Baltimore’s new city rules clear the way for an urban agricultural renaissance.

Harvest time: Seventy-year-old Lewis Sharpe manages the Duncan Street Miracle Garden. Photo by J. M. Giordano.

Farm City

By Heather Dewar
Urbanite Baltimore Magazine
Nov. 1, 2010

Excerpt:

Baltimore’s Board of Estimates approved a policy last December allowing community groups that have been using a plot of city-owned land for five years or more to lay claim to it. Under the policy, administered by the Planning Department and the Department of Housing and Community Development, the city does not sell the land directly to the community group; it sells the land for $1 per lot to a land trust, which in turn draws up an agreement allowing the group to use it for free.

The Duncan Street garden is now owned by Baltimore Green Space, a nonprofit land trust started by community garden advocate Miriam Avins during the eighteen months she spent as a fellow with Open Society Institute-Baltimore. “The goal is to transform vacant lands into assets and to make preservation affordable for the community,” Avins says.

The dollar lot program is the first of a series of planned changes to city laws and policies designed to help Baltimoreans turn abandoned city lots into community gardens and even full-fledged farms. The current zoning code, written in 1971, allows people to grow produce for their own use and to share it with their neighbors. But it prohibits farming, which unlike community gardening is a moneymaking enterprise, in all but a few districts. And farm stands are illegal for both types of growers. A proposed rewrite of the city zoning code, slated to come before the city council next year, would allow farming without a special permit in some business districts, according to the planning department’s Laurie Feinberg, project manager for the zoning code rewrite. The city is also working on a plan to rent some vacant city-owned lots to farmers who agree to sell some of their produce in the neighborhood where it is grown.

Read the complete article here.

See also: Scouting for Parks – Volunteers document urban jewels – by Heather Dewar here.