Why the nation's largest community garden must become a Wal-Mart warehouse

Log in or create an account to start a new discussion.

Posted by Tom Philpott at 2:56 PM on 07 Mar 2006

The fate of LA's South Central Community Garden, the largest of its kind in the United States, looks fairly straightforward: It sits on private property, and its owner wants to sell it for development. The 300 or so families who garden there, most of whom by all accounts live under the poverty line, will have to find a new source of food. If the owner/developer, one Ralph Horowitz, has decided to erect a massive Wal-Mart warehouse there, well, that's just the way it goes.

However, an excellent article in Los Angeles CityBeat by Dean Kuipers shines an interesting light on this unhappy deal.

(Note: The gardeners, who recently received an eviction notice, have won a stay until March 13. I assume all L.A. greens -- including movie producers, Baldwin brothers, etc. -- will hop in their hybrids, rush over to the garden, and rally to its defense in the meantime.)

Like most urban community gardens, this one sprang up on land that no one much wanted originally. In the late 1980s, the city seized the land under eminent domain from an investment group led by Horowitz, Kuipers reports. Horowitz's investment company ended up receiving $4.7 million in compensation. The city's plan (alternative-energy fans take note): to build an incinerator to generate electricity by burning trash.

Most people don't like to live amid the stench of garbage, so the neighborhood successfully organized to stop that project. By the time of the Rodney King rebellion in 1992, the lot had become trash-strewn and abandoned. The city agreed to allow a soup kitchen to turn it into a community-garden plot. By all accounts, neighborhood residents rallied around the asset, turning it into a vital source of fresh food in an area with few grocery stores.

Here is how Kuipers describes it today, in an account that jibes with others I've read:

For story: Why the nation's largest community garden must become a Wal-Mart warehouse
4 Comments | Post a Comment

Community gardens

I think that municipalities should use the new law of eminent domain and take posession of derilict properties that have not been cared for and use them for community gardens for the low income people,, they should also offer basic gardening skills training to those that want it. It would promote a green spot in the city, a place to spend their spare time, and benefit from it as well. Not to mention how it will educate the inner city kids about how food is grown and processed. Another way to promote green agriculture is to have a city adobpt a small farm that needs their help, they get free food and the farmer gets free help. This could be what the small farmer needs to stay in business. And it may bring more people back to farming too. You may never know.. HUMMMMM KATT

by kattmanduu at 12:32 AM on 08 Mar 2006

Alameda Corridor

An interesting article, but it betrays a couple of common misunderstandings of the Alameda Corridor project.

The building (or not) of a warehouse near the Corridor is not because the corridor is there. The Corridor was built as a kind of "expressway for trains", to take them from tidewater to the big railyards east of downtown L.A., a distance of about 20 miles, without stopping or much slowing, and without level crossings. The rise of huge distribution centers around southern L.A. County is happening because the logistics model for the U.S.'s importers and merchants is changing, quite independent of the Corridor.

The Corridor consolidated three railroad lines into one, and actually was considered a massive environmental mitigation. I'll leave that for others to judge, but the notion is that it made the predicted rail traffic less environmentally damaging, and diverted traffic from roads.

As to the funding: it cost more than US$2 billion, but this was not from general municipal funds but from the port authorities' transportation budgets and chiefly from a huge bond issue, floated against the prospective fees charged to the railroads. That is, it wasn't $2 billion that could have been spent on other things. (The port authorities raise their funds from the movement from freight through the ports, and are limited by law to spending on that business.)

Cheers, Richard Nelson

by jrichardn at 4:04 AM on 08 Mar 2006

The Alameda Corridor and public priority

Richard,
Your provide some valuable information about the Alameda Corridor. I can certainly see the environmental benefits of rationalizing traffic from the ports, so that trains and trucks can flow through the metropolitan area without causing traffic snarl-ups.

Also, the $2.4 billion spent couldn't have been spent elsewhere. As this press release from the US DOT's Federal Highway Administration states, the money came from: "$1 billion raised by revenue bonds issued by the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, $400 million directly from the ports, $460 provided by the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and a $400 million loan from the U.S. Department of Transportation."
Surely, the bond market and municipal and federal transportation authorities aren't going to be funding community gardens anytime soon.

Two things, though:

Let's be clear: the Alameda Corridor isn't just about trains. It has green aspects, but it's still about facilitating the flow of giant freight trucks, as this document makes clear.
The public-policy thrust behind Alameda was promoting international trade--and, of course, the companies that practice it. Here is what Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta said on the Corridor's 2002 debut: "The Alameda Corridor will help the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach accommodate the increasing trade growth in the future while helping our national economy capitalize on southern California's standing as a major trade hub of the Pacific Rim."

Now, as I've said before, I have nothing against global trade per se. What I question is whether public policy and the public purse should devote themselves to facilitating it at every level. Just as conservatives hate the state, but love the state police, neoliberals frown at most public spending that doesn't involve trade facilitation. Spending $10-$20 million to support small-scale gardening is socialism; engineering $2.4 billion to facilitate global trade is good government.

And this, if we are to create sustainable cities, will have to reverse.

Victual Reality

by Tom Philpott at 5:42 AM on 08 Mar 2006

debating at a higher level

Tom, thanks for taking the argument about the South Central Farmers to a higher level. I haven't seen much of this from lefties (including myself). We tend to look at it from the environmental & economic justice standpoint...community gardens = good, Walmart warehouses & wealthy developers = evil. I admit I'm guilty of this attitude. It's refreshing to see the debate framed in terms of financing global trade vs. financing community sustainability. Very nice, thank you.

Caroline Brown www.earthfriendlygardening.org

by caroline brown at 12:41 PM on 14 Mar 2006

ADVERTISING POLICY

You are not logged in. Thus, you cannot post a comment. If you have an account, log in. If you don't have an account, well, by all means go make one! Meet you back here in five.