Flint, Michigan considers ordinance changes to enhance urban agriculture

Neighborhood association president Barbara Griffith-Wilson and some high school students are working to plant community gardens and clear vacant lots in Flint. Photo from Planning Comm’rs Journal’s.

Flint to consider ordinance changes to enhance urban agriculture

by Elizabeth Shaw
The Flint Journal
July 07, 2009

Excerpt:

It’s not that Flint officials are opposed to residents growing their own food in backyards or on nearly 2,800 vacant residential lots within the city limits (a list that’s still growing to the tune of about 500 vacant lots per year).

The problem is the laws on the books simply predate the city’s new urban reality.

“The zoning ordinance hasn’t been revised since 1968, when we were a booming industrial city and didn’t have to think about agriculture as part of city planning,” said Erin Caudell, a technical assistant for the urban agriculture collaborative and the outreach coordinator for the Ruth Mott Foundation’s Applewood program.

“Now that we have a different scenario, we have to do some planning as a community as to what that new reality should look like.”

For example, anyone can put up a hoop house behind their home as an accessory structure. But try to do it on a vacant garden lot and you’ll end up in the zoning no-man’s-land faced by Meekins’ group.

And the worst part is everything they went through didn’t break an inch of ground for the next group wanting to build a greenhouse on a vacant city lot.

“What the city finally did was give them a variance. That means it’s just a one-time exception to the rule. So the next request would have to go through the same process all over again,” Caudell said.

Read the complete article here.

Also see Not Giving Up on Flint here.