1
Spotlight
Neighborhood Nursery Program Detroit, Michigan
2
Public underused sites for potential future greening include 1 Vacancies along North American Street, 2 North Front Street in Northern Liberties, 3 vacancies along the Amtrak Northeast Corridor in Strawberry Mansion, and 4 the Festival Pier site on the Central Delaware riverfront.
home to the Detroit Garden Resource Program, which supports urbanfarming initiatives through training, education, and focus groups on improving coordination and turnout for community events. Through the Pittsburgh Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Initiatives, Pittsburgh has implemented various programs to productively reuse cityowned vacant land. One such initiative is the Green Up program, which converts city-owned vacant lots into community green spaces. That city’s Mayor’s Office provides plants and signs for the Green Up lots, and the local Penn State Cooperative Extension provides soil testing and technical assistance. Each Green Up site has a community partner organization that can coordinate volunteers or staff to maintain ongoing maintenance and care of each lot. Pittsburgh’s Climate Action Plan also offers some interesting ideas for vacant land reuse, including ways to alter building demolition so that the leftover lot is easier to convert into a productive use, as well as ways to use brownfields to grow plants that produce feedstock for biofuel, to reduce dependence on foreign oil. 55
3
4
spotlight
Using Vacant Lots to Grow Street Trees Feasibility studies done through a landscape-architecture studio at Penn State University concluded that vacant lots can yield anywhere between 350 and 1400 street trees per acre, depending on whether the parcel is designed as a hybrid open space or a full tree farm. A private tree nursery would earn $75 per tree in revenue from production and be a source of new green jobs in Philadelphia.57
In the Neighborhood Nursery program, the Greening of Detroit organization prepares the vacant lot, builds the earthen mounds used to contain fresh soil, spreads mulch, and plants trees. The trees are grown for three to five years and are cared for by the community and the group’s Green Corps before being transplanted into the community.56 This program simultaneously creates productive uses of vacant land and improves the city’s landscape. PPR has also taken responsibility for implementing the Greenworks Philadelphia goal of planting 300,000 new trees by 2015, so implementing a program like Detroit’s would help PPR reach that goal, as well as greening vacant lots and providing a revenue-making opportunity for forprofit nurseries. After a 2009 study by the Urban Land Institute commissioned by the Redevelopment Authority of Philadelphia determined that the remedial costs needed to prepare Logan Triangle for conventional construction would far exceed the economic return, the city now feels that a green use such as an urban tree farm might be more appropriate. Indeed, as the City of Philadelphia is committed to planting 300,000 trees by 2015, the Logan Triangle offers an ideal place for a temporary tree farm to help the city reach that goal.
Green2015
83