Downtown Vancouver gardens replace trash with jobs

The high cost of local food from UBCjournalism on Vimeo.

The city granted $100,000 to develop the urban farm SOLEfood

Produced by Daniel Guillemette, Michelle Ha, and Grant Burns
UBC Journalism News Service
Thunderbird.ca
Nov. 25, 2010

Excerpt:

SOLEFood farm trains and employs 12 Downtown Eastside residents at wages up to $12 per hour. It produces 10,000 pounds of vegetables and fruit a year, then sells it back at wholesale prices to the community through farmer’s markets and at retail prices through local establishments such as The Potluck Cafe.

But it also costs the city hundreds of thousands of tax dollars, which the city must look elsewhere to make up.

Shirley Chan, the CEO of Building Opportunites with Business, a non-profit organization that helped establish the SOLEfood garden, said there should be more attention to how the city makes up the lost revenue. “The tax benefit means that land owners save money but the city has to collect [the lost revenue] from other tax payers,” Chan said.

SOLEfood negotiated the deal with Astoria Hotel to turn the lot into an urban farm. The arrangement resulted in a change in land use and tax abatement that lets the hotel save $130,000 in taxes a year, according to the Vancouver Tax Bureau.

B.C. Assessment values property based on various criteria, including usage. When a lot with a hotel on it changes to a garden, its classification changes from “business or commercial” to “recreation or non-profit.”

That lowers the tax rate from 18.6 per cent to 6.1 per cent. B.C. Assessment then reports to the city tax bureau, which charges the property owner accordingly.

Read the complete article here.

More here.

And City Farmer visits SOLEfood Farm here.