Legal in Detroit New law brings farming back to Detroit By Annette Kingsbury l
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or 20 years, St. John’s Evangelistic Temple of Truth in
Detroit’s North end community has been trying to buy seven vacant, city-owned lots between the church and its nearest neighbor. “You’ve got to understand; the church has been taking care of this land,” says Jerry Ann Hebron, executive director of Northend Christian Community Development, the church’s nonprofit development arm. In 2009 the church, which owned three lots, broke ground on the Oakland Street Community Garden to address the community’s food insecurity. Since then, the garden has grown. It now includes an onsite farmers’ market, three offsite markets and two pop-up markets. “Each year we kind of expanded our gardening efforts and started looking at this as an economic development piece, bringing some businesses
Jerry Hebron 12 EDIBLE WOW WINTER 2014
Photos by Amy Sacka
in and creating jobs,” Hebron says. “We’re now farming on the next street behind us.” In its recent history, the city of Detroit has had no agricultural zoning on the books, so farms and community gardens as a principal use of land were technically illegal. “For many years there have been a lot of gardens, and that had progressed to farms,” says longtime city planner Kathryn Underwood. With so much vacant land available, proposals for larger-scale commercial agriculture, such as Hantz Farms, began to turn up. That prompted the city to act, and in April 2013 a new Urban Agriculture Ordinance was enacted which defines legal agricultural uses. It’s been a long time coming. In 2009, Underwood convened a working group that included growers, city departments, the
Michigan Department of Agriculture, Wayne State University and many more. “I knew who to bring to the table,” she says. “It was very important to me that the ordinance not be top-down.” What resulted is an ordinance she calls “progressive” because it allows agriculture in so many zoning districts. “If one of our purposes is to increase access to fresh food and economic opportunity, we felt that was important.” The city defines an urban farm as more than one acre—an urban garden is up to one acre—where the principal land use is growing food. The ordinance also covers orchards, tree farms, hydroponics and aquaculture (fish farming), as well as greenhouses, hoop houses, farmers’ markets and farm stands. Depending on the zoning of a property, the city will exercise varying levels of review and approval. The beginning of the urban agriculture movement in the United States is credited to New York City in the early 1900s. New York is still home to the largest urban garden program, the Green Thumb Program, which began in 1978. Other large US cities were, until recently, in the same boat as Detroit, with outdated ordinances prohibiting urban farms. However, many have been updating their zoning ordinances in the last few years, including Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Denver, Minneapolis, Nashville and Seattle. In Michigan, the state’s Right to Farm Act regulates commercial farming, so cities may not. A proposed exemption for cities was opposed by the farm lobby. “We couldn’t figure out how to get around that,” Underwood says. After about a year of stalemate, the
Volunteers for American Indian Health sell Brightmoor Farm Veggies at Eastern Market
William Hebron, Oakland Farm EDIBLE WOW WINTER 2014 13