Zoning for zucchini in Baltimore

Photo by Real Food Farm.

City farms could flourish under new code

“Urban farming — which was effectively outlawed in the 1971 zoning revision — will now have the city’s blessing.”

By Julie Scharper,
The Baltimore Sun
June 13, 2010

Excerpt:

Encouraging farming is one of several ways that planners, rolling out a new zoning code for only the third time in the city’s history, say they will make the city more livable and residents healthier.

They say the draft code, to be presented at a series of public meetings beginning today, would move Baltimore forward by taking cues from its past, when the city was an easier place to walk, shop and even farm.

“In 1971,” the last time the rules were revised, “the world was very much automobile-dominated, the suburbs were exploding and state-of-the-art zoning sought to mimic the suburbs,” with lots of large parking lots and few opportunities to walk, said city planning director Thomas J. Stosur.

“This is almost taking us back to the roots of development in the city in the teens and 1920s and 1930s, when neighborhoods were more dense,” Stosur said.

The revisions, which are unlikely to become law before next year, would ease restrictions on small businesses in residential neighborhoods, to encourage the development of more shops and services to which residents could walk.

Surface parking lots would be barred in downtown Baltimore to encourage would-be drivers to use public transportation.

And in a section inspired by the burgeoning locavore movement, which extols the ecological, social and health benefits of eating food raised close to home, the city would officially recognize community gardens and urban farms, making it easier for residents to grow and sell produce within the city.

Many of the proposals were championed by members of an advisory board that includes representatives of the city Health Department and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who say good zoning can create environments in which residents can thrive emotionally and physically.

“This reflects the thinking that health disparities are less a function of health services and more a function of your community and environment,” said advisory board member Madeleine Shea, a commissioner with the Health Department’s healthy homes division.

Officials hope the new zoning laws will encourage residents to walk, increase access to nutritious food in the city’s so-called food deserts — areas bereft of supermarkets or grocery stores — and make the streets safer by fostering opportunities for neighbors to socialize.

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