Policies for a Shareable City #11: Urban Agriculture

Community organizations partner to construct an urban vegetable garden in Ft. Myers, Florida. Photo credit: Gabriel Kamener. Used under Creative Commons license.

The Sustainable Economies Law Center has created an Urban Ag Legal Resource Library

By SELC
The Sustainable Economies Law Center
12.01.11

Excerpt:

Here are a few suggestions for ways that cities can adopt policies to facilitate the growth of urban agriculture and community food growing spaces:

Offer property tax incentives for vacant private lots that are used for urban farming: Cities should offer private land owners a property tax discount during years when an otherwise empty lot is used for food growing. The Williamson Act in California already provides property tax incentives to preserve land as agricultural in rural areas, and a similar policy should be applied in urban areas. Generally, land has higher income earning potential when it is built up with strip malls and housing developments. But it doesn’t always make sense to assess a property based on this potential value when the land is actually being used for a more modest activity, like agriculture. Even if a piece of land will eventually be developed, landowners should be rewarded for putting it to productive agricultural use in the meantime. Such a tax incentive could dramatically multiply the amount of available land for community gardening and urban farming.

Conduct a land inventory and prioritize the use of city-owned land for urban farming: Cities should conduct inventories of land available for urban food growing, and prioritize the use of public lands for food growing. In 2009, Mayor Gavin Newsom of San Francisco, California, asked the city “to conduct an audit of unused land – including empty lots, rooftops, windowsills, and median strips – that could be turned into community gardens or farms.” (Yes, he even asked for a survey of windowsills!) In other cities, private groups have conducted such inventories. In Brooklyn, New York, an organization called 596 Acres has identified and created a map of 596 acres of vacant publicly owned land. In Oakland, California, geographer Nathan McClintock published a report and interactive map of public lots available for urban farming.

Conducting land inventories for urban food growing is not a new idea. During WWI and WWII, to relieve burdens on the railroads and reduce demands for materials used in canning and processing, the U.S. government encouraged the cultivation of yards and unused plots of land. Up to 44 percent of the country’s vegetables were produced by individuals and families in small “victory gardens” during WWII. Community organizers were sent out to survey available land for urban and suburban food growing. The National War Commission used the slogan “put the slacker lands to work,” implying that any tillable lands not being used for food production were, basically, slacking off.

Read the complete article here.

See the Urban Ag Legal Resource Library here.