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.
(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.
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?
[permaculture] Community Garden to be flattened by Wal-Mart,
Saor Stetler, 03/08/2006