell it for development. The 300 or so 
families who garden there, most of whom by all accounts live under the 
poverty line, will have to find a new source of food. If the 
owner/developer, one Ralph Horowitz, has decided to erect a massive 
Wal-Mart warehouse there, well, that's just the way it goes.

However, an excellent article 
<http://www.lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=3200&IssueNum=138> in Los 
Angeles CityBeat by Dean Kuipers shines an interesting light on this 
unhappy deal.

(Note: The gardeners, who recently received an eviction notice, have won 
<http://www.southcentralfarmers.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=74&Itemid=2> 
a stay until March 13. I assume all L.A. greens -- including movie 
producers, Baldwin brothers, etc. -- will hop in their hybrids, rush 
over to the garden, and rally to its defense in the meantime.)

Like most urban community gardens, this one sprang up on land that no 
one much wanted originally. In the late 1980s, the city seized the land 
under eminent domain from an investment group led by Horowitz, Kuipers 
reports. Horowitz's investment company ended up receiving $4.7 million 
in compensation. The city's plan (alternative-energy fans take note): to 
build an incinerator to generate electricity by burning trash.

Most people don't like to live amid the stench of garbage, so the 
neighborhood successfully organized to stop that project. By the time of 
the Rodney King rebellion in 1992, the lot had become trash-strewn and 
abandoned. The city agreed to allow a soup kitchen to turn it into a 
community-garden plot. By all accounts, neighborhood residents rallied 
around the asset, turning it into a vital source of fresh food in an 
area with few grocery stores.

Here is how Kuipers describes it 
<http://www.lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=3200&IssueNum=138> today, in 
an account that jibes with others I've read:

   The contrast with community gardens elsewhere in the city is
   shocking. These aren't tiny weekend projects with a few tomatoes and
   California poppies. The 330 spaces here are large, 20 X 30 feet,
   many of them doubled- and tripled-up into larger plots, crammed with
   a tropical density of native Mesoamerican plants -- full-grown guava
   trees, avocados, tamarinds, and palms draped in vines bearing huge
   pumpkins and chayotes, leaf vegetables, corn, seeds like chipilin
   grown for spice, and rank upon rank of cactus cut for nopales. The
   families who work these plots are all chosen to receive one because
   they are impoverished by USDA standards, and use them to augment
   their household food supply. These are survival gardens.

But the birth of a thriving, productive community garden wasn't the only 
thing that changed in the area after the King riots. In the 1990s, the 
city of Los Angeles dropped a cool $2 billion building out the Alameda 
Corridor, "a modern rail and big-truck super-pipeline from the Port of 
Los Angeles straight through the warehouses of South L.A. and Vernon," 
Kuipers writes. And that made the once-depressed warehouse district an 
important hub for big-box retailers to organize the booming influx of 
goods from points west, including China. In turn, South Central land 
suddenly became very valuable.

In his dealings with the city in the 1980s, Horowitz had retained right 
of first refusal if the city ever decided to sell the land. In 2003, he 
successfully sued to force the city to sell it back to him for $5 
million --a figure many observers find extremely low, given the city had 
a few years earlier valued it at $13 million. Since then, he's been 
wrangling to evict the farmers from the land, a goal he looks set to 
reach on March 13.

Let's think about this. The city of Los Angeles dropped $2 billion to 
beef up its port infrastructure, a move that brings undeniable benefits 
to import-minded big-box retailers and the consumers throughout the 
southwest who buy their gear. The great bulk of the jobs it creates, 
though, are of the low-wage, unskilled variety.

And what does South Central get? Some low-wage jobs, and the loss of a 
garden that neighborhood residents cleaned up and turned into a vital 
place when no one wanted it. In place of a food source, they get a 
warehouse that will distribute food (among other things) to other 
localities. Here we have another example of public policy -- and cash -- 
subsidizing global commerce and smashing local production, under a false 
"free-market" banner.

If the city has $2 billion to hand over to make things easier for big 
boxes, why can't it buy out Horowitz and turn the site into a permanent 
public farm?