Nowadays, I live in an eight-floor coop apartment building in NYC, so no gardening opportunities are immediately available.  But I dream of persuading my neighbors to OK the conversion of the roof into a community garden.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

I've also read that if the area that was lawn was intensively gardened, we could feed the country on what we grown there.    Lawn would include what was next to all buildings and golf courses.

We are all in this save the planet thing together, I feel it would be a moral booster if not very efficient.

In appalachia we farmed and gardened right up unil the baby boomer generation. Unfortunately we let years of know how and heirloom seeds get away from us. They all kept livestock and chickens so it was natural gardening for long periods of time.

I have seen soil that has been tended for over 150 years and is still rich black and procuctive. All it ever has put on it was natural fertilizer.

My family on my mothers side come in here and set up a mill so really the only thing they ever went to the store for was salt, coffee and sugar, in the food line of course.

It can be done but its a lost art, subsistance farming is tough and this generation won't take to it in droves.

The eons of time and nature was good to us down here. It was not until we become civilized that destroying our habitat become fathomable or fashionable.

I've been astonished at how much can be grown in a relatively small garden with very little effort plus a lot of poo. It's totally organic, but I have a healthy population of small song birds which effectively keep the insects under control. It supplies most of the vegetable needs of three people.

Five chickens supply all out eggs.

I made a cage trap to catch rabbits (which are feral here) that were trying to get through the fence and for a while this supplied my meat (until I caught the neighbors nosy pomeranian - oops!). In a city a hutch could easily do the same.

We are not connected to town water, an have drought 'proofed' ourselves with two 4500 litre tanks plus a small dam.

I would never have believed how little effort this would all take.

However, throughout cities and towns of southern Australia, the decade of drought has had a devastating impact on home gardening. Increasing water restrictions have progressed from limits on watering times, through to bans on watering gardens using hoses, through to outright bans on the use of reticulated water in gardens. Not only household gardens, but city parks and street-scapes have been let die.

The ironic thing is that you can still legally have a 30 minute shower while you can not hose your pumpkin patch. There have been constant calls for shifts to systems that limit metered use rather than usage practises. But the politicians keep saying it is too hard to do.

In the mean-time, the loss of gardens is severely impacting on the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. Especially those who relied on gardens to supplement meager incomes - in particular a large proportion of retirees who not only fed themselves friends and family, and saved money this way, but also kept fit and active in their twilight years through gardening.

I would do it myself except I have zero expertise in real estate management (and finance, and ...)

Form a company to build Green Apartment Complexes.

So, instead of a person having to deal with installing solar panels and building their own garden, you simply rent an apartment and all the stuff is there for you.

Would it be more expensive than a regular apartment?   Sure, but you would trade increased rent to cover the capital costs of panels in exchange for zero or low cost monthly energy bills.   You would trade increased rent in exchange for getting a piece of earth in the community garden, where the Apartment Managers could hire a "local farmer" to tend your crops for you while you go out and earn money programming databases...or barista-ing cappuccinos.

People are shelling out $2000 per month for houses that make them unhappy and are disconnected from community.   How about paying $1500 for the basic apartment (which would be the size of what you could get now) and using the other $500 towards making the apartment complex greener by having it re-invested in the things we mentioned.  

Would the person feel he's wasted that $500 if he moves?

Well, yes and no.  The technology is evolving so rapidly at this point, that we will probably be building, and rebuilding year after year.   There will always be better solar cells, better wind, better fuel cells.   So, by going with the rental model, instead of the homeowner model, the individual family could keep improving its access to green technology instead of being stuck with 2008 era solar cells in 2013.

Possibly the best Alternative Energy blog I read: New Energy and Fuel

There are some green apartment complexes ou there, that do use solar and other advanced green technologies.  And I do know that there are some companies that specialze in their construction...

...but I don't know of any large-scale companies that specialize in management.  Usually it's just a small one-time thing, or an eco-village concept.

It would be interestin' to have companies like though.

http://www.thesolaire.com/

Energy

•     Energy conserving building design is 35% more energy-efficient than code requires, resulting in a 67% lower electricity demand during peak hours.
  
•     Lower electric bills for residents.
  
•     Photovoltaic panels convert sunlight to electricity.
  
•     Computerized building management system and environmentally responsible operating and maintenance practices.

Meanwhile, in the boondocks, this guy is asking my question:

http://gregable.com/2007/09/apartment-solar-what-is.html

See, the '?' is a the piece that takes the green power from my solar panel on my balcony (DC, variable current) and supplements it with the brown power from my wall outlet (AC, constant current) and outputs constant AC current to my refrigerator...