Why Nation's Largest Community Garden Must Become a Wal-Mart Warehouse

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

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The contrast with community gardens elsewhere in the city is shocking. These aren't tiny weekend projects with a few tomatoes and California poppies. The 330 spaces here are large, 20 X 30 feet, many of them doubled- and tripled-up into larger plots, crammed with a tropical density of native Mesoamerican plants -- full-grown guava trees, avocados, tamarinds, and palms draped in vines bearing huge pumpkins and chayotes, leaf vegetables, corn, seeds like chipilin grown for spice, and rank upon rank of cactus cut for nopales. The families who work these plots are all chosen to receive one because they are impoverished by USDA standards, and use them to augment their household food supply. These are survival gardens.

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/3/7/145627/2798

. . .Great Plains.

Now they can fuck up the cities.

I've shopped there only one time in the last twenty-five years, because of what they did to my father's photo business. I felt dirty when I got home.

Now they can run some poor people out of an green oasis in a filthy city.

Goddammit.

they gotta eat, too you know.


:sarcasm:


Every city in America should have these. Parking violation? Shovel compost for two hours on a Saturday. Speeding ticket? You get to water.