Florida himself acknowledged that creative cities tend to have higher levels of inequality as the economy is increasingly bifurcated into a creative class and a service class . People in creative cities who do not belong to the creative class cannot fully enjoy the benefits of its use-value-rich amenities. The increasing exchange value in hip neighborhoods—or, in cities such as Seattle, all neighborhoods—contributes to higher rents and displacement of lower income and marginalized people . Furthermore, while creative cities make a show of celebrating racial and ethnic diversity, the reality is often a superficial multiculturalism lacking substantial engagement with institutional racism and the inequalities it produces . In creative cities, the downsides of increasing exchange value are borne even more heavily by marginalized people. This diminished use value is just easier for a creative city’s more affluent residents to ignore than the traditional downsides of growth such as noise, traffic and air pollution—pervasive downsides that P-Patches help ameliorate for Seattleites. For the last 30 years, the political economy of Seattle has enabled continued investment that has helped solidify the status of the city’s community gardens, but nothing about this political economy ensures that the gardens are providing the potential benefits most needed by the city’s marginalized residents—or even that they remain accessible to these communities at all. The city’s gardens do produce a lot of food, 2×4 flood tray with some of it directly feeding low-income gardeners in the P-Patch program and other gardens such as the Danny Woo International District Community Garden, which serves primarily Asian-American residents of nearby affordable housing.
As described in chapter 3, the City ensured that as its P-Patch program expanded, new gardens accessible to low-income residents were prioritized, and P-Patch gardeners also grow tons of fresh produce for the city’s food banks. Food bank donation is a longstanding tradition in the P-Patches, but it is not a requirement for participants and is contingent upon the available time and generosity of current gardeners. In good years, the total amount of produce donated by P-Patch gardeners exceeds 40,000 pounds; however, as Seattle has become increasingly unaffordable, the number of people relying on food banks has also increased. Even before the pandemic, food banks were distributing more than 22,885,000 pounds of food a year . From 2007 to 2011, average monthly visits to food banks in Seattle doubled from 61,401 to 122,197 . The rate of food insecurity in Seattle grew from 7% in 2007 to 13% in 2019 . The fresh, organic produce that flows from P-Patches to low-income gardeners and other food-insecure Seattleites is not insignificant, but the rate of growth in food bank donations is not keeping up with the rate of growth in rents and attendant growth in food insecurity. Food provision is one of the key benefits that urban gardens can offer low-income residents, but others matter as well. Low-income neighborhoods tend to suffer from more blight, higher crime rates, and lower neighborhood social cohesion, and gardens have been extolled for their potential to improve low-income neighborhoods along these dimensions. However, if the neighborhoods become unaffordable for low-income people, then those residents have to move, and the neighborhoods’ improvements are moot for them. In Seattle, over the last two decades since garden advocates won preservation victories and significant resources to expand the P-Patch program, real estate values have also increased dramatically citywide .
Staggering increases in median home values—up 93% from 2012 to 2018—have priced many people out of formerly affordable neighborhoods or out of the city entirely . As one outcome of this extreme housing market, the Laotian gardeners who helped build Bradner Gardens Park in the 1990s can no longer afford to live in the surrounding neighborhood. Overall, the program has evolved toward benefitting low-income residents because of its public mission and some of its partnerships, and P-Patch gardeners have long celebrated their racial and ethnic diversity although it does not seem that a lot of effort was put into cultivating leadership from minority communities. The social movement mobilized to prevent program cuts in the early 1990s and preserve threatened P-Patches thereafter was led by gardeners who were active in the P-Patch nonprofit. Unlike the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, this organization was seen as a legitimate representative of gardeners’ interests, but the movement the organization built was not framed around or led by gardeners of color, immigrants, or low-income people. This movement has been extremely effective at preserving community gardens and ensuring that public resources continue to support these spaces; today, P-Patch advocates quickly organize to protect any sites that become threatened . The P-Patch nonprofit has many of the features known to contribute to social movement success: skilled and experienced leadership, an engaged constituency, legitimacy in the eyes of decision-makers and the public, and sophisticated framing that resonates with their target audiences. However, this movement has been organized narrowly around preserving the P-Patches—resisting one of the symptoms of unrestrained urban growth, rather than challenging the logic of growth overall or any of its other ill effects.
As Seattle real estate values continue to balloon, displacement continues apace, and the framing for preserving P-Patches does not address the detrimental impacts of growth on poor gardeners, residents of color, or others vulnerable to the ongoing displacement.Evidence from the three case-cities indicates that a local government’s ability to support urban agriculture is tied to its economic and fiscal situation. Of course, the status of the locality within the ongoing global competition to attract growth matters for the amount of resources available to invest in urban gardens. Since cities are continuously engaged in this competition, their status is always subject to change, and potential change in the city’s economic fortunes remains a top concern of elected officials and growth elites regardless of the city’s current success or failure in attracting urban growth. The history of all three cities shows that framing urban agriculture as a valuable tool to improve or insure a city’s economic standing has been an effective strategy for winning favorable policy and public investment. The appeal to growth interests has taken on different forms in the different economic and political contexts of each city, and in all three cases these economic rationales have consequences for the city’s gardens and/or for its marginalized residents. In Seattle, as the city was beginning to experience urban growth due to its strong technology sector, P-Patch advocates refined their efforts to legitimize community gardens by framing them as a neighborhood amenity that ameliorates some ill effects of urban growth, building a case to value gardened land alongside housing and commercial development and furthering the commodification of nature as a selling point for the city’s livability. This refined framing presents urban agriculture as a palliative for the alienation from nature and fellow humans that often occurs with urbanization . However, it does not address other social impacts of rising property values—particularly the affordability crisis that displaces the city’s low-income residents. In Philadelphia, where economic downturn and disinvestment left 40,000 lots across the city vacant, PHS and other growth coalition members successfully argued that this land was a liability for the city, and that repurposing it for greening would help revitalize blighted neighborhoods and attract new capital investment. They were right; Philadelphia has turned its fortunes around and is now experiencing renewed urban growth, flood and drain table including rapidly increasing land values and gentrification in some of the city’s neighborhoods. With the floodgates opening to capital flows, gardens are getting swept away. Now, Soil Generation and its allies are trying to push back on the commodification of nature as a symbol of investment readiness that can flip vacant land from liability to asset, shifting the focus to the community members who have stewarded these spaces and arguing that they deserve to retain them—an outcome that would necessitate both the gardens and the gardeners being able to stay in place. In order for this to occur, the city’s Land Bank must implement its directives in a way that prioritizes community land uses in gentrifying neighborhoods, an uphill battle given the immense amounts of capital held by growth entrepreneurs vying for ownership of these spaces. Soil Generation’s ongoing organizing and framing around community control works to put power behind this struggle, and they have accomplished some early victories in framing the Land Bank’s mandate and revising the disposition process; however, it remains to be seen what the movement will ultimately achieve in terms of garden preservation and affordable housing. In Milwaukee, the city is still struggling to win greater capital investment and urban growth, and land is seen as a lifeline for this effort. Urban nature in the form of gardens and farms has been commodified as a tool for training and employing residents, a potential pathway to economic development that can ameliorate some of the worst impacts of capital flight that the city has experienced. Despite its poor fiscal situation, the cash-strapped city government still shows willingness to devote some resources and recruit public and private partners to invest in urban agricultural spaces. However, like PHS’s framing in Philadelphia, Milwaukee’s commodification of urban nature as training ground and space of economic production leaves open the ongoing possibility of replacing gardens and farms with any more profitable use that might come along.
The preceding chapters have revealed how the main community garden programs and proponents in each city highlighted some of urban agriculture’s potential benefits over others, influencing the priorities for how community gardens were developed and managed over time. In addition to assessing what benefits community gardens are providing to surrounding neighborhoods, we can better understand their impact on a city by investigating where community gardens are located, and thus to which neighborhoods their benefits are accruing. As noted throughout this study, many of the benefits for which community gardens are celebrated are particularly important for low-income communities and marginalized racial and ethnic groups. The free or low-cost fresh produce these spaces can yield will matter most for food-insecure households, often associated with high-poverty neighborhoods and those with a higher proportion of Black and/or Latino residents . Urban blight, crime, and inadequate green space are also more common in neighborhoods with these characteristics, so the value of community gardens as safe, attractive, and healthy green space is also especially salient in such areas . Community gardens can support important cultural practices as well, since ways of growing food and medicine are meaningful traditions for virtually every culture. In this regard, the ability for immigrants to access community gardens is another key consideration for understanding whether urban agriculture’s touted benefits are available to those who need them most.As with any alternative food initiative, there is no guarantee that the benefits of urban agriculture will accrue to those who are most in need. Assessing the socio-demographic dynamics of urban agriculture development in New York City, Reynolds notes that while low-income communities, immigrants and people of color often bring significant knowledge, energy and enthusiasm to the development and maintenance of gardens, these groups tend to have less access to the resources, networks and cultural capital required to build and defend community gardens in the urban landscape. As earlier chapters have demonstrated, in order to attract resources and legal status for their gardens, community garden programs must legitimize themselves according to some of urban agriculture’s potential benefits at the expense of others. In all three cities, urban agriculture advocates have made claims about the role of gardens in helping people in need, but they have also emphasized arguments about the economic benefits of community gardens. Economic benefits like neighborhood development and elevated property values can be in tension with serving the needs of the marginalized, whose interests are often left behind in the flow of capital through cities . On the one hand, community gardens may be easier to establish where vacant land is more abundant, that is, in neighborhoods with depressed property values—often those with higher proportions of people in poverty, immigrants, and/or residents of color. On the other hand, marginalized communities may have a harder time marshalling the resources needed to defend community gardens from rising property values and increased neighborhood development, if and when these potential economic benefits of urban agriculture materialize. This tension is ubiquitous in urban agriculture . However, researchers have to date paid little attention to the role that citywide community gardening organizations can play in mitigating neighborhood inequalities by amassing and equitably distributing the resources needed to build, maintain, and defend urban agricultural spaces.