Race, Urban Politics, and the Governance of Vacant Land in Boston from 1950

Growing Land, Growing Law: Race, Urban Politics, and the Governance of Vacant Land in Boston from 1950

Brenna Keatinge

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies University of Toronto

Growing Land, Growing Law: Race, Urban Politics, and the Governance of Vacant Land in Boston from 1950

Brenna Keatinge

Doctor of Philosophy

Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies University of Toronto

2018 Abstract

Drawing on archival research, document analysis, stakeholder interviews, and ethnographic work, this study takes an historical approach to analyze the governance of vacant land in the era of neoliberal urban governance in Boston. Previous academic and bureaucratic scholarship has established a well-worn narrative about vacant land as a critical urban problem and the importance of municipal interventions to return it to its “highest and best use.” This study investigates the physical production and ideological construction of vacant land located primarily in several historically low income racialized neighbourhoods in Boston, as well as two programmatic fixes designed by the municipality to address it: community gardening in the 1970s, and urban farming beginning around 2010. In this thesis, I contend that the identification of land as vacant is a social and administrative process that signals vacancy as an object of governance constructed alongside ideologies of the “waste” of racialized populations and their spaces. Vacancy extends the power of “blight” used to justify eminent domain takings of racialized neighbourhoods under urban renewal, while simultaneously fitting the conditions of urban development under neoliberalism and seeming, like other tools of urban planning, impartial to race. I argue that constructing vacant land in racialized neighbourhoods as an urban problem actuates particular kinds of neoliberal

iii governance assemblages designed to yield its “highest and best use,” and to govern racialized populations via the rollout of seemingly community-friendly programmatic fixes. By analyzing the role of vacant land in racialized neighbourhoods as a tool used to ensure the productive capacity of land in the capitalist city, this study offers significant insights into the relationship between race and uneven urban development. This study also contributes to knowledge about urban governance by analyzing the workings of an important tool through which the heavy-handed power of the municipality, derided under neoliberalism, is both constructed and justified.

Acknowledgments

Writing a thesis is an academic task, but it also takes a lot of emotional energy, as anyone who has ever written one can attest. This project has taken the better part of 5 years from conception to completion, and wouldn't have been possible without the assistance of many individuals. I would first like to thank my dissertation committee, Deborah Cowen, Paula Maurutto, Deborah

G. Martin, and especially my supervisor, Mariana Valverde, for their support and helpful comments on various stages of my numerous drafts. Thanks also to my dissertation coach, Keith

Burton, who helped to keep me on task, made my dissertating more fun, and helped me to see the light at the end of what seemed at times to be an unending tunnel.

I am extremely appreciative to the students in the Geography Department at Clark University where I spent the fall semester in 2013 and where I learned that I am a geographer at heart.

Deborah G. Martin did a fabulous job of supervising my work there and helping me to think more geographically about law and about neoliberal urban development.

I cannot thank the respondents of my study enough who gave me their time and their thoughts for this project. They met me at coffee houses and sometimes even took me into their homes, and helped me to understand their worlds. I also appreciate the farmers I worked with who showed me the ropes in the world of urban farming in Boston, and shared very personal and everyday experiences with me over the course of several months. Thank you to the archivers at the City of

Boston Archives who brought out many dusty boxes for me. And of course, thank you to

Rosanne and Jeff Foley who were generous enough to share their home with me for several months during 2014 when I lived in Ashmont Hill and worked on the farms.

I would like to acknowledge Julie Stone for providing several of the pictures of community gardens from the 1970s that I included in Chapter 4 and that help to bring gardens to life. I would also like to acknowledge Dexter Locke for making the map of Boston’s neighbourhoods in the

Introduction.

Thank you to the University of Toronto, the Province of Ontario, and to the Social Sciences and

Humanities Research Council for financially supporting this project.

Last but not at all least, an enormous thanks to my family and friends who helped keep me grounded and sane throughout the process, and a special mention to my long-suffering office partner, Julius Haag, who brought me lunch when I needed it most. Much love.

Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... IV

TABLE OF CONTENTS ...... VI

LIST OF TABLES ...... X

LIST OF FIGURES ...... XI

LIST OF ACRONYMS ...... XIII

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ...... 1

1 INTRODUCTION ...... 1

2 BACKGROUND ...... 2

3 RESEARCH QUESTIONS ...... 5

4 CONTEXT ...... 6

5 METHODS AND ANALYSIS ...... 20

6 CONTRIBUTIONS OF THE STUDY ...... 28

7 OVERVIEW OF THE THESIS ...... 29

CHAPTER 2 CONCEPTUALIZING URBAN VACANT LAND IN THE UNITED STATES ...... 33

1 INTRODUCTION ...... 33

2 DEFINING VACANT LAND ...... 35

3 CONCEPTUALIZING VACANT LAND ...... 37

4 THEORIZING VACANCY AS AN OBJECT OF GOVERNANCE ...... 46

5 CONCLUSION ...... 53

CHAPTER 3 GROWING LAND: THE ORIGINS OF VACANCY ...... 55

1 INTRODUCTION ...... 55

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2 A NOTE ON SOURCES ...... 56

3 BLIGHT AND VACANCY FROM URBAN RENEWAL TO SUBURBAN REDEVELOPMENT ...... 57

4 FROM BLIGHT TO VACANCY IN BOSTON ...... 64

5 CONCLUSION ...... 81

CHAPTER 4 GARDENS AS DEVELOPMENT AND AS EMPOWERMENT: COMMUNITY GARDENING AS A PROGRAMMATIC FIX IN BOSTON, 1970-1990 ...... 83

1 INTRODUCTION ...... 83

2 A NOTE ON SOURCES ...... 85

3 CONTEXT ...... 86

4 SHARED NARRATIVES OF GARDENS IN BOSTON ...... 93

5 DIVERGING NARRATIVES ...... 102

6 EFFECTS OF THE COALESCING AND DIVERGING NARRATIVES OF LAND AND GARDENS DEVELOPMENT ...... 134

7 CONCLUSION ...... 145

CHAPTER 5 GROWING LAW: ARTICLE 89 AND URBAN FARMING IN THE INNER CITY AS A NEW PROGRAMMATIC FIX FOR VACANT LAND ...... 147

1 INTRODUCTION ...... 147

2 A NOTE ON SOURCES ...... 150

3 THE POLITICAL ECONOMIC CONTEXT OF ARTICLE 89 AS A TOOL FOR LAND DEVELOPMENT IN BOSTON ...... 150

4 ARTICLE 89 AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF URBAN FARMS ON VACANT LOTS ...... 165

5 CONCLUSION ...... 186

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CHAPTER 6 CITY GROWERS, THE GARRISON-TROTTER FARM, AND GROWTH COALITION FARMING IN BOSTON ...... 188

1 INTRODUCTION ...... 188

2 A NOTE ON SOURCES ...... 190

3 URBAN FARMING AS COMMUNITY BENEFIT? ...... 190

4 ARTICLE 89 AND THE FETISHISM OF ZONING ...... 194

5 BREAKING GROUND AT THE GARRISON-TROTTER FARM ...... 197

6 NARRATIVES OF URBAN FARMING IN BOSTON ...... 207

7 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE GARRISON-TROTTER FARM AND THE OPERATION OF FOR- PROFIT FARMS IN BOSTON ...... 216

8 QUERYING COMMUNITY BENEFITS ...... 233

9 CONCLUSION ...... 238

CHAPTER 7 CONCLUSION……………………………………………………………………………………………………240

1 INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 240

2 SUMMARY AND KEY FINDINGS……………………………….……………………………………………………… 241

3 DISCLAIMERS AND LIMITATIONS……………………………………………………………………………………. 245

4 RECOMMENDATIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH………………………………………………………………. 247

REFERENCES ...... 249 METHODOLOGICAL APPENDIX……………………………………………………………………………………………267

List of Tables

TABLE PAGE

Table 1.1 Respondents by Stakeholder Type 24

Table 4.1 Comparison of the Three Revival Programs 110

Table 5.1 Snapshot of Dorchester, Roxbury and Mattapan versus Boston and Back Bay 152

List of Figures

All photos by author unless otherwise specified.

FIGURE PAGE

Figure 1.1 Boston’s Neighbourhoods. Map created by Dexter Locke. 3

Figure 2.1 The Cycle of Decline, adapted from Goldstein et al. (2013) 39

Figure 4.1 A rubble-strewn vacant lot in 1975 on Ashton Street in Mattapan. 95 Courtesy of the Boston City Archives.

Figure 4.2 Another vacant lot in Mattapan, 1975. Courtesy of the Boston City 97 Archives

Figure 4.3 Boston residents clearing rubble and making a garden, 1970s. 99 Photo courtesy of Julie Stone.

Figure 4.4 An anti-dumping campaign in Boston. Photo courtesy of Julie Stone. 105

Figure 4.5 An early community garden in East Boston. Photo courtesy of Julie Stone. 108

Figure 4.6 A community garden in Mattapan, 1970s. Photo courtesy of Julie Stone. 125

Figure 5.1 The classic Boston “triple decker” in Dorchester. 153

Figure 5.2 A typical city-owned vacant lot in Dorchester. 159

Figure 5.3 The four original urban farming sites in Dorchester/Mattapan. 171 Prepared by the BRA, posted online by Agyeman (2014).

Figure 5.4 The Tucker Street farm, operated by non-profit Revision House. 173

Figure 5.5 The Glenway Street farm, operated by for-profit City Growers. 173

Figure 5.6 One of several Food Project urban farms in Dorchester. 174

Figure 6.1 The Garrison-Trotter farm, October 2014. 198

FIGURE PAGE

Figure 6.2 The vacant lot on Harold Street that would become the Garrison-Trotter 198 farm.

Figure 6.3 Debris from the Garrison-Trotter site, with farm trainees in the 201 background.

Figure 6.4 The Trust for Public Land backhoe at the groundbreaking ceremony. 202

Figure 6.5 A representative from the Trust for Public Land with the permit for the 204 Garrison-Trotter farm in his hands.

Figure 6.6 Mayor Walsh at the groundbreaking ceremony. 204

Figure 6.7 “Breaking the ground” at Garrison-Trotter. 206

Figure 6.8 The partial completion of the Garrison-Trotter farm shortly after the 229 Day of the Legal Vegetables in Boston.

Figure 6.9 A “guerrilla garden” in Boston located on a vacant lot in Dorchester, 232 Summer 2014.

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List of Acronyms

BRA Boston Redevelopment Authority

BNAF/BNAN Boston Natural Areas Fund/Network

BUG Boston Urban Gardeners

CDC Community Development Corporation

DND Department of Neighborhood Development

DSNI/DNI Dudley Street Neighbors Incorporated/Dudley Neighbors Incorporated

MDAR Massachusetts Departments of Agricultural Resources

OFI Mayor’s Office of Food Initiatives

PFD Public Facilities Department

RFP Request for Proposals

RSMP Roxbury Strategic Master Plan

TPL Trust for Public Land

UAOD Urban Agriculture Overlay District

UFI Urban Farming Institute

Chapter 1

Introduction 1 Introduction

In 2013, Detroit became one of several American cities – along with Philadelphia, Seattle, Denver, Somerville, MA and Boston, the focus of this dissertation – to pass a rezoning ordinance enabling commercial urban farming on vacant lots in the city. The archetypal post-industrial city, large-scale deindustrialization, depopulation, recession, and eventual bankruptcy had left Detroit with vast open areas of publicly-owned property with no purpose and no budget for maintenance. After passing the ordinance, the City sold 1,500 city-owned vacant properties – about 140 acres of land – in the racially segregated East Side of Detroit to develop a tree farm, known locally as Hantz Woodlands, for the meager sum of half a million dollars or about eight cents a square foot. The purchaser, John Hantz, is one of Detroit’s wealthiest businessmen, a stockbroker and owner of the Hantz Group which controls over 1.3 billion dollars in assets. While many locals have been supportive of the farm, even volunteering to help plant saplings, others have suggested that the devaluation and sale of the land amounts to land grabbing “global north style” (Holt- Gimenez et al., 2011).

The Detroit Future City Plan (2013), designed to innovatively re-envision the future of a city whose “greatest liability and greatest asset” is vacant land (199), is a key municipal policy that enabled this immense transfer of land to a wealthy entrepreneur. The Plan has been driven primarily by “the preoccupation with what to do with all that land” (199), and thereby makes a great case for vacant land as a fundamental challenge facing Detroit. Importantly, however, as Clement (2013) and Safransky (2014) have both so pointedly argued, the Plan also actuated the construction of the land as vacant and ready for investment by labeling and mapping the land as empty, and thus discursively erasing the racialized populations who continue to call it home.

This brief sketch of the case of Hantz Woodlands in Detroit foreshadows a central claim of this study: that vacant land is not empirically real, but rather that its identification is a social and an administrative process. Thus begins the work that is undertaken in this dissertation of outlining

2 the power of the ideological construction of vacant land as problematically empty and unproductive – a process that, I claim, is intimately linked with the histories of racially segregated urban spaces. The case of Hantz Woodlands thereby also initiates the delineation of a central theme in this thesis – the dynamic interconnections between race, space, and waste at the urban scale in the era of neoliberal development.

Detroit has been a key city of focus for urban scholars interested in the conditions of postindustrial neoliberal urbanism (Sugrue, 2005; Teaford, 1990; Stoler et al., 2007) and the governance of vacant land in racialized districts of the city (Clement, 2015; Clement and Kanai, 2013; Safransky, 2014). Indeed, the sheer scale of the vacant land problem in the city and the subsequent land transfer in the case of Hantz Woodlands powerfully illuminates the necessity of querying the role of vacant land in processes of neoliberal urbanism. Unsurprisingly, the case of Hantz Farms and of Detroit more broadly have become emblematic of the issue of land accumulation by urban elites in post-industrial landscapes (Akers, 2013), and has helped to raise flags about the place of urban farming in the neoliberal city (Safransky, 2014). However, the role of vacant land as a tool of municipal governance for land and populations in cities without sprawling acres of vacant land, like Boston, has not yet been investigated.

It may seem counterintuitive to study vacancy in a city without a “vacancy problem,” and Boston is an extreme example of this, being one of the fastest developing and gentrifying cities in the United States. Yet the case of urban farming in Boston demonstrates that narratives and ideologies of vacancy as an urban problem similarly underscore the development of municipal projects and policies designed to “fix” vacancy, like urban farming, even in cities that aren’t in crisis. Following Walker (2015), I suggest that the geographic specificity of disparate cases can illuminate the workings of broader systems at play.

2 Background

In December 2013, Boston passed a rezoning ordinance called Article 89 to support urban farming by making farming a legal activity in the city, and reducing the “red tape” that currently makes economically sustainable farming a challenging prospect. This bylaw was developed by the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) between 2010 and 2013, and is one of the first municipal bylaws to support urban farming in the United States. The municipal rollout of urban farming in Boston occurred in two stages: first, the development of an urban farm pilot project

3 on two vacant sites on the border between Mattapan and Dorchester designed to investigate the viability of urban agriculture in Boston; and second, the initiation, planning, and implementation of the city-wide rezoning ordinance, Article 89. Article 89 enables a variety of urban farming activities in Boston, including rooftop farming operations, aquaculture, and hydroponics. Like the urban farming bylaw in Detroit, however, Article 89 was designed primarily for the productive reuse of vacant land in the city via ground-level urban farming, and thus represents a municipal programmatic fix for vacant land.

Like in Detroit and many other American cities, vacant land in Boston is located primarily in the neighbourhoods of the city – Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan – populated by a majority of the city’s racialized residents (mostly African Americans and Latinos) (Figure 1.1). Like most

Figure 1.1 Boston’s Neighbourhoods. Map created by Dexter Locke.

majority minority neighbourhoods in American cities, these areas have a long history of racist state-based policies and practices that have actuated and maintained their racial segregation. Such policies and practices include municipal slum clearance projects, mortgage redlining,

4 widespread tax foreclosure, arson-for-profit insurance scams on residential properties, and the suburbanization of upwardly-mobile residents (Medoff and Sklar, 1994; Vrabel, 2005). Many of these policies and events, particularly those that led to the depopulation and weakening of the central city, have meant that vacant land has become a persistent feature of racialized landscapes in American cities over the course of the last three decades.

This dissertation takes an historical approach to analyzing the politics of vacant land for use as commercial urban farms in racially segregated neighbourhoods of Boston. Indeed, the story of Article 89 is one that necessitates careful attention to the racialized politics of land in Boston, and to the social, political and economic histories that have resulted in the racialization of space and the spatialization of race in the neoliberal city (Shabazz, 2015; Lipsitz, 2007; McKittrick and Woods, 2007). Consequently, this dissertation interrogates Article 89 as a modern programmatic fix for urban vacant land that mirrors and extends the logics and realities of historic practices to “fix” racialized urban spaces, including urban renewal in the 1950s and 60s, and community gardening in the 1970s and 80s. While urban farming and the development of Article 89 are the central jumping off point for this dissertation, the story of Article 89 is just the most recent chapter in the history of the governance of vacant land and its relationship with racialized populations and their spaces in Boston over the course of the last half of the twentieth century.

When I began researching commercial urban farming and the development of Article 89 in the fall of 2013, I had already recognized that vacant land was a significant part of the equation. Ground-level urban farming relies on unused and unproductive lots for the establishment of commercial production activities. When I spoke with local residents, attended meetings and events relevant to urban farming, and read scholarly literature about urban farming, vacant land came up time and again. As I argue in Chapter 2, although there are varying accounts of vacant land, the most common narrative of vacant land relates to its negative social and economic impacts on urban neighbourhoods.

Similarly, urban farming is almost invariably seen as a fix for vacant land and the multiple issues that epitomize low income racialized neighbourhoods, including unemployment, crime, and chronic health issues related to diet like diabetes, obesity, and heart disease. The ability of commercial farming enterprises to fix the ills of the inner city is particularly significant in the neoliberal context of lagging municipal resources, declining federal support for cities, and the

5 growing significance of cross-sector public-private enterprise coalitions for urban development (Brenner, 2004; Hackworth, 2007). As I moved forward with my study of urban farming and Article 89, returning to Boston in the fall of 2014, my ideas about urban farming as an aspect of the neoliberalization of the racialized inner city began to coalesce. While scholars have raised the spectre of urban farming as an aspect of neoliberal urban development (e.g. McClintock, 2014), I began to query in a significant way the role of vacant land for urban farming, and within neoliberal urbanism more broadly, which has not been well-investigated outside of a few studies focused on Detroit (Safransky, 2014; Clement, 2015; Clement and Kanai, 2013).

3 Research Questions

By focusing on the programs, policies, and practices of urban growing on vacant land in Boston from the mid-twentieth century, the overall objective of this project is to provide an empirical analysis of the historical trajectories of the governance of vacant land in the city.

There are four questions that guided this study:

1) What are the politics and contexts of urban land governance for urban growing1 in Boston and what is the relationship between Boston’s land politics and the development of legal tools for urban growing activities?

2) Who are the stakeholders in land governance for urban growing in Boston, and what relationships, partnerships, and/or tensions exist between them?

3) What do narratives of governance across stakeholders at various scalar levels reveal about the politics and processes of urban land governance for urban growing in Boston (i.e. questions of land access, tenure, and ownership; stakeholder partnerships;

1 I use the term “urban growing” rather than urban farming because I am interested not only in urban farming, but also other forms of urban growing such as community gardening on vacant lots as forerunners to the commercial mode of urban farming.

legal/social recognition; the role of land administration systems, etc.)

4) How do the answers to the previous research questions help to illuminate power inequalities and struggles between various stakeholders involved in land governance for urban growing, particularly in relation to social/political status, class, and race?

As I continued my research in Boston, I realized that vacant land was both theoretically and substantively at the centre of urban growing, and I began to uncover the interconnections between growing activities, vacant land, and racialized populations and spaces. These questions helped to illuminate the historical contingencies of the governance of urban vacant land in Boston, including the use of vacant lots for community gardening which heightened in the 1970s with the city’s Revival Lots program, and urban farming under Article 89. Like urban farming, community gardening in Boston occurs on vacant inner city land, and is underscored both by the physical reality of the racialized inner city neighbourhoods where vacant land is located, as well as negative ideologies about the social and economic dangers of vacant land.

4 Context 4.1 Neoliberal Urban Governance

In a very basic way, the existence of vacant land in American cities, the municipal obsession with bringing it back into productive use, and the story of the governance of vacant land in Boston highlight some essential issues relevant to neoliberal urbanism. What exactly is neoliberalism, and what are the characteristics of neoliberal urban development?

Neoliberalism describes the era of capitalist governance and development that began in the early 1970s, and that proposed a return to the liberal philosophies of individualistic freedom and autonomy, and limited government interference (Brenner and Theodore, 2002; Hackworth, 2007). Neoliberalism proposes that the greatest good for the greatest number is ensured when government is used “only as a protector of free exchange” (Hackworth, 2007: 9), and the “free market” is protected from government intervention. The trifecta of neoliberal policy is thus “the individual, the market, and the noninterventionist state” (Hackworth, 2007: 10). The ideology of neoliberalism was a response to the economic crisis of the liberal Keynesian era of governance in the 1970s and 80s influenced by the globalization of economic development and resulting urban

7 decline that typified many cities in the Western world as manufacturing and production activities shifted to Asia and the global south (Brenner, 2004; Brenner and Theodore, 2002).

An important aspect of neoliberalism since the 1970s has been a rearticulation of the mode of governance from managerialism to entrepreneurialism (Harvey, 1989a). Governments at the national, regional and local scales increasingly “mobilized new, growth-oriented approaches to urban and regional policy in an effort to promote economic development from below, rather than through centrally steered programs” (Brenner, 2004: 2). The shift to neoliberalism influenced a movement away from managerial redistributive welfare policies such as public housing, unemployment benefits, and food stamp programs, and under neoliberalism “good” urban governance means the ability for government “to assist, collaborate with, or function like the corporate community” (Hackworth, 2007: 10). Indeed, entrepreneurial governance emphasizes the unrestricted free market as the central mover and shaker in urban economic development.

Significantly, neoliberalism can also be construed as a form of governance and a “way of doing things, as a principle and method for the rationalization of the exercise of government” (Türken et al., 2016), also understood as a governmentality approach to neoliberalism.2 Governmentality refers to “the ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses, and reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power” (Foucault, 1979: 20). These objects of analysis can be seen as forming an “assemblage” which Lippert and Pyykkönen (2012) suggest is

a contingent and creative ensemble of distinctive material and social elements that can include knowledges, ways of seeing and calculating, human capacities, mundane and grand devices, kinds of authority, spatialities, and governmentalities…that converge and which seek a specific outcome among those who govern and of those who are governed (1, quoted in Brady, 2016: 15).

This use of the term “assemblage” also implies decentering the state as the central institution of governance, and instead paying attention to the relationships and interconnections between the

2 See Brady (2016) for an overview of the debates between structuralist scholars of neoliberalism (e.g. Brenner, Smith, Hackworth) and governmentality scholars over whether studies of governmentality can usefully be combined with investigations into neoliberal governance. I will discuss my approach to governmentality and neoliberalism in more depth in my Methods and Analysis section below.

8 diverse players and objects of governmentality in order to understand the contingencies of governance assemblages.3

Neoliberalism has had wide-ranging impacts on the mode of urban governance in cities in the Western world, which have become “strategically crucial geographical arenas…[for] neoliberal initiatives” (Brenner and Theodore, 2002: 249). Several of these impacts are significant for what follows in this dissertation. First, the shifts tied with the pre-eminence of neoliberalism have meant the resurgence of local and regional economies, and a “rescaling of statehood” away from the primacy of the nation state, even as national-level institutions continue to have significant roles in urban and regional political economies (Brenner, 2004). Cities have thus become extremely significant players on the national and global scale in the era of neoliberal governance, an event that Swyngedouw (1997) terms “glocalization” to signal the growing importance of the local and the global scales for governance and regulation under neoliberalism. This has resulted in a variegated but ultimately diminishing role of the nation state in processes of governance at multiple scales.

Second, neoliberalism has particular and contextual expressions that are contingent upon local geopolitical and economic conditions, and neoliberalism can thus be best described as a process of urbanism (Jessop, 2002; Hackworth, 2007). This idea has been articulated by Brenner and Theodore (2002) amongst others (Mitchell, 2001; Peck and Tickell, 1995, 2002) who suggest that rather than just a political theory or ideology, neoliberalism is an “actually existing” process that has material impacts on the urban realm that are contingent and multifaceted. Neoliberal urbanism has alternately been described as engaging in a dialectical process of creative construction and destruction of political economic spaces (Brenner and Theodore, 2002), or a more linear “roll-back” of the remnants of liberal Keynesianism followed by a “roll-out” of neoliberal policies (Peck and Tickell, 2002). Like neoliberalism itself, these constructive and destructive impulses have both political and material consequences within the urban milieu.

Third, though the promise of neoliberalism is the achievement of the maximum allocation of benefits for the greatest number, neoliberalism has actualized greater socioeconomic inequality

3 See Ong and Collier (2005) and Lippert and O’Connor (2003) for studies that use the concept of assemblage in a similar way.

9 and “a dramatic intensification of uneven development at all spatial scales” (Brenner and Theodore, 2002: 352). Uneven development is a consistent feature of capitalist development (Smith, 1984)4, and expresses the fact that, under capitalist urban growth, economic, social, and political processes are not uniformly distributed but rather unevenly organized in ways “that are characterized by divergent socioeconomic conditions, developmental capacities, and institutional arrangements” (Brenner, 2004: 13). Uneven development occurs at multiple scales within cities, territories, and between and across nations, and is a pattern of sociospatial arrangement that is “highly visible in [the] landscape of capitalism as the difference between developed and underdeveloped spaces at different scales” (Smith, 1984: 156). Consequently, inequality is not only expressed socially between classes and populations, but also spatially, and implies the concentration of capitalist development and assets within particular areas, zones or nations, and the marginalization or deprivation of others (Brenner, 2004).

Uneven development also expresses the tensions and contradictions inherent to capitalism, which is characterized both by the pressure to exploit all territories equally to ensure the maximum productivity of every space, and the desire to differentiate that exploitation according to particular conditions that increase capital accumulation in specific times and places (Smith, 1984, 1995; Brenner, 2004). In this sense, uneven development is both the product of the system of capitalist development, as well as the premise of the continuation of capitalism into the future (Smith, 1984). Uneven development can also create a multiplicity of regulatory issues, however, as it constructs the basis for capital accumulation while also potentially creating the foundation for the destabilization of the system (Harvey, 1982; Brenner, 2004; Peck and Tickell, 1995). Destabilization can occur as the polarization between particular zones continues, which may create negative sociopolitical dynamics and political disruption between classes or interest groups if and when social and economic inequality increases beyond manageable limits. In such instances, issues of political legitimacy may surface (Brenner, 2004).

Importantly, and fourth, zoning and other forms of organizing the city both express and maintain the uneven development of the urban realm, and the policies that accompanied this shift to urban entrepreneurial governance were designed to concentrate and maximize the productivity of urban

4 Smith’s (1984) Uneven Development proved to be a seminal analysis of uneven development as a key feature of capitalism in the modern era, and an early work in the nascent field of political economic geography.

10 spaces. Urban planning and legislation have had a historically important role in the development of the capitalist city and thus in neoliberal urban development, and the growth of the urban planning profession itself is intimately linked with the urbanization of industrial capitalism (Boyer, 1983). The rationale that cities be divided according to their most rational and productive uses, necessary for the development of the capitalist city, underlines Euclidean zoning and other legal and political orderings of the space of the city and has been a constant since the birth of the capitalist city. While municipal policies such as Euclidean zoning, public housing, and food stamps were originally conceived of under the managerial Keynesian style of urbanism (Hackworth, 2007; Harvey, 1989) and have weakened under neoliberalism (Hackworth, 2007), they continue to hold up neoliberal urbanism in important ways.

In particular, the underlying impulse of capitalist development to maximize the efficient and productive use of every space in the city – expressed in the planning ideology of “highest and best use” – continues to be a “doxic truth” in city-building (Blomley, 2004: 86). Uneven urban development and legislative tools like zoning are thus intimately connected within neoliberal urbanism. Municipal tools that help to flag and address urban spaces that are currently being used in ways that are not their highest and best are therefore a vital aspect of the process of balancing the goal of achieving the “best uses” of all city spaces, and the exploitation of new or “waste” territories. It is my contention that vacancy, like urban “blight” that came before it during the era of urban renewal, is one such municipal tool. By flagging problematic conditions of land, vacancy also assists the municipality to justify programmatic interventions to return the land to private and productive use – interventions that, theoretically, are derided under neoliberal urbanism.

Significantly, both the heavy-handedness of the city-state and its subsequent justifications are demonstrative of contradictions within neoliberal urbanism that bear fleshing out. Indeed, while neoliberalism theoretically supports “small government” and the unfettered free market, neoliberalism “has in practice entailed a dramatic intensification of coercive, disciplinary forms of state intervention in order to impose market rule upon all aspects of social life” (Brenner and Theodore, 2002: 352). In other words, national, regional, and municipal governments must utilize legislation and policy in order to construct the ideal conditions in which the free market can work best. Since neoliberalism requires state intervention while theoretically challenging it,

11 justifications for such interventions and, ultimately, the legitimacy of the government and the system itself must be constructed.

One way in which the legitimacy of the system is constructed is through the manufacture of crises – crises that regularly flag the “problem” of uneven development itself. This helps to resolve two central contradictions of neoliberal urban development. First, constructing a crisis tied with uneven development justifies state interventions designed to address it, and second, it momentarily tackles and potentially reverses the reckless uneven development that threatens to destabilize the entire system (Smith, 1984). I claim that vacancy constitutes one such “crisis” of the capitalist urban milieu, and is thereby a key tool for the resolution of the contradictions inherent to neoliberal urban development.

4.2 Racialization of Space, Spatialization of Race

An important and relatively unacknowledged reality about uneven development is that it is integrally tied with race. Though Smith (1984) maintained that “uneven development is social inequality blazoned into the geographical landscape” (156), and other scholars have since written about the racial aspects of property and the real estate market (e.g. Brown and Smith, 2016) and other forms of institutional discrimination that may account for spatialized aspects of racial inequality (e.g. Feagin and Parker, 1990; Squires and Kubrin, 2006), research has not yet integrated race into understandings of uneven development (Fox Gotham, 2014). Indeed, Fox Gotham’s (2014) recent foray into the subject suggests that racial segregation and uneven development are often specifically distinguished from one another in studies of urban development.

However, Fox Gotham (2014) argues that racial segregation and other expressions of structural racism are not separate from, but in fact integral to, uneven development, and suggests that they must be understood as “analogous, reciprocally related, and mutually constitutive of each other” (4). This view enables a variety of urban issues to be viewed alongside and through their relationship with race, including property and real estate, poverty, school segregation, and other phenomena that are patterned by social and racial inequality, and that have implications for the spatial organization of the urban milieu. Arguing that uneven development is thus an inherently racialized process, Fox Gotham (2014) offers a retooled and simplified definition of uneven

12 development as “unequal patterns of metropolitan growth that reproduce racial and class inequalities and segregation, inner city disinvestment, and suburban sprawl” (1).

The uneven development of northern American cities along lines of race has been actuated by an array of events, policies, and legislative practices at multiple scales over the course of the last century. In the first half the twentieth century, the Great Migration of African Americans from the Southern United States to the North beginning during WWI and continuing throughout the 1920s meant that the black populations of large and/or industrial cities like New York, Chicago, Boston, Detroit, and Cleveland grew exponentially. The influx of new residents created the grounds for conflict by inducing competition for jobs (Hayward, 2015). At the same time, the Immigration Act of 1924 stemmed the tide of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, and the black newcomers to Northern cities took the place of these immigrants in the lowest position of the economic and social hierarchy: they worked in the worst jobs, and lived in the worst housing.5 Many landlords wouldn’t rent to black families, and they were forced to compete for physically run-down and overcrowded housing. They also often couldn’t get hired in good jobs, get loans to purchase a home, or get repairs done on the homes they did own. A wide array of racist institutional practices conspired to ensure that the spaces occupied by people of colour were comparatively “wasted.”

The fact that African Americans generally lived in the “deteriorated” inner city areas of the city in the early decades of the twentieth century meant that, over time, black populations were thought to actually cause the physical degradation of urban neighbourhoods (Hayward, 2015). As I will review in depth in Chapter 3, urban slums and “blight” came by the mid-century to describe the poor physical conditions of inner city neighbourhoods populated by a majority of racialized minorities and immigrants, and the terms eventually came to be commonly understood

5 Acknowledgement of this fact can be seen in the Concentric Zone theory of urban development that originated out of the Chicago school in the 1930s (Park et al., 1968), the same school of thought that eventually constructed the idea of “blight” that came to be utilized to justify eminent domain proceedings used to oust thousands of blacks from their homes during urban renewal. The Concentric Zone theory suggests that the newest immigrants would settle in the middle of the city, the “inner city”, and as they became upwardly mobile and transitioned into better housing, they would gradually move further and further away from the centre in a bull’s eye pattern of development. Studies carried out during the 1930s that focused on “diseased” inner city urban areas noted that after immigration laws changed in the 1920s, however, these areas became stagnant and declined both physically and “morally.” Such “moral” arguments were often euphemistically tied with the presence of African American residents in these areas, who were commonly regarded to be “diseased” or morally bankrupt in some inherent ways (e.g. Walker,1938; see Pritchett, 2003).

13 as shorthand for conditions associated with racialized neighbourhoods that needed interventions to return them to good order (Pritchett, 2003). This situation was buttressed by a growing common logic that suggested that it was “natural” for communities to live together and congregate according to race, and that to “mix” the races in any way was to go against this “natural inclination” and would lead to neighbourhood instability and the decline of property values (Hayward, 2015). As racial segregation was being constructed, it was also ideologically thought to be good for cities since blacks were thought to bring down property values by their very presence. These ideas about race had a “dramatic impact on the spatial organization of the American city...[and]…more generally, on the incorporation (or lack thereof) of black Americans into urban social, economic, and political life” (Hayward, 2015: 54).

By mid-century, urban redevelopment was enabled by the labeling of racialized neighbourhoods as “blighted,” which helped to justify burgeoning powers of eminent domain for municipalities to take private housing developments occupied mostly by African Americans (Pritchett, 2003). The simultaneous abandonment of central cities and the movement of upwardly mobile residents in massive waves of suburbanization were similarly influenced by negative ideas about African Americans, and the 1950s and 60s in particular were a time of moral panics about black-on-black crime (Tyner, 2014). As disinvestment of largely black central city neighbourhoods came to characterize the new neoliberal policies from the early 1970s, “ghetto neighborhoods” were left as “spaces to fear and avoid, hence furthering their isolation and exclusion” (Mele and Adelman, 2015: 7). The city eventually came to be seen as a dangerous and even murderous place because of its association with blackness (Tyner, 2014). Other policies like those that had characterized the earlier decades of the century including mortgage redlining, blockbusting and steering, school segregation by race, and even police practices have been shown to have played a part in maintaining the racial segregation of many American cities over the course of the twentieth century (Lipsitz, 2007; Manning Thomas and Ritzdorf, 1997; Massey and Denton, 1993).

This brief overview of events characteristic of broad processes of urbanization in the last hundred years demonstrates the extent to which race is integral to processes of urban change and uneven development, and makes an initial sketch of some of the patterns of segregation, settlement, and property ownership that can be described as actuating the racialization of space and the spatialization of race (Lipsitz, 2007; Shabazz, 2015; McKittrick and Woods, 2007). According to Fox Gotham (2014), racialization refers to the way in which “racial categories sort

14 people, society distributes resources along racial lines, and state policy shapes and is shaped by the racial contours of society” (13; see also Winant, 2004; Omi and Winant, 1994).

One of the most pertinent ways in which the racialization of space and spatialization of race have been actuated over time in the American context is through residential racial segregation, which has been influenced by historic forms of overtly racist practices as well as other forms of “spatial separation and isolation” that continue to operate today (Mele and Adelman, 2015: 3). While many racialized groups experience some level of segregation, the history of residential segregation in the US is intertwined with African Americans more so than any other population (Denton, 2015). Even as cities change and become increasingly diverse,

[t]he spatial and social processes that reproduce black-white segregation have persisted, because discriminatory ideologies that account for differences between blacks and whites have undergirded them (Mele and Adelman, 2015: 2)

Such discriminatory ideologies are exemplified by the belief that blacks themselves are responsible for the physical degradation of their neighbourhoods, rather than institutionalized forms of racism, as discussed above. It is subsequently impossible to disentangle discriminatory attitudes towards racial minority groups, and particularly African Americans, from the practices that have actuated their physical, social and economic exclusion.

Three broad factors have contributed to residential segregation in the US: forms of exclusion that restrict blacks from living in white neighbourhoods; policies that enable residential segregation; and social factors that inhibit residential choices for blacks and enable ones for whites (Mele and Adelman, 2015). Mechanisms that have slowed home ownership for black communities in particular have contributed immensely to the entrenchment of racial segregation, and “racial residential segregation remains the dominant organizing principle of housing and settlement patterns, urban poverty, and metropolitan development” (Fox Gotham, 2014: 3). This highlights the extent to which the history of uneven development and racial segregation in the United States is one that must account for the importance of the ideology of “privatism,” particularly privatist housing policies that prioritize home ownership as a key to financial independence and responsible citizenship. Many of these privatist policies “have overwhelming[ly] benefited entrepreneurs, private real estate interests, community builders, and the like, at the expense of poor residents and racial minorities” (Fox Gotham, 2014: 10).

Outside of residential segregation, the racialization of space is actuated more broadly by the institutions responsible for the assembly of urban space, and experienced in spatial ways beyond housing. Denton (2015) suggests that

[r]ace, space, and exclusion are built into the structures and professions that regulate urban space, namely city and state governments, the planning profession, real estate developers, among others. With no explicit reference to race at all, these groups, simply by following best practices and tradition, are easily able to reproduce the racial landscape (xx; see also Manning Thomas and Ritzdorf, 1997).

The racialization of space is thus not limited to where racialized populations are able to live and call home, but also encompasses other aspects of the comprehensive imagination of geographical space, including “who is granted the right to participate in public space” and who has a right to the city (Tyner, 2014: 129; see also Mitchell, 2003). Laws, policies and structures of governance – both ideologies and practices – embody, influence, and concretize particular kinds of rights for some while blocking others, and the expression of these structures of governance often have a spatial component. It is in this sense that the landscape of the city can become a landscape of “racial practice,” and “to experience a particular place as a ‘black place’ is to experience blackness as a social fact” (Hayward, 2013: 46). Race, and the stories that we tell about race that come to be regarded as social reality are thus “built into the very fabric of urban and suburban landscapes” (Hayward, 2013: 47).

The extent to which racist sentiments are built into the fabric of the urban milieu means that practices and policies that historically ensured the racial segregation of populations have in some ways become more covert. Indeed, Lee and Lutz (2005) suggest that “today racial exclusions no longer require overt discriminatory acts” (14), particularly to the extent that racism is entrenched so fully within “discourses, practices and ideologies” that it “is thoroughly institutionalized and systemized” (Ibid.). Even policies and practices that attempt to reverse historic forms of racial discrimination by targeting racialized populations for positive interventions (e.g. guaranteed mortgages for African Americans, racial desegregation of schools, etc.) “sort people” and “distribute[] resources along lines of race” (Fox Gotham, 2014: 13), and thus may end up unintentionally actualizing negative outcomes for the very populations they were attempting to help. Partially, this may be a consequence of the paternalistic impulse that often undergirds such interventions, and that unintentionally maintains political and economic disempowerment for

16 racialized populations by making white supremacy a precondition for such interventions (see King, 1981). The arguments that I present in this dissertation demonstrate the intertwining ways in which ideologies and practices related to race are increasingly expressed in furtive and obscure forms that often seem on the surface to be neutral, objective, and most importantly, entirely disinterested in race.

4.3 Urban Growing

There are a broad array of ways in which municipalities have attempted to address the urban problem of vacant land, several of which are discussed in Chapter 2. The most relevant of these for this dissertation, and a significant method by which municipalities have attempted to stimulate the reuse of vacant land, is via urban growing activities like community gardening and urban farming. I utilize the term “urban growing” as a generalized umbrella term to encompass growing activities that take place in cities, including both community gardening and urban farming, in a way that is akin to how other scholars utilize the term “urban agriculture.” Tornaghi (2014) suggests that urban agriculture (UA) is a broad term that encompasses many types of activities occurring in both urban and peri-urban areas, including

small-intensive urban farms, food production on housing estates, land sharing, rooftop gardens and beehives, school-yard greenhouses, restaurant-supported salad gardens, public space food production, guerrilla gardening, allotments, balcony and windowsill vegetable growing and other initiatives (551).

The broadness of activities that are encompassed within the term “urban agriculture” can make measuring and tracking such activities challenging, particularly since cities may include different aspect of urban agriculture within their specific definitions. Further, the boundaries between urban and rural areas may be blurred in some geographic contexts, making defining the boundaries of UA even more difficult (Tornaghi, 2014). In this dissertation, I distinguish community gardening and ground-level urban farming as two separate but related urban growing activities that have at various times occurred on urban vacant land. Urban growing has other significant characteristics that bear discussion here.

In the global north, urban growing activities including both community gardening and urban farming have been occurring in cities since at least the late 19th century, though urban planners historically often sought to restrict farming activities within cities and define it as a rural activity (Hodgson et al., 2011). In most American cities, community and backyard gardening that is non-

17 commercial has historically been considered an acceptable use of land, while commercial enterprise farming has only become a recognized and legal use of land in some cities within the last decade or so. Broader governmental support for growing activities within urban centres over the course of the twentieth century has followed a historical trajectory of crises like war and periodic food shortages (Lawson, 2005; Tornaghi, 2014). Once the crisis has resolved, however, the land is often reverted to more economically viable uses of land. Urban growing activities are thus often considered a temporary use of land (Drake and Lawson, 2014; Pearsall and Lucas, 2014), although city governments are increasingly supportive of commercial urban farming and are challenged to determine policies and legislation that can support the longer-term use of land for urban farming (Hodgson et al., 2011).

4.3.1 Community Gardens

People have been gardening in cities in the United States more or less continually since the 1890s, when social reformers utilized gardens to “provide land and technical assistance to unemployed labourers” in some of the largest cities in the US including New York and Chicago (Lawson, 2005). During both world wars, many of the common lands in urban centres like the Boston Common and Central Park in New York were converted to agricultural lands, and backyard plots were promoted as patriotic acts to support the nation in a time of war. By the 1970s, a new boom period of gardening hit the United States as global forces of urban restructuring meant the suburbanization of many of the most populous American cities, and the subsequent emptying out of central cities that left behind vacant land and little in the way of municipal finances to address it. Community gardening during this period was seen relatively romantically as a way in which communities hit hard by these issues, particularly low income and racialized urban residents, might retain control and power over local land (Dowty, 2005), and community gardening has been called the ‘child’ of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s (Warner, 1987; see also Nettle, 2016; Hynes, 1996). This is because gardening was seen at that time to represent a grassroots response to pollution, crime, and poverty in areas predominated by people of colour, and many of the first community gardeners during this time were experienced activists in other civil rights-related movements (Warner, 1987; Nettle, 2016).

Nevertheless, while it is common to think of community gardening in the 1970s as originating from within local communities, it is more correct to think of urban gardens as programmatic in that their development entailed municipal administrative support and a broad cast of characters

18 including local leaders and garden development organizations to make them a reality (Lawson, 2005). They often required a high level of technical knowledge as well as financial resources, and their development was complex and challenging, necessitating the assistance of experts and administrators. Community gardens may thus be seen as active interventions to bring vacant land back into productive use, often on behalf of, rather than by, racialized low income communities. We will see these realities detailed in Chapter 4 on the Revival community gardening program in Boston.

Like other forms of urban growing, community gardening has often been supported broadly during times of economic, social, or environmental crises, which diminishes when the crisis is over and the land may be used for more valuable developments (Lawson, 2005). Gardens thus need considerable support to ensure their continued existence, such as purchase and protection by conservation or community land trusts, as has happened in cities like New York and Boston. Ironically, the fact that gardens are seen to produce a dizzying array of benefits, from education to job training, spaces of “nature” in the city, and democratic self-help for the unemployed, youth, or the poor contributes to their temporary nature since “the garden itself is rarely the end goal but rather facilitates agendas that reach beyond the scope of gardening” (Lawson, 2005: 11). Indeed, while some gardens are protected in perpetuity, this is a relatively small percentage of gardens across the United States (Lawson [2005] suggests about 5.3% of gardens), and most struggle nearly constantly with retaining land and other resources to continue gardening programs into the future. Gardens thereby present an interesting object through which to examine rights to the city, and conflicts over who can use land and how (Staehali et al., 2002).

4.3.2 Urban Farming

A multiplicity of forms of urban and peri-urban farming activities have been exploding across the developed world for more than a decade, though many North American cities have begun explicitly supporting the activity relatively recently, from about 2009 (Tornaghi, 2014). Urban growing activities may have varying levels of municipal support and involvement. In many cities, municipal support for urban growing is rather “state-led” in the form of food policy councils, zoning changes, or the use of other planning tools designed to open land or reduce bureaucracy for urban growing.

For example, some cities may implement overarching food-system assessments and municipal sustainability plans, or more specific studies of urban agriculture and its incorporation into the urban landscape. Both London, UK and Toronto have developed municipal plans to propose ways in which urban agriculture can be scaled up and prioritized at the administrative level (Hodgson et al., 2011). Land inventories of potential urban farming sites is a common inclusion in such municipal plans; many cities including Minneapolis (City of Minneapolis, 2010), Portland (Balmer et al., 2005), Oakland (McClintock et al., 2009), and Boston (Chan et al., 2013) have undertaken such inventories. Inclusion of urban farming within local comprehensive planning is also an option, as has been undertaken in Madison, WI (City of Madison, 2006) and New Orleans in the plans to rebuild following Hurricane Katrina (Eggler, 2010).

In order to actualize greater inclusion of urban farming within the urban landscape, cities might alter regulations that make it easier for private land to be used for agricultural activities, particularly the allowance of chickens, livestock and bees in backyards; this has occurred in San Antonio, TX (City of San Antonio, 2010), as well as in Boston, amongst other cities. Cities may actively make public land available to be used for gardens as an interim use, as has occurred in Hartford, CN, which keeps a database of useable properties and matches gardening groups with suitable land (City of Hartford, 2010). Some cities may also create land disposition regulations to allow surplus properties generally owned by the municipality to be used for urban agriculture, particularly those that are waiting for future development or, alternatively, are not useable for other uses due to size, shape, location, or other issues (de Zeeuw et al., 2007). Cities may also choose to implement policies that strengthen infrastructure more generally to support urban farming and other urban growing activities, such as land banks, abandoned-property management systems, and tax-exemptions for property owners, amongst others (Hodgson et al., 2011).

Zoning is becoming an increasingly common tool for cities to support urban farming. Historically, cities did not recognize farming as a legal use within residential, commercial or industrial zones, and often sought to separate commercial-scale growing of food from the urban realm entirely (Hodgson et al., 2011). Over the past ten years, American cities have utilized zoning in several ways to support the growth of urban farming. Some have permitted particular urban farming activities within existing zoning districts, as is the case in Boston, as well as Philadelphia (City of Philadelphia, 2010), Seattle (City of Seattle, 2010), Denver (City of Denver, 2010), and Austin, TX (City of Austin, 2010). Others have created new zoning districts

20 in which urban farms or other urban growing activities are specifically permitted, such as the case with Cleveland (City of Cleveland, 2007), or have included urban farming as a “desirable amenity within planned unit development (PUD) or traditional neighborhood development (TND) project guidelines” (Hodgson et al., 2011: 48-49).

In other cities, however, there has been a much more grassroots development of urban farming, like the example of “Grow Heathrow” which came out of the mobilization campaign against the development of Heathrow’s third runway (Tornaghi, 2014), or the Black Farming movement out of Detroit. In some cities, like Detroit, both city-led and community-led urban farming movements coexist. This makes categorizing urban farming according to political manifestation, motivation or cause quite challenging, with some clearly originating from within the community and others, like that in Boston, much more akin to any other urban development. This fact is significant for what follows in this dissertation since, while the case of Boston clearly highlights some key issues with regards to the politics of urban farming, it is not possible to have a “one size fits all” approach to theorizing urban farming. Indeed, McClintock (2014) has suggested that urban farming is a complex and variegated phenomenon that must be recognized as having both radical and neoliberal, “status quo” characteristics.

The dual nature of urban growing is expressed in the fact that, while urban farming and other forms of urban growing are often considered to be particularly beneficial for low income communities, they may also contribute to “green” or environmental gentrification in which the upgrading of landscapes in poor and racialized communities may lead to increases in property values and eventually to the ousting of long-time residents (Gould and Lewis, 2017; Curran and Hamilton, 2018). The related potential for urban farming to assist cities to compete for neoliberal “global city” status by beautifying and sanitizing the urban environment with important implications for low income urban residents and the democratic use of public space should also not be overlooked (cf. Mitchell, 1997). These tensions surrounding urban farming will be explored in depth in Chapters 5 and 6.

5 Methods and Analysis

Drawing on a governmentality approach, this dissertation seeks to analyze the processes of neoliberal governance of vacant land that have been occurring in Boston over the course of the last half of the twentieth century. As outlined above, a governmentality approach pays attention

21 to the “assemblage” of ways of knowing and seeing, and a variety of “distinctive material and social elements” (Lippert and Pyykkönen, 2012: 1, quoted in Brady, 2016: 15) contingent upon a particular temporal and spatial milieu. Forefronting governmentality also means decentring the state by paying heed to the variety of relationships between a diversity of players in addition to the state in order to comprehend the ways in which modes of governance occur. Consequently, both formal and informal modes of governance as well as state and non-state actors are considered in discussions of governance assemblages or regimes (cf. MacLeod and Jones, 2011).

In order to prioritize the ways of knowing and seeing that underscore particular governance assemblages, this dissertation emphasizes the importance of logics or narratives, and the power of narratives both to shape and to sustain the social world. Throughout my thesis I pay analytical attention to the narratives and logics of governance that underline the practices of governmentality within a given geographic and spatial milieu, and how particular narratives win out over others and become hegemonic. Paying attention to narratives is important for understanding not only how the state operates, but is also vital for comprehending the broader social world and other stakeholders within in. As Hayward (2015) suggests, “it is all but commonplace in contemporary social and political theory to suggest that people construct both their personal and their collective identities, and that they do so in specifically narrative form” (15). Importantly, storytelling is how people impose on the chaotic world around them

a structure that renders it readable, and hence usable. Storytelling is how social actors give to lived experience a shape and a form that enables them to comprehend it and to use it as a guide for future action (Ibid.).

Analyzing narratives has thus enabled this dissertation to achieve the goal of tracing logics of governance across multiple stakeholders while also doing justice to narratives characteristic of the community or other non-state stakeholders, and how disparate narratives might compete with each other for legitimacy. To this extent, more so than some rather abstract studies of governmentality, I have chosen to infuse my approach with narrative analysis that pays heed to the emotionally laden and embodied narratives that entrench social life.

My attention to narratives and storytelling is also influenced by work in the field of legal consciousness studies, which originated during the social sciences “cultural turn” in the 1980s and 90s. The cultural turn inspired scholars to focus much more intently on what might be called cognitive schemas – how people think about and experience the social world around them – as

22 well as their influence on a wide variety of decision-making processes and actions. In the field of sociolegal studies, this influenced the development of legal consciousness studies, the study of how people think about law and the ways in which it influences the role of law in society (Yngvesson, 1989; Merry, 1990; Greenhouse et al., 1994). Arguably the most influential work that came out of the field is that of Patricia Ewick and Susan Silbey. In their book The Common Place of Law, Ewick and Silbey (1998) argue that there are limited but contradictory ways in which people think about law, and that the contradictions actually strengthen the role of law in society and contribute to its legitimacy and hegemony over time (see also Silbey, 2005). My treatment of narratives in this thesis similarly emphasizes the iterative relationship between thoughts or schemas and decision-making processes, and the ways in which narratives and related practices become hegemonic and constitutive of social structure over time.

The methodological and analytical framework of this thesis also expresses a sensitivity to what Brady (2016) has termed the “ethnographic imaginary.” This is neither a technique nor a particular methodology, but rather “entails a sensitivity to concrete practices within a milieu” in order to investigate neoliberalism and develop “an analytics of governmentality” within particular geographical and temporal contexts (Brady, 2016: 4-5). By prioritizing the “actually existing” policies and realities that form within a broader neoliberal context, I follow other scholars (e.g. Fairbanks, 2012) who suggest that it is possible to combine structural and governmentality approaches to investigate the contingent and ad hoc nature of neoliberal urban governance. The ethnographic imaginary thereby enables attention to the material and social elements that constitute a governance assemblage, in addition to narratives or logics of governance.

In order to achieve an analysis of governance assemblages relevant to vacant land that have coalesced over time in Boston, I utilize vacancy as a central analytical object around which governance assemblages in particular times and places are constructed. Because vacant land has for decades been considered an urban problem, this approach emphasizes the “practice of problematization” within governmentality studies (Brady, 2016: 17), which stresses the ways in which particular issues come to be represented as problems and their solutions come to be recognized as “self-evident while others are marginalized” (Ibid.).

5.1 Methods

Prioritizing a governmentality approach and constructing an ethnographic imaginary within the bounds of social science research can involve drawing on a range of methods, from ethnography to participate observation, archival documentary analysis, interviews, and media or content analysis (Brady, 2016). I combined several of these methods in this study in order to answer the questions that lie at the centre of this dissertation.

5.1.1 Semi-Structured Interviews

In 2013 and 2014, I conducted a total of sixty-six semi-structured qualitative interviews with respondents in several stakeholder groups relevant to urban farming in Boston. These are: state representatives; city representatives; members of food/farming advocacy organizations and businesses, both for- and non-profit; urban farm land developers/owners; community leaders and members; and farmers, both for- and non-profit. The breakdown of respondents in each stakeholder category is outlined in Table 1.1 below.

I gathered participants in a variety of ways: identifying stakeholders through media, organizational and municipal documents; snowballing from existing contacts; and meeting stakeholders at various urban farming events, as well as through my work on the urban farms. Many of the participants who are public figures and were identified in media relevant to urban farming in Boston I “cold contacted” via a form email that I created for that purpose; many other participants I met in person at the farms, relevant events or meetings, and solicited interviews either at that time or later after attaining contact information from them. I solicited a total of 93 interviews and successfully completed 66 interviews, a fairly strong response rate of 71%. The vast majority of those who were solicited for an interview but did not participate in the study stated their lack of time as the reason for refusal.

Participants generally chose the interview site; these ranged from cafés to offices and, in a few cases, participants’ homes. Interviews lasted from a minimum of 30 minutes to a maximum of 120 minutes. Informed consent was collected from all participants; all names have been

Table 1.1 Respondents by Stakeholder Type

Stakeholder Type Number of Respondents

State Representatives 4 City Representatives 15 Food/Farming Advocacy Organizations and Businesses 18 (Non-profit: 13) (For-profit: 5) Urban Farming Land Developers/Owners 6 Community Leaders/Members 11 Farmers 12 (Non-profit: 6) (For-profit: 6 ______TOTAL 66

anonymized for privacy6 or, in many cases, only the stakeholder type or role is used to identify the individual (e.g. city representative, farmer, community member). In the few cases when names are not anonymized, the individual in question is a known public figure, and had additionally been quoted in relevant media or in other public forums regarding their views on urban farming in Boston. The names of all relevant organizations have been retained, however, though the particular positions of the interviewees within the organizations and identifying details about them have been removed whenever possible.

Two of these interviews were oral histories of individuals who were involved in the development of community gardens in Boston from the 1970s. The first individual, Sara Woodson, worked with BUG, a grassroots organization created in 1976 with a mandate to assist gardening groups with organizational and technical aspects of gardening in the city of Boston. The second individual, Cheryl Green, has similarly been involved with community gardening and conservation in Boston for several decades, and worked for many years with Boston Natural

6 When I obtained informed consent from all participants, I specifically asked for permission to use their real identities; all but one of my participants consented. However, I have chosen to anonymize my respondents for privacy because of the political and potentially contentious nature of the arguments presented in my thesis, and, most importantly, because their specific identities do not add to the arguments being made herein.

Areas Fund (BNAF), which is now the Boston Natural Areas Network (BNAN). BNAF/BNAN was founded in 1977 and works to conserve natural lands within and surrounding the Boston Metropolitan Region.

Specific interview questions varied based on the type of stakeholder being interviewed. However, all respondents were first asked questions specific to their organization or business (e.g. questions about the operation of the organization and their role), and then queried about their views on urban farming and city land development (e.g. how urban farms impact the local community and the city, the development and passing of Article 89 in Boston, their views on vacant land, and their perception of how the new law may impact farming in the city). All interviews were recorded and later transcribed. Please see the Methodological Appendix following the References section of this dissertation for the consent form and a selection of interview questions.

5.1.2 Field Work

During my two periods of research in Boston I volunteered with two different urban farming organizations. In the fall of 2013 I spent between one and three mornings a week volunteering with Revision Urban Farm, a non-profit urban farm with two farm sites in the Roxbury and Mattapan neighbourhoods of Boston. In the summer and fall of 2014 I volunteered 2 to 3 mornings a week with City Growers, one of the only for-profit urban farming businesses in Boston that also has several farm sites in Roxbury, Mattapan and Dorchester. During my 2014 visit to Boston I lived in the Ashmont Hill neighbourhood of Dorchester within biking distance of a number of urban farms sites, which also allowed me to gather “day-to-day” data about the neighbourhood. During this fieldwork (literally and figuratively) I learned everything I could about how each company works and how its employees perceive farming (both for- and non- profit) as a land use in Boston, particularly in light of the new legal changes enabling commercial farming as a legitimate land use. I took extensive fieldnotes, collecting information about each organization including: working conditions; organizational structure; financial matters including external funding; what they grow; where they sell their produce and for how much; and how the passing of Article 89 has impacted their business practices. I also spoke informally on a regular basis with the employees of both organizations, many of whom were long-time community members and informed me about various aspects of neighbourhood life.

During my time in Boston I also attended a variety of events and meetings relevant to urban farming in Boston; I recorded extensive fieldnotes after each event. For instance, I went to several city planning feedback meetings held by community groups and/or city agencies in which designated or potential new urban farms sites were discussed. I attended several meetings of the new urban agriculture working group that was founded near the end of my tenure in Boston and which continues to hold meetings on a bimonthly basis to discuss the development of farming in Boston and surrounding areas. I regularly went to farmers markets where local urban farms sold produce, sometimes in my study neighbourhoods and other times in more upscale neighbourhoods nearby. I went to several meetings and events related to the annual Massachusetts Food Day, held by the Massachusetts Department of Agricultural Resources in which urban farming is promoted as a key aspect of the health and development of the state’s food system. Shortly after I arrived in Boston in July 2014, I attended the groundbreaking ceremony for a new urban farm site which turned out to be an especially significant moment to showcase local perceptions of urban farms, the relationship between stakeholders, and the politics of land governance for urban farming in the city; this event is recounted in detail in Chapter 6.

5.1.3 Archival Data and Other Documents

While in Boston, I also collected hundreds of pages of archival documents drawn from two collections housed in the city. The first of these is an unprocessed collection of records of the Boston Urban Gardeners (BUG) from 1959 to 1980 held at the Healey Library at the University of Massachusetts (JFK campus). They include organizational documents, correspondence, and media clippings relevant to the organization and its work in garden development. The second source is archival documentation of the administration of the municipal Revival Program which operated in the 1970s and early 80s held at the Boston City Archives. I also utilized processed papers from the collection of Kevin White, who was the Mayor of Boston during the operation of Revival.

In addition to archival data, I collected a wide variety of documents on both trips to Boston. These include: organizational documents of community groups and municipal agencies; the minutes of meetings that were held at community and city venues where Article 89 was presented, discussed and/or developed; and media accounts related to urban gardening and farming, both historical and recent.

5.2 Analysis

Data from all sources were combined into one large database in Atlas.TI for analysis. The data was then coded utilizing a grounded approach to identify both narratives and practices of governance related to vacant land during the periods of each of the municipal programmatic fixes addressed in this thesis: the period of the Revival Program and community gardening during the 1970s and into the 1980s; and the period of urban farming and the development of Article 89 beginning around 2010. This first stage of analysis enabled me to create large “chunks” of related data that I then printed out and continued to analyze on paper, making notes and further clarifying codes and relevant details of the narratives and practices that surfaced in the data. As a fairly visual and tactile researcher, I carried out the final stage of analysis by hand, literally cutting and pasting relevant quotations and analytical notes relevant to narratives and practices into linear accounts that I then utilized to write my final analyses.

The analysis and consequent utilization of data in this dissertation reflects the emphasis on both the practices and narratives of governance that together constitute the governance assemblages that have operated in Boston with regards to vacant land over the course of the last half of the twentieth century. Analytically, I consider a wide variety of texts as expressive of narrative. All texts, whether written (academic literature, grey and bureaucratic literature, media reports, organizational documents), oral (stakeholder interviews), or experiential (ethnographic and meeting notes) are treated as constitutive of narratives that tell stories about the social world. You will see in what follows that I move back and forth seamlessly between a variety of different kinds of texts in order to analyze narratives and the role they play in both reflecting and producing the social world. Indeed, I am interested not only in what narratives express and where they come from, but also in what Hayward (2015) calls their “productivity” – the ways in which narratives influence or inscribe in some way the social world. While narratives are not predictive, they do limit in important ways the possibilities of what might come after.

The prioritization of a governmentality approach and the ethnographic imaginary within this study achieves several overlapping analytical aims. First, it allows me to effectively highlight the particular contexts, both geographic and temporal, that have produced the distinct history of vacant land management in Boston over the last half of the twentieth century. Second, such an approach enables me to emphasize the “governmental assemblages” that link together narratives,

28 practices, and techniques of governance that characterize particular eras of vacant land management in Boston. Ultimately, enabling a governmentality approach and the ethnographic imaginary to inform both data collection and analysis equips this study with the ability to highlight the workings of power and especially “the state’s strategic role in the historical organization of power relationships” (Bröckling et al., 2011: 2, quoted in Brady, 2016: 8) without relying on a state-centred approach. Indeed, throughout the proceeding chapters, I pay attention not just to the workings of the state, whether at the federal, state, or municipal level, but to the ways in which logics of governance weave themselves into common understandings of various social phenomena that exist across and between stakeholders at various scales. It is precisely the ways in which governance logics or narratives are constructed in disparate and decentralized ways and locations that lends power to particular ways of seeing and of constructing the social world, both ideological and physical.

6 Contributions of the Study

In demonstrating that vacant land is simultaneously an expression of the race-space-waste nexus and of uneven development under neoliberalism, this study contributes to our understanding of the ways in which these two phenomena, traditionally treated as disparate within urban studies, are “analogous, reciprocally related, and mutually constitutive of each other” (Fox Gotham, 2014: 4). The work of this dissertation thus also makes an argument for acknowledging more fully the centrality of race as a structuring force of neoliberal policies and the sociospatial expression of them within the urban milieu.

By taking an historical approach to the analysis of vacant land governance, this study presents a significant account of the shift into neoliberalism in a notable American city that can potentially illuminate broader characteristics of this shift. Vacant land in inner city neighbourhoods is itself a vestige of the attempts of the US federal government to create a “spatial fix” for the failure of liberal Keynesian policies and the resulting influx of funds into suburban enclaves as property and highway investments in the 1950s and 60s (Harvey, 1989; Hackworth, 2007), and is thus a significant sociospatial expression of that failure and the birth of neoliberalism. Indeed, inner cities themselves can be seen as creations of the Keynesian state because they were often built via public welfare policies such as public housing and the subsidization of private and state enterprise (Jessop, 2002; Hackworth, 2007). The inner city has thus “served as the focus of high-

29 profile real estate investment, neoliberal policy experiments, and governance changes” (Hackworth, 2007: 13), and has been called “a ‘soft spot’ for the implementation of neoliberal ideals” (Ibid., in reference to Marcuse and van Kempen, 2000).

In shifting the geographical focus of the study of the governance of vacant land to a city without a “vacancy crisis,” a key contribution of this study is in demonstrating vacant land as an object of governance for municipalities. Indeed, this study helps to highlight significant features of the role that municipal governments have in the neoliberal development of urban space, the management of uneven development within their borders, and the governance of urban populations in relation to and through the management of particular kinds of spaces. The study additionally highlights the ways in which vacant land illuminates contradictions inherent to uneven urban development, and in particular the necessity of justifications for state-based interventions to smooth the workings of the free market. By placing vacancy within historical perspective, this study demonstrates that, while vacancy as a tool of governance has originated from particular political, economic, and social conditions characteristic of neoliberal urbanism, vacancy is also a rearticulation and reassembly of modes of governance that reach back even into colonialism that define property ownership hierarchically according both to particular land uses and to the populations associated with or defined by those uses.

The work presented in this dissertation also contributes to scholarly knowledge about urban growing activities including community gardening and urban farming. In acknowledging the complex and contradictory meanings and practices of urban growing activities within the urban milieu, this study demonstrates the importance of considering the specificity of geospatial and temporal contexts in order to understand why and how particular politico-economic governance regimes for land and growing occur. By considering urban growing both as a municipal entrepreneurial activity that attempts to actuate the movement of capital into low income racialized districts of the city, and simultaneously as a radical community-based mode of “taking back the land,” this dissertation demonstrates the role of conflicting ideologies of land in how the urban landscape comes to be the way that it is.

7 Overview of the Thesis

In the chapters that follow, I present an analysis of the processes and outcomes of the governance of vacant land in Boston from the mid-twentieth century. Chapters 2 and 3 set up the thesis

30 theoretically and substantively. Chapter 2 presents an analysis of conceptualizations of vacant land in scholarly and bureaucratic literatures, and lays the theoretical foundation for the remainder of the dissertation. I argue that, while there are multiple competing claims about vacant land, there is an existent hegemonic ideology of vacant land as an urban problem that holds considerable socio-political weight for Westernized conceptualizations of urban spaces. I suggest that, rather than an empirical reality, vacancy is an administrative and a social process that must be interrogated in order to comprehend the rhetorical and material power that flows through it as a municipal tool of land governance. I begin in this chapter to sketch the outlines of a theoretical understanding of vacancy as an object of governance that is produced alongside and through the “waste” of racialized populations and their spaces, and that has the ability to limit how we think about urban “waste-lands” and what should or must be done to address them.

Chapter 3 begins the work of tracing the material and ideological assembly of vacant land and associated processes of governance together with racialized populations in the United States, drawing on Boston as a case study. I suggest that vacancy extends the ideological power of urban blight, which was invented in the 1930s to justify the expansion of municipal powers of eminent domain to take privately-owned housing in mostly African American neighbourhoods during urban renewal. I argue that several socio-political and economic shifts that occurred during the middle decades of the twentieth century tied with the growth of neoliberal urbanism account for the movement away from the legal use of blight in racialized neighbourhood and towards the increasing recognition of the problem of “vacancy.” The first of these is the increasing recognition of urban renewal as “Negro removal,” which influenced its political untenability. The second is the rescaling of neoliberal urban development toward the scale of individual lots, i.e. the scale of property. The third shift is the coalescence of a variety of racist policies at multiple scales that actuated the weakening of the central city and the deterioration of racially segregated neighbourhoods, and made vacancy an apt descriptor for those spaces. Like blight before it, I suggest that vacancy is both a tool of land governance and a justification for the use of that tool, and thus expresses the role of uneven development in the accumulation of capital particularly within racialized urban spaces.

Chapters 4, 5 and 6 present in-depth analyses of the two programmatic fixes for vacant land in Boston, community gardening beginning in the 1970s in Chapter 4, and urban farming in Chapters 5 and 6. Chapter 4 analyzes Boston’s REVIVAL Program, an acronym that stands for

“Revitalizing Vacant Lots.” This program was designed as a comprehensive system to bring city- owned vacant land back into private and productive use, and was a vital aspect of the city’s new urban revitalization scheme funded by federal Community Development Block Grants (CDBGs) starting in 1975. Drawing primarily on archival research and oral histories, this chapter analyzes the overlaps and tensions between the narratives of gardens that existed from the perspectives of the City and of the community – the narratives that I dub Gardens-as-Development and Gardens- as Empowerment respectively – to make two central arguments. First, I suggest that rather than merely an interim use of land, gardens were utilized by the municipality as special tools for the redevelopment of vacant land in the inner city on the federal dime. Gardens thus illuminate the role of vacant land in processes of uneven development in the neoliberal city. Second, while shared ideologies of the dangers of vacant land in the inner city helped to produce considerable agreement between stakeholders – low income mostly racialized residents, municipal bureaucrats, and garden development organizations – about the importance of gardens for inner city communities, this agreement also masked disagreements and power imbalances across these groups to influence desired outcomes in the urban landscape. Ultimately, the potential of gardens as spaces of political empowerment for racialized urban residents was reduced by their prioritization as redevelopment tools for vacant land in the inner city.

Chapter 5 jumps forward in time to the first decade of the twentieth century and the newest programmatic fix for vacant land in Boston, the rezoning ordinance Article 89 that was designed to enable commercial urban farming on ground-level lots in the inner city. While urban farming as a new programmatic fix for vacant land extends the logics underlying renewal and revitalization, urban farming takes place within the new politico-economic context of the return to the city that has occurred in Boston and many American cities over recent decades. As a result, the inner city neighbourhoods of Boston have become the focus for municipal policies designed to invite middle class settlement, private development, and ultimately the creation of dense “urban village”-type landscapes. In this chapter, I contextualize Article 89 and urban farming within these broader redevelopment plans, suggesting that vacant land has increasingly come to be seen as an asset for the redevelopment of the inner city that prioritizes private developers and commercial enterprises in new developments in the city, including urban farming. While urban farming is often touted as providing a broad range of benefits for the residents of low income racialized neighbourhoods, I suggest in this chapter that Article 89 and

32 urban farming are primarily regarded by the municipality as tools for the construction of a new land market that makes previously unbuildable land in Boston buildable, and are thereby harbingers of potential future gentrification in these areas of the city.

Chapter 6 also focuses on Article 89 and urban farming, presenting a detailed analysis of the development and operation of the first urban farm that was opened after the passing of Article 89, the Garrison-Trotter farm in Roxbury. This farm was the first to be developed via a growth coalition partnership of for-profit and non-profit organizations that have become preferred developers for ground-level farming businesses on vacant land in the inner city in Boston. I present an analysis of the common understanding of the multiple benefits of urban farms for local low income racialized communities, suggesting that in reality urban farming may reinscribe class and race-based patterns of social and economic exclusion at the urban scale. I argue that the municipality’s prioritization of urban farming as a tool for the redevelopment of the inner city means that the promise of urban farming for inner city communities – to ameliorate food deserts, provision economic returns, or create jobs in the new “green economy” – in Boston has largely gone unrealized.

A Quick Note on Spelling

In this dissertation, you will notice the presence of both American and Canadian spellings of particular words, like neighbourhood/neighborhood and labour/labor. This is because I have kept the American spelling when quoting my respondents, as well as within American sources. My own writing utilizes Canadian spellings.

Chapter 2

Conceptualizing Urban Vacant Land in the United States

1 Introduction

In this chapter I explore how vacant land is conceptualized by scholars and by practitioners such as urban planners and city bureaucrats in the United States, and how these conceptions have influenced the ways in which vacant land is governed by American municipalities. In order to investigate these issues, I analyzed scholarly materials written about vacant land across several disciplinary fields including urban studies, psychology, criminology, geography, urban studies, and the burgeoning literature on “shrinking cities.” I also examined bureaucratic literature and studies of vacant land, some of which date back to as early as the 1930s.1 My analysis suggests that, while there are multiple competing ideologies of vacant land, there is an extant dominant narrative that conceives of vacant land as an urban problem. This narrative articulates vacancy as a measurable condition of spaces that influences numerous negative social and economic outcomes in cities, and that is produced by various impersonal sociospatial processes.

The hegemonic notion of vacant land as an urban problem has wielded significant power to shape the social world both materially and ideologically in the United States, particularly since the 1970s. Materially, the narrative of vacant land as an urban problem has influenced the production of state-based policies and tools of governance that treat vacant land as deserving of resources to return it to its highest and best use via institutional and technical solutions. Ideologically, the hegemonic conception of vacancy works to obstruct other important realities

1 Many of these historical sources, particularly those written prior to the 1950s, were prepared by city bureaucrats as urban planning was becoming institutionalized as a profession necessary for the development and planning of cities (Boyer, 1983). As a result, many of the sources emphasize the importance of the growth of the rational city, and focus on how urban planners and other city bureaucrats could develop more powerful tools for ordering and reordering the city in a very top-down way. Urban “blight” and other disorders of the landscape including vacancy were as a result often a focus. I sourced many of these resources from Pritchett’s (2003) excellent historical legal analysis of urban blight in the United States.

34 about vacant land, and, in particular, the co-productive relationship between race, space, and waste (cf. Dillon, 2013).

Indeed, questions about the relationship between race and vacant land have not been given the attention they deserve in studies of vacancy, even as scholars acknowledge the geographical correlation between low-income racialized populations and urban vacant land (e.g. Lipsitz, 2007; McKittrick, 2006). While there are a few excellent studies that investigate the relationship between race and vacancy – most notably the work of Clement (2013), Clement and Kanai (2015), and Safransky (2014) – these studies are rather narrow at this point in their common focus on Detroit, the archetypical postindustrial “crisis city” with immense amounts of land identified as vacant and little in the way of municipal finances to address it. The limited number of studies of the relationship between race and vacant land across historical and geographical contexts is significant considering that critical scholars have long emphasized the ways in which the sociospatial organization of cities reflects social and economic inequalities, and especially the racialization of space (Lipsitz, 2007; Massey and Denton, 1993; Shabazz, 2015; Wilson, 1987).

I argue that it is imperative to investigate and contest the hegemonic narrative of vacant land as an urban problem, and instead to understand vacancy as an object of governance that constitutes and is constituted by the state in city-building, in order to grasp the relationship between race and vacant land in the United States. The purpose of this chapter is thus to lay the groundwork for the chapters that follow it. The proceeding chapters take up the project of comprehending vacant land as an object of governance by tracing the ideological construction and physical production of vacant land, as well as its programmatic fixes, alongside racialized urban populations and their spaces over the last half of the twentieth century in Boston.

The chapter proceeds as follows. I first explore the ways in which vacant land has been defined and discuss the temporal and spatial conditions for defining vacancy as a municipal problem, highlighting the extent to which its identification is a social and an administrative process. Next I delve into the various ways in which vacant land has been conceptualized by scholars and by practitioners like urban planners, highlighting policies and tools of land governance commonly utilized by municipalities to address it, and the power of hegemonic ideologies to sanction particular realities of vacant land while obstructing others. I then briefly sketch the scholarly

35 underpinnings of a conception of vacant land as a municipal tool of governance, and the ways in which this view can enable meaningful linkages between the management of vacant land and of racialized populations in urban environments during the last half of the twentieth century in the United States. Ultimately, I suggest that scholars studying vacant land must acknowledge the role of race in epistemological and ontological processes of urban vacant land production (i.e. knowledges and realities of urban vacant land).

2 Defining Vacant Land

What, exactly, is vacant land? On the surface it seems to be an easy enough question to answer. Most of us rather involuntarily conjure up a mental image of vacant land as a weed- and trash- strewn lot, usually located in some low-income urban neighbourhood. In the social imagination, such land is primarily understood as playing a nefarious part in crime and other untoward activities, and as presenting an imminent threat to the coalescence of the ideal neighbourhood form. This cultural understanding supports the idea that vacant land is an easily identifiable object, and an inherently dangerous one at that. How vacant land is actually defined by municipalities is more complicated, however, and varies widely to the extent that vacancy has been called an “elastic” (Bowman and Pagano, 2004), “heterogeneous” (Northam, 1971), undefined (Pearsall et al., 2004), and unstandardized concept (Pagano and Bowman, 2000). This variability demonstrates that the labeling and identification of vacancy is neither as natural nor as obvious as the common understanding of vacant land presupposes. Nor is it an empirical science. Rather, the identification of vacant land is a social and an administrative process.

Evidence for this claim is supported by the fact that the identification of land as vacant regularly reflects the development concerns and histories of a given city. For example, municipalities may only label land as vacant when it is considered immediately developable, and exclude land with abandoned or derelict structures, as well as brownfields (contaminated land) and greenfields (e.g. parks) (Pagano and Bowman, 2000). Some scholars, and the General Accounting Office of the United States, additionally note that vacant land should only be labeled vacant by a municipality after it has been empty for two or more years (Accordino and Johnson, 2000; USGAO, 2011). In such a situation there has presumably been an identified failure of private market actors to develop the city satisfactorily, resulting in the need for municipal intervention. Vacancy is thereby both recognizant of a sense of urban crisis and incongruous to mere physical emptiness.

On the other hand, land that is not physically empty may sometimes be labeled as vacant, such as the “land that supports structures that have been abandoned, derelict, boarded up, partially destroyed, or razed” (Ibid., 563-564). Clement’s (2013) work on Detroit highlights a case in which the term “vacant” is utilized not to reflect the reality of an empty landscape but rather to effectively erase those left behind by depopulation and deindustrialization to mark the land as open for new investments (see also Safransky, 2015). Indeed, land may be recognized as vacant but not actually identified as a problem in need of programmatic fixes unless, like in the case of Detroit, the urban population is in decline (Accordino and Johnson, 2000). In such a case, the municipality may intervene to retain ownership of vacant properties, and thereby reduce their tax base since the city does not tax their own land.

The identification of vacant land also has very particular spatial and temporal expressions and limitations. The focus on vacant land as an urban problem and the development of corresponding municipal tools and policies have occurred in a specific way in the United States mostly since the 1970s. While empty land preexists this period, cities did not regularly recognize vacant land as a problem of governance or of municipal solvency needing to be addressed. As will be discussed in detail in Chapter 3, this historic period came with specific economic, governance, and land use conditions at the urban scale that leant themselves to the construction of “vacancy.” Similarly, vacant land as an issue of governance exists in the United States, and with very particular racial connotations and histories, in a way that it does not in other places, even neighbouring countries like Canada. The temporal and spatial specificity of vacancy highlights its social constructedness, and the necessity of understanding how and why it has originated in the last half of the twentieth century.

3 Conceptualizing Vacant Land

How do scholars and practitioners think and write about vacancy? Through my analysis of the literature, and by drawing on the work of Moore (2012) in her conceptual mapping of the waste literature2, I have identified six discrete concepts of vacant land: vacancy as hazard; as manageable object; as asset; as context; as risk; and as an object of governance. I will discuss these concepts below; you will also see them resurface in the proceeding chapters.

3.1 Vacancy as Hazard, as Manageable Object, and as Asset

The first three of these concepts of vacant land – hazard, manageable object, and asset – share many characteristics in common, and are by far the most voluminous in terms of use and output in the literature on vacant land. They also demonstrate the best-developed avenues of inquiry within studies of vacant land; these are the concepts that together reflect the hegemonic narrative of vacant land as an urban problem. They also reach the furthest back historically, and policy studies coming out of the planning field and government agencies as early as the 1930s mostly drew on these concepts of vacancy. Indeed, the vast majority of bureaucratic literature and that written by and for urban planners falls here, which may partially account for the abundance of scholarship in this area.

While these three conceptions of vacant land do differ in important ways, they also share several characteristics in common. All three concepts take for granted the empirical quality of vacant land, and thus regard vacancy as a characteristic of spaces that can be empirically known, defined, and measured. Scholars writing in this area thus rely on municipal definitions of vacant land, and consider it to be produced largely by impersonal forces beyond any particular human intention – for example, as a manageable but problematic byproduct of sociospatial processes inherent to the capitalist system. Consequently, a major interest in this area is tracking how and why patterns of vacant land are produced within cities and at the national scale, and its impacts

2 In order to organize the various concepts of vacancy that I found in the literature, I draw on the work of Moore (2012) in her conceptual typology of the literature on waste; for more detail about her analysis, please see Moore (2012). The scholarship on vacant land can similarly be organized. Scholars may utilize several different concepts of vacancy across or even within individual academic resources, and thus the concepts that are outlined in this chapter can be seen as ideal types or archetypes of vacancy.

38 both locally and municipally. Notions of vacancy that fall into this area of the literature thus legitimize the notion of vacant land as “an aberration” (Drake and Lawson, 2014) of the capitalist city requiring state-led interventions to return it to its “highest and best” use, and thereby empower particular orderings and reorderings of the cityscape. Because of these similarities, these three conceptions overlap considerably, and are often found together in studies of vacant land. I have attempted to disambiguate the central features of these three concepts, however, in order to highlight their distinctions and to enable a more methodical discussion of the various characteristics of the literature on vacant land.

3.1.1 Vacancy as Hazard

Scholarly approaches that treat vacancy as a hazard utilize municipal definitions (or, in most cases, a single municipal definition) of vacant land in order to track the uneven distribution of vacant land between and within cities (Bowman and Pagano, 2000; Goldstein et al., 2001; Hughes, 2000; McGovern, 2006; USGAO, 2011), and to measure the impact of vacant land on neighbourhoods and cities more broadly. Various socioeconomic factors are attributed as the central causes of vacant land. Bowman and Pagano’s (2000) survey of ninety-nine American cities, for instance, suggests that the five most common causes of vacant land are divestment, suburbanization, deindustrialization, land contamination and out-migration, all of which produce particular municipal and national patterns of vacancy. Following these forces, scholars note that cities in the south tend to have more vacant land than northern cities, while postindustrial cities and neighbourhoods are especially impacted. Vacancy as hazard work also emphasizes the concentration of vacant land in inner cities compared to their suburban counterparts, except when cities have recently expanded their boundaries, or in suburban areas hit harder by the foreclosure crisis than their urban counterparts, such as in southern states like California, Arizona, Florida and Nevada (Tappendorf and Denzin, 2011). An important aspect of studies of vacant land that approach it as a hazard is thus a concern with utilizing seemingly scientific and technocratic tools such as maps to locate vacant land, which lends these studies an air of neutrality and objectivity.

The local and municipal impacts of vacant land are also an important focus in this area of the literature. Scholars interested in how vacant land impacts society regularly highlight the link between vacant property and negative health outcomes, loss of collective efficacy, high drug and

39 crime rates, and other local conditions (Accordino and Johnson, 2000; Alexander and Powell, 2011; Bowman and Pagano, 2000; Fahy, 1989; Goldstein et al., 2001; Hirokawa and Gonzalez, 2010; Kremer et al., 2013; Langegger, 2014; Spellman, 1993; Stucky and Ottensman, 2009; USGAO, 2011). In this sense, scholars often draw attention to the ways in which vacant land is seen to signal the overall health of a neighbourhood (Accordino and Johnson, 2000). On the municipal scale, vacant land is seen as a symbol of the erosion of the city’s tax base and a lost economic opportunity (Garven et al., 2012). The economic cost to municipalities is also highlighted, and with million dollar lot cleanup programs and associated impacts on adjacent property values (Pearsall, Lucas and Lenhardt, 2014), vacant land is often characterized as a barrier to development (Accordino and Johnson, 2000). In this vein, some scholars have gone so far as to propose the existence of vacant land as a municipal crisis, particularly in the post-war years when cities had little in the way of finances to intervene and address the issue (Lawson, 2005), as well as in some postindustrial “shrinking cities” where vacant land can present an overwhelming obstacle to the continued solvency of the municipality.

Figure 2.1 The Cycle of Decline, adapted from Goldstein et al. (2013)

Although the characterization of vacant land as the cause of various negative impacts is now commonplace, this is a relatively new trajectory in conceptions of vacancy as hazard, which at one point saw vacant land as a symptom of divestment and “problem neighbourhoods” rather than as a cause (Accordino and Johnson, 2000). Scholars working in the area of vacancy as

40 hazard now commonly recognize a kind of “cycle of decline” in which vacancy is both caused by and exacerbates various economic forces, producing more vacant property (Figure 2.1).

3.1.2 Vacancy as Manageable Object

Closely related to the notion of vacancy as hazard is the conception of vacant land as a manageable object. In light of the common recognition of vacant land as empirically real and problematic, a preoccupation with methods to manage and to intervene on vacant land seems natural and obvious. In this vein, many scholars, and especially municipal agents and bureaucrats including urban planners, think and write about vacant land – explicitly or implicitly – as an unwanted byproduct of a range of sociospatial processes, and consequently as an object that must be managed by society. Vacant land is recognized as deserving of various municipal and state- based resources to manage it and ultimately to return it to its “highest and best use” and the private market. This area of the literature views the amelioration of vacant land as “open to technical and…institutional solutions” (Moore, 2012: 786) and the state – whether municipal, state, or federal – is constructed as the ideal intervener to return the land to productive use (e.g. Bartholemew, 1932; Knight, 1930; see also Bowman and Pagano, 2000; Hughes, 2000; Nabarro, 1980; Northam, 1971).

As a result, scholars working in this area have flourished a wide-ranging discussion of the function of the state and various state-based tools designed to intervene on vacant land, including: eminent domain (e.g. Domas, 2011; Ihlder and Brooks, 1936); the municipal seizure of speculative properties, either through liens or tax foreclosure (e.g. Accordino and Johnson, 2000; Goldstein et al. 2001; Kraut, 1999;); the increase of vacant property taxes and other tax reforms (Berkman, 1957; Brown, 1957; Sinn, 1986); and the development of land record databases (e.g. Hughes, 2000), or land banks (Garven et al., 2012; Tappendorf and Denzin, 2011). Strategies for maintaining properties, such as mowing lawns and putting up fences, as well as incentivizing residents to upkeep their vacant properties, is also a focus (e.g. Accordino and Johnson, 2000; Tappendorf and Denzin, 2011). These various tools – whether reliant on state or citizen action – are seen as important and necessary for the successful and continued functioning of the municipality.

While the particular features of vacancy as manageable object can be drawn apart from the conception of vacancy as hazard, in the literature these two concepts are nearly always found together. Indeed, gaining legitimacy for the management and intervention of vacant land necessitates locating it as well as measuring its problematic local impacts. Taken together, the concepts of vacant land as hazard and as manageable object both reflect and reproduce the perception of vacant land as an empirical and objective reality that has the potential to manufacture municipal events of crisis. They also simultaneously lend credence to the construction of a reality in which interventions are needed to fix vacant land and break the inevitable cycle of decline that it presents. Indeed, because vacant land is constructed within conceptions of vacancy as hazard and as manageable object as an actually existing feature of the cityscape, often via the technocratic quality of the work and tools related to it, the concern with locating, measuring, and managing vacant land seems politically neutral. However, such preoccupations have the power to draw attention to and problematize particular cities, and particular urban spaces, over others. Considering the lack of a definitive definition of vacancy and the ability of municipalities to label some land “vacant” while excluding other less desirable and less developable land, conceptions of vacancy as hazard and manageable object together wield substantial ideological power over the landscape. These claims foreshadow the arguments made in the following chapters in which I discuss the production of vacancy and its programmatic fixes in Boston from the 1970s to the present.

3.1.3 Vacancy as Asset

A third related notion of vacant land, vacancy as asset, also exists in the literature. It is a comparatively small but nevertheless significant body of work that challenges the idea of vacant land as inherently problematic by considering instead its potential as a resource rather than a liability. Several key ways in which vacant land can represent a municipal resource have been highlighted. For example, rather than a drain on the local economy, scholars have suggested that vacant land can represent a “key competitive asset” for a wide variety of “economic development strategies” that may assist in the recovery of declining areas, including “creating jobs, increasing tax revenue, improving transportation infrastructure, and attracting residents” (Pagano and Bowman, 2000: 1). In this sense, rather than symbolizing deterioration and loss, vacant land can represent the hope of future growth and prosperity (e.g. Ehrenhalt, 1997; Pearsall and Lucas, 2014). Scholars have also discussed the potential for vacant land to enable the reshaping of the

42 central city in order to encourage urban livability (Fox, 1989) and ultimately the development of a “new urban green” (Pearsall and Lucas, 2013: 1). In this vein, the use of vacant lots for community gardens, parks, and other green spaces has been highlighted, in addition to other more practical environmental benefits such as the absorption of excess water runoff (ibid.; McPhearson et al., 2013). In a recent special issue of Cities on the topic of vacant land, Pearsall and Lucas (2013) sum up the perspective of vacancy as resource well when they suggest

vacant land can provide alternative spaces for human and nonhuman interactions and processes, areas for innovation in public policy, particularly in a shrinking cities context, and an opportunity for communities to reclaim and revitalize their neighbourhoods and bring together different cultures and people (1).

This optimistic view of vacant land is important for balancing the more negative perspectives that dominate the literature on vacant land, and for opening a space to consider more community- centric considerations of vacant property that challenge the prescriptiveness of the state as the best intervener to “fix” vacancy. However, as I will discuss in Chapter 5, in cases when the economic potential is emphasized as the “asset” of vacant land, the view of vacancy as asset can also represent an important facet of the neoliberal development of the inner city that ultimately prioritizes private and entrepreneurial urban growth over communities. When this happens, as in the case of urban farming in Boston, it may represent a shifting of responsibility for urban redevelopment away from the municipal government for the benefit of communities and towards the prioritization of private developers and urban growth coalitions.

3.2 Vacancy as Context

Scholarship that conceptualizes vacancy as context represents a relatively new area of study. Scholars who utilize the concept of vacancy as context suggest that vacant land is produced by society and thus that it exists empirically and objectively. However, in contrast to the previous three concepts of vacancy that have been discussed, meanings of vacant land are not inherent to the object itself but, rather, are variable and constitutive. Foo et al. (2014) suggest, for instance, that meanings of vacant land are locally defined and relational, and that vacant lots “acquire functions and values in accordance with their local physical and broader social and economic contexts” (176). Similarly, Pearsall et al. (2014) accentuate contestations over meanings of “productive” land that influence perceptions of vacancy and the policies that may be designed to

43 address it. In this sense, the role of geographical place in shaping connotations of vacant land is an important focus in this area of the literature.

Scholars working in this area have also laid out alternative meanings of vacant land that challenge hegemonic narratives. Foster (2014), for instance, suggests the political potential of vacant lots as spaces for contesting the capitalist cityscape. Similarly, Langegger (2014) argues that community uses of vacant lots, like gardens, illustrate the possibility of “publicizing” previously private spaces in the city. Work that falls into this area thereby suggests that vacant lots can be considered as sites of social and political disruption.

However, it has also been recognized by scholars working in this area that not all perceptions of vacant land are equal, and that some have more power than others to influence municipal land use policy. Vacant land can thus be seen as an important locus for the competition of stakeholders in city building (Lawson, 2004, 2005; Marcus and Morse, 2008; Staehali et al., 2002). In other words, despite some scholars suggesting the potentially disruptive nature of vacant land to the hegemonic order of the city, a hierarchy of uses exists that limits the probability of such political disruption. Vacant lots utilized in more “bottom up” ways such as community gardens, for instance, are regularly labeled as temporary and consequently rendered invisible (Drake and Lawson, 2014; Pearsall and Lucas, 2014), while municipalities often prioritize economically productive uses of land, including “green” commercial uses such as urban farming (Mees and Stone, 2012). These topics will be returned to in Chapters 4 and 5. Further, even when non-economic uses of vacant land like community gardens do prevail, they can unintentionally contribute to the gentrification of neighbourhoods (Voicu and Been, 2008) which may in itself challenge their disruptive potential, a subject that will be further explored in Chapter 4.

3.3 Vacancy as Risk3

Similar to vacancy as manageable object, vacancy as risk treats vacant land as inherently dangerous and problematic for a variety of social and economic reasons. Vacancy as risk differs from vacancy as manageable object, however, in that it focuses on the relative and specific ways in which populations and actors define and respond to such threats, actions that are seen to be productive of the object of vacant land itself. Scholarship in this area thus attends to the ways in which the process of “fixing” vacant land is itself “generative of social practice and space” (Moore, 2012, 788). As a result, work in the area of vacancy as risk is likely to focus on the variety of ways in which municipalities might manage vacant land in addition to the productive interrelationships between relevant “objects, technology, expert knowledge, and local understandings” (Moore, 2012, 789). The risk that vacant land might pose in particular situations versus others – for instance, to some populations or in some conditions – is seen as variable, with a focus on the ways in which municipal actors might address and manage those risks.

An important focus for scholars working with the concept of vacancy as risk is studying the variability of approaches to fixing vacant land. Scholars regularly challenge top down tactics for addressing vacant land, for instance, highlighting instead the importance of place specific (Goldstein et al., 2001), locally holistic (Johnson et al., 2014), and “temporary, incremental, flexible, and experimental” (Nemeth and Langhorst, 2014: 143) responses to vacancy. Similarly, Hirokawa and Gonzalez (2010) have suggested the dangers of municipal overreach and the potential harms to property owners of various state-based strategies to ameliorate vacancy. Some of the most interesting work that draws on this concept of vacancy points to how local meanings of vacancy actually mediate the success of related municipal interventions (Garven et al., 2012), and thereby “emphasize the cultural and historical specificity of risks and people’s responses to them” (Moore, 2012: 789).

3 Following Moore (2012), I have differentiated vacancy as hazard from vacancy as risk. While on first inspection these concepts may seem synonymous, Moore suggests that waste as risk “nuances [waste as hazard] by emphasizing the cultural and historical specificity of risks and people’s responses to them” (789). In comparison to waste as hazard, then, waste as risk “posits a more emergent relationship between society and waste” (Ibid.). My treatment of the vacancy literature follows suit.

3.4 Vacancy as an Object of Governance

The final concept of vacant land that I identified in the literature is that of vacancy as an object of governance. What does it mean to suggest that vacancy is an object or a tool of municipal governance? A small body of work, mostly originating in critical urban geography, pushes against the preoccupation with vacant land as an urban problem requiring municipal management by viewing vacant land as constituted within the context and relations of governance. Vacant land is thus viewed “as a constitutive element in contemporary sociospatial relations and economic processes” (Moore, 2012, 790). Though not acknowledged explicitly, this scholarship echoes Foucault’s work on “governmentality” to highlight how processes of state-based vacant land management can be revealing of how relations of power, including the power of the state, operate. What is important about Foucault’s approach to governmentality is that it enables the power of the state to be revealed without centering the state as the most significant player in the social field (Brady, 2016). A governmentality approach is significant because it allows modern logics of governance to be traced across stakeholders in order to highlight the workings of decentralized power in contemporary neoliberal metropolises.

Dillon’s (2013) study of brownfields, for instance, highlights the ways in which waste and wastelands are both ideologically and spatially formed byway of their association with racialized populations, which are in turn constituted via their relation to deteriorated, decaying, or contaminated objects and land. She advances the concept of “waste formations” to highlight the co-constitutive nature of waste, space, and race, suggesting that waste can be considered an analytical category revealing of underlying social processes and especially social relations productive of race. The term “waste-able” is meant to signify the continued concentration of moveable waste such as pollution, garbage, and, in Dillon’s case, radiological waste and brownfields within racialized spaces, influenced by the extent to which racialized populations are themselves considered to be “waste-able.” The concept of “waste-ability” will be utilized throughout this dissertation to highlight these dynamics.

Similarly, Clement (2013) and Clement and Kanai (2013) demonstrate in their study of the neoliberal redevelopment of Detroit’s vacant land how ideologies of race and racialized areas of the city impact how vacant land comes to be labeled, and its reuse imagined, by the municipality. In a similar study of Detroit, Safransky (2014) illuminates how vacant land is constructed as

46 vacant through its narrative association with the “new urban frontier,” which echoes the colonial sentiment of terra nullius. Reflecting Clement’s work, Safransky argues that this narrative assists in bolstering “green” strategies of neoliberal development for vacant land that obliterate black histories and communities from the landscape. While not specifically addressing race, Akers (2013) convincingly outlines the ways in which decline in Detroit has influenced state and market interventions, such as the construction of “micromarkets” for the sale of bundled vacant and foreclosure properties, that enable “predatory capital accumulation” in the city (1070).

4 Theorizing Vacancy as an Object of Governance

So far, these few critical studies of the role of vacant land in modern municipal governance illuminate the potential for vacant land to be variably constructed, documented, and exploited by the municipality, highlighting the power inherent in processes of vacant land governance. Each of these studies demonstrates that vacant land, in particular contexts, can be produced and governed in ways that are beneficial to elites and to the state, and underscore the extent to which vacant land can become a crucial aspect of “land grabbing” global North style (Holt-Gimenez et al., 2013). To this point, however, this work has focused largely on Detroit, seeming to suggest that vacant land operates exclusively as an object of governance within the context of municipal conditions of crisis that characterize postindustrial shrinking cities. I would like to suggest, however, that there are significant theoretical underpinnings that provide validity for an understanding of vacancy as a wide-ranging tool of municipal land governance couched in an understanding of the capitalist city and the role of “waste” as a foil to the productive capacity of land.

4.1 A Brief Colonial History of Vacant Land

Conceptions of the emptiness or “waste” of the American landscape have long underscored and legitimized property regimes. Indeed, modern America was built on the supposition of the emptiness of the New World through the Doctrine of Discovery, which formed a tool rendering particular spaces as open to expansion while reordering rights to property. The understanding of the Americas as a vast empty expanse, and its Indigenous populations as inhabitants but not owners of the New World, long justified the European empire’s westward “absolute geographic expansion” (Smith, 1996: 341).

The vacancy of colonial America was actualized largely through the legal fiction of terra nullius (Miller et al., 2010), meaning “no man’s land” or land that is “null or void,” a discursive and legal tool utilized by European colonists to render land empty, ownerless and open to colonial encroachment (Poindexter, 2003; Miller et al., 2010; Lindqvist, 2007).4 The discursive construction of vacancy through terra nullius, also referred to as vacuum domicilium – an empty or vacant domicile – formed an essential feature of the Doctrine of Discovery which outlined the right of first discovery for European nations in the New World. Colonialist powers employed the Doctrine to label lands used by Indigenous populations in legally or culturally unrecognizable ways as vacant and open for discovery (Miller et al., 2010). The legal fiction of terra nullius is thus an early moment in the construction of land vacancy that obfuscated and devalued some land uses while justifying appropriation for other “better” uses.

Justifications for taking the New World became essential due to widespread skepticism of English colonial undertakings in America, with many reasoning “that England had no right to claim land already occupied by another people” (Arneil, 1996b: 61). Rationality and industriousness came to fashion the core of a complex construction of land vacancy that, rather than exploding Indigenous land rights, created a hierarchy of property ownership that ethically and economically justified land appropriation. These values were grounded in understandings of property that originated largely from John Locke’s Two Treatise, and, as Locke had political and financial sway in the colonies5, his writings both directly and indirectly defended English colonialism. Vacuum domicilium and the English understanding of property ownership influenced by Lockean philosophy enabled both the viciousness of land appropriation and the representation of that taking as civilized.

4 There is ongoing debate amongst property scholars and colonial historians about the history of terra nullius. While some authors like Miller et al. (2010) argue that terra nullius was an important legal fiction that justified the colonial conquest of the New World, others have suggested that terra nullius is anachronistic and was developed by international legal scholars in the nineteenth century as an analogy to the Roman legal concept of res nullius (objects without owners). Cavanagh (2014) has even gone so far as to suggest that terra nullius was “barely contemplated, if at all, during the first century of occupation” (99), at least in Australia. However, there is agreement amongst scholars that Indigenous land rights were not properly acknowledged in colonial encounters. In an attempt to reconcile these strands of thought, Cavanagh (2014) recently suggested that terra nullius might be “a set of practices whereby rights to property in land were created for newcomers after the rights of prior inhabitants to property in land were disregarded” (99) rather than a legal doctrine.

5 During the 1660s and 70s Locke was “secretary to…the Lord Proprietors of Carolina and the Council of Trade and Plantations” (Arneil, 1996b: 61) and a financial investor in New World resource industries. See also Blomley, 2004.

The colonialist construction of the New World as vacant was thus necessary because land appropriation did not occur by simply taking the land from the Indigenous populations without acknowledging their status as rights-bearing occupiers. Scholars have proposed that the land was rendered empty via a colonial understanding of Native Americans as a part of the “savage wilderness,” and thus of the land as not yet inhabited because the Natives were “less than social, simply a part of the physical environment” (Smith, 1996: 339-340; also see Whatmore, 2003). However, it may be more correct to say that by constructing the land as vacant and placing value on a particular form of land productivity, colonialists effectively created a hierarchy of proprietary land ownership that denied Indigenous land rights while expunging colonial powers from responsibility for that denial. Vacancy and spoilage were key tools in the constitution of this hierarchy and the production of consent – that of colonialists and the entire English population – to the implicated accompanying reordering of rights.

These sentiments eventually became entrenched and codified in American land rights as the country became increasingly settled, enabling the mentality of exploration and land appropriation that exemplified the American frontierism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Indeed, the Doctrine of Discovery played a central role in the determination of land rights in the New World and the embedding of those rights via federal and state-based legislation. The founding fathers of the United States were well aware of the place of the Doctrine in international law, and historical legal evidence demonstrates that it underscored the establishment of the original thirteen American states and acted to proffer “sovereign and commercial rights over Indian nations to the Crown and its Colonial governments” (Miller et al., 2010, 26). Indeed, terra nullius remained a legal fiction in the settlement of the New World that justified the taking of Native occupied lands with “a distinctive rationalization” that acknowledged the land as owned by nobody (Miller et al., 2010, 30).

The current condition of American land settlement is an expression of the entrenchment of the legal fiction of vacancy into early colonial legal doctrine, and its meaning for the constitution of a capitalist mode of production. In this sense, this early historic genealogy of vacancy allows us to uncover the ways in which the colonizing tools of previous generations become reformulated in particular ways in order to produce and reproduce “crafts of governance and the management of people’s lives” (Stoler, 2013: 4-5). Indeed, the cultural and legal narrative of land vacancy that began to be constructed under colonialism was, and continues to be, central to the process of

American capital expansion. Colonial activities in the New World were based on a supposition of vacancy and a particular idea of property ownership via enclosure and cultivation that were eventually codified into a legal property system that worked to translate the “newly acquired territories into exploitable property” (Blomley, 2004: 112).

4.2 The Modern Capitalist City and “Highest and Best Use”

Beyond recognizing the colonialist underpinnings of modern property regimes and concepts of vacancy, an argument attempting to highlight the inherent interconnections between vacancy and race in the modern capitalist city must attend to the extent to which the modern capitalist city is built upon the rationalizing logic of “highest and best use.” Highest and best use originates from jurisprudence that defines the value of private property subject to forced takings6 via eminent domain in order to determine the just compensation that must be paid to the property owner. In such situations, just compensation is based on the market value that a buyer “willing and able, but not obliged to buy, would pay a seller, willing and able, but not obliged to sell” the property (Rose, 1979: 450). Market value, in turn, “is determined by the most valuable and best use to which the property could reasonably, practically, and lawfully be adapted which is referred to as ‘the highest and best use’” (Rose, 1979: 457).7 Though jurisprudence has retained a relatively narrow definition of highest and best use, as upheld in Masheter v. Ohio Holding Co. (1973), it is also an ideology regularly utilized in urban planning in Westernized countries to make decisions about how land should best be used based on the economic merits of a particular land use. These economic merits are not limited in planning to the market value of the land, but also take into

6 The government may also “place restrictions on land use which sometimes rise to the level of a taking” in that the restriction is so high that it negates the desired private use of the land. Such restrictions predominate in zoning and environmental protection laws, such as in land conservation. If the restriction renders the property more or less worthless on the open market, then the regulations may be defined as a taking, and just compensation must be paid (Carson, 2008: 276).

7 This definition of market value and highest and best use comes from Masheter v. Ohio Holding Co. (38 Ohio App.2d 49, 313 N.E.2d 413[1973], a particularly important case for outlining how the courts defined and interpreted “highest and best use.” In this case, the valuation at the time of the take was based on the residential zoning of the property, but at question was whether the valuation of the property could be based upon an anticipated change of the zoning for commercial use, which would increase the value of the property. The decision in this case retained the narrow definition of market value to the price of the property in a voluntary sale on the open market, but suggested that an informed buyer and seller may take the potential for future rezoning of the property into account when selling the property on the date of take. Future use could thus influence the determination of the market value, but it could not wholly determine it.

50 account the potential economic benefits that a particular use might generate for the public more broadly, including creating jobs and increasing the municipal tax base. It is common, for example, for planners, scholars, and municipal bureaucrats to argue about whether some particular use of land – from industrial (Chapple, 2014), to conservation uses (Carson, 2008), and parks and open space (Crompton, 2001) – is its “highest and best” by accounting for these broader economic benefits.

Highest and best use is thus not only a legal doctrine, but also one that is central to urban planning more generally, and it is considered so central to most decisions about how land should be used in cities that it has naturalized a widespread aspiration to achieve the economic productivity of every urban space (Boyer, 1983). Highest and best use has thusly achieved an “ideological invisibility” that has rendered it a “doxic truth” in city building (Blomley, 2004, 86; see also Valverde, 2011). Importantly, the doctrine supports the role of the state in actualizing property’s most beneficial use as defined by market logics (Logan and Molotch, 1987), and articulates an underlying binary between improvement and waste signaled by the lack of either private ownership or productive use of land that invite interventions to realize its ideal use (Blomley, 2016).

This aspiration to maximize productivity and minimize waste, such as vacant land, has proliferated both pre-emptive and interventionist strategies to order the city in the most rational, efficient and productive way possible (Boyer, 1983). The ideological invisibility of productivity in the capitalist city partially accounts for the cultural understanding of vacant land as an urban problem. An array of legal and administrative tools are available to organize the city in the name of highest and best use, although some tools, like eminent domain and tax foreclosure, wield far more power than others to open new spaces or creatively destroy old infrastructure in the name of progress. Considering that neoliberal urban development requires state interventions in the name of the private market while simultaneously ideologically deriding such interventions (Blomley, 2016), justifications for the heavy-handedness of the state in utilizing tools like eminent domain are necessary. The “wastefulness” of the landscape – labeled via legal findings of blight or municipal identification of vacant land – thus becomes a justification for interventions in the name of highest and best use (cf. Dillon, 2013).

By relying on such justifications and their construction via technocratic and bureaucratic strategies, state-based interventions to reorder the landscape to achieve productivity and ameliorate waste can come to seem necessary, neutral, and objective. Such planning tools also appear to govern land rather than populations despite having considerable potential impacts upon populations, which also aids in lending them an apolitical air. Tools like eminent domain, for instance, have historically entailed major reorderings of the urban property landscape that necessarily prioritize some private rights over others. State-based interventions in the name of highest and best use thus construct and depend on a hierarchy of land uses that is linked with a hierarchy of identities in which some individuals or groups are more deserving of property rights than others (Akers, 2013; Pritchett, 2003). Just as the landscape comes to be constructed as wasted in order to justify interventions to return it to its highest and best use, populations living on or associated with wasted landscapes come to be seen as wasted themselves or, in Dillon’s (2013) terminology, waste-able. The waste-ability of landscapes and of populations is thus difficult, if not impossible, to disentangle.

Historically, as the following chapters will explore, the consequences of such property reorderings have descended inordinately upon racialized populations who have long been constructed as living in wasted landscapes and themselves as waste-able (Dillon, 2013). State and city building thus necessarily constitute and are constituted by the spatialization of race and the racialization of space, and waste in the landscape is a significant aspect of the actualization of these processes. Indeed, the doctrine of highest and best use can be seen to extend a long history of the association between respectable citizenship, ownership, and whiteness – what might be called the “white imaginary” (Lipsitz, 2007) – that assembles the racialized other and their dispossession alongside and through land governance regimes (Smith, 1996; Safransky, 2014). It is in this sense that critical geographers have connected the construction of the colonial frontier with the segregation of racialized populations in urban centres, maintaining that these historically divergent frontiers similarly require the construction of a spatial imaginary of “free spaces” alongside the designation of a deficient and racialized “other” (Smith, 1996; Lipsitz, 2007). The opening of the landscape for capitalist expansion is thus enabled by the physical and ideological construction of emptiness or vacancy.

While these “free spaces” were assembled during colonial expansion via the legal fiction of terra nullius, in the modern metropolis they are constructed both physically and ideologically via

52 associations with the decaying and abandoned inner city and its racialized inhabitants. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in American cities, these “free spaces” were produced through “a host of attendant practices responsible for racially segregating residential areas in the United States” including “racial zoning, restrictive covenants, mortgage redlining, blockbusting, [and] steering” (Lipsitz, 2007, 15; see also Massey and Denton, 1993, and Shabazz, 2015). Urban renewal, differential access to transit, the delimiting of school boundaries, and discriminatory policing procedures have also played a role in these processes. In turn, the existence of “free spaces” worked to solidify constructions of racialized spaces as wasted landscapes that necessitated further interventions. These intersecting practices have guaranteed that “the lived experience of race has a spatial dimension, and the lived experience of space has a racial dimension” (Lipsitz, 2007; 12), and vacant land is an essential aspect of these processes.

Though a nascent addition to studies of vacant land, the preceding discussion demonstrates that the concept of vacancy as an object of governance holds considerable promise for deepening our understanding of the role that vacant land plays in municipal land governance in the United States, and interrelated processes of the racialization of urban space. Indeed, it should be clear that the idiosyncrasies of the history of American race relations have in effect assisted in producing the particularities of the existence of vacant land in American inner cities as a problem needing to be addressed. This reality has not yet been sufficiently recognized by scholars of vacancy, highlighting the work still to be done to understand the power of vacant land as a context-specific socially constructed process for the governance of racialized low-income populations in the American context. The few studies of vacancy as an object of governance, discussed in the previous section, have laid an excellent foundation for advancing the study of vacant land in a critical direction that is thoughtful about the political implications of activities related to the management and amelioration of vacant land at the municipal scale. These studies have not yet gone far enough, however, to demonstrate the connections between race, space and land at the urban scale, an issue of central interest to urban scholars interested in understanding the workings of power in the city.

To that extent, I would like to suggest here and in the remainder of this dissertation that vacant land is not incidentally related to race and racialized populations in some circumstances or instances, but that it has very particular meanings, histories, and political implications for racialized populations and spaces at the urban scale. Scholars of vacancy wishing to advance

53 questions about the condition of vacant land in the modern urban milieu must thus necessarily confront questions about race. Further, these questions must be pushed beyond a geographic focus on crisis cities like Detroit, which has been at the centre of governance studies of vacant land to this point. Indeed, my work on Boston, the subject of following chapters, demonstrates that vacant land is a significant object of governance even in cities without a vacant land problem. The ways in which vacant land is approached and addressed by all municipalities, regardless of economic, social or political conditions, is revealing of broader processes of the governance of racialized spaces and populations that occur in the urban milieu.

5 Conclusion

This chapter has highlighted several distinct approaches to studying and conceptualizing urban land vacancy. As should be clear, the predominance of writing on vacant land reflects and reinforces a widespread understanding, in scholarship, in practice, and in society more broadly, of vacant land as empirically real, problematic, and in need of state-based management and interventions. These ideologies have considerable power to influence urban landscapes, including which land gets counted as vacant, when vacant land is seen as problematic or representative of a moment of crisis, how land construed as vacant might be managed, and ultimately who will benefit from such events. Such narratives have the power to obstruct competing realities of vacant land, and in particular the comingling productions of race and vacant land at the urban scale that critical urban geographers have only begun to uncover.

Through the development of a conceptual outline of the substantive literature on vacancy, this chapter contributes in several ways to scholarship on vacant land, and to the field of urban studies more broadly. I challenge the predominance of scholarship on vacancy that hegemonically emphasizes the objective reality of vacant land by outlining the social constructedness of vacancy and the power that is wielded by the state in findings of vacancy. I demonstrate the importance of understanding the inherence of race in the construction of vacant land and make a case for scholars studying and writing about vacancy to acknowledge and query race in their studies as a way forward in the literature. The most significant contribution of this chapter, however, is the case for a sustained and systematic politics of vacancy that pays heed not only to the current problems of vacant land and its solutions, as most scholars writing about vacant land have done, but also to the historical antecedents of urban wastelands, and to the

54 movements of power that coalesce through its discursive and physical construction in racialized spaces.

Importantly, by highlighting the essential ties between racialized populations and waste-able land, my analysis signals the importance of paying attention to these forces that coalesce in all cities, not only crisis cities like Detroit, which has to this point been the geographical heart of studies of race and vacancy. Indeed, as the municipal focus on ameliorating vacancy and other wastelands in cities across the United States continues, often with problematic and sometimes covert outcomes shouldered unevenly by impoverished minority residents – topics that will be explored in depth in the following chapters – a politics of vacancy has never been more necessary. Vacancy is produced alongside other relations of power, and must consequently be acknowledged as inherently political. Chapter 3 begins the work of tracking the ideological and physical construction of vacant land alongside racialized populations in Boston.

Chapter 3 Growing Land: The Origins of Vacancy

1 Introduction

In Chapter 2, I outlined the various ways in which vacant land has been conceptualized in the American context. I suggested that a consideration of vacant land as an object of governance provides a fruitful avenue for contemplating the critical interrelationship between the production and construction of vacancy as an urban problem alongside and through racialized urban populations in the modern American city. This chapter begins the work of tracking the ideological and material assembly of vacant land and its governance together with racialized populations in the United States, starting in the urban renewal decades of the 1950s with a focus on Boston.

I argue in this chapter that vacant land has been physically produced and its problematic nature constructed alongside racialized urban populations and their spaces over the last half of the twentieth century in the United States. Rather than merely a material condition of the urban milieu, I posit that vacancy was invented as a tool of municipal land governance with the ability to reshape the cityscape and associated rights to land in areas of the city populated largely by low income racialized residents.

To make this argument, I track the physical and ideological construction of vacant land from the urban renewal decades of the 1950s, utilizing Boston as a case study. I discuss historical shifts in municipal findings of urban blight, which was invented to justify expanding municipal powers of eminent domain in low income racialized districts under urban renewal (Gold and Sagalyn, 2010-2011; Pritchett, 2003). I suggest that as urban renewal and blight became increasingly recognized as “Negro removal” and largely shifted geographically to revenue sharing schemes in suburban areas (Gold and Sagalyn, 2010-2011; Kokot, 2011; Gordon, 2003-2004), vacancy filled the vacuum left behind.

I argue that this shift towards governing urban neighbourhoods through the category of vacancy has been affected by several important factors in addition to the increasing political untenability

56 of “Negro removal.” One important explanatory factor is the rescaling of urban redevelopment away from large-scale urban renewal and towards urban revitalization at the scale of individual parcels of land. This is the scale of vacant land (i.e. municipally-defined parcels or lots) as well as the scale of property – at which, as Brenner and Theodore (2002) have maintained, neoliberal development most often occurs. This shift is also a result of a multiplicity of racist policies at both the federal and the municipal level that effectuated the deterioration of racially segregated neighbourhoods, and that made vacancy an apt descriptor for the waste of those spaces. Ultimately, vacancy has come to be used to justify state-based interventions in racialized urban districts to return land to higher and better uses – two examples of which are explored in the following chapters – and, like blight before it, buttresses the power of the city over the landscape. The fact that vacancy became both a tool and a justification for the use of that tool is largely due to the fact that, like apparatuses of urban planning such as zoning, vacancy appears unrelated to race by seeming to describe and address measurable and thereby neutral conditions of land (cf. Blomley, 2004; Valverde, 2011).

The arguments presented in this chapter about vacancy offer an important contribution to the history of urban development and to a scholarly understandings of the basis of city power via governance. As suggested in Chapter 2, while important foundations for the scholarly conception of vacancy as an object of governance have been laid (cf. Clement, 2013; Clement and Kanai, 2015; Safransky, 2014), this chapter, along with those that proceed it, deepens our understanding of the temporal and spatial conditions of vacant land governance by highlighting both its historical antecedents and the extent to which it is an important object of governance even in municipalities that are not in crisis. This chapter thereby proposes that vacancy must be interrogated as a significant tool of municipal power and governance that parallels and extends that of blight under urban renewal.

2 A Note on Sources

To make the arguments presented in this chapter, I investigated the history of municipal land use in Boston during and directly following urban renewal (around 1950 to 1980), examining state policies at the federal and municipal levels that were focused on racialized populations and spaces in the city. I draw on sources on the history of Boston that examine events that had important impacts for how residents of colour were placed in the political and physical landscape

57 of the city. I also draw on secondary sources on land use planning in American cities. Additionally, archival research conducted at the Boston City archives led me to find and analyze municipal documents produced between approximately 1970 and 1984. I also draw on documents prepared by one of the major developers of community gardens during the 1970s in Boston, the Boston Urban Gardeners (BUG). Because community gardens were constructed on vacant land, BUG’s archives are filled with references to vacant land and its place in the city, and demonstrate that municipal players other than the city thought about and utilized vacant land in particular ways. I also draw on some data from stakeholder interviews.

3 Blight and Vacancy from Urban Renewal to Suburban Redevelopment 3.1 Blight and Eminent Domain under Urban Renewal

Urban renewal, which began in earnest with the passing of the federal Housing Act of 1949, marked the beginning of a new era of municipal development powers and entrepreneurialism in city building. Before urban renewal, cities utilized eminent domain to take private property to build publicly accessible infrastructure like roads and bridges, but, with the growth of urban planning, popular thinking suggested that cities needed more power to reorder the urban landscape. The Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution, known as the Takings Clause, presented a challenge to augmenting the city’s power by protecting the inalienability of private property unless the conditions of public use and just compensation were met. The urban elite thus needed a persuasive justification for increasing the police power of the municipality in the name of rationalistic and productive city building. Blight became this justification. It is in this sense that Gold and Sagalyn (2010-2011) suggest that blight “had to be invented” (1121).

From its inception, blight signaled urban conditions associated with racialized inner city spaces that appeared as a 'crisis' and hence were seen as requiring state intervention. 'Blight' played a significant role in growing the legal powers of the municipality to take or expropriate privately held property in the name of productivity and rationalistic order (Pritchett, 2003). The concept originated out of the Chicago school of ecological urbanism in the 1930s and was taken up by urbanists, real estate developers, and government agencies to indicate various problematic characteristics of low income and racialized inner city neighbourhoods. Discourses of blight relied on the circulation of anti-urban sentiments with strong racist undertones, and suggested

58 that blighted neighbourhoods could become slums, potentially “infect” surrounding neighbourhoods, and lead to considerable economic costs (e.g. Wood, 1935: 3). Indeed, only by constructing blight as a “public menace”, in Pritchett's memorable phrase, could cities justify their burgeoning powers to intervene on the private market by presenting land takings for urban renewal as an equally “public” good (Pritchett, 2003).

In cases of eminent domain takings under urban renewal, the definition of “public use” was broadened considerably to include “public benefits, such as the reduction in crime, the removal of health hazards and the increase in tax revenues that would result from the slum clearance and improvement of the neighborhood” (Rose, 1979). The broad interpretation of public use as public interest was influenced significantly by the case of Berman v Parker1 in 1954 in which the Supreme Court allowed the use of eminent domain for a redevelopment project in Washington, D.C., that was aimed at eliminating urban blight. In this case, “the court found that all property in the designated area, including non-blighted property, could be taken as part of the project given the redevelopment of the entire area was in the public interest” (Miceli, 2011: 22). A similar case occurred in 1981 with Poletown Neighborhood Council v. City of Detroit2 in which the Michigan Supreme Court allowed Detroit to “condemn an entire ethnic neighborhood in order to clear the way for a General Motors assembly plant” (Ibid.) with the understanding that it would create economic benefit in the form of jobs and tax revenues for the city. These cases demonstrate the extent to which the planning ideology of “highest and best use” as an economic calculus helped to justify the doctrine of public use as public interest.

Although the racialized history of urban renewal is well-known and documented, the racial aspects of legal findings of blight more specifically have been discussed far less, with Pritchett’s (2003) study of the legal and racial construction of blight an important exception (see also Dillon, 2013). It is undeniable, however, that findings of blight and associated urban renewal projects had considerable and concentrated impacts on racialized urban populations across the United States. Despite urban renewal being designed under the Housing Acts of 1949 and 1954 as a national housing strategy, it “destroyed more housing…than it created” (Logan and

1Berman v. Parker, 348 U.S. 26 (1954)

2 Poletown Neighborhood Council v. City of Detroit, 304 N.W.2d 455 (Mich. 1981)

Molotch, 1987: 168), demolishing twenty percent of all housing units occupied by black urban populations during the 1950s and 60s who “made up more than 60 percent of the population displaced by urban renewal” (Lipsitz, 2007: 18). The vast majority of the housing units were never replaced, or were supplanted by housing unaffordable to the original residents3, reflecting the prioritization of economic boosterism at the time that “put the health of the [Central Business District] at the top of the urban agenda” (Gordon, 2003-2004: 317). Urban renewal thus effected the mass displacement of people of colour from central city neighbourhoods while entrenching patterns of racial segregation, and caused extreme levels of disruption in many majority black neighbourhoods throughout the United States. The power of the doctrine of blight was thus established alongside the socioeconomic and political reality of the populations it governed, and demonstrates the ways in which the power of the state comes to be constituted through objects of governance.

3.2 A History of Vacancy

During urban renewal and the construction of urban blight, vacant land was not similarly problematized. Indeed, vacant land was not always seen as a problem and was at one time geographically and legally separate from blight. Leading up to and during urban renewal, land that was recognized as “vacant” was generally identified as unused and undeveloped land on the outskirts of the city. In an early treatise on urban land use, for instance, blighted areas of the central city are distinguished from “tracts of virgin prairie” surrounding the epicenter of urban development (Hoyt, 1933: 202, cited in Gold and Sagalyn, 2010-2011: 1122). Similarly, in a government-funded study of slums published in 1935, “vacant land” is distinguished from the “developed area” of the city, which would have also included “blighted” districts (Wood, 1935). This reflects a comparable study published a decade later that suggests a distinction between “slums and blighted land” which are the focus for redevelopment, and “vacant land” which is the focus for primary development (Nelson, 1945). Although it was recognized at this time that

3 The ability for replacement housing units to be built at rental prices unaffordable to the original residents was due to an amendment to the original Housing Act of 1949 present in the Housing Act of 1954. This amendment changed the original version of the Act that stipulated that housing built on land that had been cleared by eminent domain had to house the displaced residents. This amendment thus cleared the way for residential displacement during urban renewal. The 1954 Act also altered the ability for federal urban renewal grants to support commercial in addition to residential developments, an important change for enacting what became a growth strategy for CBDs at the expense of low-income populations who prior to urban renewal often called the central city home.

60 blighted districts could decrease in population and become abandoned, which in itself could present a danger to the city, this land was labeled “abandoned” rather than “vacant” (e.g. Wood, 1935). In these sources, vacant land is not problematized but rather presented a foil to developed land, whether used productively or not (see also Brown, 1957).

Vacant land was problematized, however, when it was the result of poor platting or state intervention that left tracts of land open and thus negated the planning law ideal of "highest and best use". While outlining the importance of eminent domain for slum redevelopment, for instance, Ihlder and Brooks (1936) suggest that if a city wished to use eminent domain (what in Canada is called expropriation) to clear land, the land must be built up shortly thereafter or may “lie vacant and unused, [and] become again a community liability in another form” (359). In a later publication, Berkman (1956) discusses the issue of land on the outskirts of the city that had previously been vacant in the “open prairie” meaning of the word, but where development had hopscotched and left behind troubling holes in the landscape. Such land, Berkman maintains, should be called by “the latest term – blighted vacant land” (271), and suggest that these “vacant areas…constituted a threat to local government” (279). These historical sources suggest that while blight was used during urban renewal to describe overcrowded and unsanitary racialized spaces of the city, vacant land was not initially associated with any particular populations, but rather problematized the lack of population, the emptiness and unproductiveness of the landscape. Indeed, Berkman (1956) calls vacant land a kind of “no-man’s land.” O’Connor (1993), known as one of Boston’s best historians, supports this interpretation, suggesting that “blight…had more to do with the ways in which populations and enterprises had moved – or not – than with the age and condition of the localities themselves” (66).

Despite these historic differences between blight and vacancy, both land use characteristics signified a waste of urban space and the dangers of poor planning – although in different ways – and thus lent support for increasing the city’s power to reorder the landscape in ways that were more economically and socially productive. The National Housing Act of 1949 and the 1954 amendments were designed primarily for the redevelopment of poorly planned and built inner city residential neighbourhoods. However, considering the recognition of the problem of both overcrowded tenements and unplanned urban environs, many redevelopment statutes included provisions for the use and taking of both “blighted” and “open” lands, distinguishing between these two disparate land uses. However, in only twelve states is open space defined in

61 redevelopment statutes as a condition for legal findings of blight, and in only nine states4 are vacancies5 alone a condition for findings of blight (Gold and Sagalyn, 2010-2011).

3.3 Shifting Geographies of Blight

Eventually, blight lost much of its dominance as the municipality’s primary legal tool for reshaping the urban centre. The mounting social and political focus on the impacts of racist practices and policies during the civil rights era meant that urban renewal, now widely recognized as “Negro removal,” and ‘blight’ as a key term used to operationalize such removal, became increasingly politically untenable.6 Combined with the widespread acknowledgement that urban renewal had largely failed as a housing strategy, support for it ended in its overtly “top down” mode in 1974 with the passage of new federal legislation, the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974, under President Ford’s administration. This did not mark the end of the use of blight to justify municipal use of eminent domain altogether, however, and “it remains a highly significant precondition in undertaking economic development projects in many states today” (Gold and Sagalyn, 2010-2011: 1132). However, blight has over time been fundamentally altered in geographical location, scope and impact. As the legal application of blight gradually “moved from slum clearance to urban redevelopment, then to economic development projects, and on to revenue enhancing projects” (Gold and Sagalyn, 2010-2011: 1119), it shifted geographically away from the central city and into suburban areas.

In the suburbs, blight has increasingly become a way to transfer businesses rather than housing to bigger and wealthier developers. Redevelopment policies relying on findings of blight have been used to finance the building of suburban shopping malls (Gordon, 2003) and large-scale mixed use development projects (Gold and Sagalyn, 2010-2011). In California, well-developed areas of

4 Importantly, Massachusetts is one of the nine states where vacancies are considered a land use criteria that can form the foundation for legal findings of blight for eminent domain proceedings (Gold and Sagalyn, 2010-2011).

5 “Vacancies include vacant and abandoned buildings, vacant lots, low percentage of occupancy in buildings, and high turnover rate for leased properties” (Gold and Sagalyn, 2010-2011: footnote 21, p. 1126).

6 The idea of urban renewal as “Negro removal” originated from an incisive comment famously made by Black author James Baldwin when he was interviewed alongside Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. during an interview for the PBS program “The Negro and the American Promise” in 1963, which was aired live on Boston public television. Footage of the interview can be found online at http://www.pbs.org/video/2112495022/.

62 cities, “even the entire town of affluent Coronado” (Gold and Sagalyn, 2010-2011: 1127), have been declared blighted in order to leverage an augmented share of state tax abatements (Gold and Sagalyn, 2010-2011). These shifts have been assisted by the lack of a definition of blight in most redevelopment statutes, meaning that it can be utilized in many different ways depending on context, while courts generally defer to local agencies in findings of blight (Gold and Sagalyn, 2010-2011). Blight has thus become “a designation sought by developers, and hence shaped not by public purpose, but by private interests seeking public subsidies” (Gordon, 2003: 336-337), and municipalities are effectively able to “find the blight that’s right” to address an array of development challenges (Gold and Sagalyn, 2010-2011; Kokot, 2011; Kraut, 1999).

Even as blight has broadened in definition such that municipalities can use it reliably to justify a wide variety of eminent domain takings, the redevelopment of blighted areas is only one, albeit classic, reasoning for the taking of private land for public use. Echoing the much earlier decisions in Berman and Poletown, the Supreme Court’s decision in Kelo v. New London7 in 2005 ruled that economic development itself could be considered a “public good” (Blomley, 2004; Kokot, 2011). The crux of this case was a question of whether the city was able to take and condemn an area of private property for the building of an outpost of the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer. The plaintiff, Susette Kelo, owned a home in the relevant swath of land and had lived there for most of her life. The question in front of the court was the limit of the city’s power of eminent domain considering that neither the houses there, nor the area more generally, was blighted by any legislative definition. In their decision, “by a five to four majority, the Court held that local governments could use their power of eminent domain to take private property, including homes, to promote economic development” (Kokot, 2011: 46).

It is important to note that, while Kelo merely extended legal reasoning already found in Berman and Poletown, the public outcry that followed the case was considerable, and many states enacted reforms to limit the subsequent increase in municipal power to use eminent domain (Gold and Sagalyn, 2010-2011). While it may be argued that the controversy over Kelo was a result of the fact that the American public is more concerned now than in the past with protecting private property rights, it is also significant that the plaintiff in Kelo was a white homeowner,

7 Kelo v. New London, 545 U.S. 469 (2005)

63 rather than the low income minority neighbourhood residents subject to takings in Berman and Poletown. As Pritchett (2005) has so insightfully suggested, “eminent domain has received more attention over the past year (i.e. 2005) because the people involved in these disputes are middle- class suburban homeowners and small businessmen, particularly those in older, built-out suburbs” (909). This also implies that the beneficiaries of post-Kelo reforms are similarly white middle-class homeowners, rather than those populations most likely to have been impacted by eminent domain takings during the era of urban renewal. Nevertheless, despite legislative reforms, the broadness of the definition of blight remains in many statutes and the reforms have had limited effectiveness. Blight thus continues to present a “black box” of justifications for cities to take private land with a broad array of “substandard” use characteristics.

The shifting use of legal findings of blight away from racialized city districts is not to say that findings of blight have become fairer or less likely to have problematic implications, however, and findings of blight can still present challenges for the equity of land use. In several recent cases in New York City, for instance, “long-time businesses were pushed out to make way for large developments” including an expansion of Columbia University’s West Harlem campus and a $700 million entertainment and cultural complex in East Harlem (Bagli, 2011: n.p.), two historically low income neighbourhoods settled primarily by Latinos and immigrants.8 In both of these cases, the areas were declared blighted according to New York redevelopment statutes; in the case of the expansion of Columbia University, the blight of the neighbourhood was determined based on the questionable finding of local conditions such as “sidewalk defects…unpainted block walls [and] loose awning supports” (Kaur, 72 A.D.3d at 16-17, cited in Gold and Sagalyn, 2010-2011: 1149).

Comparably, the movement of blight into suburban areas and away from racialized low-income city districts has not meant the end of state interference in such neighbourhoods. Rather, as the racist impacts of blight became increasingly recognized and its use inched slowly toward modern

8 See Kaur v. N.Y. State Urban Development Corporation, 15 N.Y.3d 235 (2010) in the case of the expansion of Columbia University’s West Harlem campus.

64 suburban revenue sharing projects, a more politically neutral tool used to designate the waste- ability of racialized spaces of the city and to justify state-based interventions surfaced: vacancy.

4 From Blight to Vacancy in Boston

Several important factors account for the shift from blight to vacancy as the central signifier for the waste-ability of the inner city, the first of which is the increased focus on the politics of race in urban renewal and the shifting geographies of blight, discussed in the previous section of the chapter. The second significant factor is the changing physical conditions of inner city neighbourhoods over the middle decades of the twentieth century from overcrowded and diseased “slums” to the deteriorated and abandoned inner city districts of many modern American cities. Urban renewal and other national and municipal policies influenced these changes in important ways. Third, the criticisms launched at urban renewal also influenced a transformation to what were believed to be gentler “revitalization” schemes, which existed at a smaller scale that fit perfectly with the single-lot size of vacant land. The remainder of the chapter explores the shifting focus of the municipality towards vacancy as the new blight in urban development, and the context of this change as it occurred in Boston from the urban renewal decades into the 1970s.

4.1 Urban Renewal, Racial Segregation, and the Creation of “Free Spaces” in Boston

Urban renewal and several other policies, both at the national and the municipal scale, influenced massive sociospatial and demographic changes in Boston during the 1950s and into the 60s that heavily impacted the residents of colour in the city. These policies, taken together, resulted in shifting patterns of racial segregation and the creation of the “free spaces” (Lipsitz, 2007) of vacant land as a persistent feature of the racialized landscape. The era of urban renewal began in Boston in 1957, but by that time residential racial segregation was already an entrenched feature of the city.

Massive suburbanization processes, for example, contributed dramatically to racial segregation in Boston prior to urban renewal. During the 50s and 60s, the suburbs grew precipitously and by 1970 had a larger population than the city of Boston – about a half a million to approximately 1.5 million in the suburbs – making Boston an unusual city in this respect (Formisano, 1991). The

65 suburbs were about 99% white, while non-white populations “were ringed into the central city by the suburban noose” (Formisano, 1991:12). Partially, this pattern can be attributed to the growing tech industry along the new federally funded highway Route 128 which ran around the city and where, during the 1950s and 60s, tens of thousands of new jobs were created for those who could reach them (suburbanites) while thousands of jobs were concurrently lost in the central city. Indeed, the federal government contributed to suburbanization on a dramatic scale via policies that provided massive housing and highway subsidies that enabled the wealthiest white and non- white residents to move to the suburbs in droves, leaving behind the poorest of the poor (Wilson, 1996). Indeed, the federal government was one of the major players in the constitution of what scholars call the “American apartheid” of racial residential segregation in American cities, including Boston (Massey and Denton, 1993; Formisano, 1991).

At the same time as suburbanization drained about 100,000 of the city’s wealthiest and whitest of its residents during the era of so-called “white flight” (Wilson, 1996), the black population of Boston increased dramatically as blacks left the South in the Great Migration. Between 1940 and 1970, the black population of Boston increased by more than 300% to just over 100,000, making up more than 15% of the population of the city by 1970 (Formisano, 1991; Vrabel, 2014). During the initial influx of African-Americans in the 1950s, a decade that saw about 63,000 new black residents arrive in the city (Vrabel, 2014), the vast majority settled in several densely populated central city districts including Beacon Hill (known colloquially during the time as “Negro Hill” or “Nigger Hill”), the South End, the Back Bay and Lower Roxbury, neighbourhoods that had been recognized since prior to urban renewal as “slums” or blighted areas (Walker, 1938). These were the neighbourhoods that became the significant targets for urban renewal in the city.

The first urban renewal project in Boston was the New York Streets housing project in the South End begun in 1957, with plans to raze 24 acres and displace 858 mostly black families (Vrabel, 2014). The city’s next project was the West End, one of the only majority white neighbourhoods razed under urban renewal in the US (although nonetheless an immigrant neighbourhood), where 48 acres were razed and 7000 residents displaced, leveling the neighbourhood entirely. The Cathedral Housing Project in the South End was next, in 1965. In all three cases, the land stood vacant for years before new housing was built in its place; the West End was known locally and somewhat ironically for a time as the city’s biggest parking lot (Fisher and Hughes, 1992). The

West End is an especially interesting case because recent research has revealed the City’s direct involvement in manufacturing the “blight” that secured federal funds for redevelopment. Indeed, Vrabel (2014) suggests that in preparation for applying for urban renewal funds, the city neglected the district to create the appearance of deterioration, and then sent the resulting pictures to Washington along with their funding application. This evidence challenges the perception of both blight and vacancy as objective and measurable characteristics and spaces, and demonstrates the role of the state in manufacturing such conditions.

The Boston Housing Authority was initially responsible for these projects, but when the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) was created in 1958, it took over the administration of urban renewal.9 The BRA also designated several urban renewal districts in the city where its powers of eminent domain were relatively unbridled.10 Unsurprisingly, these districts – Beacon Hill, the South End, South Boston, Charlestown, Lower Roxbury, and the Back Bay – were areas of the city already overwhelmingly populated by the city’s black, low-income, and immigrant populations, and several renewal projects in these areas followed over the next decade and a half.

As in other American cities, urban renewal in Boston resulted in mass displacement of black residents and a low-rent housing crisis in the city. A report prepared by the BRA in 1978 on urban renewal suggests that while a total of approximately 25,000 units of “substandard housing” were demolished by the BRA under urban renewal in the designated districts, 25,236 units of housing were rehabilitated or constructed in the city, an increase of only 236 units over a twenty- year period (from about 1954 to 1974).11 Further, while the units destroyed would have been affordable to low-income populations in the city, those created during the same period would not have all been comparably affordable despite the increased need for low-income housing in the city. Many of the families displaced from the central city moved south into Dorchester,

9 The BRA is one of many redevelopment authorities created in major urban centres under the Housing Act of 1949 that became responsible for administrating federal funds and managing urban renewal programs across the country.

10 The urban renewal districts designated by the BRA still exist today, and these are the only areas of the city where the BRA has powers of eminent domain. There have recently been discussions of the BRA having their powers of redevelopment stripped, but in 2016 their power of eminent domain was extended for another ten years period. These urban renewal districts are now some of the wealthiest areas of the city, subject to what Lees (2003) calls “supergentrification.”

11 BUG archives, Series XIII: Revival Gardens, Collection 43, Box 9.

Mattapan, Roxbury, and Jamaica Plain, and as many future black residents continued to settle in these areas, they became the new racially segregated areas of the city. Indeed, the black population of the city, which had already skyrocketed during the 1950s, continued to rise steeply during the 1960s when another 40,800 black residents moved into the city. Records show that more than half of these residents settled in Dorchester and surrounding areas.12 These areas are still home to the majority of the city’s racialized residents, and Dorchester, Mattapan and Roxbury are all majority minority neighbourhoods: in 2017, African-American and Hispanic residents made up 60.4% of the population of Dorchester, 82% of the population of Roxbury, and 89.5% of the population of Mattapan.13

Findings of blight contributed to racial segregation in the city in other important ways as well. By the 1940s and 50s, local banks in Boston had identified several neighbourhoods in the city – generally those that would be the focus for urban renewal, or the less well-developed areas of the city where African-Americans would move in droves after they were displaced from urban renewal districts, i.e. Charlestown, Dorchester, Roxbury, and South Boston – as “blighted” and refused to offer mortgages or home improvement loans within these areas (O’Connor, 1993). Commonly known as “redlining,” this process reduced the potential for all residents within these districts to obtain homeownership, forcing those who could afford mortgages to seek homes in the suburbs where mortgage rates were lower, and thus contributing to forces of suburbanization, as well as to the decay and abandonment of the inner city districts. O’Connor (1993) suggests that through redlining, the banks helped to actualize and maintain the conditions of these neighbourhoods that they had originally predicted. It is notable that these findings of blight were not technically legal but rather based on organizational decisions and policies on the part of the banks.

Financial institutions in Boston assisted in propping up the racial segregation of the city in other ways as well. As African-American residents were displaced from the central city districts and largely moved south into Dorchester, Mattapan, and nearby areas, black residents may have also

12 Victory Garden Revival Project, Box 3/I/082.

13 Dorchester has 44.1% Black and 16.3% Hispanic residents; Roxbury has 53% Black and 29% Hispanic residents; Mattapan has 73.7% Black and 15.9% Hispanic residents (Boston Planning and Development Agency, 2017).

68 been drawn there in an attempt to take advantage of the B-BURG program and the promise of homeownership it provided. B-BURG, which stands for Boston Banks’ Urban Renewal Group, was a program created in 1961 by Boston’s then-mayor Kevin White in partnership with the federal government following the acknowledgement of racial discrimination in mortgage lending practices, i.e. redlining. The program enabled $27 million in federally backed mortgages provided by a consortium of Boston banks designed to enable black residents of the city to own homes in a particular section of the city bordering Mattapan and Dorchester (Levine and Harmon, 1993; Vrabel, 2014). In a similar but opposite way as redlining, B-BURG identified a particular area of the city where the possibility of homeownership would be determined by race.

Although the program started out with good intentions, it had similarly problematic outcomes as redlining, however. The program forced black residents to compete within a relatively small area for home mortgages, an area that had been harmoniously occupied for decades by an upwardly mobile and relatively successful Jewish community (Levine and Harmon, 1993). This “created a land rush as unscrupulous real estate agents raced ahead of minority families to buy up homes from the white residents of Mattapan, using despicable tactics to drive the prices they paid below market value” (Vrabel, 2015: 98). Many of these “despicable tactics” incited and relied on the racialized fear of the incoming black community by the established Jewish community. Just as the Jewish were victimized by B-BURG, so were the African-Americans attempting to take advantage of the program, however. They were often given mortgages for which they would not have otherwise qualified, and without proper inspections of the houses they were purchasing; when they moved in, the same banks that had ensured their mortgages would not give them home improvement loans. “When the owners fell behind on their payments,” maintains Vrabel (2015), “the banks initiated ‘fast foreclosures,’ got their money back, and left the FHA [Federal Housing Administration] with ownership of the properties” (98). Many of these homes fell into disrepair over time, “leaving the once stable, middle-class neighbourhood pockmarked with vacant lots” (Vrabel, 2014: 99).

The Boston Urban Rehabilitation Program (BURP) was another federally-backed program launched in the 1960s in Boston designed to address the problematic living conditions of minority residents in the city (Vrabel, 2014). BURP promised 2,700 new and better units of low income housing for racialized residents in the city by offering tax incentives paid for by the federal government for developers to renovate apartment buildings, mostly in Roxbury, which

69 had fallen into disrepair. Like B-BURG, BURP had good intentions but ultimately negative outcomes for racialized residents in Boston. The program got off to a rough start with developers purchasing buildings “by stealth” without community consultation, inspiring outrage amongst Roxbury residents (Vrabel, 2014). As the renovations got underway, significant numbers of tenants were evicted from the buildings, sometimes without the promise of return. In many cases the renovations took much longer than anticipated, and were sometimes done so poorly that they had to be redone in only a few years for the buildings to remain livable. Vrabel (2014) suggests that the issues with the program resulted from the fact that financial benefits came from tax shelters for developers rather than from payments that would be secured after the work was done, or after tenants had successfully moved into the new apartments. This meant that there were no incentives to do the work well, or to ensure that the new buildings were maintained. By the late 1970s, rather than increasing the living standard of disadvantaged residents in Roxbury, BURP had contributed to the problematic physical conditions of the neighbourhood after “the Department of Housing and Urban Development [HUD]…[was] forced foreclose on 1,781 of the original 2,100 units” (Vrabel, 2014: 96) that had been renovated through the BURP program.

The issues surrounding the racial segregation of schools was also an important one during the middle decades of the twentieth century in many American cities, and particularly in Boston, that contributed to increased racial segregation and poorer social and economic outcomes for the non- white population of the city. The de facto segregation that characterized Boston throughout the mid-twentieth century meant that the school system in the city, and across the nation, was similarly segregated. Black schools were considerably poorly funded in comparison to their white counterparts, and while the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v Board of Education14 had ended the “separate but equal” system of schooling in the nation, de facto segregation largely continued after the decision, partly due to large-scale political pushback across the country (Formisano, 1991). Massachusetts was one of only two states including Washington D.C. that passed legislation following this decision to correct the racial segregation of schools in the state. The bill, called the Racial Imbalance Act of 1965, defined any school as racially imbalanced if over 50% of the students were nonwhite, and required that balance in such schools be instituted at the risk of lost funding. Thus began the era of forced school busing in Boston in which mostly

14 Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954)

70 black students were bused sometimes miles away from their home districts to ensure the racial balance of schools in the city (Formisano, 1991). These events enflamed a riotous protest on the part of white residents of the city who resisted black students being brought into their children’s majority white and comparatively well-funded schools.

Notably, just as some local policies designed to desegregate or improve racially segregated urban neighbourhoods, busing in Boston actually led to increased rather than decreased segregation and challenges for the racialized residents of the city. In many areas of the city, white residents resisted forced desegregation by leaving the city altogether and moving to the suburbs where forced desegregation did not occur (Formisano, 1991). Over time, busing also led to overall decreases in the number of students in the public school system and ultimately to reductions in funding as residents who could afford to moved their children into private schools that were not subject to desegregation legislation. Busing also occasionally led to the closure of schools in black districts due to the loss of students who were bused outside of their home districts, contributing directly to the loss of population and physical abandonment that already characterized these areas of the city (Interview with community member, 2014). The busing issue additionally contributed to the continuation of a political climate in the city characterized by a lot of racial tension and anger on the part of African-Americans and other people of colour towards the administration of the city – anger that, as I will discuss in later chapters, persists to this day.

The vast majority of the properties abandoned during the middle decades of the twentieth century as a result of B-BURG, BURP, school desegregation and other policies focused on the racially segregated districts of the city and their populations ultimately ended up in state ownership, whether by the federal government or a municipal agency. As I will discuss in more detail in the next section of the paper, as well as in Chapter 4, the City utilized federal funds that were akin to urban renewal grants to clear the abandoned land of structures and thus to physically actuate vacant land. This demonstrates the ways in which vacant land came to be both a consequence and a confirmation of the material and ideological waste of the racialized landscape and its populations. The historical events that have been discussed in this section of the chapter also establish the extent to which the City, in partnership with the federal government and financial institutions, contributed immensely to creating much of the empty land in low income racialized districts of Boston. Vacant land thereby resulted from a complexity of overlapping forces at

71 multiple scales, and often from failed past attempts to ameliorate problematic physical conditions of the inner city. As a consequence, vacant land “became a symbol of the American city’s inability to keep its own house in order” (Warner, 1987: 23), and, as I will show in following chapters, lent ideological weight to future interventions designed to fix the landscape.

4.2 From Renewal to Revitalization

The wholesale top-down destruction wrought by urban renewal ended by 1974, by which time the crisis areas of Boston had largely shifted south. Urban renewal was not entirely eliminated, however, but rather repackaged along with several other federal programs under the national Housing and Community Development Act of 1974. This Act created a new federal funding mechanism for municipalities called Community Development Block Grants (CDBGs), which were organized and financed through the Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), but administered at the municipal level (Dowty, 2005). The grant money thus flowed from the federal government, and each city held an internal competition in which a variety of organizations and non-government entities would apply for funding for projects with goals that fit with the overall objectives of the CDBG program.

CDBGs were designed to address the complex administrative and bureaucratic requirements of earlier federal urban redevelopment programs, and were thought to be a vast improvement over earlier urban renewal schemes. The growing logic of the “new federalism” suggested that local matters should be dealt with at the local level, and CDBGs signaled a shift in scale of city building from federal to state and local governments, a new “bottom up” era of revitalization designed to more effectively reflect local contexts and needs (Logan and Molotch, 1987). Demonstrative of neoliberal urbanism, revitalization emphasized the neighbourhood as the new centre of urban growth with federal financing now allocated on a pre-determined project-based formula that could be spent according to the needs of the city (Nenno, 1996). This also ushered in a new era of private sector participation under entrepreneurial governance, as it enabled cities to administer and offer partial funds bestowed from the federal government for capital projects that would be met with support from private and foundational funds (Ibid.).

While CDBGs managed to look like a gentler and more equitable form of urban development, they extended similar paternalistic and interventionist logics as urban renewal that relied on ideas and realities of the physical deterioration of racialized inner city neighbourhoods. Indeed, very

72 similar principles and discourses underlined the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974 as that of the earlier Housing Acts. Despite the growing understanding of the issues of utilizing “blight” as a tool for redevelopment, the first objective of the 1974 Act, like those before it, was

The elimination of slums and blight and the prevention of blighting influences and the deterioration of property and neighbourhood and community facilities of importance to the welfare of the community, principally persons of low and moderate income.15

Other objectives of the Act clearly focus on addressing the various physical ailments of low- income neighbourhoods in the central city: eliminating “conditions…detrimental to the health, safety, and public welfare” through the enforcement of city codes, property demolition, and rehabilitation assistance; “more rational utilization of land…and the better arrangement of residential, commercial, recreational, and other needed activity centers”; and the desegregation of low-income housing through “the revitalization of deteriorating or deteriorated neighborhoods.”

While the CDBG program was designed on the surface for the benefit of low-income and largely racialized populations in the city like those that now lived in the southern neighbourhoods of Dorchester and Roxbury, like urban renewal it eventually reflected the broader goal of urban economic development that primarily benefited urban elites. The Revival Gardens program in Boston supported by CDBG funds, for instance, which will be discussed in Chapter 4, was supposedly designed for the creation of gardens in low-income neighbourhoods of the city, but historical municipal records reveal that the City in actuality viewed gardens as a means of rehabilitating vacant land on the federal dime. Just like urban renewal before it, cities figured out how to leverage federal grants designed to benefit low income populations to promote economic growth that had the potential to increase rather than decrease social inequality. Revitalization, in a sense, was merely “urban renewal lite.”

Further, in parallel with changes to urban renewal legislation between the Housing Acts of 1949 and 1954, by 1977 economic development itself had become an activity eligible for CDBG

15 Housing and Community Development Act of 1974, pp. 2. Found online at https://www.hudexchange.info/resources/documents/Housing-and-Community-Development-Act-1974.pdf.

73 support when the new funding formula was designed. These changes to the program put a renewed emphasis in urban development

on the revitalization and conservation of viable residential neighborhoods, and the stimulation of commercial and industrial development essential to the vitality of central cities and their residential neighborhoods.16

This meant that, despite the objectives of the Act outlined above, even if the city desired to increase support to low income communities via the CDBGs that they received from the federal government, the conditions placed on the funds meant that particularly distressed communities were not well served by CDBGs. Indeed, a city document from 1977 suggests that CDBG funds

…cannot be used to target assistance to distressed communities which have severe problems of physical and economic deterioration and a high degree of commitment and performance in dealing with these problems.17

The funding limitations of CDBGs thus seriously restricted the ability for the city to be responsive to the most distressed communities, even if that had been their intention. It also demonstrates the extent to which CDBGs were one of the earliest forms of municipal public- private partnerships in the United States (Nenno, 1996). This will become clearer in Chapter 4 with the discussion of community gardens in Boston, which relied on the various benefits imagined for gardens, including vacant land amelioration, to leverage the participation of private citizens in the rehabilitation of inner city land.

Even in those neighbourhoods that did receive CDBG grants for programs, however, low-income residents did not always benefit directly. For example, it was quite common for the funds to be spent on rebuilding infrastructure like highways and for the clearance of neglected structures including tax-foreclosed houses that were often located in inner city neighbourhoods.18 While the local administration of federal grants was idealized as a solution to past issues with urban renewal, then, the reality was that the discretion granted to municipal governments gave them

16 Draft 1977 Community Legislation Briefing for Boston Congressional Delegation, Kevin White Papers Box 24.

17 Ibid.

18 Victory Gardens Revival Project, Box 3/I/074.

74 considerable power to engage in growth machine-type governance and “deflect the grants to other purposes” (Logan and Molotch, 1987: 172).

Over time, the geographic requirements of CDBGs also softened, and CDBG funds at times came to finance new physical assets even in wealthy communities. In Boston there is evidence that corruption and mismanagement in the administration of CDBGs at the city level meant that much of the funds were not spent smartly nor exclusively on low-income communities. In some years, not all the funds allocated to the city were spent at all, and as a result funds for future years were clawed back by the government to match past spending rather than city need.19 This topic will be explored in more depth in Chapter 4.

Several other issues with CDBGs must also be mentioned. Firstly, since CDBGs were thought initially to be an ideal fix for many of the issues plaguing inner city neighbourhoods, programming under CDBGs was initially so well-funded and highly regarded that it justified cuts to other federal welfare programs geared towards education and other important social issues (Nenno, 1996). Second, CDBGs had complex administrative requirements that made applications for CDBG funds from the municipality challenging and time-consuming and, because they were annual, future support was never guaranteed. Many programs, including the Revival Community Gardens Program discussed in Chapter 4, were at constant risk of losing CDBG funding for their programs. Further, since competition for CDGB funds through the municipality would have been intense, many small and medium-sized non-profit organizations dedicated to working in low-income communities at that time were at a disadvantage in the competition for the grants. Over time many of them found foundational and private support for their organizations rather than relying on CDBGs for ongoing support; we will see this dynamic at work in the building of community gardens in Boston discussed in Chapter 4.

19 Victory Gardens Revival Project, Box 3/I/074.

4.3 Rescaling from Blight to Vacancy

An important aspect of CDBGs that made them appear gentler and more “bottom up” was the rescaling of revitalization from the razed blocks of urban renewal to individual parcels of land under revitalization. While the objectives were comparable, the goals of the new Act would be actualized without the large-scale tool of eminent domain and would instead focus on individual projects and parcels of land. Indeed, as Mel King (1981) points out, urban renewal in Boston “had its origins in the large-scale planning envisioned for the city” and as a result was “consistently obsessed with size: the towering Prudential Center building, the mammoth Government Center…”20 (23). To make this vision a reality, entire swaths of the city had to be found blighted. Under revitalization, by comparison, the primary tools available to municipalities were code enforcement, demolition, and rehabilitation, tools at the scale of property, and the scale at which neoliberal development has generally occurred (Brenner and Theodore, 2002). Demolition in particular, discussed briefly earlier in the chapter and explored in more depth in Chapter 4, was an important tool in the construction of vacancy at the municipal level.

The move from revitalization to renewal was thus a shift from the language of waste couched in blight to that of vacancy. This is evident, for example, in a report prepared by a member of the Mayor’s policy team in conjunction with the BRA in 1978 that declares21:

Doubtless the major change in attitude [about urban renewal] was in the attitude toward ‘blight.’ Although many slums demolished at the time have not been missed, it is now generally thought that the condition of real estate in an area should not be the sole consideration in renewing it. Blight can be arrested and even reversed and efforts should be made to do so where an established community is involved. Communities are harder to erect, it seems, than buildings, and are a more important resource to the city.

The report continues, “the old simplification, ‘blight,’ has given way to a more sophisticated understanding of the City’s life and a new respect for the intangibles which hold a city together.”

20 The Prudential Center and Government Center were both projects built in the central city in Boston during the 1950s and 60s.

21 Patricia Brady. 1978. The City of Boston – History, Planning and Development. p. 6. BUG Archives, Series XIII: Revival Gardens, Collection 43, Box 9.

Similarly, a Boston media account of the new Act in 1984 notes that, in the case of urban development,

the bulldozer is the extreme solution. Instead, new city and state representatives – with the leadership and commitment of the [Mayor Raymond] Flynn administration, the business community, and neighborhood groups – will do much to restore the city and its abandoned buildings.22

These quotes highlight the extent to which urban revitalization schemes were characterized by a lot of idealism about the power of cities to address their own issues more effectively than the federal government had previously, as well as the mounting concern with restoring the now abandoned and vacant urban neighbourhoods.

The physical deterioration of racialized neighbourhoods thus continued to lend justificatory powers to programs funded by the federal government to rehabilitate the urban landscape, and CDBGs were similarly focused on low-income racialized areas of the city. The “crisis” areas of Boston had largely moved south since urban renewal, however, into the new black ghettos of Dorchester, Roxbury and Mattapan. With the end of urban renewal, the BRA lost the ability to designate new urban renewal districts, meaning that the flow of government subsidies for urban renewal purposes was limited to the central city even after it had begun to recover economically. New CDBG-funded programs enabled new government, private, and foundational money to flow into the new black ghettos that had not been subject to urban renewal (with the exception of Washington Park in Lower Roxbury) and were not designated as urban renewal districts by the BRA.23

22 Purcell, David. 1984, n.p. “Boson is hammering out solutions for restoring city’s abandoned housing.” Christian Science Monitor. Victory Gardens Revival Project, Box 3/I/074.

23 While the objectives of the new Act reflected the new reality of inner city neighbourhoods that were struggling with population losses and vacant land, the funding allocations for CDBGs were initially based on population, poverty, and the number of overcrowded housing units. This description reflects the characteristics of densely populated post-war slums but did not effectively reflect the new reality of inner city spaces. This mismatch between the objectives of the Act and its funding conditions was recognized early in the CDBG program after the most distressed cities in the nation did not receive an equitable share of CDBG funds. A new formula was thus rolled out in 1977 that took into the account the amount of older housing stock, lack of population growth, and number of families below the poverty line (Overview of Community Development Amendments of 1977, Kevin White Papers Box 24). Boston benefited considerably from the new formula, and the city’s federal funds were maintained at a similar level as under urban renewal through the end of the 1970s and into the 80s (Draft 1977 Community Development Legislation Briefing for Boston Congressional Delegation, Kevin White Papers Box 24).

4.4 Vacancy as the New Blight

The new crisis facing the city as urban renewal turned into revitalization was vacant land, and it was the central object of governance targeted in many revitalization schemes. By the era of revitalization, vacant land itself was considered an urban “blight.” It is important to understand that I am referring here to the social rather than legal meaning of blight, however. Indeed, vacant land is often understood to be blighted or a blighting influence in the absence of statutory declarations of blight or the use of eminent domain, highlighting the ways in which understandings of blight have a social and cultural dimension that has trickled down from its legal aspects. Ideas of blight tied to inner city neighbourhoods have persisted even as legal findings of blight tied with municipal use of eminent domain powers mostly receded from these spaces, and as decay and abandonment, rather than the overcrowding of post-war slums, became the primary identifying characteristic of these spaces. I will provide several examples here of the relationship between vacant land and blight to illustrate this point; a more in-depth analysis of the utilization of ideas of vacancy for urban development will be developed in Chapter 4.

By the time that the city of Boston had begun a series of CDBG-funded programs – a vacant land survey, a demolition program, and the REVIVAL gardens program, an acronym that stands for “Revitalizing Vacant Lots” – designed to address the problem of vacant land in the mid-1970s, vacant land had clearly become the “new blight.” For example, a document prepared by BUG, an organization involved in Revival, describes

climbing weeds, broken glass, and beer bottles on two vacant lots at the intersection [of Lamartine and Hoffman Streets in Jamaica Plain that] gave a distorted picture of that section of the community. Families fled the integrated neighborhood, fearing more blight around their homes…24

This quote highlights the concept of blight as a contagious physical condition, and clearly demonstrates the common understanding of the relationship between race and blight: the racial integration of the neighbourhood itself is cause to “fear more blight around their homes.” In another document authored by BUG, they suggest that much of the natural or “wild” land in the city

24 Johnson, Doris. 1977, August 24. “Blight to delight as urban gardens raise morale. The Boston Globe, p. 4. BUG archives, Series XIII: Revival Gardens, Collection 43, Box 9.

takes the form of neglected and dangerous vacant lots. These lots are usually filled with rubbish and broken glass, and detract from the other neighborhood efforts to beautify or structurally improve the housing stock and parts of the community.25

In its description of vacant land as “dangerous” this excerpt also demonstrates an understanding of vacant land, like blight, as a kind of poisonous condition that presents a threat to neighbourhood improvements and residents. Similarly, in a BUG report on community gardens, it’s suggested that the

physical and social character of these neighborhoods [the South End, Roxbury, Jamaica Plain and Dorchester] are seriously marred and threatened by the overgrown and littered vacant land.26

The understanding of vacant land as a blight is similarly demonstrated in municipal documentation describing Revival as “a means of upgrading blighted urban environments” through the “conversion of blighted land to food gardens.”27 It is also highlighted by a BUG report that lists one of the organization’s purposes as

[contributing] to the reduction of deterioration and blight by encouraging gardening among residents of economically depressed areas.28

Similarly, in promotion materials for a garden project, BUG suggests that gardens are “a means of upgrading blighted urban environments” through the “conversion of blighted land to food gardens by low-income residents.”29

25 Summary and Description of Emerald City Project. BUG archives, Series XIII: Revival Gardens, Collection 43, Box 9.

26 Summary and Description of Emerald City Project. BUG archives, Series XIII: Revival Gardens, Collection 43, Box 9.

27 CDBG Year VI Application, Attachment A: Scope of Services. Summary and Description of Emerald City Project. BUG archives, Series XIII: Revival Gardens, Collection 43, Box 9.

28 BUG Incorporation Application. Summary and Description of Emerald City Project. BUG archives, Series XIII: Revival Gardens, Collection 43, Box 9.

29 CDBG Year VI Application, Attachment A: Scope of Services. Summary and Description of Emerald City Project. BUG archives, Series XIII: Revival Gardens, Collection 43, Box 9.

CDBG-funded programs were focused on particular neighbourhoods of concern – Roxbury, Dorchester, Jamaica Plain, South Boston, and Mattapan – all of which were either current or past areas of crisis in the city and populated mostly by racialized and low income residents. The geographical focus of these programs was a means not only to address the problematic landscapes of racialized neighbourhoods, but to initiate their identification and justification as problematic in the first place. A CDBG-funded vacancy survey, for instance, was to be focused on these particular areas of the city despite the fact that other city documentation suggested that vacant land is “scattered” across the city.30 Vacant land is thereby articulated as an actually existing and problematic phenomenon even as it is constructed by, and lends power to, the very governance structures meant to address it.

Indeed, as will be explored in more depth in the following chapters, this focus on particular racially segregated neighbourhoods works to reinforce the narratives of racialized populations as problematic and needing interventions, deepening rather than challenging the racialized impacts of spatial and governance logics. This is indicated in a report written by the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination in 1978 evaluating the City of Boston’s annual application for CDBGs. The Commission suggests that “it is unable to concur with the application as presently proposed” due to their “[grave concern] with the possible negative impact on minority citizens under the present program.” The letter suggests that the Commission is concerned with the focus of CDBGs on racially segregated neighbourhoods, suggesting that the approach “can only serve to reinforce existing segregated conditions in the City.” The report continues,

…as long as many parts of the City remain inaccessible to minorities, the present neighborhood emphasis in a Community Development Program is counter- productive to any efforts to eliminate racial violence and segregation.31

Partially, the report suggests, these negative impacts, and the maintenance of racial segregation via block grants, is due to the focus of CDBGs’ housing policies on homeowners in “the absence

30 Victory gardens program pamphlet, Victory Garden Revival Project, Box 3/I/074.

31 Memorandum written by Jane C. Edmonds, Chairman of the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination to Frank Keefe, Director of the Office of State Planning. April 11, 1978. Pg. 1. Victory Garden Revival Project, Box 3/I/082.

80 of comparable programs which impact low and moderate income residents who are overwhelmingly [sic] renters.”32 The report recommends to the Office of State Planning

…that in order to assure that these efforts continue and to assure that the problems in the area of fair housing and in the Block Grant Program itself are addressed, the application not be approved unless and until it is revised to address the serious equal opportunity and housing assistance needs to low income, minority and female-headed households in the City of Boston.33

Despite these criticisms and the resultant recommendation, however, the City of Boston attained CDBG funds the following year, demonstrating the extent to which policies and structures of urban development can become “sticky” and extremely difficult to challenge or change.

To conclude the discussion, the understanding of vacant land as a blight persists into the present day and continues to lend ideological weight to the understanding of the dangers of vacant land. It provides a kind of shorthand for the social construction of particular land use characteristics discursively and materially linked with inner city neighbourhoods, the “waste-able” conditions of the racialized landscape that continue to be understood as dangerous and even contagious. I witnessed the commonness of the narrative association between vacancy and blight amongst my study participants. When speaking about urban farming on vacant land, for instance, many used the terms “blighted land” and “vacant land” interchangeably:

We need to use space and reactivate space that is blighted in cities…So many of the neighbourhoods that we’re talking about, there’s just so much vacant land (city representative).

So I think by blighted land I mean land that was previously used for something else whether it was a residence or a business that’s then been abandoned (city representative).

The blight of it is, in neighbourhoods when they see a lot of vacant land, I mean, on one hand just on the emotional level it’s not fun to see this blighted land (community gardener).

One stakeholder suggested that “vacant land is a blight on communities,” which similarly lends vacant land the power of the discourse of blight. These narratives echo the historical project of

32 Ibid.

33 Idem, pg. 3.

81 constructing blight that Pritchett (2003) suggests included the desire to ensure that “every man” understood blight as a significant urban problem to garner consent for urban renewal. Ironically, this shift has occurred as the legal use of blight has broadened in scope such that local interests have been granted “almost carte blanche in their creative search for ‘blighted’ areas eligible for federal funds or local tax breaks” (Gordon, 2003-2004: 306-306). Importantly, the ideological similarity between blight and vacancy highlights their power to make seem natural and common sense what has in fact been constructed over time.

5 Conclusion

The history of urban land vacancy in the American city and its relationship with blight expands our knowledge of the norms and tools used by municipal powers to alter the landscape in the name of progress and “highest and best” development. As discussed in Chapter 2, the binary opposition between wasteful and productive land uses provides an essential underpinning for the “doxic truth” of highest and best use. As a result, the identification of waste in the landscape – whether blight under urban renewal or vacancy under revitalization and beyond – comes to be an essential apparatus of city building. This chapter has surveyed several important economic and social changes that altered the sociospatial landscape of the city, particularly for racialized low income populations. These changes resulted in a shift towards vacancy as a new powerful tool to reorder the landscape in the name of productivity that extends the power of blight, a prior descriptor of the “waste-ability” of racialized urban spaces and populations.

The arguments presented in this chapter provide evidence for the extent to which, as Harvey (1989) maintains,

…when the physical and social landscape of urbanization is shaped according to distinctively capitalist criteria, constraints are put on the future paths of capitalist development (3).

In other words, the development of cities over time is to a large extent limited by what has come before. This fact is illustrated in this chapter by the ways in which land declared blighted, legally or in the popular imagination, may physically and ideologically morph over time into empty, deteriorated, and vacant land, land which is similarly understood to be problematically utilized and desirous of interventions to “fix” the ailing landscape. These logics suffer from a circularity

82 in which, as I have demonstrated, the state at various levels both actuates and relies upon them for the maintenance of its own power over the landscape.

To a large extent, the historical narrative discussed in this chapter is also a story about the scale at which urban development occurs. As urban managerialism shifted into the entrepreneurial mode characterized by the increasing emphasis on private developers and “growth coalitions” in urban development, the plot-by-plot scale of vacancy fit perfectly with the small-scale, project- based scale of entrepreneurial development (Harvey, 1989; Theodore and Brenner, 2002). The next chapter shifts gears from a focus on the material and physical production of vacant land to analyze the first era of programmatic fixes for the “waste” of racially segregated neighbourhoods in Boston that relied on federal CDBG funds under urban revitalization and that operated at the scale of property.

Chapter 4 Gardens as Development and as Empowerment: Community Gardening as a Programmatic Fix in Boston, 1970-1990

1 Introduction

Chapter 3 overviewed the origins of urban land vacancy in the United States, arguing that as the use of legal findings of blight have shifted largely to revenue sharing schemes in the suburbs, vacancy has come to describe the “waste-ability” of the racialized inner city. The construction of vacant land as an urban problem is an important aspect of this reality because it lends power to the characterization of vacant land as in need of particular kinds of interventions to return it to higher and better use. This chapter takes up the subject of a significant programmatic fix designed to address vacant land in Boston: the REVIVAL program, an acronym that stands for “Revitalizing Vacant Lots,” which was designed as a comprehensive system to bring city-owned vacant land back into private and productive use. Revival was an important aspect of the city’s new urban revitalization scheme, and was funded by federal CDBG grants starting in 1975.

Though only one aspect of Revival, community gardens were an extremely significant part of the program. New logics of federalism meant the increased responsibility of cities for their own management as well as reductions in federal funding, and financially strapped municipalities “struggled to maintain the abandoned buildings and acres of cleared land in the inner city,” while residents “clamored for some sort of municipal and federal response” to the conditions of the city (Lawson, 2005: 218-219). Community gardens were relatively inexpensive and provided a significant opportunity for communities to engage in neighbourhood land development. Importantly, gardens also fit the new lot-by-lot scale of development under revitalization, answering the call for a fix for the problem of vacant land. As a result of these coalescing factors, community gardens came to seem like a natural response to the widespread anxiety about the crisis of the inner city, and a boom period in garden development occurred beginning in the late 1960s and heightening throughout the 1970s across the United States, including in Boston.

This chapter analyzes the stories of community gardens from the perspective of the City and of the community – what I have dubbed the narratives of Gardens-as-Development and Gardens-as- Empowerment respectively – highlighting the ways in which these narratives coalesce and overlap, as well as the significant divergences and tensions between them. Two central arguments emerge from this analysis that form important contributions to the urban governance literature. First, I argue that rather than merely an interim use of land, a common characterization of gardens (Dowty, 2005; Warner, 1987; Lawson, 2005; Drake and Lawson, 2013), the City utilized gardens as a special tool for the redevelopment of vacant land in low-income racialized neighbourhoods. Indeed, the development of gardens on vacant land enabled the City to access, and sometimes exploit, federal monies for the development of city-owned land and with the involvement of private citizens and non-profit gardening organizations. Second, I suggest that while shared ideologies of vacancy and the new scalar logics of urban revitalization produced agreement about the importance of gardens and the role of the community in their development, they also masked underlying tensions and differentials in power across stakeholders to influence desired outcomes in the urban landscape. As the City understood gardens as tools of urban redevelopment, they also simultaneously relied on the enthusiastic participation of gardeners in the development of the inner city, which reduced the political potential of those spaces for the empowerment of the community. Tracking the role of gardens in urban revitalization as a product of the relationship between the community and municipal actors, as well as garden developer groups, represents a unique contribution to the scholarship on urban development.

By analyzing the role not only of the city itself but also residents and non-profit gardening organizations in the redevelopment of vacant land in the inner city of Boston, this chapter achieves the aim of decentring the actions of the state in governing urban space (Rose, 1999). By paying attention to the ways in which what Foucault termed the ‘will to govern’ is enacted by various stakeholders, “the state now appears simply as one element…in multiple circuits of power, connecting a diversity of authorities and forces, within a whole variety of complex assemblages” (Rose, 1999: 5). This chapter thereby expressly achieves the aims set out in this dissertation to achieve the “ethnographic imaginary.”

The chapter proceeds as follows. I first contextualize garden development as a form of urban revitalization in the United States, suggesting that this period of garden development is unique in many of its features in comparison to earlier eras. Next I briefly outline the central features of the racial political landscape in Boston at the time, a period of history that was characterized by a considerable amount of tension between the white and racialized residents of the city, and the racial politics of community gardens. It is essential to understand the race relations that characterized Boston during this period in order to understand the story of community gardens and what they accomplished – and didn’t accomplish – in Boston during this era. I then move on to sketch the central similarities between the two narratives of gardens, and the major divergences between them, highlighting the effects that these shared and disparate narratives of gardens had on the landscape of Boston as neoliberal urbanism gained a foothold in the city.

2 A Note on Sources

This chapter is based primarily on the archival data that I collected in Boston from two sources. The first of these is an unprocessed collection of records of the Boston Urban Gardeners (BUG) from 1959 to 1980, the bulk of which were produced between 1977 and 1980. These records are held at the Healey Library at the University of Massachusetts (JFK campus). They include organizational documents, correspondence, and media clippings relevant to the organization and its work in garden development. The second source is archival documentation of the administration of the municipal Revival Program held at the Boston City Archives. I also utilized processed papers from the collection of Kevin White, who was the Mayor of Boston during the operation of Revival.

I also draw on the oral histories of two individuals I interviewed and who were involved in the development of community gardens in Boston from the 1970s. The first individual, Sara Woodson1, worked with BUG, a grassroots organization created in 1976 with a mandate to assist gardening groups with organizational and technical aspects of gardening in the city of Boston. Cheryl Green has similarly been involved with community gardening and conservation in Boston for several decades, and worked with Boston Natural Areas Fund (BNAF), which is now the Boston Natural Areas Network (BNAN). I have also drawn on some relevant secondary sources.

1 Both individual’s names have been anonymized for privacy.

3 Context 3.1 Community Gardens as a Tool for Urban Revitalization in the US

As discussed in Chapter 3, the period of Boston’s development initiated by the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974 and characterized by urban revitalization originated the focus on vacant land, rather than conditions of “blight” associated with earlier post-war slums. Vacant land was by this time identified as an urban problem and became a concerted focus of state-based programming, and the new scale of these revitalization programs partially accounts for the new focus on the “crisis” of vacant land. Indeed, the identification of vacant land as a problem needing a fix was a necessary tool to justify state-based interventions at the new scale of revitalization, which was on a much gentler plot-by-plot basis. The increasing significance of vacant land during this time period demonstrates the extent to which objects of governance necessary for particular processes of governance are constructed in and through those very processes.

Given the shift in scale of development under revitalization, the period from the late 1960s into the 1980s was a significant boom stage of garden growth in cities across the United States, including in Boston. Municipal gardening programs and initiatives such as pocket park, adopt-a- lot, and community gardening were extremely common during this time, particularly in older cities in the northeast including Philadelphia and New York, as well as Boston (Warner, 1987; Lawson, 2004). Many of these cities have long histories of garden development that follow a historical narrative in which moments of environmental, political or social crisis – e.g. war, food shortages, growing populations of urban poor – have produced periods of heightened garden growth that recede after the crisis has subsided (Lawson, 2004, 2005). Indeed, as Lawson (2005) has pointed out, “gardens have been an almost knee-jerk response to crisis” (288). Partially this is because gardens don’t require a lot of monetary investment and are relatively self-sustaining since they are created and utilized by urban residents.

This boom period of community gardening growth that began in the late 1960s was influenced by the crisis of the empty and deteriorated inner city and has been characterized as a period of garden development comparable to other earlier periods. French (2008) has suggested that this is the “second wave” of gardening that extends the “first wave” during the wars when thousands of

87 acres across the United States were converted to Victory gardens. There is also evidence that gardens under revitalization were commonly understood as a return to the earlier period of Victory gardens. A local Boston newspaper article published in 1977 asks, “whatever happened to those victory garden plots which Americans so valiantly and patriotically hoed, seeded, planted and weeded, during those critical war years?” The author answers, “those gardens are under ‘revival.’ The concept of Victory Gardens, anyway, are [sic] making a major comeback, with the revitalization of vacant plots of land in parts of Boston…”.2 Further, gardens built under revitalization programs in Boston were called Revival Victory gardens, also reflecting this understanding of garden growth.

Despite the common understanding of the new era of garden development as an extension of earlier historical eras, however, in many ways this period was quite unique. During both world wars, a wide variety of both public and private land was used for gardening in answer to a global crisis with the primary goal of food production. In Boston, in addition to private garden plots, large portions of public parks including Franklin Park and the Boston Common were utilized to cultivate vegetables until the end of WWII (French, 2008). Under revitalization, on the other hand, gardening was seen as a means to ameliorate problematic conditions of the landscape influenced by urban and national issues and that were located in geographically specific areas of the city. Gardens were still a means to an end, but food production was no longer seen as the primary fix to the crisis at hand. Rather, the period of gardening growth under revitalization was defined by a drive for urban development, an underlying goal of gardening that was new. The role of gardens in ameliorating the waste of vacant land from poor inner city areas under revitalization challenges the idea of this period of community gardening as an extension of earlier periods of garden development. The era of community gardening that began under revitalization cannot be understood without being contextualized within the broader issue of the development of vacant land in the inner city.

This is not to say that the relationship between gardens during this period and the presence of vacant land in the urban milieu has been ignored. On the contrary, countless urban and community gardening scholars have pointed out the extent to which gardens during this period

2 Toy, Christiane Sampan. October 1977. “Bak choy, gai-lan and more in abundance.” A publication of the Chinese- American Civic Association. Victory Garden Revival Box, 3/I/075.

88 were a response to the collective anxiety about the deterioration of the inner city and the municipality’s increasing inability to confront the issue (Lawson, 2005: 218-219, Warner, 1987; Dowty, 2005; Vrabel, 2014). As French (2008) points out, “vacant lots were opportunities for the creation of new gardens” (74). What has not been recognized, however, is the extent to which shared narratives of vacancy and the hegemonic recognition of its problematic implications in the cityscape partially account for the construction of the crisis of the inner city during this golden era of garden development, as well as the recognition of community gardens as the answer to that crisis. Given the new scale of revitalization, narratives of vacancy and the role of residents in ameliorating the problematic conditions of the inner city make perfect sense.

3.2 The Politics of Race and Gardens in Boston

Contextualizing garden development alongside the physical and ideological construction of vacant land also means paying attention to the racial politics that characterized Boston during this era. As has already been stated, vacant land and thus gardens were concentrated in particular areas of the city where race-based policies such as urban renewal, redlining, and blockbusting were focused. In combination with mass suburbanization, these processes had effected concerted racial segregation in the city and the “free spaces” associated with it, as outlined in depth in Chapter 3. The racial tensions that resulted from these policies and that characterized this era of Boston’s history cannot be understated.

While racist policies had impacted the segregation of the racialized population of the city, they had also simultaneously produced a general feeling of anger, frustration, and a sense of mistrust on the part the black community towards the municipal administration. Indeed, as O’Connor (1993) states, the “ideas of progressive improvement” that characterized Boston City’s administration during the 1960s and into 70s “[produced] widespread antagonism and violent disaffection” (266). On the one hand, O’Connor suggests, while much of the white population of the city, particularly the white blue-collar communities concentrated in the South End and other nearby areas, resented changes to the city that occurred throughout the mid-twentieth century and that demonstrated to some extent the entrenchment of “old boy”-type oligarchs at City Hall, black residents of the city reacted just as angrily to their displacement from the central city via urban and other racist policies outlined in Chapter 3.

A significant aspect of the racial tension produced during this period came as a result of forced busing to desegregate the city’s schools, as overviewed in Chapter 3, as children of white and minority families were bused “between hostile communities” (Bluestone and Stevenson, 2000: 44), like the majority white South Boston and majority black Roxbury. As a result, “the racial climate in the city degenerated rapidly” (Ibid.). The tensions erupted in moments into full-blown violent confrontations between residents in the city, one of which was captured in the infamous Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph “The Soiling of Old Glory,” which depicts a white man attacking a well-dressed black man (who was an architect employed at City Hall) with the American Flag at a protest of school desegregation at City Hall Plaza in 1976 (Masur, 2008).

There is no doubt that the sense of frustration and anger on the part of the non-white residents in the city was also a result of an acknowledgement on some level of the fact that the challenges that faced them in the labour market, in housing, and their general standard of living that was lower than for white residents were a result of racist policies and attitudes. As Bluestone and Stevenson (2000) suggest, even decades later, race and class antagonisms continue to affect much of Boston, and the “renaissance” that has increased the standard of living of the white population in the city since the problems of the 1970s has not done so equally for non-white residents. Indeed, Boston was during this era, and continues to be into the twentieth-first century, “two separate cities, one black, one white” (Barnes, 1995: 209, quoted in Bluestone and Stevenson, 2000: 45).

An important aspect of the “separate cities” thesis is the lack of political representation for black Bostonians in the city and across the state of Massachusetts more generally. Partly this is a result of the fact that African-Americans in the city have historically made up less than a quarter of the population, and white voters have generally rejected black candidates at the city and state level (Jonas, 2003). Boston has never had a non-white Mayor, and has had few district or at-large councilors at City Hall over the years, despite the fact that the creation of district representation in the mid-80s was designed to ensure more representation of non-white residents at City Hall (Ibid.). Indeed, since Mel King, one of the most well-known and beloved black public figures in Boston, famously won one of the two spots in the final ballot for the Mayor of Boston in 1983, black political representation in the City has only regressed. (King lost to Raymond Flynn by a margin of 2-to1.) Of course, due to Boston’s strong mayoral system, the election of racialized city residents to council may not make a huge difference to the politics of the city overall (Ibid.).

This lack of political representation in the city has influenced a smoldering resentment that underlies much of the racial politics in the city.

Considering the history of racial politics in Boston, it makes sense that gardens came to seem like a potential answer to the question of empowerment, a kind of community-led form of urban revitalization and enfranchisement that side-stepped the question of political representation. And indeed, as I will discuss in this chapter, gardens had a particularly political implication for the racialized residents of Dorchester, Mattapan, and Roxbury, where the “free spaces” characteristic of the racialized landscape existed. However, though guerrilla gardening that did not require municipal permission or involvement was an important aspect of the early “taking back the land” movement in Boston, once the Revival Gardens program was underway it brought considerable challenges for community members attempting to build gardens and make them a permanent feature of their neighbourhoods. As a result of those challenges, garden developer organizations like the Boston Urban Gardeners (BUG) became essential to the construction of community gardens from the mid-1970s.3

BUG was formed in 1976 by community activists who had protested the creation of Interstate 95 through Boston, along with those more specifically concerned with building a gardening movement in the city (French, 2008). Like many of the organizations involved with gardening across the US, BUG was entrenched in the civil rights movement and concerned primarily with the development of social justice and equality rather than food production (Interview with Sara Woodson, 2014). As a result, garden developers like BUG played a key role in constructing and espousing the rhetoric of political empowerment surrounding gardens at that time. As French (2008) suggests, community activists and organizers “used community gardening to empower urban neighbourhoods in cities across America,” and gardens became “the vehicle by which community organizers were able to mobilize disenfranchised urbanites into collective action” (4). Similarly, Sara Woodson told me that those involved in gardening activism were often “radical people” interested in “making the city a better place, working with the community, [and] pulling together around food and gardens as a way to develop community” (Interview with Sara

3 Boston Natural Areas Fund/Network (BNAF/N) was another important organization involved in garden conservation in Boston that I will discuss in the chapter. In the early 1980s, they were essential for protecting existing gardens, but they were not involved with development of gardens as BUG were.

Woodson, 2014). Like many non-profit social justice organizations at that time (and now), BUG was small (less than 10 employees) and was made up mostly of middle class white women.

The central mission of BUG was to advocate on behalf of community gardeners for legitimacy and, ultimately, for garden land access, permanent status in the cityscape, and for the self- determination of the community to build and use gardens as they saw fit. BUG would meet with representatives from the various city agencies involved in constructing Revival gardens, and they wrote a lot of letters on behalf of gardeners in the neighbourhoods to argue for better recognition, infrastructure, and tenure for gardens in the city. They also prepared reports about the benefits of community gardens, particularly for low-income populations, and the challenges of building gardens in a large metropolitan centre; we will see the content of many of these reports and letters throughout the chapter.

The characterization of gardens as “by residents, for residents” and BUG’s advocacy on behalf of resident gardeners seems to provide evidence for the characterization of the era of political gardening of the 1970s as a break from earlier charitable forms of community gardening. Writing in the mid-90s, for instance, Hynes (1996) suggests that the gardening movement has “lost the odor of reform charity – of the ‘haves’ uplifting the ‘have nots’ – that characterized earlier garden movements in cities” (x). Warner’s 1987 history of Boston’s community gardens similarly argues that rather than “a politics of charity or reform of the poor” (xiii), the American community gardening movement is

[p]ropelled by groups of neighbors who organize themselves to clear or secure their own land and to maintain their garden parcels. It is a politics of self-help and local empowerment (xiii).

There may be some truth to these submissions, particularly in the very early forms of community gardening when residents took empty lots for gardens boldly and often without the permission of the city. On the other hand, there is also reason to dispute these claims, especially when community gardening was not necessarily by the community itself, but assisted by organizations like BUG that were well-meaning but somewhat predictably paternalistic at their core.

Groups like BUG (and BNAF/N) were staffed almost entirely by middle class white women, the bonafide charitable representative of progressive causes designed to rectify social ills, and often fueled precisely by a kind of paternalistic response enabled by their place as a “have” of the

92 world. As I will explore in more depth later in the chapter, BUG was able to garner municipal support precisely because they could leverage their political power at City Hall in their crusade for gardens. A critique of the kind of work done by mostly white middle class groups like BUG on behalf of the low-income racialized residents of the city is presented by Mel King in his memoir of black community activism in Boston, Chain of Change: Struggles for Black Community Development (1981). He suggests that

[d]uring the past century Boston’s ethnic neighborhoods, particularly those inhabited by Black people, have been ‘served’ by an incredible number of programs administered in the missionary spirit, by non-community residents serving city-state, federal and private agencies (xvi).

The tendency towards black communities being “served” by a glut of agencies attempting to “fix” the problems of the ghetto, he argues, actually work to perpetuate negative stereotypes about the black community as incapable of helping themselves or as full and participatory citizens in their own right. What is needed, he suggests, is for black residents to form their own institutions without dependence on white society or on “service” from the government, which only work to keep black communities dependent and disempowered. It is easy to see in his words potential issues with the CDBG grants that formed the community gardens in the city and which, despite desires to overcome the blatant racism of urban renewal, continued to perpetuate and even depended on negative attitudes about inner city communities as blighted and in need of intervention. It is possible, then, that rather than empowering the racialized communities of Boston through gardening, groups like BUG actually assisted in inadvertently dampening their revolutionary potential.

Beyond the particularities of the Boston case, however, it is also important to note that there has been a long-running debate over the politics of community gardens and the potential for gardens to produce political change in the neoliberal urban landscape. On one hand, community gardens have long been recognized as radical political spaces that enable the exploration and definition of local politics and citizenship (Crossan et al., 2016), particularly for urban residents, like those of the inner city of Boston, who do not own land and utilize gardens as spaces of collective organization and cohesion. Gardens can also enable independence from social welfare provision by enabling low income families more freedom over food provision and potentially increasing food sovereignty, if only at the family scale (Block et al., 2012). Other scholars, however, have challenged the extent to which gardens can be considered radical spaces. They point out that

93 community gardens fit into the neoliberal urban landscape because they “alleviate the state from service provision” and necessitate the extraction of both material and human resources from citizens who are already resource poor (Ghose and Pettygrove, 2014). Gardeners can thus be considered “neoliberal citizen-subjects” who participate in the development of the neoliberal city. Another scholarly camp falls somewhere between these two, suggesting instead that gardens and other forms of urban growing are at once both radical and neoliberal (e.g. McClintock, 2014), and that multiple competing narratives compete for and win legitimacy in particular moments.

The work presented in this chapter contributes to a scholarly consideration of the politics of gardens by analyzing the ways in which competing narratives about gardens – the narratives of gardens as neoliberal urban development versus gardens as politically empowering – are leveraged by stakeholders to produce particular spaces and outcomes in the urban milieu while challenging and suppressing others. The role of non-profit garden developer organizations like BUG is essential to this story in many cities, including in Boston. The next section of the chapter explores the shared features of both the City’s and the community’s narratives of gardens in Boston. I demonstrate that both narratives were characterized by a conception of the understanding of the crisis of vacant land in Boston, and the importance of community members in constructing gardens that would influence a kind of neighbourhood-based urban renewal.

4 Shared Narratives of Gardens in Boston 4.1 Gardens as an Answer to the Crisis of Vacant Land

Chapter 3 demonstrated that vacant land became the new tool of municipal land management in racialized low income districts of the city over the course of the twentieth century, gaining its power principally through its association with blight and with the racialized landscapes where vacant land was largely located. Archival analysis demonstrates that gardens were thought to be an ideal fix for the vacancy of the landscape in these areas of the city. A quotation from a local newspaper article reporting on the Revival Program when it began in 1975, for example, illustrates (although somewhat hyperbolically) the common outlook on the inner city neighbourhoods where vacant lots was located, and their geographic and narrative association with community gardens

The places chosen for the gardens couldn’t be made worse by very much short of nuclear holocaust – with few exceptions.4

From city agents and bureaucrats, to community members, to activists and the media, archival documentation shows that stakeholders agreed that vacant land was an extreme urban problem facing the City and the nation during this period of time in Boston’s development. Indeed, the “problem of vacant land,” explains the Boston Urban Gardeners (BUG) in one report, was a rather enormous issue for low income inner city communities, and

The presence of 40,000 vacant house lots and more than 4,500 acres of [vacant land] emphasizes the extent of the problem…5

Vacant land is regularly described in the language of decay, and the gardens as the perfect solution to address the problem of vacant land against all odds:

Revival gardens are growing up despite the carbon monoxide of the streets – despite substrata of broken glass and rubble – despite occasional vandals – despite official neglect.6

Indeed, as discussed in Chapter 3, by this time vacant land was associated with urban blight, now commonly understood as symbolic of “urban decay” more generally and thus of vacant land itself. Attention must be paid to the extent to which the meaning and use of blight has by now officially transferred to a characteristic of the landscape rather than to populations. The descriptions and the images of the blighted vacant lots included here are devoid of people, seeming to echo the common view, discussed in Chapter 2, that vacant land is a phenomenon

4 Desmond, Patricia. 1977, July 1. “Green Patch, Then Food.” The Patriot Ledger, p. 12. BUG Archives Series XIII: Revival Gardens; Collection number 43; Box Number 9.

5 Regulations for Revival Victory Gardens in the City of Boston. BUG Archives Series XIII: Revival Gardens; Collection number 43; Box Number 9.

6 “Who Farms in Revival Plots?”. BUG Archives Series XIII: Revival Gardens; Collection number 43; Box Number 9.

Figure 4.1 A rubble-strewn vacant lot in 1975 on Ashton Street in Mattapan. Courtesy of the Boston City Archives.

that has occurred as a result of economic and social forces and processes, rather than as a result of particular decisions and ideologies. This view helps to support the idea that urban revitalization is “softer” on populations than urban renewal, and points to the role of “vacant land” itself in justifying state-based interventions to address it.

A specific aspect of vacant land often brought up in archival documentation during this time was its lack of productivity and its problematic physical appearance, similarly reflecting the common understanding of vacant land as an urban problem. This narrative of vacant land is utilized most commonly in municipal documentation, foreshadowing the City’s understanding of vacant land as a barrier to development and of gardens as tools for land rehabilitation and redevelopment. For example, a pamphlet produced by the City in 1975 to educate residents about the Revival program suggests that it represents

A City-wide [sic] effort to upgrade presently vacant land for the use of the citizens of Boston. We have long faced a problem of maintaining the large amount of vacant land scattered throughout City neighborhoods. Much of this land could be used in

productive and attractive ways by the residents of Boston’s neighborhoods for their own benefit.7

A letter written in 1977 by the Commissioner of Real Property Department to the garden club in the Fort Hill neighbourhood in the South End parallels this rhetoric, stating that

The transformation of a vacant lot into a productive and attractive garden contributes immeasurably to City-wide efforts to improve the neighborhoods.8

Similarly, a form letter that would have been sent on behalf of the Mayor to those who had been successful at receiving an ownership lot through Revival starts by congratulating the applicant, and states

I hope that you enjoy it, and that the return of this lot to responsible, private ownership will contribute to the appearance and productivity of your neighborhood.9

A similar form letter prepared by Mayor White in 1975 and sent to individuals who had requested use of a vacant lot that was privately owned and thus not eligible for the program also utilizes the language of productivity:

For the benefit of the communities, the City of Boston is committed to turning vacant land into productive land.10

These quotations clearly express an understanding of a binary between “vacant” land and “productive” land, reflecting the common narrative of vacancy as a hazard overviewed in Chapter 2. The unproductivity of vacant land also meant that its presence was considered by the administration to be “a key indicator of a neighborhoods [sic] confidence and strength.”11

7 Victory gardens program pamphlet, Victory Garden Revival Project, Box 3/I/074.

8 Victory Garden Revival Project, Box 3/I/074.

9 Victory Garden Revival Project, Box 3/I/082.

10 Victory Garden Revival Project, Box 3/I/073.

11 Victory Garden Revival Project, Box 3/I/082.

Figure 4.2 Another vacant lot in Mattapan, 1975. Courtesy of the Boston City Archives.

Through the improvement of vacant land, then, the administration could revitalize Boston’s neighbourhoods,12 a theme also evident in community understandings of gardens. Community narratives of vacant land also regularly utilize the language of development, highlighting the fact that vacant land needs “upgrading” and the physical aspects of vacant land. In a letter written by the Fort Hill Neighbourhood Association to the Public Facilities Department in 1977, for instance, the applicant suggests that

A Victory garden would be an asset to our neighborhood and would do a lot to improve our community. We would prefer to see a Victory garden with fence and water where members of our community could grow vegetables for their families rather than an eyesore covered with stolen and abandoned cars on these lots owned by the city.13

12 Letter written by Mayor to White about status of Victory Garden, 1975, Victory Garden Revival Project, Box 3/I/073.

13 Victory garden Revival Project, Box 3/I/074.

Later in the letter the applicant suggests that the community “would appreciate assistance from the current REVIVAL program to help with the upgrading of the land.”14 A similar letter from the Cooper Community Center in Roxbury written in 1975 to the Commissioner of Real Property echoes this account, suggesting that if they were granted their request for several plots of land for use as a garden “a beautification process would occur.”15 The Roxbury Community Corporation wrote its own letter of support for this project to Real Property, suggesting comparably that the garden would “turn an eyesore (vacant lots) into something beautiful…”16 These excerpts demonstrate that community views of vacant land as hazardous parallel those of the municipality in many ways, and highlight the hegemony of notions of vacant land across stakeholders.

4.2 “Bottom up” Development and the Role of the Community in Revitalization

The crisis of vacant land and the understanding of community gardens as an ideal “bottom up” fix for the ills of the city put the community at centre stage in garden development. It is important to understand the extent to which the community and gardening groups were the most important stakeholders in the creation of gardens during this period. Community gardens in many cities, including in Boston, were one of the earliest forms of public-private partnership in the development of urban land in the US. Their creation was funded by the federal government and administrated by the municipality, and their infrastructure was designed and constructed with the assistance of private local construction companies. Later in the 1970s and into the 80s and 90s, BUG and other garden organizations and collectives also assisted with advocacy and garden development on behalf of the community. But private citizens were absolutely essential to the development of community gardens – after all, they are called “community” gardens for a reason.

On the side of the community, the narrative of gardens as politically empowering and as a way to take back the land placed a considerable importance on the community in the development of

14 Victory garden Revival Project, Box 3/I/074.

15 Victory Garden Revival Project, Box 3/I/074.

16 Victory Garden Revival Project, Box 3/I/074.

Figure 4.3 Boston residents clearing rubble and making a garden, 1970s. Photo courtesy of Julie Stone.

urban land. These views originated prior to Revival in the explosion of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, and the idea of empowering communities to make their own decisions about how land would be used in their neighbourhood, particularly following decades of disastrous state-led projects that resulted in housing crises for many low income and racialized populations in Boston and in other cities. As a result, scholars and activists regularly describe this period of garden growth as a kind of community-led neighbourhood-based urban renewal or revitalization (see Lawson, 2005; Dowty, 2005; French, 2008). The idealism of gardens as a new form of “bottom up” revitalization for the community reflects the hope of shifting power to the neighbourhoods who had been ignored for so long in urban development and politics. Warner (1987), for example, describes gardening as “residents’ own voluntary urban renewal” (4), while Hynes (1996), in her study of inner city gardens in several American cities including Boston, suggests

The stories of community gardens in Roxbury, Dorchester, and the South End of Boston implies an innovative kind of urban renewal, one undertaken with the cheapest of resources: seeds, soil, and the sweat equity of inner-city people…Urban renaissance comes closer to capturing the complex effect of these community gardens, which nourish the body and also the soul (viii).

Where gardens occur “in low-income neighbourhoods and ghettos,” Hynes suggests, “side-by-

100 side with decay, neglect, and disintegration, we can also see a contrasting, if tentative, neighbourhood revitalization occurring… (vii). In this sense, community gardens are regularly characterized as “the very antitheses of war, interstate highways, and urban renewal land takings” (Warner, 1987: 22), and “the symbol of the opposite of what was going on…racial violence and divisions among people, and [a] top-down approach to urban renewal” (Charlotte Kahn, Director of BUG, quoted in Lawson, 2005: 214).

The idea of gardens as a kind of “bottom up” renewal or revitalization is also reflected in archival documentation. A report produced by BUG that describes their role in the gardening movement in Boston utilizes this language to highlight BUG’s contribution to the development of gardens in Boston, suggesting that

What seems at first glance a pleasant pastime is in fact an approach to neighborhood revitalization…we are committed to neighbourhood revitalization and the reclamation of vacant and neglected urban land by and for neighbourhood residents through the application of urban agriculture and related products…17

Similarly, a report on the South End Garden Project prepared in 1977 suggests that gardening “transforms” vacant inner city land via the participation of community members:

Suddenly, a rubble and garbage-strewn vacant lot on the corner of Lenox and Tremont Streets was transformed into a hilly landscape of fertile soil with about twenty community people working to spread the soil to our first garden…Think of how the South End could be in five years!18

Gardens are emphasized as the only real hope for community-led renewal in these areas. For instance, the BUG report cited above outlines that

The physical and social character of these neighbourhoods are seriously marred and threatened by the overgrown and littered vacant land which will probably exist in its current state for many years without intervention in the form of community action in concert with continued support for gardening and landscape programs on the part of

17 Summary and Description of the Emerald City Project. . BUG Archives Series XIII: Revival Gardens; Collection number 43; Box Number 9.

18 Community Garden Programs: Getting Organized. BUG Archives Series XIII: Revival Gardens; Collection number 43; Box Number 9.

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the City.19

The birth story of community gardening in Boston from the perspective of community gardeners (one that, you will see, is quite different from that of the municipality) demonstrates the importance of political resistance in the history of garden development for the community. This story suggests that the initiation of the Revival Program was a municipal response to the political activism that arose when the city began razing a large area of the city between the North End and Lower Roxbury to build a segment of Interstate 95. This event became a political catalyst for the community gardening movement in the city when a group formed to protest the project after

the City cleared an eight-mile strip of land of nearly 700 homes and 300 businesses from the North End all the way to Lower Roxbury. A large portion of the homes and businesses demolished were in poor and minority neighbourhoods (French, 2008: 72-73).

As a result of this destruction, protest groups formed and eventually stopped the building of the highway, and convinced the city to rebuild a portion of the subway underground that had been dismantled to make way for the highway. As a part of the political response to these events, a group of citizens and politicians got together and drafted the Massachusetts Gardening and Farming Act of 1974, which gave individuals and groups the right to cultivate vacant state- owned land for free until a higher and better use had been determined for the land; this would effectively allow the community to utilize the swaths of land now lying fallow. Although this legislation did not impact the use of city-owned land for gardening and other growing activities, French (2008) suggests that it did open the door for community gardens to be created in the city, and that it influenced Mayor Kevin White, to “allocate Federal block grant funds towards the construction of ‘Revival Gardens’ on these [i.e. State] and other vacant lands” (73). Some of the earliest gardens founded in Boston during this period were in fact on state lands in the South End and along the Southwest Corridor, some of which had been razed in the original I95 expansion project.

19 Summary and Description of the Emerald City Project. . BUG Archives Series XIII: Revival Gardens; Collection number 43; Box Number 9.

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While the place of citizens in the growth of gardens in Boston had a very particular flavor for the community and for garden advocates, the role of the citizen as the central mover and shaker in the development of gardens was similarly expressed in the municipal narrative of gardens. For their part, the municipality clearly saw the Revival program as a means to return vacant land to private and productive use, which required the participation of citizens who wanted to use the land. As I’ll discuss in the next section in more depth, through Revival the City had designed a system of vacant lot reuse that could bring a variety of types of vacant lots – whether publicly- owned or with complex title issues, small or large, developable or not – back into productive use. Indeed, in a memo by city officials appraising the first year of the Revival program, for instance, it is clearly noted that “the whole philosophy behind Revival is to return publicly held property to private ownership and to the tax rolls.”20⁠ Similarly, a program report from 1976 explains that “the purpose of the open space management concept is to use existing open spaces to improve the neighborhood and to encourage community maintenance of those spaces.”⁠21 Such “community maintenance” of open spaces, of course, necessitated the participation of citizens in the process, whether they desired to purchase an abutting vacant lot or to utilize a larger plot for gardening as part of a group.

The importance of the community in the revitalization of the inner city via gardens influenced the administration to attempt to market participation in the Revival program to the residents of the city who would take the land off their hands, and back onto the tax rolls and into “productive” use. For instance, the city actively marketed participation in ownership and gardening programs to the public in pamphlets made available at local community hubs. The pamphlet, using somewhat similar language to that of earlier victory gardening programs during the wars, demands to readers, “Don’t just stand there. Grow something!” The pamphlet also makes the work of building a community garden sound straightforward and easy, outlining the various steps involved, and suggesting that any group desiring the use of a vacant lot for gardening could “call on Revival to handle the details of preparation [of the site]”:

20 City Memo, Victory Garden Revival Project, Box 3/I/074.

21 Priorities/Programs for 1976 Community Development, Mayor’s Office of Community Development to the Community Development Advisory Committee, Fall 1975. Victory Garden Revival Project, Box 3/I/082.

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There is no charge for Revival’s work. They’ll clear away any debris. Excavate, grade and topsoil the area. Provide water, fencing and advice of how best to plant and reap your bounty. Revival will also arrange with Boston’s Real Property Department for the permits you need, at the outset of each successive year.22

While the pamphlet does make clear that the city only intended gardens to be permitted on a yearly basis, and only when the responsible parties would be “willing to keep up their efforts throughout the year,” the fact that the city was attempting to make gardening sound attractive and easy is clear. As I’ll show, however, getting access to land for gardening was rarely this easy, and since the administration had their own goals for the land in the long run that did not prioritize garden development, the participation of community groups in the short- and especially long-term use of vacant land was limited significantly. In this sense, the municipality leveraged the desire of the community for gardens to meet their own ends of land development in an era of limited municipal funding. As Sara Woodson explained to me about garden development during our interview, “the city would be happy if you cleaned up the lot for them,” demonstrating the overlapping narratives of community participation on the part of the city and of the community (Interview with Sara Woodson, 2014).

5 Diverging Narratives

While there were important similarities between the narratives of gardens-as-development and as -empowerment, their ideological underpinnings were quite divergent. This section of the chapter will delve into these diverging narratives of gardens: that of the City, which emphasizes the role of gardens as tools of land development, and that of the community, which views gardens as political tools of neighbourhood empowerment.

5.1 Gardens-as-Development: Revival as a Municipal Tool for Developing Vacant Land in the Inner City

22 Revival Victory Garden program pamphlet, Victory Garden Revival Project, Box 3/I/074.

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5.1.1 CDBG-Funded Revitalization of Vacant Land in Boston

Despite the fact that municipal narratives of gardens overlap with those of the community in significant ways, the City ultimately saw gardens neither as empowering to the community, nor as mere interim uses of land holding space until higher and better developments came along, both common characterizations of gardens in the scholarly literature and amongst stakeholders. Rather, archival municipal documents demonstrate that the City of Boston saw gardens primarily as tools for the rehabilitation and redevelopment of vacant inner city land on the federal dime and with the willing participation of residents.

The first clue that land development rather than gardens was the primary goal of the municipality is that Revival was just one of several programs funded through CDBGs that reflect the concerted focus of the City on the existence and amelioration of the problem of vacant land. The first of these programs was a survey designed to locate and inventory the vacant land in the city. In 1977, city records show that the city utilized CDBG funds for a CETA-Title 6 Employee training program23 to hire 17 workers for a yearlong contract to work on a Vacant Lot Monitoring and Improvement program. The program was administrated by the Mayor’s Office of Public Service, and was focused on several areas of the inner city in Boston, specifically Fields Corner, Franklin Field, Roxbury, and Uphams Corner. The objectives of the program were to survey the neighbourhoods in order to identify vacant lots, the condition they were in, their owners, and the “status of activities relative to the lot.” The project was also designed

to sensitize residents of the neighbourhood to the need to keep lots clean and report violations such as contractors dumping materials; to assist community groups in organizing activities to improve the condition of vacant lots in the area; [and] to develop a system for tracking the situation of each lot as a check to departmental activity and to improve accountability of owners of lots, both public and private.24

23 CETA is the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act and was a federal law in the United States passed by Nixon administration in 1973 to train and place public service workers in jobs. Jobs were provided for periods of 1 or 2 years in non-for-profit organizations or public service agencies.

24 Victory Garden Revival Project, Box 3/I/075.

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Figure 4.4 An anti-dumping campaign on a vacant lot in Boston. Photo courtesy of Julie Stone.

It is not clear from the documentation whether or not this program was successfully carried out, but by the next year, in 1978, another city proposal on behalf of the Mayor suggested that a survey should be conducted of the vacant buildings and lots in the city, and that

It is important that the City have this information, especially over the next few years because it is a key indicator of a neighborhoods [sic] confidence and strength.25

The fact that another survey was proposed just a year later suggests that the original vacancy survey may have been discussed but not immediately completed.

The second proposal for a survey, like the first one, outlines the neighbourhoods of concern – in this case Roxbury, Dorchester, Jamaica Plain, South Boston, Mattapan and Franklin Field – reflecting the role of vacant land in revitalization programs and in constructing particular areas of the city as “problematic.” The geographical focus of these programs can be seen as a means not only to address the problematic landscapes of racialized and low-income neighbourhoods, but to

25 Victory Garden Revival Project, Box 3/I/082.

106 initiate their identification and justification as problematic in the first place. This logic reflects the criticisms launched at CDBGs reviewed in Chapter 3 – that focusing on particular racially segregated neighbourhoods can reinforce the narratives of racialized populations as problematic and needing interventions, deepening rather than challenging the racialized impacts of spatial and governance logics. The preeminence of a vacancy survey, and the idea that vacant land is a measure of a neighbourhood’s “confidence and strength,” articulates vacant land as an actually existing and problematic phenomenon even as it is constructed by the very governance structures meant to address it.

This vacant land survey is integrally connected to the second CDBG-funded program focused on ameliorating vacant land in Boston, an “open space management system.” The same city document introducing and discussing the vacant land survey indicates that these same neighbourhoods that were the focus for the survey should also be the site of a “clearance and maintenance program…that would clear and clean vacant land in areas of the City where it is an issue.” This demolition program would have been utilized to tear down homes that had been abandoned, mostly as a result of tax foreclosure and arson. The fact that federal monies would have been utilized to create vacant land as well as to manage it is notable, as it highlights the role of the state in constructing the conditions necessary to support future state interventions into the urban land market.

There is evidence that the demolition program was utilized in concert with both the vacant land survey and the Revival program to bring land back onto the market and into private ownership. In various years, more or less CDBG funding was requested for Revival or for the demolition program, depending on what the city identified as the central need at that time. There is evidence, for instance, that after the city recognized some of the challenges that faced the Revival program and that contested its ability to address the issues of vacancy on the scale the city had envisioned, which will be discussed later in the chapter, the city focused on the demolition of abandoned structures in later years of their CDBG funding applications. In FY 1978 (CDBG Year III), for instance, the city requested 2 million dollars in federal funds for

107 boarding and demolishing abandoned houses,26 considerably more money than was ever requested for the Revival Program alone.

5.1.2 The REVIVAL Program: Revitalizing Vacant Lots in Boston

Contextualizing Revival alongside the vacancy survey and demolition program demonstrates the City’s focus on ameliorating vacancy in particular areas of the city, and the various methods and tools that the City had at its disposal for addressing vacancy at that time. The Revival Program, an acronym that stands for “Revitalizing Vacant Lots,” was the most significant program in the city of Boston during this period for addressing vacant land. The program was begun in 1975 and financed capital expenditures via federal CDBG funds to “upgrade” publicly-owned vacant lots with the help of private businesses to fulfill construction contracts, and community members for much of the other work of garden development. Indeed, gardens in Boston during this time represented a real public-private partnership for the redevelopment of wasted inner city land.

The initial application for CDBG funds in Boston highlights the centrality of the redevelopment of urban vacant land for garnering federal grants for the program. The City’s application for Year I CDBG funds for the Revival program in the total amount of $532,000 describes the project as “an effort to upgrade vacant land for public utilization primarily for gardening,” and indicates that the objectives of the project as it aligns with the Act of 1974 is twofold: first, the program would contribute to the “elimination of slums and blight [and the] prevention of deterioration of property and facilities of importance to the welfare of the Community, principally person [sic] of low and moderate income”; and “more rational utilization of land.”27 These objectives reveal that, like most revitalization programs, Revival reflected and extended the logics of urban renewal rather than challenging them, as highlighted in Chapter 3.

Revival had three programs that created several possible uses for city-owned vacant lots: an abutter lots program to encourage private ownership of small lots abutting homeowners’ properties; a permit gardens program that enabled individuals and community groups to use lots less than 5000 square feet on an annual basis for gardening; and the Revival Victory gardens

26 Victory Garden Revival Project, Box 3/I/082.

27 Application for CDBG Year 1, Victory Garden Revival Project, Box 3/I/074.

108 program that allowed community groups to apply on an annual basis to use plots of land larger than 5000 square feet to create community gardens. These three programs had important differences that I will overview shortly, and that increased the ease of use and reuse of a wide variety of vacant lands. Taken together, the three aspects of the Revival program gave the City considerably greater tools to address vacant land than they had before its inception.

Figure 4.5 An early community garden in East Boston. Photo courtesy of Julie Stone.

In total, the program financed the creation of 64 community gardens in Boston from the mid- 1970s through the early 1980s via investments in capital infrastructure such as “water systems, chain link fencing, railroad ties, and soil to create raised beds in new community gardens” (Dowty, 2005: 2). Including the ownership program, Revival improved 208 vacant lots in Boston, the bulk of which were located in the majority black districts of Dorchester and Roxbury.28 The remainder of the lots were scattered across Mattapan, Jamaica Plain, West Roxbury, Charlestown, South Boston, and East Boston; the lots located in urban renewal districts were usually surplus land taken by the BRA during urban renewal. The municipality did not

28 Program Appraisal Report, Revitalization of Vacant Land, City of Boston. Prepared by C-E Maguire, Inc., December 29, 1978. Victory Garden Revival Project, Box 3/I/082.

109 finance the program, but several agencies were involved in its organization and administration: the Public Facilities Department, which was responsible for detailing and fulfilling the contracts for work on Revival plots; the Real Property Department, which owned the majority of the City’s vacant land; and the Mayor’s Office of Community Development, which administrated the program.29 The requirements for the Revival Program coincided with the geographical and demographic requirements of federal CDBGs: the majority of the population (51%) in the area of the project had to be of low or moderate income, and project sites were required to be owned either by the city or by a non-profit entity. Funding for improvements of individual sites varied considerably, with ownership lots garnering about $1,300 to $1,500 in funds, while garden sites were improved for anywhere between $3,000 on the low end to upwards of $35,000, depending on location, size and improvement needed.30

5.1.3 Not all Vacant Lots are Created Equal: Revival as a Comprehensive System for Redeveloping Vacant Land

As discussed in the previous section, the administration clearly believed that vacancy was a problem for the city and that the Revival program was an important means to return the land to productive use. While city bureaucrats sometimes talked about the Revival program as one overarching initiative to address the problem of vacancy, again highlighting the idea of the program as a means not for garden growth but for the amelioration of vacant land, there were important distinctions between the three Revival programs. The differences between how vacant land was developed and administered within each of these programs reveals a lot about how the city imagined the Revival project and its usefulness for developing vacant land.

Taken together, the three aspects of Revival presented a comprehensive system designed to effectively advance the use and reuse of vacant lots of varying types that was well adapted to the complexities of a large metropolitan centre. The Revival program enabled the immediate and

29 The Real Property Department and the Public Facilities Department eventually combined to create the Department of Neighborhood Development.

30 Victory Garden Revival Project, Box 3/I/074. There is evidence that gardens in areas of the city that were at that time economically more viable had greater financial investments than others. For instance, the East Berkeley garden in South Boston received one of the largest investments of any garden in the city at $35,000, while most garden projects in Jamaica Plain, Dorchester, and Roxbury were likely to receive closer to $3,000. (The East Berkeley Garden is now valued at over $3,000,000.)

110 long-term use of vacant land and the amelioration of the problems associated with vacant lots, whether the vacant lots were small or large, buildable or not, or subject to various complex title issues. A report produced by the Mayor’s Office of Community Development in 1976 about the Revival Program demonstrates that the City clearly saw the Revival program as a means to utilize vacant lots in the city that had not been created equally and did not have the same potential for future development. The report states

Because of our major demolition program, we now have a variety of lots – of differing sizes and locations. We recognize that not all lots will be available for future construction and that all must be treated differently if we are to enhance the neighborhood. Although the City of Boston has demolished the buildings, foreclosure proceedings on most of its property has not been initiated. This limits the outright sale of lots to abutters (where they exist) and suggests that interim uses for the land are needed.31

I have plotted the three Revival programs across several axes of comparison in a chart on the following page (Table 4.1) that highlights their disparities in addressing different kinds of vacant land.

The first of the three of these programs was the gardens permit program. Permit gardens were effectively a relic of the old ad hoc system that existed for community garden development prior to the Revival program. As noted, gardens were developed in Boston, as in most American cities, prior to revitalization and the Revival lots program, but this process was made more organized and standardized under Revival. Under the permit program prior to Revival, the city decided on a case-by-case basis if and how a lot could be used, and did not offer much financial or other support for the development of the lot for gardening or other community activities. There also weren’t many rules around how large the lot could be in order to be gardened, or whether the user could be an individual or a community group. Most notably, the permitting process was one in which, rather than granting yearly permits as under Revival, a one-time permission would be granted with the understanding that it could be revoked at any time with a month’s notice. Gardens prior to Revival would have existed for many years without the necessity of renewing

31 Priorities/Programs for 1976 Community Development, Mayor’s Office of Community Development to the Community Development Advisory Committee, Fall 1975. Victory Garden Revival Project, Box 3/I/082.

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Table 4.1 Comparison of the Three Revival Programs

ABUTTER LOTS/ GARDEN PERMIT REVIVAL VICTORY OWNERSHIP PROGRAM PROGRAM GARDENS PROGRAM

APPLICANT Individual Individual or community Community

LAND Application to city, sale at auction Application to city, permission Petition city for use of lot, ACCESS/ADMIN after identifying purchaser denied or granted permission denied or granted PROCESS

LAND TENURE Permanent ownership Unlimited permit with notice Annual permit with notice upon upon revocation revocation

DEVELOPMENT Land without future development Land with or without future Land with future development STATUS potential development potential, variable potential depending on lot

TITLE STATUS Lots with clear title, owned by Land with or without clear title Land with or without clear title City (complex title issues) (complex title issues)

COST TO USER Lots appraised at $100 to $400 Lots not appraised; $0 Lots not appraised; $0

COST TO THE $1,500 Before Revival: $0 (no Range from $3000 to $35,000, CITY investment made by City) more for permanent infrastructure (Up to $400,000 total cost) No evidence of development after Revival

BENEFIT One person benefits; private Community or private benefits, Community benefits (PRIVATE OR (1:$1,500) depending on who builds garden (Approximately 1:$300 under COMMUNITY) Revival costs)

LOT SIZE Up to 5000 square feet No limits for size 5000 square feet plus

LOT LOCATION Abutters only Abutters or local community Local community location location

NUMBER OF 150 At least 14, the number brought 64 (which I believe includes permit LOTS IMPROVED under Revival gardens)

112 the permit yearly, but also without any kind of land tenure protection offered on the part of the administration. Fourteen of these ad hoc gardens were brought under the auspices of the Revival Program at the start of the program, and were given priority for upgrades using Revival funds. However, I found no evidence that the municipality continued to create new permit gardens under Revival in this same ad hoc way.

The abutter lots program enabled individuals to purchase city-owned vacant lots that abutted their property cheaply (usually between $100 and $400) from the city at land auctions. The program would ensure that the lots were brought up to minimum standards – cleared of debris, graded, and provided with top soil, etc. – “to provide incentives for persons to purchase vacant lots from the City.”32 The private ownership aspect of the abutter lots program is one of the primary factors that clearly differentiates it from the permit garden or Victory Garden program. The lots had sometimes been subject to CDBG-funded demolition to remove abandoned structures, and had completed the process to become owned by the municipality, generally through tax foreclosure. Since these lots were owned outright by the municipality and did not have any complex title issues like liens, their title could be transferred relatively easily to private property owners. The abutter lots program was thus, at least in theory, an efficient means to bring isolated and recently demolished properties owned by the City quickly back onto the market and into private and productive ownership.33 The other important distinction of the abutter lots program is that only lots that were 5000 square feet or less and that had been identified as having a low likelihood of future development were eligible, which ensured their low valuation and financial accessibility for a wide demographic of city residents.

On the surface, zoning, lot size, and location were the central factors that accounted for the appraisal of vacant lots as undevelopable. Zoning setbacks, for instance, could mean that building a structure on a small lot apart from a small private garage would be a challenge and

32 Revival Program Information, December 1, 1975, Victory Garden Revival Project, Box 3/I/082.

33 City Memo, subject: Revival Production in Uphams Corner. IMG3091. Victory Garden Revival Project, Box 3/I/082.

113 thus reduce the price of the lot.34 This issue is reflected in a property appraiser’s report of a vacant lot in Dorchester for the Revival program in 1975, suggesting that

for various reasons, both economic and zoning, this lot will never be built upon again, except possibly for a private garage.35

A similar appraisal of a lot in the same area bases the value of the lot on

the size, shape, location, topography, and zoning of the subject properties. I also considered, to the extent available, recent sales of other vacant lots in the different locations involved here.36

There was also, however, more general anxiety about “the marketability of the City’s existing inventory” that went beyond lot size and zoning. Partially this was because as parcels were acquired by the City to be sold, abutting properties had often been abandoned. While large areas of contiguous vacant lots that were in the tax foreclosure process would often be held back by the City for future and more robust economic development, areas of concentrated vacancy could also make individual lots harder to sell. Appraisers working for the City thus assisted in constructing values for this land that was based on the specific physical and locational context of the lot and that seemed by all intents and purposes measurable, but which was also undeniably influenced by constructed ideas of value combined with the desire of the municipality to move the land back into private hands.

Indeed, there were an array of physical and economic characteristics that were accounted for to produce the rock bottom valuation of vacant lots in low-income neighbourhoods at prices between $100 and $400, and their inclusion in the abutter lots program. These appraisals also highlight, however, the extent to which property values are constructed rather than objective, and based on physical characteristics of spaces that seem measurable and objective, but which are highly dependent on ideologies differentially tied to those spaces. Past valuations of properties thereby exacerbate negative future valuations, and ensure that economic and social effects of particular areas continue into the future. These appraisals also demonstrate that markets are not

34 Property appraisers letter, 1975a; Victory Garden Revival Project, Box 3/I/082.

35 Property appraisers letter, 1975a; Victory Garden Revival Project, Box 3/I/082.

36 Property appraisers letter, 1975b; Victory Garden Revival Project, Box 3/I/082.

114 neutral and are actually social artifacts that are bound up with and reflect the broader culture of the society in which they are embedded (Logan and Molotch, 1987).

The Revival Victory Gardens Program was created under Revival to join the permit program, and made City-owned lots larger than 5000 square feet “available to community groups for use as community gardens”.37 Victory Gardens were subject to more intensive improvements and thus required more investment of CDBG grant funds than either ownership or permit gardens. These lots would have been well graded and fairly open, and as a consequence were valuable for other higher and better developments. The Victory Gardens Program thus offered annual permits for the use of the land for gardening rather than outright sale as under the abutter lots program, ensuring that the city retained future control over the land. Although gardens cost the city more of their revitalization funds to improve the lots, gardens were also a comparatively smaller commitment than the abutter lots program, which transferred title of the land to private property owners.

The ownership program was initially emphasized over Victory gardens because it would enable the auctioning of lots to individual owners at a nominal fee, and would expend a limited amount of CDBG funds for capital upgrades to the land; the preliminary goals for Revival were set at 600 ownership lots and only 15 Victory gardens.38 Gardens, on the other hand, meant a longer and more engaged process for development.39 The City also predicted that the ownership program would be popular amongst residents, while the appeal of the Victory gardens program was thought to be questionable at best. However, in the first six months of the program, there had already been 34 Victory gardens created.40 Over the course of the program there was a total of 64 rather than 14 Revival gardens created or upgraded, a testament to the popularity of the program and the fact that the program tapped the political spirit of community gardens. On the other hand, only about 150 ownership lots were upgraded, considerably less than the original goal of 600 lots. This was partially a result of the many challenges with the program, the topic of the next section of the chapter.

37 City Memo on Victory Gardens, Victory Garden Revival Project, Box 3/I/082.

38 Memo Re: Victory Garden/Revival, 1975. Victory Garden Revival Project, Box 3/I/082.

39 Revival Program: Status Report/Planning Proposals, 1975. Victory Garden Revival Project, 3/I/082.

40 Ibid.

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The emphasis on the ownership program did not mean that there was not some ambivalence within the administration to the program, at least at first. The potential that the City would not retain control over potentially buildable land in the future seems to be one of the reasons that, as an early memo written by city officials appraising the first year of Revival, “when Revival was launched there was some resistance to the notion of the city actively selling off its inventory of vacant lots.”41 The fact that the administration would retain control over lots used for gardens seems to have been leveraged to gain municipal support for the Victory Gardens program. A letter written by a representative of the Public Facilities Department in late 1975 seems to seek to assure City agents about the positive aspects of constructing gardens in comparison with the ownership program:

The Victory Garden program should not be viewed by Real Property as an obstacle to their on-going sales program. Rather, it should be viewed as an extension of their long-standing Garden Permit program with the added advantage of having federal funds to pay for physical improvements to City land, thereby adding to its value. It should be remembered that the City retains all rights of ownership under the Victory Garden program and thus can reallocate the use of this land at any future date.42

Although the ownership program was initially favoured over the development of gardens, the administration came to view the Victory Gardens program as more rewarding than the ownership program.43 There were several reasons for this that highlight the extent to which the City viewed gardens primarily as tools for development and as investments into the future use of the land. First, as highlighted in the quote above, gardens meant retaining control over the future use of the land that was not possible with outright sale so that the land could eventually be put to higher and better use. Second, the municipality calculated that there was a higher cost/benefit ratio for the gardens than for the ownership program. Although gardens required a larger investment than ownership lots, an ownership lot that cost $1,500 would benefit only one person while a garden

41 City Memo, Victory Garden Revival Project, Box 3/I/075.

42 Memo by Susan Child of PFD, Re: Victory Garden/Revival, November 21, 1975. Victory Garden Revival Project, Box 3/I/082.

43 City memo, Victory Garden Revival Project, Box 3/I/082.

116 would benefit more people and thus equaled a lower estimated per person investment of about $300 per person.44 Third, as highlighted in the quote above, the City saw gardens as a means to improve city-owned land on the federal dime and thus to increase the value of the land for future development. Indeed, the City chose to provide more financial aid via CDBG grants to gardens in more economically viable neighbourhoods, likely understanding that they would reap a greater future reward on that investment. For instance, the East Berkeley garden in South Boston received one of the largest investments of any garden in the city at $35,000, while most garden projects in Jamaica Plain, Dorchester, and Roxbury were likely to receive closer to $3,000.45 A city memo indicating that CDBG funds should be used to increase administrative support for the Revival program suggests that this is “mandatory if the City is to protect its investment, and to reap the maximum return from this investment in terms of neighborhood benefits.”46 The language of gardens as “investments” clearly demonstrates the economic thinking with which the city approached gardens.

Even more dramatic, perhaps, is the fact that the administration utilized federal funds not only as a way to increase the value of city-owned land via garden development, but also evidently to line the pockets of municipal bureaucrats and for other developments unrelated to CDBG purposes. A federal audit in 1982 of the Revival program found a minimum of $180,000 in unrecorded program income that came from “reimbursements from private owners for the cost of boarding and demolition funded by the CDBG program.”47 This means that the City was effectively “double-dipping” by receiving payments from both the federal government and property owners for boarding/demolishing structures. The audit found an additional two million dollars in payroll and administrative spending of federal monies but unrelated to CDBG programs.48 Further, the

44 Memo by Susan Child of PFD, Re: Victory Garden/Revival, November 21, 1975. Victory Garden Revival Project, Box 3/I/082.

45 The East Berkeley Garden is now valued at over $3,000,000, which will be discussed later in the chapter.

46 Memo by Susan Child of PFD, Re: Victory Garden/Revival, November 21, 1975. Victory Garden Revival Project, Box 3/I/082.

47 Draft of Report on Audit of the City of Boston Community Development Block Grant Program, Office of Inspector General, 1982. Kevin White Papers, Box 24.

48 Draft of Report on Audit of the City of Boston Community Development Block Grant Program, Office of Inspector General, 1982. Kevin White Papers, Box 24.

117 audit suggests that low and moderate income residents did not benefit from the program “to the degree intended by the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974.”49 The lack of focused support for low-income residents is likely a result of the fact that the city purposely strategized about how they could convert geographically focused funds into citywide grants for other projects that would not be earmarked to the same extent as CDBG funds. The audit blames the administrative and management weaknesses of the City, and suggests that remedial actions were warranted including potentially suspending future CDBG funding until evidence of changes in the management of the program were clear.

Although the City ultimately preferred the gardens program for these various reasons, they also made it comparatively easy to purchase abutter lots over providing land for gardens, demonstrating their desire for control over garden sites. The application process for ownership lots was very short (only one page) and did not request much information from the applicant other than their name, address, their status with regards to the lot (an abutter or neighbour), and a basic request for use of the lot, including the proposed use (garden, side yard, backyard, private off-street parking, or other). Once the application had been put forward, the lot was more or less guaranteed to be sold to the individual who had requested it as long it was owned outright by the City. Sale occurred after an applicant had been approved and had submitted a $25.00 deposit to guarantee their purchase. The auction would then take place at the lot being sold where the buyer would bring the difference of the cost in cash or certified cheque; an additional payment for recording and a payment in lieu of taxes would be required after the initial sale. The term “auction” is interesting, then, because it brings to mind an open sale with many competitors bidding on the same piece of land, but in fact these auctions were closed, with the purchaser having already been identified.

Community groups, on the other hand, had to petition the city for the use of a lot for a Victory Garden, and there was no guarantee that the City would acquiesce to that request. In contrast to the abutter lots program, community groups were often not interested in the use of a specific vacant lot, but rather wanted to build a garden in general. In such a case, they may contact the City – usually the Real Property Department – requesting the use of some land for gardening,

49 Draft Report on Audit of the City of Boston Community Development Block Grant Program, Office of the Inspector General, 1982. Kevin White Papers, Box 24.

118 and the city might then attempt to find them a suitable site. Other times, an organization might write in requesting the use of a particular site, and then make an argument for why the group deserved use of the site and why the site was suitable for gardening use; some of these letters are excerpted in the discussion on vacant land earlier in the chapter. The suitability of the site, the demand for a garden from the relevant neighbourhood, and whether the square footage of the site reflected the size of the group and its needs would influence whether the PFD would recommend use of the lot for use as a garden. At that point, the PFD would contract workers to do the labour needed to make the site garden-ready, and a permit would be issued to the group for a single year of use.50

When gardening groups were given a plot of land to use for gardening, they were told that the first year would be treated “as an experimental period” during which the Real Property Department would retain ownership of the lot. If after the first year the group was successfully utilizing the garden, the property would be transferred to the Parks and Recreation Department as a garden site, and an agreement would be made that the Parks Department would not “at any future time, withdraw the use of a Victory Garden lots from a group unless there is due evidence of abandonment and neglect on the site.”51 This wording may help to explain why many gardening groups referred to the potential of garnering long-term tenure when requesting the use of a site for the development of a garden. However, the historical record makes clear that the City had no real plans to extend long-term tenure to gardens, suggested by the wording of permits granted to Victory Gardens:

If the City of Boston determines that the garden has not been operated in conformance with Revival Victory Garden regulations or if, in the opinion of the City, a higher and better use for the land exists, permission for use shall be terminated and you will surrender all rights to said land forthwith and without further notice of any kind from the City.52

50 Letter from the Director of the Public Facilities Department to the Director of the Real Property Department, 1977; Victory Garden Revival Project, Box 3/I/074.

51 Memo from Susan Childs to Kevin Shea, June 19, 1975, Subject: Victory gardens/revival program. Victory Garden Revival Project, Box 3/I/082.

52 Revival Victory Garden permit, 1978. Victory Garden Revival Project, Box 3/I/074.

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The rhetoric of “higher and better use” was clearly at play when the city decided whether or not to extend the use of a vacant lot for gardening. Rather than guaranteeing long-term use of vacant lots for gardening, then, the City’s yearly permit process was designed to create an annual opportunity to take the land back for other developments.

The final distinction between the three Revival programs, and a significant one for highlighting the attitudes of the municipality to gardens as a tool for the redevelopment of vacant land, is that while the abutter lots program required that the municipality have clear title to the lot, gardens – either permit or Victory – did not. Through the construction of gardens, the City could render liens or other complex title uncompromising to the reuse of the land, while the eligibility of lots in the ownership program would require the clearance of tax bills, deeds, or liens on the property to transfer title.53 Complex title issues occurred when the city had not yet cleared title of the land through the tax foreclosure process, or in the case of an absentee owner that could not be located by the City.

The bureaucracy and inefficiency of the tax foreclosure process presented an immense challenge to the revitalization project in Boston, as well as to the effective operation of the ownership program. Indeed, a status report of the Revival program in 1976 suggests that city agents recognized that more efficient administration of the tax foreclosure process was “key to any future success in the management of vacant land by the City…[and] the first major change which I would suggest for Revival ’76.”54 In the first two years of the Revival program, lots that were upgraded were mostly those that had been owned by the City for many years, rather than those that had more recently become vacant and publicly owned. Issues with tax foreclosure may present another reason that the garden program came to be favoured by the municipality for vacant lot redevelopment.

53 IMG 3028, Victory Garden Revival Project, Box 3/I/082.

54 Memo from Kevin Shea to Victor Hagan, subject: Revival Program: Status Report/Planning Proposals, May 10, 1976. IMG 3093. Victory Garden Revival Project, Box 3/I/082.

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Beyond upgrading vacant lots, tax foreclosure issues were also understood as a challenge to the City accessing the value of the vacant land in the city that could not be sold on the open market until the title was cleared. In the same Revival status report produced in 1976, for instance, it is estimated that the City would lose out on an estimated $100,000 in income in 1976 alone if its vacant lots had not completed the tax foreclosure process. As a result, the report recommends that Revival funds be prioritized for completing the tax foreclosure process and thus acquiring the vacant land in the city for private sale. City bureaucrats understood that if they could utilize federal funds to clear title to vacant land in the city and then sell it through the Revival Program, even for minimal value, they could effectively convert federal funds into city income that could be spent without the earmarks, limitations, and administrative headaches of federal revitalization funds. This is another way in which the City understood gardens as means to invest federal funds into the broader development of Boston.

5.1.4 The Benefits and Challenges of Revival at the Scale of the City

Both the benefits and the challenges of the Revival program were understood by the municipality to exist at the scale of the city itself, highlighting gardens as means to broader urban development. The initial application for CDBG funds indicates that while the project was to be focused in areas where individuals of low and moderate income were located, the City envisioned that the general population of the city would benefit considerably from the program.55 This is partially because City agents thought about the problem of vacant land as a citywide issue that challenged the success of the city holistically. A quote presented earlier in the discussion of vacant land from a pamphlet designed by the City to educate residents about the program underlines this idea well, suggesting that Revival is

55 Citation for 1976 application for CDBG funds.

56 Victory gardens program pamphlet, Victory Garden Revival Project, Box 3/I/074.

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This quote suggests that the “citizens of Boston” rather than low income individuals are meant to benefit from the reuse of vacant land, which is said to be “scattered” across the city rather than concentrated in particular geographic locations. It effectively erases the reality of vacant land, even while the city’s CDBG applications and programming focused specifically on the problem of vacancy in low-income neighbourhoods. This attitude may partially explain the misuse of CDBG funds for city-wide programs and efforts.

Considering that the City understood the benefits of Revival to exist at the scale of the city, the fact that there existed various issues with the program that challenged its ability to provide citywide benefits produced a considerable amount of frustration for municipal agents. City agents saw these issues as endemic particularly to the ownership aspect of Revival, and they highlight the single lot scale of development of revitalization programs, and the inability of the City to advance a program to bring vacant land back into private and productive use at the scale of the city more broadly. After the first year of Revival, for instance, documents show that the municipality was troubled by the lack of private and productive redevelopment of vacant lots at the scale and quantity they had imagined for the program. An inter-agency memo written in 1976 evaluating the program to that point, by which time 15 Victory gardens and 90 ownership program sites had been completed, with an additional 11 ownership lots and 2 gardens in the works, states that

While this improvement represents a substantial amount of work the lack of sucess [sic] which we experienced in locating and selling a large number of lots for the ownership program meant that Revival did not have the effect which was originally proposed (i.e. 500 lots).57

Exemplifying the ineffectualness of the program, the memo suggests that in September 1976 in Uphams Corner there were a total of 1,030 lots identified as vacant, 488 of which were city- owned, and an additional 185 vacant buildings targeted for future demolition. Forty ownership lot application had been made, while only 12 lots had been sold to private owners through Revival. Reasons given in the memo for unsuccessful applications include: that the lot was not city-owned, pointing to the issues surrounding the tax foreclosure process; that the parcel was

57 Memo from Roy Bishop to Jim Baecker, Subject: Revival Production in Uphams Corner. IMG 3091. Victory Garden Revival Project, Box 3/I/082.

122 too large or the applicant was not an abutter, indicating the strictures of the new program; or that the application had not been received, suggesting issues with management and administration of the program.

Indeed, there were several administrative and management issues that evidence shows challenged the effectiveness of the program on the scale originally envisioned by the City. First, there were considerable issues with poor communication across the city agencies that worked together to administer and manage the Revival program, and which a City memo on the Revival program criticized for being “frequently at cross purposes” with each other.58 Second, the city agencies did not seemingly have an accurate inventory of the lots identified as vacant in the city, particularly those that were lost somewhere in the complex process of tax foreclosure, despite the regular discussion of completing a vacancy survey. Third, while the comprehensiveness of Revival was ideal for the City, it also meant that it was difficult to define and communicate one overarching procedure that could easily outline how community members and gardening groups might access different kinds of vacant lots in their neighbourhoods. This challenged the participation of private citizens who were key players in the success of the program and in revitalization schemes more generally, and who were relied upon by the municipality considerably for vacant lot rehabilitation.

In the first year of the program, the lack of success in getting vacant lots back into productive and private ownership had two important consequences. First, the barriers for redevelopment led to the City failing to utilize its entire CDBG allotment of $685,000 for the program. As a result, the federal government reduced funding for Revival in 1976 to only $519,000, an anxiety- producing result for municipal agents. Second, the initial challenges with Revival led to City bureaucrats discussing how to restructure the Revival program in order to scale up the redevelopment of vacant lots in the city. They imagined refocusing the program on the creation of an overarching citywide open space management system over and above individual vacant lot ownership and the Victory Gardens program. This would mean increasing the focus of the City on acquiring vacant lots currently in the foreclosure process by whatever means necessary, potentially circumventing the slow and bureaucratic tax foreclosure process. There were

58 Memo from Roy Bishop to Jim Baecker, Subject: Revival Production in Uphams Corner. IMG 3091. Victory Garden Revival Project, Box 3/I/082.

123 suggestions, for instance, that City agents could get the voluntary consent of the owner to give up their title to the property in return for the clearance of liens, or access title to the land by certain “mechanisms provided by law for the sale of properties of low value”, or potentially

by having the Building Department press the housing court to require a transfer of title by the City…on past and future sites, where the Building Department incurred the cost of demolitions.59

The memo also makes the recommendation to employ staff dedicated to the acquisition process.

Another important recommendation to scale up Revival was to restructure the program entirely in order to enable a greater role for the private market in the Revival Program. In this situation, rather than continuing to utilize federal grants to rehabilitate vacant lots for sale at closed auctions to abutters, municipal agents imagined that Revival could instead be used as a grant program that would repay improvements made by owners of lots purchased at open auction. This would enable the Revival program to do away with restricted auction of lots for sale by a particular owner and potentially empower more effective reuse of vacant lots, since they would be able to remove limits for lot sizes and other tight restrictions tied to closed auctions, and enable the free market a stronger role in determining use based on the free sale of land. The City imagined that a mere $750 seemed like a reasonable improvement rebate, considerably less than the $1,300 to $1,500 per lot that had been invested for capital upgrades under Revival, evidently in hopes of increasing the power of the program to rid the city of its vacancy problem. Lots would continue to be sold to abutters, however, in hopes of reducing the level of speculation by individuals from outside the immediate areas. Nevertheless, the City figured that these changes would remove many of the restrictions of the Revival program that had made its administration challenging and “allow the City to get a truer value for its property by going to a public auction procedure rather than the restricted Revival sale.” City bureaucrats also figured that since

59 City Memo, 1976; Victory Garden Revival Project, Box 3/I/082.

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This system would put more responsibility on the buyer to arrange for the sale, arrange for the rebate, and arrange for improvements…[the City would be] less open to complaints over program management.60

Considering that the Revival program continued in more or less the same way through the end of the 1970s and into the early 1980s, it seems that these recommendations for restructuring Revival were not taken up by the City. However, the federal audit of the program in 1982 that criticized the strategies the City used to garner funds for broader citywide projects seems to suggest they may have managed to come up with some creative means to scale up Revival for urban development purposes.

5.2 Gardens-as-Empowerment: Gardens as an Instrument to “Take Back the Land”

At the same time that the City was administering federal finances and organizing the development of vacant lots into gardens, however haphazardly, gardens had long existed in communities in much less bureaucratic and “top down” ways. With the boom period of garden development beginning in the late 1960s, the deterioration of inner city neighbourhoods in Boston and other American cities and related problem ideologies of vacancy influenced a significant gardening movement that often preceded programs like Revival. As discussed, the community was anxious about all of the vacant land and the deterioration of the inner city just as the municipality was, and while residents “clamored for some sort of municipal and federal response” to the conditions of the city (Lawson, 2005: 218-219), they also saw gardens as a way to take back the land and to empower their communities on their own terms, independent from state-funded programs. Sara Woodson from BUG explained this history of community gardens in Boston, suggesting that in the 1970s

there was a lot of violence and a lot of heartbreak. It was a really terrible time in our history around racial inequality and really looking at segregation and the racism that Boston is still struggling with somewhat. People…felt like we needed a better place to live where kids don’t have to be afraid and where the neighbourhoods can be cleaned up and we can grow things and flowers and food and that sort of thing (Interview with Sara Woodson, 2014).

Parallel to the “top down” story of community gardening development in Boston, then,

60 City Memo, 1976; Victory Garden Revival Project, Box 3/I/082.

125 community members, and eventually garden developers like BUG who worked with and on behalf of neighbourhood residents, similarly saw gardens as an ideal way to address the problems of the inner city, albeit in very different ways and for different reasons than the City.

Figure 4.6 A community garden in Mattapan, 1970s. Photo courtesy of Julie Stone.

The community gardening movement that originated from within the neighbourhoods was a child of the civil rights movement and “propelled by groups of neighbours who organize themselves to clear or secure their own land and to maintain their garden parcels” (Warner, 1987: xiii). The movement was about participation in city building and taking some sort of action to improve neighbourhood conditions, rather than waiting for state responses, many of which residents now realized were more likely to benefit downtown elites than the neighbourhoods. This period of community gardening began in Boston as in many other cities as a political movement based on taking back the land, and early forms of community gardening during this period were often guerrilla, a kind of “grow now, ask later” gardening that did not often ask for nor invite legitimation or permission on the part of the municipality. As Warner (1987) suggests, gardeners “find room on the wastes and fringes of cities – in vacant lots, along railroads and highways, in rough land unfit for commercial agriculture, and on the cast-offs at the outer edges of urban expansion” (4). For the community, of course, this ideology originated from a politics

126 of land based in a frustration with predictable downtown elites being prioritized in city building, and a long project of entrenched racism that had left many in the inner cities without land of their own for building, growing, and living.

The idea of gardens as bottom-up renewal is one of the central ideologies of gardens for community members and, later, for BUG. These ideologies, shared with the municipality and central to the neighbourhood scale of revitalization, have been discussed earlier in the chapter. The shared nature of this ideology is evident in the language of gardens as “renewal,” “revitalization,” and as “fighters of blight,” terms that are utilized by both the administration and the community, as well as by garden developers. What is telling about this language is that it lends credence to the idea that, despite the characterization of gardens as “antithetical to urban renewal,” city-led garden growth actually extended the logics of state-led urban renewal in important ways. Nevertheless, while the language of “renewal” or “revitalization” parallels the language of the City with regards to garden development, the themes underlying the idea of community-led renewal in the narrative of gardens-as-empowerment – garden development by residents for residents, community control of local land, and with benefits and beneficiaries at the scale of the community or neighbourhood – show it to be a very different narrative phenomenon and with distinct tensions with the City’s story of gardens.

5.2.1 Gardens by residents, for residents

Community gardens built by and for the community points to the significance of “the citizen” or neighbourhood resident in garden development, and rhetorical and narrative stories surrounding community gardens coming out of activist circles regularly emphasize the role of “the people” in creating and benefiting from gardens. For example, Charlotte Kahn, a long-time director of BUG, suggests that gardens represent “the possibility for a better city and a real centered community” and that they are “an expression of what is best in people” (quoted in Lawson, 2005: 214). Gardens are “propelled by neighbours” (Warner, 1987: xii), enable residents of the city to resist patterns of increasing deterioration and divestment, and are the first step towards producing an “activated citizenry” (Lawson, 2005: 219). Initially these excerpts seem to reflect again the shared narrative of “bottom up” development at the “local” scale in revitalization, but the underlying conception of gardens as productive of political power for communities is distinct to the narrative of gardens-as-empowerment and actually in tension with that of the municipality.

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The idea that gardens can generate an “activated citizenry” begins to hint at these distinctions in the politics of gardens for the community versus the City.

In a very basic sense, this narrative of gardens suggests that they bring members of the community together for a common cause. A 1977 article about community gardens in Boston published in the Allston-Brighton Community News, for instance, suggests that gardeners find “productiveness and social fulfillment” in gardening, which is “a kind of sharing together, a building of a sense of community and neighborhood and mutual help,” while “everyone inside the garden fence enjoys a ‘common ground’.”61 An earlier newspaper article published in 1975 in the Maine Audubon News also expresses the “togetherness” of community gardens well:

The victory garden concept of World War II has evolved into the community garden of the 1970s, a spreading popular phenomenon that’s bringing people together and giving city and apartment dwellers of all ages and walks of life a place to burrow their hands in the soil.62

The idea that gardens reflect the harmonious existence of residents from “all walks of life” is also articulated in a BUG report instructing community gardeners on how to organize a garden, which maintains:

The gardeners themselves come from all walks of life, ranging in age from nine to ninety, and in income from poverty level to upper middle class. There are singles, widowers, retirees, and entire families coming together at all hours of the day…the experience produces not only vegetables but friendships.63

An important aspect of the “bottom up” story of gardens is that gardens express a community- directed form of development that is primarily undertaken on behalf of and for the benefit of residents. Considering the political history of gardens as comprehended by the community and garden developers, this form of resident-led development was understood to be an important key to the success of community gardens. For instance, BUG expressed an explicit belief in a report

61 Warburg, Philip. 1977, July-August. “Urban Gardens: A Common Ground.” Allston-Brighton Community News. BUG Archives Series XIII: Revival Gardens; Collection number 43; Box Number 9.

62 “Community Gardening – an Overview” in Maine Audubon News, July/August 1975. BUG Archives Series XIII: Revival Gardens; Collection number 43; Box Number 9.

63 Community Garden Programs: Getting Organized. BUG Archives Series XIII: Revival Gardens; Collection number 43; Box Number 9.

128 on the greening of the city of Boston that “community residents and local groups prefer self-help projects planned and implemented with their direct participation.”64 In light of this understanding of gardening, the importance of organizations like BUG was not to take over garden development but rather

To encourage grassroots energy that is already there, first by facilitating community attempts to get gardens going, and second by providing a forum through which people can launch cooperative efforts to deal with problems that are common to all gardens.65

Indeed, a common thread of this narrative is the idea of community gardens as self-governing, reflecting the value placed on the neighbourhood resident as the centre of community garden development. BUG clearly expresses this value, suggesting

…we are committed to neighborhood revitalization and the reclamation of vacant and neglected urban land by and for neighborhood residents through the application of urban agriculture and related products. By urban agriculture we mean: self-governing community gardens in urban neighborhoods [and] the productive use of vacant land by neighborhood people…66

Directly tied to the significance placed on neighbourhood residents and self-government in community gardening is another important aspect of the story of gardens as community-led renewal and empowerment: the idea that the development of gardens by and for residents means increasing the community control of local vacant land. This was a significant aspect of the community empowerment narrative, particularly since by the time of the gardens boom in Boston the lack of land ownership and control in low income communities had come to be commonly recognized by activists and organizations like BUG as a key issue. A BUG report emphasizes the importance of local control of land and its place in bottom up community gardening in the city:

Low-income city residents have historically had little access to, or control over,

64 Summary and Description of the Emerald City Project. BUG Archives Series XIII: Revival Gardens; Collection number 43; Box Number 9.

65 McCord, Mary. Summer 1977. Community Gardens in Boston: Report on Interviews with Garden coordinators. BUG Archives Series XIII: Revival Gardens; Collection number 43; Box Number 9.

66 Summary and Description of the Emerald City Project. BUG Archives Series XIII: Revival Gardens; Collection number 43; Box Number 9.

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productive green areas within their own neighborhoods…The establishment of community gardens over the past few years, particularly in low-income neighborhoods, is the beginning of a movement towards community control, through increased neighborhood use, maintenance and ownership of such open space.67

The concept of increased land control for low-income residents expresses another important aspect of the bottom-up narrative of community gardens – that the benefits of gardens were thought to exist primarily on the neighbourhood scale, rather than at the scale of the city as a whole, as the City imagined gardens. Partially this was linked to the recognition that low income residents in particular neighbourhoods of the city were the primary beneficiaries of gardens, as expressed in the quote above, as well as in a BUG report on community gardens in Boston published in 1977 that states explicitly that “residents of urban neighborhoods stand to benefit the most from community gardening activities,”68 due primarily to the concentration of “rubble- strewn vacant lots” located there, “created by the bulldozing of burned or neglected buildings and/or urban redevelopment efforts.”69 Further, BUG documents show that the organization explicitly conceptualized gardening as an activity that

…of necessity can only occur on a relatively small scale and so reflects the ideas, energies, skills and aspirations of each neighborhood.

“In this sense,” the report continues, “this project satisfies both the federal and City of Boston guidelines for appropriate use of CDBG monies in FY 1980.”70 Indeed, like the City itself, BUG understood the importance of targeting its efforts within particular neighbourhoods in the city where low income and racialized populations in the city reside:

BUG proposes to address the problem of vacant and neglected lands in the four target neighbourhood [sic] of Dorchester, Jamaica Plain, Roxbury and the South End through a garden development program which will support neighbourhood

67 Luce, Tom. Land Trusts. BUG Archives Series XIII: Revival Gardens; Collection number 43; Box Number 9.

68 Community Garden Programs: Getting Organized. BUG Archives Series XIII: Revival Gardens; Collection number 43; Box Number 9.

69 Community Garden Programs: Getting Organized. BUG Archives Series XIII: Revival Gardens; Collection number 43; Box Number 9.

70 Summary and Description of the Emerald City Project. BUG Archives Series XIII: Revival Gardens; Collection number 43; Box Number 9.

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revitalization efforts in a variety of ways…71

5.2.2 Garden Benefits at the Scale of the Neighbourhood

It is clear from documentary accounts of gardens by residents in Boston in the first years of Revival that neighbourhood residents similarly understood garden benefits to exist at the local level. These accounts exist in letters that community members and gardening groups wrote to the City requesting the use of land for gardens. One of the tangible benefits of gardens at the neighbourhood level in these accounts is the ability for gardens to change the physical conditions of the neighbourhood through beautification, an aspect of community narratives of gardens that is unique to the way residents thought of gardens and contrasts with municipal accounts, which only rarely mention the role of gardens in neighbourhood beautification. A letter written in 1975 to the Real Property Commission from the Cooper Community Centre in Roxbury, for example, that requests the use of several plots of land for a community garden, suggests that

This project’s future goals would provide not only a recreational source for Lower Roxbury Seniors, but also a beautification process would occur, with children learning the full values of conservation and development of Urban Land [sic]. Also, we hope to stimulate initiative and leadership to area residents as volunteers, and provide a short intensive training program leading toward ecology, conservation and beautification of the Urban Inner City [sic].72

This quote highlights the narrative of physical beautification, as well as the significance of the residents of the neighbourhood – seniors and children alike – as the primary users and beneficiaries of gardens. Importantly, this particular quote also mentions the role of gardens in developing urban land and specifies the potential for gardens to beautify the “urban inner city,” themes that are common in many resident accounts as well, of course, as those of the City itself. On the other hand, the mention of ecology and conservation in this quote is rather unusual, and I found few other similar examples in community accounts. Rather, the potential of neighbourhood physical beautification that gardens present is linked in many accounts to the presence of unproductive and unattractive vacant land, and the role of gardens in “upgrading” land, an association that parallels the development narrative of the municipality. Indeed, as

71 Summary and Description of the Emerald City Project. BUG Archives Series XIII: Revival Gardens; Collection number 43; Box Number 9.

72 Victory Garden Revival Box, 3/I/074.

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Lawson (2005) points out, “gardening… transformed a detriment – a vacant lot – into a resource” (218). The connection between gardens and vacant land reflects the idea of gardens as “bottom up” renewal or revitalization, and highlights the role of the gardener-citizen in processes of land development under revitalization. Reflecting these themes, a letter written by the Lower Roxbury Community Corporation to the Real Property Commissioner in support of the garden to be built for use by the Cooper Community Centre in Roxbury suggests that the garden would

Turn[] an eyesore (vacant lots) into something beautiful…[We] strongly support[] this garden effort and ask[] for your support to make this property permanently available as a victory garden under the current revival [sic] program.73

Another letter, written in 1976 on behalf of the residents of Bullard Street in Dorchester, similarly demonstrates the negative perception of vacant land as a kind of visual blight, and the role of community gardens in upgrading vacancy:

The vacant lot on 32 Bullard Street is an eyesore and garbage collects there. Many families are interested in the Victory Garden Program so that we can upgrade the land and neighbourhood.74

This quote also highlights the role of neighbourhood residents as the garden developer and beneficiary, as is the link between upgrading the physical land and broader benefits at the neighbourhood scale.

The various themes evident within the narrative of gardens-as-empowerment – beautification, the danger of the vacant lot, local and resident beneficiaries, and the centrality of the scale of the neighbourhood – are evident in a letter written in 1977 by a representative of the Fort Hill Neighbourhood Association in Roxbury to the Public Facilities Department requesting assistance with developing a Victory garden at a particular site in the neighbourhood. The applicant writes,

[W]e think our neighborhood is unique in that we are a good cross-section of Black, White and Spanish adults, youths and senior citizens. A Victory garden would be an asset to our neighbourhood and would do a lot to improve our community. We would prefer to see a Victory garden with fence and water where members of our community could grow vegetables for their families rather than an

73 Victory Garden Revival Box, 3/I/074.

74 Victory Garden Revival Box, 3/I/074.

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eyesore covered with stolen and abandoned cars on these lots owned by the city.75

5.2.3 Gardens as Panacea

Understanding how community gardens were understood to benefit communities by residents, garden developers, activists and others suggests important aspects of the “bottom up” story told about gardens. To some extent, however, this story of community gardens also draws on a certain amount of romanticism floating around in the collective consciousness about the power of gardens to transform the ills of the inner city. The excerpts above from Hynes’ (1996) book are exemplary of this romanticism – the idea that inner city neighbourhoods could be “renewed” by “seeds, soil, and the sweat equity of inner-city people,” while its inhabitants would be nourished “body and soul.” Indeed, it is clear from material written about community gardening during this political era that activists and scholars could wax poetic about the transformative power of gardens nearly endlessly. In her book, Hynes (1996) continues with this kind of idealism related to gardens, describing her encounter with vacant inner city lots that had been turned into gardens:

…We saw lots that were once wastelands, and that are now oases of rose arbors, fruit trees, and vegetable and herb gardens. What moved many to tears was not only the profound transformation of blight to beauty…but the stories of those who were the instigators and the unrelenting pulse of each garden…” (viii).

An important part of this story is the transformative effect that gardens are said to have in inner city communities, as well as the communal, “togetherness” aspect of gardens that flows through these narratives. Many of the quotes discussed above express a rather romantic idea of gardens as uniting residents of various ethnic and class backgrounds, everyone from “welfare mothers, newcomers from the suburbs, [to] overseas immigrants” (Warner, 1987: 5) in harmonious existence. This narrative is partially a reflection of the basis of community gardening in civil rights politics and a growing recognition of the importance of coalition building in the development of a politics of equality in urban development. It must be noted, however, that this narrative also minimizes the social and economic differences that sometimes act as barriers to building coalitions across classes and ethnic groups. And indeed, the political history of Boston presented in accounts like Formisano’s (1991) study of school desegregation in the city

75 Victory Garden Revival Box, 3/I/074.

133 following the Brown v Board of Education decision in 1954 demonstrates the role that racial differentiation has played in challenging the political empowerment of the working and lower income classes. This historical reality challenges to some extent the ideological romanticism of gardens as able to bring groups together to toil harmoniously towards a common cause, and presents reasons to be at least skeptical. Of course, this fact does not minimize the significance of this narrative and the power that it has wielded in the historical development of gardens in Boston and in other American cities.

The romanticism of community gardens reflects Lawson’s (2004) research on the panacea-like quality of gardens to seemingly address a wide variety of social, political and economic crises, but with little evidence of gardens’ “soft” benefits supporting these beliefs. A quote taken from a BUG report on gardens perfectly demonstrates the vast quantity of social and economic challenges that community gardens are sometimes thought to address:

Urban gardening is a concept that reaches as far as the imagination can stretch. What seems at first glance a pleasant pastime is in fact an approach to neighborhood revitalization through job development, community organization, environmental management and urban design, improved nutrition and preventive health care, energy conservation, deployment of manageable technologies by and for community residents, community cohesion, recreation and income supplementation.76

Lawson suggests that this narrative of gardens can actually have problematic or negative impacts when the belief in the power of gardens relieves other forms of service provision by the state that might better address social or economic issues facing low income populations in the long run. As I suggest, these ideas about gardens as fixers for the problems of low-income communities have also historically helped to build consent for the construction of gardens ultimately treated by the municipality as tools for land development. In Chapter 5 I also outline how these ideas of community gardens have shone a positive light on commercial urban farming, an activity that, in its superficial similarities to community gardening, has managed to borrow its status as a cure-all for the problems of low-income and racialized communities.

76 Community Garden Programs: Getting Organized. BUG Archives Series XIII: Revival Gardens; Collection number 43; Box Number 9.

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6 Effects of the Coalescing and Diverging Narratives of Land and Gardens Development

There were three major effects of the overlaps and tensions between the narratives of gardens-as- empowerment and gardens-as-development that impacted the place of gardens in the urban landscape in Boston. First, there were considerable challenges with the development of gardens for the community, related specifically to the permanence of the gardens in the landscape. Second, in order to support the development of gardens in the city, organizations like BUG and, later, BNAF/BNAN became important players in the development of gardens. Third, the political promise of gardens for the community was ultimately challenged.

6.1 Challenges of Developing Gardens

The diverging logics between the City and the community meant that, despite the sometimes idyllic picture of the municipality and residents working cooperatively to build gardens on vacant land, communities struggled with developing gardens. The context that community gardeners found themselves in – one in which the City, despite supporting gardens on the surface, were concerned more broadly with vacant land redevelopment – meant that they struggled greatly with building gardens in their neighbourhoods, especially with establishing gardens as permanent features of the landscape. Scholars, activists and gardeners have long recognized the challenge of garnering long-term recognition of gardens, which are recognized as temporary and interim uses until “higher and better” uses come along (Drake and Lawson, 2013; Lawson, 2005). In Boston, this meant that gardening groups grappled primarily with challenges of land access, infrastructure, and tenure; they also faced the issue of top-down garden development, which had the potential of removing the “community” aspect of gardens and thus their attraction for residents. Indeed, the Revival Gardens Program was thought to be altogether too “top down” by many neighbourhood residents and BUG, an issue that similarly underscores the “community first” attitude of residents and gardener developers.

The first issue that community gardeners came up against was that of land access. Although Revival was meant to make access to land for gardens easier than it was prior to the program, the application process for vacant land for Revival gardens was neither clear nor easy, as discussed earlier in the chapter. Garden groups needed to petition the city for the use of land for gardens, drawing on the shared ideologies of vacant land as problematic and in need up “upgrading,” as

135 well as the promise of mostly independent caretaking of the land, in order to be permitted the use of the land for gardening. The fact that individuals applying to purchase abutting lots from the city – land that could not be used for “higher and better” uses in the way that garden lands could – did not have to leverage narratives of vacant land and the positive benefits of gardens is revealing of the municipality’s attitude towards gardens as impermanent and rehabilitative land developments.

Even when groups were given access to lots, the City was not favorable to granting community gardening groups long-term tenure on vacant land, and all gardens under Revival were given annual renewable permits. These permits came to be utilized by the municipality as annual opportunities to review the utilization of developable vacant land, and I came across several cases where permits were not renewed from one year to the next, not because the community had not cared for the lot properly, but because a developer had made the City an offer on the land for a – sometimes disputably – “higher and better” use. Take the example of a garden established in 1973 at the corner of Green and Elm in Jamaica Plain that had garnered about $7,000 of CDBG funds in 1976 to “install fencing, loam, and a water hydrant,” and thereby to bring the site into the Revival program.77 After three years operating as a Revival Garden, the Real Property Department unexpectedly signed a lease with the a local church, the Spanish Church of God, for the use of the garden as a parking lot for the sum of $1.00 per year. Apparently the Real Property Department had neglected to send out requests for permit renewals to the garden coordinators, and as a result the church was given use of the lot and the garden was paved over to make way for the parking lot (a very literal interpretation of the famous Joni Mitchell song), even despite the money that the city had earmarked for the development of the land into a garden. This was not at all a rare occurrence, either prior to or after the involvement of BUG as garden developer and advocate. As I will discuss shortly, however, BUG had a lot to say about this and other instances of garden destruction in the city, which occurred at a much faster rate as federal spending on municipalities decreased as the 1970s turned into the 80s.

Despite the destruction of Revival gardens or, less dramatically, the refusal of the City to grant long-term tenure or ownership to gardeners, Revival gardens were thought to garner more

77 Letter from BUG to Mayor White, November 28, 1979. BUG Archives Series XIII: Revival Gardens; Collection number 43; Box Number 9.

136 protection from the City than other gardens that were not protected. In archival documents, “Revival” is sometimes referred to as a kind status of gardens, suggesting the extent to which a particular garden was legitimated or supported by the municipality. While a report on the community gardens in Boston prepared in 1977 indicates that, on the whole, garden coordinators were not particularly concerned with the temporary status of gardens since

…the general feeling seems to be that there are plenty of vacant lots for the city to build on and that it would not be politic for anyone to take over a garden… the report also suggests that

…this probably makes sense for Revival gardens where the city has poured money in, but independent gardens are probably less secure.78

The idea of Revival gardens as relatively secure land uses may potentially have been a feature of the early years of the Revival program, when gardens were just being built and few had yet been returned to “higher and better” uses. It is doubtful that after many of the gardens were sold off in the early 80s that gardeners would have continued to believe that Revival gardens ensured any special treatment or status on the part of the municipality.

In addition to the issues of tenure and access, building infrastructure for the gardens through Revival was also regularly a challenge, and similarly expresses the issue of long-term tenure for the community. While the City saw gardens as tools of land rehabilitation and development, they provisioned limited resources for gardens and also supplied capital infrastructure that was unattractive and sometimes actually challenged the desire and ability for gardeners to use the sites. Early in the Revival program the City’s method for preparing vacant land for use as a garden was to install extremely basic infrastructure such as chain link fences, railroad ties or pressure-treated lumber to divide plots, and a rudimentary water system. The City would also have provided soil, although Sara Woodson explained to me that much of that soil was “fill” pulled from local construction sites and had issues with contamination (Interview with Sara Woodson, 2014). All of this infrastructure was relatively inexpensive, and not really meant for permanent developments, demonstrating the City’s understanding of the gardens as

78 McCord, Mary. Summer 1977. Community Gardens in Boston: Report on Interviews with Garden coordinators, p. 4. BUG Archives Series XIII: Revival Gardens; Collection number 43; Box Number 9.

137 impermanent. The gardeners themselves were also prohibited from designing and implementing more attractive and permanent infrastructure at the garden sites, as one of the regulations in the early years of the program for gardening groups using city-owned land was that “no permanent fixtures shall be installed on any garden plot except as authorized by the City of Boston.” As a result of these factors, the early Revival gardens did not look like permanent features of the landscape, and, as Cheryl Green explained to me, many of the gardens were “very scruffy pieces of land” that were often perceived to be an eyesore rather than an amenity by the local community who lived in proximity to them (Interview with Cheryl Green, 2014). (See Figure 4.5 on pg. 106 for a good example of the “scruffiness” of some gardens.)

To some extent, the various issues with the construction of the gardens was also a consequence of their ties with the CDBG program. It meant a host of rules about how the contracts for construction would be filled, and by whom, and extended the time to the completion of contracts considerably. While the city generally expected that the bidding and construction process could take several months, with extensions granted due to unforeseen issues or bad weather,79 the complex employment standards for CDBG grants and the priority given to untrained CETA workers to carry out CDBG-funded projects, meant that due to the “additional steps required by CDBG contracts, the normal length of time for executing a contract has been greatly increased.”80 The public bidding process required for building on publicly-owned land also meant that the construction of ownership lots and gardens was quite expensive due to high administrative costs and consulting engineer fees, as well as being quite time intensive, partially as a result of challenges communicating across agencies.81 Many of the contracts for gardens went both over time and over budget. But the type of materials utilized in the construction contracts, and the fact that the municipality clearly wanted to spread their CDBG monies around as much as possible to ensure the broadest development of land in the City also contributed to this state of affairs.

79 Victory Garden Revival Project, Box 3/I/082.

80 Memo from Kevin Shea to Vic Hagan, subject: Revival Program: Status Report/Planning Proposals, May 10, 1976. IMG 3093. Victory Garden Revival Project, Box 3/I/082.

81 Memo from Kevin Shea to Vic Hagan, subject: Revival Program: Status Report/Planning Proposals, May 10, 1976. IMG 3093. Victory Garden Revival Project, Box 3/I/082.

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Some of the Revival gardens that were constructed by the City, even if they were done so relatively well and with few barriers to development, were created with little input from the gardeners who would be using them, sometimes rendering them more or less unusable for community purposes. These gardens had often existed as ad hoc gardens prior to Revival, and under Revival these gardens were changed drastically in the vision of the municipality rather than that of the community itself. Indeed, gardens developed by the community – for and by residents – in the way envisioned by gardening groups were often preferred by residents in comparison to the “top down” construction of some of the Revival gardens. This in itself shows the extent to which the logics underlying municipal versus community construction of gardens can influence various aspects of gardens, including how gardens are designed, organized, and used (c.f. Jamison, 1985).

6.2 Creating a Role for Garden Advocates and Developers

The tension between the City’s desire to use gardens as tools for development and the community’s vision of gardens as sites of political empowerment gave garden organizations like BUG and later BNAF/N a significant and important role in the development of gardens in Boston, as discussed earlier in the chapter. To the extent that garden developers worked on behalf of the community to realize the existence of gardens in the neighbourhoods, they became an important go-between to aid community groups in navigating the complex and bureaucratic challenges of constructing gardens.

The importance of garden organizations like BUG was a product of their legitimacy as a trusted organization in the city – a legitimacy that they attempted to lend to the community gardens themselves – which was constructed over time and with considerable work on the part of members of BUG. Over time they developed an important voice at City Hall where they held gardener gatherings designed to “build community and advocate city-wide for community gardens” (Interview with Sara Woodson, 2014). As discussed earlier, an important part of BUG’s legitimacy and their role in the creation of community gardens in Boston was the fact that the organization was staffed primarily by white middle-class women, and that they were working on behalf of the communities of colour where the gardens were located. The legitimacy of the organization was also assisted politically by the fact that their Director for many years, Charlotte Kahn, was able to work as a team with the municipality rather than at cross-purposes. Sara

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Woodson explained to me that

Charlotte was really good at brokering the higher ups with the BRA, she definitely was able to make very convincing arguments with the Mayor and the department director. We could play subtle hardball. And we didn’t just go away. I think we had a lot of legitimacy (Interview with Sara Woodson, 2014).

While BUG clearly had a very different vision and goal for gardens in the city than did the municipality, gaining power and legitimacy to develop gardens in a way they saw fit resulted from the fact that they did not challenge the municipality on their garden policies too directly or extremely. “I’m trying to think of a time when we really locked horns [with the City] or when we really lost,” Sara told me. She continued,

I mean, we didn’t, we tried to be realistic. I think that was really important. We didn’t try to do anything so radical or in your face that we became, that we were seen as not a legitimate player. I mean, there must have been times when we were kind of frustrated for sure, but when I think about it, it was very effective (Interview with Sara Woodson, 2014).

This quote is extremely telling of the attitude that BUG had to garden development in the city during this period. On the one hand, BUG represented and worked on behalf of the communities who had suffered for decades under state-led renewal and other policies, and thus carried the torch of the politicization of gardens as opportunities to take back the land. On the other hand, BUG clearly recognized that in order to acquire tenure for gardens, and ultimately to protect them in some way from development, they also had to “play ball” with the City. This meant softening the political bent of the community’s message in order to be seen as a legitimate player. It was this realism, the fact that they did not attempt “anything so radical or in your face,” that helps to account for their ultimate success as developers and protectors of the gardens on behalf of the community. Of course, they were not always successful, and both Sara and Cheryl told me about several occasions when the advocacy of BUG could not protect even entrenched and popular gardens from destruction. But they were able to allay the impending bulldozers much more effectively byway of their legitimate advocacy on behalf of the community, influenced by their political knowledge and savvy at City Hall.

Importantly, what may have also contributed to the success of BUG in developing gardens was that the organization took on the language of gardens-as-development as they attempted to engage the state at both the municipal and the federal scale for financial and resource support.

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While BUG was clearly entrenched in the civil rights movement and inspired by the social justice aspects of gardens as spaces of empowerment, they also drew on and contributed to the shared narratives of vacancy as blight and the responsibilization of the community in the development of gardens, increasing the palatability of their messaging on the surface. In addition to the excerpts highlighted in the vacancy section above, BUG drew on the language of vacancy as a blight to apply for incorporation in 1976, suggesting that one of their corporate purposes would be

…to contribute to the reduction of deterioration and blight by encouraging gardening among residents of economically depressed areas; and to encourage economic development and unemployment opportunities of residents in economically depressed areas, for the benefit of all residents of the greater Boston area.82

By the early 1980s BUG was being funded by CDBG grants for their Model Gardens project, and they indicated that this funding would go towards the “widespread conversion of blighted land to food gardens by low-income residents.”83 Similarly, they suggested that an important aspect of the program would be to

…publicize the elements of the model gardens as a means of upgrading blighted urban environments, and encouraging backyard gardening, neighbourhood economic development, development of more community gardens, [and] neighbourhood beautification efforts…84

BUG also emphasized the role of the resident in the development of garden sites in the City, and a considerable number of the documents that they prepared directed gardeners to engage in independent development activities to ensure the place of gardens in their neighbourhoods. For instance, BUG suggested that residents should search their own neighbourhoods for vacant land and attempt to access the land for gardening. “In seeking space,” one BUG report prepared to instruct residents on how to organize community gardens suggests,

82 BUG Incorporation Application. 1976. BUG Archives Series XIII: Revival Gardens; Collection number 43; Box Number 9.

83 CDBG Year VI Attachment A, Scope of Services. BUG Archives Series XIII: Revival Gardens; Collection number 43; Box Number 9.

84 CDBG Year VI Attachment A, Scope of Services. BUG Archives Series XIII: Revival Gardens; Collection number 43; Box Number 9.

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consult local government agencies about the availability of public land…Other sources are private landowners or private organizations such as churches or conservation groups. A newspaper article asking for leaders may help, but probably the best way is to drive the different areas of town until likely places are spotted. Once spotted, stop and inquire about the ownership.85

Gardeners should also “take an active role in seeing that adequate repairs are made…around the garden,”86 “enlist the support or approval…of local public officials, municipal offices and governmental agencies depending on their degree of influence and potential involvement…”87 and could even access funds on their own for gardens:

Keep your eyes open for upcoming ‘neighborhood revitalization projects’ monies from the federal government by staying in touch with your local city planner.88

The engagement of community members was in service of “creat[ing] a self-sustaining network of gardens that won’t require future large-scale expenditures to continue into the future,” and “the wider goals of community economic development and self-reliance.”89 The language of economic development and the “upgrading of blighted urban environments” by low-income residents and with benefits for the whole city of Boston clearly reflects the shared narratives outlined above. This language also reflects the ideologies of gardens espoused by the municipality, as well as the funding conditions set out by federal revitalization grants, demonstrating a means to gain organizational legitimacy and support.

It was this legitimacy that eventually meant that BUG could assist in achieving the tenure and the permanent infrastructure that the community had trouble garnering on its own. These achievements resulted partially from the organization’s ability to leverage their legitimacy to raise funds for gardens on their own, away from the auspices of Revival or the municipality.

85 Organizing Neighborhood Gardens for your Community. BUG Archives Series XIII: Revival Gardens; Collection number 43; Box Number 9.

86 Luce, Tom. Land Trusts. BUG Archives Series XIII: Revival Gardens; Collection number 43; Box Number 9.

87 Community Garden Programs: Getting Organized. BUG Archives Series XIII: Revival Gardens; Collection number 43; Box Number 9.

88 Community Garden Programs: Getting Organized. BUG Archives Series XIII: Revival Gardens; Collection number 43; Box Number 9.

89 Goals and Purposes of Revival, April 1979. Series XIII: Revival Gardens; Collection 43; Box 9.

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Some of this funding came initially from their own independent application for CDBG funds from the federal government, which enabled them to build gardens with more permanent infrastructure. They also raised funds from private foundations and sponsors.

The achievement of the permanent tenure of many of the gardens in the Boston cityscape also resulted from the eventual partnership between BUG and BNAF/N that began in earnest in the early 1980s. By that time, the number of gardens created and improved had dwindled drastically from dozens in the early years of the project to only four in total for CDBG year IV (1978).90 As Cheryl Green explained to me, by the early 80s

the city decided that they didn’t want to run the program anymore and they were going to sell the land that the gardens were on. The way other land was being sold…for other kinds of developments (Interview with Cheryl Green, 2014).

When BUG received news that the Revival gardens were going to be auctioned off, they asked for BNAF/N’s help. By that point, the gardens were growing food successfully and could be considered “wild” enough that they fit within BNAF/N’s mission to protect urban wilds under their conservation land trust. BNAF/N’s role in the development of gardens in Boston, then, was not about the gardens but the protection of the lands on which the gardens were grown. The auction in question was held on May 23, 1983, and Boston Natural Areas Fund, Inc. purchased a total of forty-six parcels of city-owned land that made up sixteen gardens at a total cost of $21,211.00.91 These parcels are scattered across East Boston, Roxbury, Dorchester, and Jamaica Plain, with the vast majority located in Roxbury and Dorchester. This sum is relatively low, but it approximates the total federal monies that the City would have invested into the land to create the gardens in the first place (at approximately $1,500 per garden), meaning that through the sale the City would have successfully converted federal money into municipal funds via the development of gardens that could then be spent without limitations. These gardens are still held in BNAN/F’s land trust, now under the auspices of the national organization Trustees of Reservations. Over the years from this initial auction, BNAN/F collected numerous other garden lands under the protection of their land trust, some when several other community land trusts that

90 Housing and Community Development Issues Memo, Kevin White Papers, Box 70.

91 Deed 10654 079, Suffolk Registry of Deeds, online at http://www.suffolkdeeds.com. Accessed October 7, 2016.

143 had also worked to protect gardens, such as the South End Lower Roxbury Open Space (SELROS) Land Trust, eventually merged with BNAF to create BNAN.

Only once these gardens had been protected by BNAF/N’s land trust was the development of permanent infrastructure on the sites possible; they had been taken out from under the municipality and thus were no longer cogs in the machine of municipal land development. BUG and BNAF/N worked together to raise funds for the construction of permanent infrastructure for the now-protected gardens in the city, such as “more attractive fences, some kind of more solid surface paths, [and] buffers at the street edge” (Interview with Cheryl Green, 2014). Later, in the 1990s, both BUG and BNAN were able to access funding through the Department of Neighbourhood Development’s (DND) Grassroots program, which had replaced the Revival Program for garden development in Boston and provided federal grants for capital expenditures to upgrade existing gardens in the city.

6.3 Quieting Dissent and the Political Promise of Gardens

One of the most significant impacts of the coalescence and divergence of these narratives, and the way they played out in Boston’s urban landscape, was the reduction of the political promise of gardens and the quieting of the dissent that had been bubbling up in many neighbourhoods where gardens were developed in response to the events of the first half of the twentieth century. As discussed earlier in the chapter, there has long been a significant debate between scholars who suggest, on the one hand, that community gardens must be considered as radical political spaces (e.g. Crossan et al., 2016), and on the other, those arguing that gardens merely recapitulate neoliberal politics and the construction of neoliberal space (e.g. Ghose and Pettygrove, 2014). It is clear, however, that community members and garden developers believed the rhetoric of gardens as politically empowering for the racialized communities of Boston, and as holding the potential to “take back the land” that had been lost during urban renewal and other events.

However, the fact that BUG drew on and legitimized the municipal narrative of gardens-as- development in their search for greater recognition of the gardens, and the shared belief by stakeholders in the important role of community members in the Revival program, ultimately reduced the political promise of the gardens. Indeed, while the community itself perceived their participation in community gardening as empowering, from the point of view of the municipality

144 their participation easily replicated the responsibilization of organizations and citizens for state- provisioned goods and services characteristic of the shift to entrepreneurial neoliberal urbanism. By inviting community members to partake in the “remaking of urban space” (Brenner and Theodore, 2002), then, the municipality invited the construction of neoliberal subjectivity amongst them, a vital aspect of the neoliberal governance of populations (Miller and Rose, 1990). Indeed, Türken et al. (2016) suggest that neoliberal governmentality must be considered as a “conduct of conduct” that considers the human subject as “an autonomous, individualized, self-directing decision-making agent who becomes an entrepreneur of one self” (33). This claim parallels Rose’s (1999) archetype of neoliberal subjecthood homo economicus, the self that is focused primarily upon private economic success. The transformation of low income racialized residents into neoliberal subjects via their participation in Revival demonstrates what, following Foucault, Rose (1999) outlines as an enactment of the ‘will to govern’ “aimed at the conduct of the conduct of individuals, groups and populations” (5).

The invitation of the municipality for residents to assist in the “remaking of urban space” can also be seen as effectively reinscribing the community gardens within the bounds of the polis, thereby reducing their political impact (Rancière, 2001). Rancière’s conception of real politics as dissensus suggests that for the gardens to retain their status as politically empowering, they must continue to exist in some sense outside the boundaries of the polis. In this approximation, the original form of community gardens, the guerrilla gardens that characterized the “grow now, ask later” form of growing, could be considered to be truly political because they were not legitimized by the city-state. But once the City had provisioned a space for the growth of gardens on vacant lots via Revival, the potential for such activities to be political in the sense of disrupting or challenging the status quo was effectively erased. There is also evidence that the municipality created the Revival program at least partially as a kind of olive branch to the racialized low income residents of Boston who were dissatisfied and angry with their place in the city by the 1970s, which in itself may have had a role in quieting the dissent that had partially influenced the “take back the land” movement in the first place. Sara Woodson suggested to me that Revival was at least partially an attempt by the City to

soften the blow on…this whole issue around racism and the busing, in order to try and throw a little money at these neighbourhoods and try and clean them up (Interview with Sara Woodson, 2014).

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This fact illuminates an essential aspect of neoliberal governance which, rather than simple domination, means “to recognize capacity for action [of the dominated] and to adjust oneself to it…To govern humans is not to crush their capacity to act, but to acknowledge it and to utilize it for one’s own objectives” (Rose, 1999: 4).

7 Conclusion

In the 1990s, the CDBG-funded Grassroots program replaced the Revival program, but as the real estate boom hit Boston “securing land became more difficult…[and] the number of gardens initiated per year dropped precipitously” (French, 2008: 74). As a result, the Grassroots program put more emphasis on upgrading existing gardens in the City rather than constructing new ones, and provisioned funds directly to non-profit groups like BUG for capital expenditures on gardens. The Grassroots program requires that these non-profit organizations raise private or foundational funds at a rate of 25% for the 75% granted from the program. The larger funds allocated through Grassroots meant that organizations like BUG and BNAN could continue to operate for years to come. Nevertheless, BUG and other non-profit gardening organizations have all but disappeared since their heyday. BUG ceased operations in 2002, while BNAN continues to operate and support the construction and conservation of gardens in the city under the national non-profit organization Trustees of Reservations, and their land trust still protects the majority of the gardens in the city. Indeed, even decades later, the City itself only owns 11 of Boston’s 168 gardens, and despite having offered relatively little in the way of direct support, financial or otherwise, to the construction and operation of gardens in the city, Boston prides itself on being one of the country’s preeminent garden cities.

The place and role of gardens in Boston’s urban landscape has also changed dramatically from the scruffy Revival gardens in the 1970s located in rough and deteriorating urban neighbourhoods. Many of the gardens protected by BNAN in the early 80s are now gems in the gentrified landscapes of Boston’s South End, South Boston, Beacon Hill, and Lower Roxbury, neighbourhoods that have shifted drastically in social, economic and demographic characteristics over the last three decades. What were once potentially important sites of food provision for low- income residents are now often places of leisure and recreation for wealthy residents. BNAN’s land trust, once an entity chockfull of political savvy and revolutionary zeal, now protects land assets in the city valued at more than $18 million. This presents another aspect of the paradox of

146 the loss of political potential of gardens that comes with the permanence offered by legal and institutional legitimation. It also points to the importance of recognizing gardens as potential sites of “aestheticisation” that mark the city as safe and sanitized for investment, and act as potential or actual points of transfer of cultural into economic capital (Ley, 2003). Spaces of urban growing as cogs in the capitalist landscape will be explored in more depth in the next two chapters on the development of a new kind of capitalist fix to the “waste” of vacant land in the inner city in Boston: urban farming.

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Chapter 5 Growing Law: Article 89 and Urban Farming in the Inner City as a New Programmatic Fix for Vacant Land

1 Introduction

After Boston’s municipal Revival Lots program to build community gardens on vacant lots in the city’s low income racialized neighbourhoods ended in the early 1980s and was replaced by the Grassroots program, a new form of urban greening on vacant lots was established in the neighbourhoods of Dorchester, Roxbury, and Mattapan. While farms preexist Article 89 in Boston, including several non-commercial social enterprise farm sites built by a local organization called The Food Project in the 1990s, the formal development of commercial urban farming in the city began much later, in 2010.1 This was when a pilot project was developed to cultivate two farms on vacant parcels located on the border between Dorchester and Mattapan.2 The farms were the first phase of a two-phase project to bring urban farming to Boston. The second phase of the project entailed the design and implementation of a rezoning ordinance called Article 89, developed between 2010 and 2013 and passed in 2013 by the Boston Zoning

1Prior to Article 89, urban farms would have been enabled by a Zoning Board of Appeals variance procedure. It is significant that many respondents in my study referred to the farms that were developed under Article 89 as “the first” urban farms in Boston, considering The Food Project had been operating a number of farms in Boston for several years by that point. This will be discussed later in the chapter.

2 It is difficult to determine with any certainty whether these sites are firmly located in either Dorchester or Mattapan, since the western boundary that separates them is “not uniformly agreed upon but extends roughly to halfway between Washington Avenue [sic] and Blue Hill Avenue” (Smith et al., 2012). (This should actually read “Washington Street” rather than “Washington Avenue.”) In Dorchester, which is east of Mattapan, Washington Street forms a boundary that runs north-south through Dorchester and divides the neighbourhood into a dense black population to the west, and a majority white population to the east. What is important to note is that all the sites that were chosen, and much of the publicly-owned vacant land in this part of the city, is located west of Washington Street, demonstrating the sociospatial proximity of urban wastelands to racialized spaces and populations in the city.

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Board, that makes urban farming legal by right in much of the city.3 In Boston and other cities, zoning to make farming legal in the city is necessary because farming has historically been treated as incompatible with the urban realm, and is thus seen as a new, innovative, and even revolutionary use of city land (Ladner, 2011; Hodgson et al., 2011; Pollans and Roberts, 2014).

Like community gardening before it, Article 89 has been envisioned primarily as a method by which to open vacant plots to higher and better uses, and thereby constitutes a state-based intervention to smooth the workings of the private market and make vacant land more productive. It is thus an excellent “fix” for vacant land in the era of neoliberal urbanism and focuses attention on the capital expansion of unevenly developed racialized spaces of the city. Indeed, urban farming presents a new programmatic fix for inner city vacant land that parallels and extends the logics underlying renewal and revitalization, and the development of community gardens explored in Chapter 4. Farming takes place in similar areas of the city and with a comparable parcel-by-parcel scale of development as community gardening, and it shares a similar panacea-like quality in that, like gardens, farms supposedly address many of the ailments of the inner city associated with racialized populations (Lawson, 2005). These issues will be explored in more detail in Chapter 6.

Urban farming occurs in a rather different political economic context than the earlier era of community gardens in the 1970s and into the 80s, however. Since then, Boston has experienced a return to the city with increasing real estate prices and land development pressures, especially in the central urban core. As a result, over the last decade or so, the inner city neighbourhoods of Dorchester, Roxbury and Mattapan south of the core have become the focus for various municipal policies to invite middle class settlement, private development, and ultimately the creation of a dense “urban village”-type landscape. Article 89 and urban farming is one aspect of these broader redevelopment plans for the inner city districts of Boston designed to attract new investments and residents. These include the Boston 2030 plan (City of Boston, 2014), the Roxbury Strategic Master Plan (City of Boston, 2004), the extension of the commuter rail into Mattapan and the building of several new railway stops, and the new high-density mixed-use transit-oriented design (TOD) plans that have followed suit along the new and existing

3 Article 89 did not pass through City Council but rather was designed by the BRA over several years, which then brought a petition to the Zoning Board for approval. That approval was granted in December 2013.

149 transportation lines in the area (City of Boston, 2015a, 2015b). Considered in conjunction with current municipal proposals and policies for these areas of the city, Article 89 can be seen as part of a broader plan to sanitize and restructure the inner city, preparing it for new forms of capital accumulation (Smith, 1996). Article 89 is thereby a significant harbinger of the potential for future gentrification in these neighbourhoods.

As an analysis of these redevelopment plans demonstrates, rather than merely an urban problem, vacant land has increasingly also come to be seen by the municipality as an asset for the redevelopment of the inner city. The view of vacant land as an asset is part of the prioritization of private developers and for-profit commercial enterprises in a variety of neoliberal developments in the city (Hackworth, 2007; Brenner, 2004), including urban farming. I suggest that despite the mélange of social, economic and environmental benefits touted for urban farming (many of which have little evidence, as will be discussed in Chapter 6), ground level urban farming is primarily a significant aspect of the City’s strategy to achieve the holistic and productive use of all land within its borders – to “unlock the potential of the land,” so to speak. This becomes particularly clear when considering that the municipality has placed an emphasis on utilizing otherwise unbuildable lots for urban farms, rather than lots that present ideal conditions for successful farm production. As such, Article 89 is capable of and has ultimately been utilized to construct a new land market and to make previously unbuildable land in Boston buildable (cf. Akers, 2013).

The central contribution of this chapter is its challenge of the common understanding of urban farming as a positive and innovative urban activity (e.g. Gudzune et al., 2015; Orsini et al., 2014; Hanson et al., 2012; Contesse et al. 2018; Dubbeling et al., 2009). By placing urban farming in the context of the broader municipal plans for the redevelopment of the inner city for the primary benefit of middle class newcomers and private developers, I demonstrate that urban farming and how it has been imagined contributes to the modern vision for the inner city as “urban village.” An important aspect of this is demonstrating the extent to which ideologies of “underutilized”, vacant, or waste land and the prioritization of private developers undergirds many of these municipal plans for developing and densifying the inner city, and helps to constitute the positive recognition of urban farming as a fix for the inner city.

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This chapter also lays the foundation for Chapter 6 which explores in more depth the existence of a variety of bureaucratic and financial barriers to farm construction that prioritize wealthy private and non-profit developers while excluding others, including residents, from the process of farm construction. These organizations share in common some access to a combination of power, political status, and resources (whether financial or human, or both), and together summon the power to reorganize rights to vacant land, an important aspect of the characterization of farming in the city as a rather elite activity with decidedly neoliberal tendencies.

2 A Note on Sources

This chapter is the first of two, including Chapter 6, that primarily draw on the data from the interviews that I conducted in Boston during 2013 and 2014. Several of the individuals I interviewed sat on the Mayor’s Advisory Committee for the design of the ordinance, were involved with one of the organizations engaged in some aspect of urban farming in the city during 2013 and 2014 (i.e. City Growers, the Urban Farming Institute, the Trust for Public Land, or Dudley Street Neighbors Inc.), or had some other important role to play in the process of planning and implementing Article 89. This chapter also relies heavily on analyses of municipal policy documents.

3 The Political Economic Context of Article 89 as a Tool for Land Development in Boston

The Boston that is the focus of this chapter and the next is very different from the city that existed during the mid-twentieth century and that was described in Chapters 3 and 4. In the years since mass suburbanization meant the loss of hundreds of thousands of the wealthiest and whitest residents, the emptying out of the inner city eventually reversed trend with a return to the city that has characterized many American metropolises in recent decades. Amenities like walkability and trendy restaurants have become increasingly desired over the sanitized low density of the suburbs, and major metropolitan areas across the United States have seen large upsurges in population in comparison with exurban areas especially since 2010 (Toppo and Overberg, 2014). In Boston, the return to the city began in 1980 when Suffolk County, the administrative and legislative heart of the region and Boston’s home, started to see a rise in population while surrounding counties generally experienced declines (Selverajah and Garg, 2014). This timing coincides with the initial increase of development pressure across the city in the early 1980s and

151 the auctioning off of the Revival Gardens built via federal CDBG grants, as discussed in the previous chapter. The population of the city has continued to grow over the past several decades, and for the first time since the 1950s, Boston passed the milestone of 700,000 residents in 2014 (City of Boston, 2014). The pressure on the urban core has increased in kind, pushing the price of real estate up: between 2012 and 2013, for instance, there was a 12% increase in the median sales price from $383,000 to $427,500. By 2014, a household with an income of $80,000 could not afford even the bottom quarter of the homeownership market in the city (Ibid.).

These trends have contributed to Boston’s status as one of the fastest gentrifying cities in the nation, with one study suggesting that two-thirds of the city’s low-price census tracts had shown signs of gentrification, representing about a quarter of the city’s population4 (Hartley, 2013). Boston is also home to the highest rate of income inequality of any large city in the US, with households at the 95th percentile earning around $266,000 while those at the 20th percentile made just under $15,000 annually in 2015 (Holmes and Berube, 2016). This wealth inequality is stacked against people of colour in the city, and a report published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston in 2015 revealed that while white households in the Boston Metropolitan Statistical Area (BMSA) have a median net worth of $247,500, Dominicans and US-born Blacks have a median net worth close to $0 (Muñoz et al., 2015). Whites in the city also have a higher homeownership rate than non-white populations with close to 80% owning a home, while about a third of Blacks and less than one-fifth of Dominicans and Puerto Ricans own a home (Ibid.).

The racialization of wealth disparities, as well as its geographical expression, is an important way in which the Boston that now exists shares similarities with the Boston described in Chapters 3 and 4. Indeed, the neighbourhoods of Dorchester, Mattapan, and Roxbury have largely continued to house the lowest income populations of colour in the city, and the broad segregation of racialized minorities in these areas of the city has cemented over the past few decades. These trends can be seen in the snapshot provided in Table 5.1 below of Dorchester, Roxbury and Mattapan compared with Boston as a whole, as well as with the Back Bay, the neighbourhood in the city with the highest per capita

4 An important caveat to this finding is that the author of the study looked at the Boston Metropolitan Statistical Area (BMSA), which includes 5 counties in Massachusetts as well as 2 in New Hampshire, meaning that some of the census tracts that changed were not a good representation of the neighbourhoods within Boston that would have been flagged as having gentrified (Selverajah and Garg, 2014).

152 income (Boston Planning and Development Agency, 2017). The figures provided in this table comparing the per capita income, racial and ethnic makeup, poverty rates and owner-occupied

Table 5.1 Snapshot of Dorchester, Roxbury and Mattapan versus Boston and Back Bay

housing tenure of each neighbourhood highlight clearly the colour of wealth in the city. While Back Bay has a per capita income of $91,710 and a vastly white population (76.4% of residents), Dorchester, Roxbury and Mattapan all fall well below Boston’s per capita income of $35,728 while housing the majority of the city’s non-white population. Together the three neighbourhoods are the home to 39.1% of the city’s impoverished residents, while only 1.6% of the city’s poorest residents live in Back Bay by comparison.

The combination of low-density development, a highly racialized population, and a low per capita income that characterizes these inner city areas have made them ripe for gentrification, especially as the population of the city continues to grow and real estate prices in the core become increasingly untenable for the majority of residents. There is mixed evidence that gentrification has actually been occurring in these areas, however. A recent report published by the Codman Square Community Development Corporation in Dorchester found that little displacement has happened to this point, although it also highlights residents’ fears of being displaced (Selverajah and Garg, 2014). A recent report produced by the City of Boston, however, suggests that several neighbourhoods in the core of the city are now experiencing what might be called “supergentrification” (Lees, 2003) in which both middle and low income residents are being priced out, while several other neighbourhoods including Dorchester have experienced the

153 pricing out of low income residents5 (City of Boston, 2014). In Dorchester, for instance, the report indicates evidence of a 22% loss of low-income residents with annual incomes less than $50,000 between 2000 and 2012, in addition to a 5% increase in middle class residents with incomes between $50,000 and $125,000 (Ibid.).

Indeed, there is evidence that Dorchester is on the cusp of massive economic and density changes, mostly within proximity to the new South Bay Shopping Center where there is a pocket of properties on the verge of “wholesale redevelopment” (Conti, 2016). Houses in the area are now sometimes being sold for several million dollars, with rentals going for $2,500 to $3,000 per month, and condos starting in the range of half a million dollars (Ibid.). Some of the condos currently on the market are representative of the “condofication” of the classic Boston triple decker, built in the decades around the turn of the century to house manufacturing and trade workers, and the most common housing type in the lower density neighbourhoods south of the city’s core (Figure 5.1).

Figure 5.1 The classic Boston “triple decker” in Dorchester.

5 Central Boston, Charlestown, South Boston, the South End and Jamaica Plain all show signs of “supergentrification”; West Roxbury, Back Bay, Beacon Hill, Hyde Park, Dorchester, Roslindale, and Allston/Brighton all show signs of gentrification with the pricing out of lower income residents (City of Boston, 2014: 89).

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Increasingly, these homes are being renovated and sold as single-floor condos to accommodate the incoming middle class residents in the area. As for Roxbury, even as early as 2004, the City’s Roxbury Strategic Master Plan reported that the price for a three-bedroom home in Roxbury had increased over the past 5 years by 117%, “one of the sharpest increases in housing prices” (City of Boston, 2004: 64) in the city. Jennings (2004), quoting Nelson (2000), argues that gentrification in Roxbury is undoubtedly occurring, and that it has an obvious racial bias:

The strategic position of Lower Roxbury has stimulated strenuous efforts by private developers to push Blacks out of this community. These efforts are buttressed by city policies that raise property taxes, encourage condominium conversions, and increase the price of rental units beyond the reach of low-income citizens (97, quoted in Jennings 2004, 17-18).

On the other hand, there is little current evidence for gentrification in Mattapan, with a 7% increase in low-income populations in the area between 2000 and 2012 (City of Boston, 2014). Since Mattapan has the lowest real estate prices of the inner city districts, this increase in low income population could potentially represent those pushed out of Dorchester and other proximal areas, however, meaning that Mattapan may not remain untouched by the impacts of local gentrification.

There are reasons to believe that these economic trends will continue into the future. As the owner of the South Bay Shopping Center finalizes plans to build a giant mixed-used complex nearby including a movie theatre, a hotel, restaurants, residences, and shopping (Acitelli, 2016; Conti, 2016), the city has also augmented its focus on these areas in several policies and development plans to increase density, incentivize development, and attract new middle class residents. These include the Boston 2030 plan, the Roxbury Strategic Master Plan, the extension of the commuter rail into Mattapan and the building of several new railway stops, and the new high-density mixed-use transit-oriented design (TOD) plans that have followed suit along the new and existing transportation lines in the area. In order to understand Article 89 and how and why the City has designed it to enable commercial urban farming on vacant lots in low income racialized neighbourhoods, it must be contextualized within these broader redevelopment plans for the inner city districts of Boston. This context reveals commercial urban farming in the inner city as an important bolster to municipal strategies to generate high density, “modern village”- type developments attractive to the middle class that are a potential harbinger of future gentrification.

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3.1 Boston’s Plans to Redevelop the Inner City

The citywide plan “Housing a Changing City: Boston 2030” published in 2014 by incumbent Mayor Marty Walsh’s administration presents a broad plan for development for the city as it moves towards its 400th anniversary in 2030, with a focus placed on addressing the future housing needs of the city. The plan emphasizes the importance of retaining “a strong middle class” (City of Boston, 2014: 1; defined as households with incomes between $50,000 and $125,000) as the city continues to swell in population with a projected increase of 20% through the year 2030, and to stabilize the housing market by increasing the vacancy rate. The report clearly indicates the openness of the housing market in Roxbury, Dorchester and Mattapan, as well as Hyde Park (south of Mattapan) and East Boston (the location of Boston’s Logan Airport) to households with an income of $80,000 annually6, and effectively invites new residents into these districts historically unattractive to the middle class. Of course, this means that the homeownership market in these neighbourhoods could become increasingly closed to residents who already call the neighbourhoods home (Jennings, 2004). The invitation to middle class residents to relocate to the inner city in Boston could increase housing prices in these areas and effect the future displacement of residents, even if the process has not yet had notable impacts on the local population.

As the Boston 2030 report has set the agenda for the city’s housing market over the coming decades, it has also influenced an increased focus on building transit and on transit-oriented development (TOD) in these same areas of the city to support the growing demand for middle class housing. TOD generally encompasses mixed use developments, walkability, and “higher- density development within a designated area…surrounding a transit station or stop” (Cappellano and Spisto, 2014: 315). TOD has been tied to rising property values and median household incomes, as well as demographic changes such as increases in the number of students and working professionals living in an area adjacent to TOD developments (Arrington and Cervero, 2008; Kahn, 2007; Pollack et al., 2010). Although TOD has no proven negative impacts on low-income residents, researchers admit that it can influence gentrification “when a transit

6 In Roxbury, 64.8% of the housing market is affordable with conventional underwriting to a household with $80,000 in annual income; in Mattapan the share is 72.1%, and in Dorchester, 62.5%. Hyde Park sits at 64.1% of the market and East Boston is at 67.6% (City of Boston, 2014).

156 system is implemented within the nearby area” (Cappellano and Spisto, 2014: 315). Further, Rayle (2015) has suggested that while there is insufficient data to conclude that TOD leads to displacement of current residents, often considered to be the most important marker of gentrification, gentrification may also occur on a social and a psychological level that has not been sufficiently captured in TOD studies to date. Nevertheless, to the extent that TOD has not been clearly linked with negative impacts on low-income residents, it continues to be supported by a wide array of actors in urban development, including community members and advocates, environmentalists, and developers tied to “growth machine” politics (Rayle, 2015).

Exemplifying the pillars of TOD, a project to build five new stations – Talbot Ave., Newmarket/South Bay, Cummins Highway, Four Corners, and Columbia Road – and to redevelop four existing stations – Upham’s Corner, Morton Street, Fairmount, and Readville – along the Fairmount Indigo Commuter Line has been ongoing for the past decade (Boston LISC, n.d.). This train line runs from South Station in downtown Boston south to Readville Station in Hyde Park (just south of Mattapan), and the new development is notable for increasing commuter access to the low-income racialized areas of Boston where the train line has historically not stopped. Indeed, though the Fairmount Line was renovated in the early 1980s, until the redevelopment plans were launched in the mid-2000s “Fairmount trains [sped] through parts of Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan without stopping” (Goody Clancy, 2006: 2). In this eight-mile stretch between Upham’s Corner and Morton Street, “91% of the population are people of color” (Goody Clancy, 2006: 2). One of my respondents, a black man who has lived in the Codman Square neighbourhood of Dorchester for his entire life and works at a local CDC, commented dryly that the only experience most people in his neighbourhood had with the commuter train was waving to the white people who would ride through the neighbourhood on their daily commutes in and out of downtown. In effect, the commuter trains have enabled the majority white residents of the suburban reaches of Boston to commute to work and to shop in downtown Boston while maintaining the residential and commercial segregation of the racialized residents of the inner city by essentially cutting them off from access to the same. The same respondent explained this to me when he continued:

So [the commuter train] is something that we definitely need in this community, but it’s something that was needed in this community for years. It’s not now just

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because the faces are changing in this community, it should have been done years ago. But it’s being done now when the rent in Boston is being too high and forcing the majority of black folks out of this community. So that’s when they would bring it in. They wouldn’t bring it in when it was folks that really needed it.

This occurred despite these areas of the city, particularly Dorchester, being some of the most densely populated in the entire city (Good Clancy, 2006.).

Indeed, now that these areas of the city have been identified as “prime locations to support new middle-income housing, which is a priority for Mayor Walsh’s administration” (City of Boston, 2015a: n.p.), the new stops will allow more connected access to downtown for the new and existing residents of these neighbourhoods, and position the Fairmount Line as a new “smart growth corridor” (Selverajah and Garg, 2014; Goody Clancy, 2006). The new developments will “[serve] today’s residents and employees with opportunities for new development to welcome new residents and employers to the Fairmount Corridor” (Goody Clancy, 2006: 1), demonstrating the extent to which these new developments are designed to support the settlement of the middle class into these districts of the city.

TOD has been the focus of several other recent developments in the city. In 2015, for example, the BRA announced the undertaking of formal planning for two TOD “corridors,” one along Washington Street and Columbus Avenue in Jamaica Plain and Roxbury, and the other in South Boston along Dorchester Avenue, a central arterial road that runs south into Dorchester. These areas are characterized in the City’s press release for the project as having “untapped potential” that can be released by drawing on the resources of the transit nearby (City of Boston, 2015a: n.p.). The Red Line of the subway in Boston, called the “T”, has also been a focus for TOD with the terminal Ashmont-Peabody Station in the Ashmont Hill area of Dorchester at the centre of the project. The station “has been transformed into a transit node integrating…TOD and extensive investment on modernization of nearby Red Line stations” (Selverajah and Garg, 2014: vi). Millions of dollars have been invested into the redevelopment of a parcel adjacent to the station for 116 units of mixed-use housing and 10,000 square feet of neighbourhood retail (City of Boston, 2015), including a “hipster” coffee shop regularly criticized for being symbolic of gentrification (not least by several of my respondents who call the area home).

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While involving more community consultation than either Boston 2030 or various TOD projects, the Roxbury Strategic Master Plan (RSMP) is another important document that draws on comparable discourses and rhetorics of development. The RSMP was begun in 1999 after “the Boston Redevelopment Authority issued a call for proposals to help design a master plan for the Roxbury neighborhood” (Jennings, 2004: 20). Roxbury was the focus for such a plan because of its status as the most impoverished neighbourhood in the city, as well as its large contingency of “underutilized” parcels located in the area, a detail that will be explored in more depth in the next section. The central goal of the plan was to create a holistic vision for economic development in Roxbury, and involved a long process of community input in which those involved, including the community, the City, and the architectural firm hired by the city to undertake the plan, agreed that Roxbury should focus on “strategies for enhancing the social and economic fabric of the neighborhood and its connection with other neighborhoods and the city” (Ibid.). The plan was developed between 1999 and 2004, and made public in January 2004. It emphasizes the place of industry, including the growing technology sector, the growth of transit, and the connectivity of Roxbury to the rest of the city for neighbourhood development. The Plan also includes TOD principles in local development including increasing density and walkability (City of Boston, 2004).

While Jennings (2004) suggests in his study of the RSMP that the residents were very effective at voicing their concerns and in challenging the economic logic that suggests that improving the business climate will ultimately benefit everyone, the plan clearly supports the kind of progress that would make the neighbourhood more attractive to developers. One of the ways in which this is achieved through the plan is by highlighting the massive land assets that are currently underutilized in the area. Indeed, a hugely important aspect of the RSMP, as well as the other policies that have been discussed, is highlighting the extent to which these areas of the city are overrun with vacant and “underutilized” land that can ideally become more productively used to create room for middle class residents and to symbolically sanitize the inner city for incoming capital investments (Smith, 1996). Paying attention to the ways in which these logics and rhetorics line up with those utilized in earlier eras of urban development as discussed in Chapters 3 and 4 highlights the necessity of contextualizing city development both historically, as well as within the broader development goals of a municipality at any particular moment in time.

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3.2 Vacant and “Underutilized” Land in Boston’s New Developments

Figure 5.2 A typical city-owned vacant lot located in Dorchester.

Increasing the development of housing and transit across Dorchester, Roxbury and Mattapan as proposed in Boston 2030, the Fairmount and Red Line TOD plans, and the Roxbury Strategic Master Plan necessarily implies increasing the density of local development. As a result, the plans of the municipality to redevelop the inner city of Boston consistently emphasize the reordering of the landscape to accomplish densification and ultimately the economic development necessary for the prosperous future of the city. The general narrative across these policies is that for the ideal urban form to coalesce, the most productive uses of land must be assembled by addressing properties that are “waste” in some sense. As such, the new era of redevelopment in Boston’s inner city very much mirrors the ideological and municipal tools that existed relative to the waste of the landscape under urban revitalization and that underlay the first programmatic fix for vacant land, community gardens.

Indeed, in parallel to the era of vacant land development for community gardens as discussed in Chapter 4, a common narrative continues to exist that constructs some properties as “problematic” and as needing municipal intervention to address them and shift them into a

160 productive state. The Boston 2030 plan, for example, identifies problem properties primarily as those that are privately owned but delinquent with regards to property taxes, or present some other form of public or physical hazard to the city (City of Boston, 2014). The creation of a Problem Property Task Force in 2011 by then-Mayor Tom Menino, as discussed in the Boston 2030 plan, highlights the current attitude in the city towards defining and addressing such problem properties. The Task Force crosscuts several municipal agencies, including fire, police, public health, and inspectional services, in order to designate and resolve problem properties in the city. Properties are defined by the Task Force as a “problem” if they have had four or more complaints regarding noise, unsanitary conditions, criminal activity, and/or building code violations in the previous twelve months, and if the chair of the Task Force decides that these complaints warrant designation as such (City of Boston, 2011). If a property is designated as a problem, the Task Force can levy fines of up to $300 per day against the property owner “per outstanding code violation, and can also charge owners the cost of the public safety response to their properties” (Idem: n.p.).

These conditions for identifying properties as problematic reveal that such properties are often houses and other structures that are currently inhabited rather than vacant lots. However, properties can also be considered problematic if they are vacant and “have remained on the tax- delinquency rolls for years” in which case “the City must prioritize foreclosures that benefit the neighborhoods” (City of Boston, 2014: 16). The reliance on tax foreclosure to appropriate vacant privately owned properties highlights its continued significance as a municipal tool for reordering the unproductive landscape, and echoes discussions by the municipality during the Revival Lots program of the use of tax foreclosure to seize private property during that earlier era of urban redevelopment.

The construction of “problem” properties as symbolic of irresponsible private ownership that necessitate a strong-armed response from the municipality is an important similarity shared between modern municipal redevelopment plans and those of earlier eras of renewal and revitalization in the inner city. However, the ideology as expressed by the municipality has also shifted to some extent. I identified far less emphasis placed on the problem of city-owned vacant properties than during the era of revitalization in the 1970s, for instance, and more on the issue of complaint-worthy homes as the properties most in need of intervention; this is clear in the excerpts discussed above. What is notable is that my analysis demonstrates that a new ideology

161 of vacant land has arisen in the modern neoliberal era of urban development alongside, but also competing with, that of vacancy-as-problem: vacant land as an asset. The analysis presented in this chapter deepens the analysis presented in Chapter 2 regarding this notion of vacant land by suggesting that it is intimately linked with the shift to neoliberal urbanism and the entrepreneurial city (Harvey, 1989). And indeed, this new ideology comes across loud and clear in documents discussing the City’s future plans for Boston.

3.2.1 Vacant Land as Asset

As I argued in Chapter 2, the ideology of vacancy-as-asset recognizes vacant land not as a problem needing intervention but rather as an asset for future development that can assist in generating revenues, residents, and density for the city, all aspects of the City’s plans for the future of Boston. As such, the ideology as it is articulated in municipal plans for the inner city neighbourhoods of Boston is clearly an expression of the current political, social and economic reality of Dorchester, Roxbury, and Mattapan. As the municipality reimagines the future of these areas of the city as dense, walkable “urban villages” joined via highly developed public transport systems to the urban core, vacant land becomes identified as “underutilized” space that can become productively used as transportation, housing, or commercial areas to make this vision a reality. Vacant land as asset is thus intimately connected with the desire to actualize the land’s highest and best use and to “unlock the value of the land,” so to speak.

The Boston 2030 plan, for example, discusses the potential of city- and state-owned “surplus land” that could be made available “for developers to build mixed-income housing” (City of Boston, 2014: 11). Later in the report, it is similarly suggested that “infill lots” could be used since

[t]he City owns nearly 300 vacant lots that could be quickly developed into mixed- income housing by making these parcels available to non-profit and small builders at no or low cost in exchange for affordability (Idem: 56).

Similarly, it is suggested in the city’s Fairmount TOD plans that, for instance, part of the development of the new Columbia Road station will be “new housing and businesses [that will] replace vacant and underused industrial sites” (Goody Clancy, 2006: 11), and the redevelopment of Upham’s Corner Station will involve upgrading “underutilized buildings and vacant land near the station [that] offer development opportunities” (Idem: 13). The Roxbury Strategic Master

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Plan makes the most direct allusion to vacant land as an asset, labeling vacant land as “underutilized” or “underdeveloped” throughout, and suggesting that the Plan

recognizes the neighborhood’s enormous potential resources and assets, including…the substantial amount of open space and underutilized land… (City of Boston, 2004: 3).

This falls in line with Jennings’ (2004) suggestion that the RSMP was born of a growing concern with the existence of large public parcels of land in the community, and it was designed specifically as “a framework for decision making about…the disposition of [the] land” (20). In order to “build wealth in the neighborhood,” the RSMP suggests, what is needed is “the implementation of policies that facilitate the use of empty land and vacant buildings for new business development where appropriate” (City of Boston, 2004: 29). As a result, the RSMP also proposes undertaking a vacant lot analysis of Roxbury to identify the “underutilized parcels” of land and to

[establish] a framework to balance open space needs with the growing demands for developable housing parcels on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis (Idem: 24).

The request for an exercise in the identification and analysis of the vacant land in the landscape of the inner city echoes the cartographic technologies utilized during the era of revitalization to locate vacant land in these same areas, highlighting the historical, technological, and ideological extensions of past governing regimes into the current era. It also illuminates Safransky’s (2014) argument, reflective of a broader understanding amongst critical urban geographers, that “cartography has long been used to produce frontiers and assert control over land and resources” (5).

As the RSMP’s request for a vacant lot analysis suggests, the central intention behind these various plans and their discussion of “underutilized” land is to set in motion the actions necessary to utilize the land more productively and efficiently. For example, the RSMP maintains that

[u]pon issuance of the Roxbury Strategic Master Plan, Requests for Proposals will be solicited for a number of the major city and state owned development parcels beginning in the Crosstown Corridor and Dudley Square (City of Boston, 2014: 35).

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Boston 2030 makes the citywide plan for developing housing more explicit, stating that “in order to stimulate the production of middle-income housing, the City will work to provide a suite of incentives to the development community” (City of Boston, 2014: 55). The incentivization of the involvement of the private “development community” in the improvement of underutilized land in the city is also highlighted in the quotation above that suggests that vacant city-owned lots will be given to developers at little to no cost to build housing.

Indeed, more so than in previous eras of urban development, under neoliberal urbanism emphasis is placed on the special role of the private developer in constructing the beneficial future of the municipality (Hacker, 2007; Brenner, 2004). Of course, the logic of private development for socially advantageous outcomes like housing affordability suggests easy justifications for the low cost to the developers themselves. Whether the housing built is in fact affordable and beneficial to the community, however, is somewhat beside the point. Indeed, its potential benefit does not diminish the extent to which this logic recapitulates the rhetoric that underscored the building of low income housing under urban renewal, and even under the B-BURG program in the late 1960s in Boston. In these historical cases, private development of affordable housing was incentivized ultimately to the benefit of urban developers and elites, and to the detriment of the very populations supposed to be advantaged by those developments.

Events have taken place in more recent years in relation to new municipal plans that demonstrate the dangers and the challenges of relying on similar “trickle down” economic logics to attempt to achieve more equitable ends. In 2000, for example, following the initiation of the RSMP, a local real estate firm was awarded about 100,000 square feet of vacant land owned by the Department of Neighborhood Development (DND)7 at a discounted rate. This parcel of land is located close to Bartlett Yard, the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority (MBTA)-owned bus depot, which was flagged in the plan as a future site for mixed-use developments (Herndon, 2016). The land was provided to the developer without public consultation or plans to build housing, affordable or otherwise, and the private developer clearly stands to profit when the parcel is developed or sold

7 The Department of Neighborhood Development (DND) is the city agency responsible for vacant land ownership, management and sale, as well as other municipal property issues. The DND was once the Public Facilities Department but was renamed since the era of community gardening in the 1970s.

164 in the future. The financial benefit to the developers is particularly significant given the increasing value of land in Roxbury. Indeed, Jennings (2004) suggests that

Roxbury is home to enormous economic resources…[and] one of its most valuable resources is the land that is available for development since relatively few open spaces remain in Boston for physical investment… (17).

Depending on what the parcel becomes, the community may indeed also benefit. Nevertheless, the accumulation of private capital by urban elites and developers under the guise of increasing the productive use of “underutilized” parcels demonstrates the power of the ideology of vacancy- as-asset to invite the movement of capital into new and previously unreached spaces (Brenner and Theodore, 2003). Indeed, an important aspect of the ideology of vacant land-as-asset is that it seemingly highlights the value of the land for the community, and yet has the ability to benefit predictable players in quite a direct and measurable way.

The vision of vacant land-as-asset expressed by the City in these plans stands in stark contrast to the narrative of vacant lots as physically deteriorated and dangerous spaces that characterized the earlier eras of renewal and revitalization. Despite their differences, however, a similar kind of invitation to capital occurs – to unlock and value of the land and actualize its highest and best use – that influences a set of outcomes in which particular stakeholders are prioritized and rights to vacant land are potentially reordered.

The type of capital investment tied to each of these constructions is different, however, and may account for the distinctions between them to some extent. Under revitalization schemes and the construction of community gardens primarily from the 1970s into the 90s, the distribution of federal CDBG funds was tied to problem areas of the city. This meant that the municipality was required to construct, label, and identify areas as problematic in order that they could generate government financial support for the redevelopment of the inner city, influencing the recognition of vacant land as an urban problem. On the other hand, under modern neoliberal urban development when the private developer is king, the attractiveness and marketability of the land as well as the potential for returns on investments are very important, which inspires the consideration of vacant land as an asset. Each funding form – public versus private – influences to some extent the rhetorics of land and of vacancy that are utilized to bolster and justify those particular forms of urban redevelopment during each era. It is in this sense that the ideology of

165 vacant land as asset can be seen as integrally linked with the shift to entrepreneurial neoliberal urbanism.

4 Article 89 and the Development of Urban Farms on Vacant Lots in Boston

Article 89 has come about within the context of this broader municipal vision of increasing the productivity of vacant land for the densification of the inner city. In fact, the Roxbury Strategic Master Plan explicitly creates room for the use of vacant inner city land for “innovative” uses like urban farming, stating that

although the Roxbury Strategic Master Plan includes general design guidelines and preferred land use options for the publicly-owned parcels, innovative proposals that are consistent with the spirit of the Plan are also welcomed (City of Boston, 2004: 87).

The consideration of vacant land in and of itself within these policies demonstrates the extent to which the municipality continues to be concerned with the use and reuse of vacant land, and supports the move toward developing urban farms in the city. What exactly is Article 89, how was it developed, who was involved, and most importantly, why was it developed? Answering these questions requires considering in more depth the role of vacant land in the development of urban farming in the city, as well as contextualizing Article 89 and urban farming within the current and historic development of the inner city in Boston.

4.1 What is Article 89?

Article 89 was initiated by the BRA in 2010 and passed by the Boston Zoning Board in 2013. It is a city-wide ordinance that makes legal a variety of different forms of commercial farming in the city, including hydroponics, aquaponics, roof top farming, and ground level farming on vacant lots. Article 89 does this by rezoning the city to make farming legal by right or a conditional use in residential, commercial, and industrial districts in the city. Ground level farms of up to one acre are now allowed as of right in all zoning districts (residential, commercial, and industrial), while farms larger than one acre are conditional in residential and commercial districts, but allowed by right in industrial zones (BRA, 2013). Article 89 also regulates soil safety procedures, the keeping of accessory animals like hens and bees, composting, and structures allowed on farm sites. Only commercial farming – both non-profit and for-profit – is

166 regulated by Article 89, and thus backyard and community gardening is not governed by Article 89.

Various aspects of Article 89, including whether a site requires a Comprehensive Farm Review (CFR) and if the residential keeping of bees and backyard hens is allowed, varies by zones in ways that demonstrate the complexity of zoning practices in the city. In Boston, there are several neighbourhoods mostly located in the central city (i.e. Back Bay, Beacon Hill, Kenmore Square, South Boston) where what is called a “Base Code” for land use regulations applies. Many other areas outside of the Base Code districts, however, have had their zoning updated over the years since about 1965, and have a new neighbourhood-based code that regulates the local use of land in a way that recognizes the individual needs and built form of each neighbourhood. The districts that utilize new neighbourhood zoning are a combination of residential, commercial, and industrial zones, as are those that rely on the Base Code. The City of Boston is thus a kind of patchwork of zoning regulations, and what is allowed in one district may not be in another, and vice versa.

The accessory keeping of animals and bees, for instance, has long been conditional where the Base Code applies, including in residential districts. In neighbourhoods with new neighbourhood regulations, however, the keeping of bees and animals is generally conditional in commercial and industrial zones, but forbidden in residential areas (City of Boston, 2013). While Article 89 sets out the conditions for the keeping of hens and bees, it does not alter the neighbourhood zoning that may be applicable in any given district. A neighbourhood in which the keeping of animals is forbidden must thus undertake the alteration of the local zoning to make this activity conditional, and then comply with the conditions set out for these activities in Article 89. To my knowledge, no neighbourhood has undertaken the process to change the local zoning regulations to this point. Similarly, ground level farms larger than 300 square feet in new neighbourhood zoning areas, and 750 square feet in Base Code zoning areas of the city must undergo a Comprehensive Farm Review in which the operator of the farm submits a detailed plan for the site and any built structures, photos of the site, and their proposed methods for irrigation and runoff to the Urban Design staff at the BRA (Ibid.). The entire process can take up to about 45 days in theory, although in practice, as I’ll discuss in Chapter 6, it is often considerably longer. These facts demonstrate the extent to which Boston is a particularly complex city in terms of

167 zoning, and the challenges of understanding what activities and developments are allowed in one neighbourhood versus another for developers, city agents, and community members alike. In this sense, Boston truly is a “city of neighbourhoods.”

Another important aspect of the new ordinance regulates soil safety practices, particularly since urban land is generally contaminated with a variety of pollutants, including from lead-based house paint and car exhaust. As environmental justice studies have repeatedly shown, land in historically low-income racialized neighbourhoods, where most ground level urban farms are located, is often contaminated to a greater degree than other urban areas (Agyeman et al., 2003; Steady, 2009). Indeed, contamination is an essential aspect of the racialization of space and the “waste-ability” of racialized neighbourhoods (Dillon, 2013). A long history of divestment and state-based policies encouraging the movement of middle class residents out of the city from the 1950s to the 70s led to housing abandonment, dilapidation and demolition that was particularly extreme in the majority racialized neighbourhoods of Dorchester, Mattapan, and Roxbury as discussed in Chapters 3 and 4. In Boston and some other American cities, there were also arson- for-profit rings in which owners burned down their own homes for insurance kickbacks; between 1978 and 1982 alone there were 3,000 suspicious house fires concentrated in Roxbury, East Boston, Jamaica Plain, and Dorchester (Brady, 1983). A city councilor I spoke with who had grown up in Dorchester described living in a neighbourhood where houses burned literally everyday; he told me that everyone just got used to the sounds of the sirens as a normal feature of living in the neighbourhood. These events devastated many inner city areas of Boston, and caused a considerable amount of soil damage that must now be mitigated in order to safely eat produce grown in the soil. Article 89 sets out the best practice for soil safety, the raised bed method, which involves laying a geotextile barrier over an entire site before bringing in fresh soil lain between a cheaper barrier material like wood chips or solid wooden barriers to create raised beds for intensive growing (BRA, 2013).

The central raison d’être of Article 89 is to make commercial farming in the city legal, an activity that prior to the rezoning was prohibited because it was not explicitly allowed in the city’s bylaws. The existence of Article 89 thus highlights the general approach to zoning in North American cities whereby only those activities that are explicitly stated in an ordinance are recognized as legal. In other words, in Boston and other North American cities, if a use is not mentioned in the zoning code, that use is forbidden. While this is true, the recent increase in the

168 popularity of urban farming on public land has also meant that many cities allow farming without explicit legal change. Toronto, for instance, is a good example of a city that has not yet addressed commercial urban farming in formal legal changes at the municipal level, but has nevertheless supported the construction of farms, mostly on the city’s exurban fringes. The farms in Toronto are governed and regulated on a case-by-case basis with relative success, and suggest that explicit and broad legal changes at the urban scale are not necessary in order to support urban farming. In this sense, though Boston is not entirely unique for undertaking explicit legal change to make a new activity legal “on the books,” the city has taken a rather hard-lined approach to urban farming by resorting to changing the zoning ordinance to ensure its support.

There are, of course, several American cities other than Boston that have decided to utilize rezoning as a tool to enable urban farming, including Detroit, Portland (Maine), Cleveland, San Francisco, and Boston’s close neighbour, Somerville. Nevertheless, the fact that many cities support urban farming without complex city-wide ordinances means that rezoning as a municipal tool should be approached with curiosity rather than with an assumption that it expresses unadulterated and uncomplicated municipal support for farming. The move to rezone Boston to enable urban farming can indeed be seen, on the one hand, as an expression of the city’s openness to legal change and its desire to support the existence of urban farms. Paradoxically, though, it can also be understood as a manifestation of the City’s challenge with accepting new and “innovative” urban behaviours without complex administrative strictures in place. As a respondent who works with the Department of Neighborhood Development (DND) on urban farming explained to me, rather than making farming as an urban activity easier or less restrictive than it would have been without Article 89 by reducing the red tape of bureaucracy, Article 89 has merely made the red tape visible. And indeed, as will be discussed in Chapter 6, the “labyrinthine” bureaucratic structures of Boston and the intense resource and administrative challenges of building a farm mean that, rather than simply opening land and creating equitable opportunities for the construction of urban farms, Article 89 may actually make land accessible for farming to particular stakeholders while closing it almost impossibly to others.

4.2 How was Article 89 developed?

There is a formal, municipal history of Article 89 and its development in Boston that will be explored momentarily. It’s important to note, however, that there is also a distinct local

169 mythology regarding the birth of urban farming in Boston, and it is extremely telling in terms of how urban farming has been imagined and rolled out in the city. The story was told to me repeatedly by respondents when I asked about the establishment of urban farming in Boston, and has even been put into print as an article published in the Boston Globe (2013) demonstrates:

Glynn Lloyd, CEO of Roxbury-based City Fresh Foods catering company, had an epiphany a couple of years back. “I was standing in the kitchen at City Fresh and realized that we were buying all this lettuce from California and paying a pretty good dollar for it,” he recalls. “Then I was driving up Harold Street [in Roxbury] and I just noticed vacant lot, vacant lot, vacant lot, vacant lot, vacant lot. I said, ‘We are going to get land and start growing food’” (Harris and Lyon, 2013).

Lloyd has been credited with bringing urban farming to Boston to the extent that he has become something of a local hero. He is also the cofounder of City Growers, along with Margaret Connors, one of the few – if not the only – land-based for-profit farming organizations active in Boston over the past few years.8 The story and activities of City Growers will be explored in more depth in Chapter 6, but it is important at this point to note briefly the place of City Growers in the development of urban farming in Boston. Lloyd not only imagined using vacant lots for growing food for his food catering business, but actually called the Mayor at the time, Tom Menino – a personal friend of his – to discuss the potential of designing some legislation that would actualize his dream. That legislation, of course, became Article 89. City Growers was also one of two organizations (along with non-profit Revision House) chosen for the two pilot farm sites in the first phase of Article 89’s development, and was responsible for the opening of the Garrison-Trotter Farm, the first urban farm opened three years later on Harold Street after the passage of Article 89 and discussed in Chapter 6. Harold Street is, of course, the very same street where Lloyd first saw the vacant lot that inspired Article 89.

The nascence of urban farming in Boston highlights the importance of the so-called “agropreneur” and small-scale entrepreneurial enterprises in the development of inner city land for growing and greening. It also demonstrates clearly how urban farming fits in with the broader pattern of neoliberal inner city development that promotes the role of the private entrepreneurial

8 City Growers began, at least, as a for-profit enterprise, but the challenge of maintaining the company’s finances without the considerable help of foundational and state grants has influenced their move to non-profit status. These events and the story of City Growers will be explored in more depth in Chapter 6.

170 developer in the growth of urban spaces. Indeed, urban farming in Boston was initiated from the point of view of entrepreneurial advantage by an individual who had enough political clout to influence a major bureaucratic change in the city. A similar set of events has occurred in other cities that have undertaken legislative changes to promote urban farming. In Detroit, for example, local millionaire entrepreneur John Hantz influenced the development of the farming bylaw in the city and opened Hantz Farms, a for-profit tree farming business located in the majority black East Side of Detroit shortly thereafter (cf. Safransky, 2014). It is no surprise, then, that the rezoning bylaw in Detroit still only enables tree farming rather than broader production agriculture.

Following the envisioning of urban farming by Lloyd and his conversations with the Mayor that marked the unofficial beginning of Article 89, its official development began in Fall 2010 when the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA), the agency in charge of planning and land development in the city, and the Department of Neighborhood Development (DND), which oversees land disposition in the city, convened a meeting of what became the Mayor’s Urban Agriculture Working Group. This group brought together a broad constituency of community leaders, farming advocates and experts, and business owners to advise city staff on the potential of urban farming in Boston. City staff also separately met with the local City Councilor in Dorchester, Charles Yancey, to float the idea and get his support. Following these first meetings, the City selected four vacant lots on the border between Dorchester and Mattapan that would be appropriate for urban farming for what was then called the Pilot Urban Agriculture Project (Figure 5.3), and subsequently held three community meetings for the project to elicit public feedback. Notices for the meetings were posted in local newspapers and delivered to abutters in a 300 foot radius of the potential farm properties, while email notifications were sent to local community leaders and organizations. Staff of the Mayor’s office and the DND also personally delivered notices of the meetings to direct abutters of the properties prior to each of the meetings (BRA, 2011).

The original plan was to initially rezone those four individual properties on a parcel-by-parcel scale under a proposed zoning amendment called the Urban Agriculture Overlay District (UAOD), which would legally allow urban farming on these particular sites as a pilot project while the City worked on the citywide rezoning. During the early stages of designing the UAOD,

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Figure 5.3 The four original urban farming sites in Dorchester/Mattapan. Prepared by the BRA, posted online by Agyeman (2014)

172 the City proposed allowing the keeping of small animals and bees by right at these sites in addition to the growing of produce. This was intended as a test run for the inclusion of the keeping of bees and accessory animals within Article 89. The City were surprised, however, by the local community’s pushback against this vision, who were worried about the smells and other issues associated with the keeping of farm animals in their neighbourhood. Community members were also concerned about soil safety and how the City would ensure that the issue was properly mitigated to ensure that any produce grown at the urban farms would be safe to eat. Additionally, the community was frustrated with the lack of community consultation, and questioned the idea that the proposed farms would benefit the community rather than outsiders who would be brought in to operate the farms. As a consequence of these concerns, the City immediately removed this aspect of the UAOD from the proposal in order to garner the support of the community as they moved into the planning stage for the urban farms and the design of Article 89, added more community consultation meetings, and decided to slow down the process of designing Article 89 altogether. They also dropped two of the original four sites due to lack of community support.9

The two remaining sites – one on Glenway Street and the other on Tucker Street (Figure 5.4 and 5.5) – would eventually become the first urban farms in the city as part of the push to expand urban farming in Boston. The farms were not, however, the actual first urban farms in the city since the Food Project, a local non-profit organization, had been operating several farm sites in the area since the mid-1990s (Figure 5.6). The new urban farms were legitimized by the concurrent development of the new law, however, and were initiated by the City itself rather than by a non-profit organization, which made them rather new municipal creatures. The City awarded the use of the two plots under short-term two-year licensing agreements to two organizations, Tucker Street to non-profit Revision House and Glenway Street to for-profit City Growers, with the intention to extend the licenses if the experiment proved successful. These licenses cost about $500 an acre, and based on the size of the properties the actual cost of licensing was between $125 and $200 per year (MDAR, 2011).

9 Agyeman (2014) has written an excellent account of these events in Boston that explores in more depth than I do here the origins and resolution of the community conflict.

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Figure 5.4 The Tucker Street farm, operated by non-profit Revision House.

Figure 5.5 The Glenway Street farm, operated by for-profit City Growers.

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Figure 5.6 One of several Food Project urban farms in Dorchester.

The second phase of the development of urban farming in Boston was the actual design and development of Article 89. In light of the conflict that had erupted over the pilot phase of the project, the City was particularly vigilant about conducting a fair, open, and considerate process, and not pushing their vendetta for the City at the expense of the local community. As a result, the second phase took over two years to undertake, from the summer of 2011 to December 2013 when the Zoning Board approved the new zoning. This phase involved a series of meetings of the Mayor’s Urban Agriculture Working Group, as well as neighbourhood presentations across the City to solicit public questions and comments, which were then brought to the working group meetings and worked into the bylaw. The Mayor’s Urban Agriculture working group meetings were open to the public, and were held before work in downtown Boston in an attempt to be inclusive to a variety of individuals impacted by the bylaw. These meetings, however, also became a point of tension for the individuals in the community who felt that they hadn’t been fairly consulted on the development of Article 89, considering their neighbourhoods and not those in the city centre would be most likely to be impacted by urban farming in the city.

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4.3 Why was Article 89 developed?

You know, who doesn’t agree that vacant land should be used for something, and what better idea than farming?

This quotation, spoken by a city representative intimately involved with the development of Article 89, expresses perfectly the reality of Article 89 as a new programmatic fix for vacant land. Indeed, while the new ideology of vacant land as an asset surfaces in public policies produced by the municipality, evidently as a feature of the welcoming of private investors into the neighbourhoods, an important aspect of Article 89 as a fix for vacancy is the continuation and coexistence of the ideology of vacancy as a problem. Of course, it must be noted before I continue with a discussion of the place of vacant land in the development of Article 89 that there is a multiplicity of other benefits that have been touted for urban farming including the production of fresh “local” food for city residents, economic benefits like the creation of “green” jobs, and environmental benefits like the mitigation of storm water runoff. Many of these benefits are imagined rather than securely evidenced, however, as I will discuss in more depth in Chapter 6.

4.3.1 The Problem of Vacant Land in Boston

The narrative of vacant land as unproductive, wasteful, and needing to be put to “higher and better” uses underlies stakeholder conceptions of vacant land and its relationship with urban farming, just as it did community gardening in that earlier era of urban development. Across the gamut, respondents underscore the specific negative impacts of vacant land on local conditions, echoing the neighbourhood effects literature. Exemplifying these ideas, an urban farmer who had grown up in Dorchester told me:

When you have vacant land, you have mass exodus, you have neglect on the part of the community decision markers, sense of community diminishes a little bit and that contributes to health disparities, it contributes to depression, it contributes to all kinds of things.

Similarly, a representative from the Trust for Public Land who worked on developing the first urban farm after the passage of Article 89 explained:

[Vacant land] attracts nuisances, people dealing, fires, whatever. Dumping. And there’s a cost to that, to all of that…It’s bad for the community. It’s like a hole, like

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a literal hole in the neighbourhood. It’s unsafe…I can’t think of anything positive about vacant lots.

The image of vacant land as a “literal hole” in the neighbourhood that attracts, almost like a vacuum, the negativity of health and crime disparities is a vivid one for highlighting in a powerful way just how negative vacancy is thought to be, and also foreshadows the idea of vacancy as a “lost” economic opportunity that is held by many representatives at the city level. These quotations are reminiscent of the conceptions of vacancy held by community gardeners and city agents discussed in Chapter 4, and that emphasized the idea of vacant land as a “blight” on communities.

Beyond the physical dangers of vacant land, many respondents described vacant land as unproductive in some way. Sometimes productivity was explicitly tied with economics, as in the case of a representative from the Trust for Public Land (TPL) who explained that

…there’s no productive use going on [with vacant lots]. It’s often a negative economic use because it attracts nuisances, people dealing, fires, whatever. Dumping…

Previous Mayor Tom Menino echoed this sentiment, noting that “trash strewn lots bring down the neighbourhood, the values of the property.” In each of these quotations, the respondent understands the economic hazard of vacancy to be interconnected with physical hazards, reflecting the cyclical logic of the narrative of vacant land as hazard discussed Chapter 2. Only one city representative who worked with the DND had an explicitly economic understanding of vacant land delinked from other hazardous conditions when he noted that

Any site that [the City] own[s], it’s not taxed. The city doesn’t tax itself, so that’s another reason it’s important to get these parcels back into some productive use…once we get it back into productive use most likely it’s going to be back on the tax rolls.

Many other respondents did not directly link the meaning of productivity either to hazards or to economics, however, but to a vaguer and more inchoate conception of “productivity.” For instance, an urban farmer I spoke with expressed this idea when he told me

I’m someone who believes in productivity, so there’s something about just empty lots, uncared for lots that’s just…that’s just…they represent to me a loss of productivity.

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The lack of productivity or the production of value of some sort is expressed in the following quotation of a farmer not as “unproductive” but as “waste,” signifying an understanding of the binary between productivity and waste underlying the landscape:

From a city planning perspective, or from looking at any system it’s a shame to see things just go to waste. If a plot of land isn’t being used in some way to add value to the lives of the people who are interacting with that space then let’s engage in a conversation about [it]. Let’s find resources, let’s transform this into something that is of value for the community.

The binary that is evident here between “waste” and something that “adds value” is clear, as is a desire to rectify the “waste” of the land by “transforming” the land into something “of value.” A community leader and key player in the creation of the first urban farm similarly told me:

Seeing a lot…transformed into something productive is the whole flipside of [the negative aspects of vacancy], it’s like the whole psychology of the neighbourhood, the whole perspective changes.

A community member used very similar language when discussing vacant land:

Vacant land is a blight on communities. And so communities should be in dialogue with the city over transforming all vacant lots into some positive or productive use.

While most respondents emphasized the dangers and negative aspects of vacant land, a limited few exemplified instead the vacancy as asset ideology by stressing the idea that vacant land could also be a resource for future development or other opportunities. A representative from TPL clarified, for instance, that

the only good thing about vacant land is that you have a lot of possibilities, you could do something good about it.

Another representative from TPL also noted that “vacant lots could be a blank slate,” although what would be done with the land would be limited by “what’s actually on the site, what the neighbourhood wants, and what you want to do with it.” A community member also noted the potentially positive aspects of vacant land, suggesting that while “it can be a blight” it could also be “an opportunity” since blight could trigger action, meaning that vacant land “isn’t necessarily a bad thing.”

Similarly, other respondents espoused a contextualized concept of vacancy by suggesting that the meaning of vacant land shifts according to perspective rather than having one particular meaning

178 across contexts. A respondent working with a local Community Development Corporation exemplified this attitude when he said:

So vacant land to a developer might look different than it does to me. A developer, they see it as an opportunity. I see it potentially as an opportunity for maybe open space, they might see it as an opportunity for a building…So I think it’s different things to different people.

Perhaps the most interesting example of a respondent highlighting the contextual nature of vacancy was an older man I interviewed who worked for the State Parks Commission. He told me that:

I always find it interesting what people consider vacant land…Some people see woods as vacant lands. It’s like, no, that's a park…Some guy was complaining about the lots in the neighbourhood were vacant and that was bad because people see them as vacant lots. That’s like, no, that's open space. But they don’t want that, he thinks it should be housing or buildings or revenue…So it depends on your perspective…[Vacant land] is not a bad use of open space. It depends on how it’s used and what’s the form of use.

This quotation acknowledges the primacy of the economic model of land development that counts only “developed” land as productive and all other forms of use as “waste.”

While a recognition of vacant land as a resource or as contextually-specific are clearly different from the idea of vacant land as a problem, they nevertheless support the idea that vacant land should be put to better use, and thus continue to buttress the cultural strength of the planning ideology of highest and best use. All of these concepts of vacancy also reflect the common cultural and scholarly understanding of vacancy as delinked from histories and bodies that inhabit the spaces where vacant land is located. Indeed, across the spectrum of stakeholders, only three individuals mentioned in any way the politics of vacant land and its racialized aspects in a meaningful way. Two of these individuals, one male and one female, are black and elderly, and have been living in the inner city in Boston – one in Dorchester and one in Roxbury – for several decades. Both had also been actively involved in their communities for much of that time. When I inquired about the development of one of the first farms in Boston, located in close proximity to his neighbourhood group’s area, the elderly gentleman told me:

The farm used to be a big house. And we had some of the schools torn down because since urban renewal and school busing, urban renewal occurred in the late

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60s and 70s, and school busing took place in 1974. Some of the schools were torn down, so we had vacant land.

In this account, he clearly links the history of racist policies like urban renewal and forced school desegregation to the development of vacant land. Similarly, when I asked about gardening and farming in Dorchester, the elderly female resident I spoke with explained the history of dumping on vacant lots in Dorchester in the 1970s when garbage would regularly be disposed of from neighbouring areas. In protest, she joined a group of residents who gathered some of the mail that made up part of the garbage, and sent it back to the intended recipients in warning of their wrongdoing. She explained:

People shouldn’t have to live like that. And that’s what we had to do in order to get the place cleaned up, and this is twenty-five years later and the lot is still vacant, which is absolutely ridiculous.

Here, she clearly links the city’s neglect and their continued unwillingness to rectify those issues with the symbolic representation of those issues – the allowance of dumping on empty land in her neighbourhood. Within her account is also evident an outrage over this history, that her neighbourhood has literally experienced being “dumped on,” something that vacant lots have come to symbolize, both materially and ideologically, over time. This history is explored in depth in Medoff and Sklar’s (1993) book about Roxbury in the 1970s and 80s, which also portrays the community’s anti-dumping campaigns like that described by the respondent above. A third respondent, who was also a community member, spoke specifically about the history of vacant land in Boston, noting:

All the empty land that we have is pretty much where buildings used to be that were either torn down or burned down over the last forty or fifty years. And it’s… coupled with larger banking policies, political issues, over time the vacant land just became a part of the landscape in our neighbourhood.

4.3.2 Article 89 and Urban Farming as a New Programmatic Fix for Vacant Land

As suggested by the above quotations, many stakeholders express an understanding not only of the unproductivity of vacant land, but the ability for, and the importance of, “transform[ing] the lot into something productive.” Urban farming has become an important new way in which this productivity is to be actualized. Certainly, Article 89 is constructed as a strategy to open primarily city-owned vacant land to productive use, much of which has been lying vacant for

180 many years, often since the decades of inner city abandonment, tax foreclosure, and municipal stewardship of land. Mayor Menino told me, for instance, that “[Article 89] was a desire to turn vacant lots into productive pieces of the community. That’s what it was, honestly.” Similarly, a city councilor explained to me “that’s pretty much why they started [Article 89] in the first place…to get rid of these parcels and use them for farming.” This point is also underlined by the almost mythical story about the role of the “agropreneur” Glynn Lloyd in the birth of Article 89 to address vacant lots in the city discussed in the previous section of the chapter.

The ubiquity of this story and the central role that Lloyd has played as a consequence in the design and development of Article 89 also means that City Growers and the idealization of the independent and economically-driven for-profit farming model has set the agenda in terms of how urban farming has been imagined and rolled out in the city. Indeed, while both for-profit and non-profit businesses are possible under a commercial model of farming, there is clearly more support for economically viable business farming, echoing the emphasis placed on private developers in the City’s plans for the inner city. For example, a 2010 Boston Globe article proclaims:

The city of Boston owns significant quantities of vacant land – most of it in underprivileged neighborhoods like Mattapan, Dorchester, and Roxbury. The possibility that urban farmers could turn this land into thriving local businesses is one of the most exciting consequences of Article 89’s passage (Neyfakh, 2014).

Similarly, a handbook for farmers looking to start farms on city-owned plots of land states

[p]ublic officials are realizing that farming is an economically viable strategy for revitalizing neighbourhoods and managing vacant land and are beginning to establish formal processes to set up farm businesses in the inner city (Satzewich and Christensen, 2005).

These quotations clearly reflect the ideology of vacancy as asset, and the related emphasis placed on for-profit businesses means that organizations like City Growers have been recognized as the ideal developer of urban farms. Indeed, early in the development of urban farming in Boston, City Growers explicitly built their business model around the revitalization of vacant lots in the inner city. The company’s tagline is “Turning Vacant Lots into Urban Farms” (I have the tote bag to prove it), and the introduction page on its website inquires to the reader,

Would you believe that there are hundreds of acres of vacant land within Boston’s city limits? Imagine the positive impacts of converting many of these small

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abandoned spaces, one by one, into thriving green farms. That is City Grower’s [sic] vision.

The political climate at the time of Lloyd’s dream to grow lettuce on a vacant inner city lot in Roxbury also played a key role in the development of Article 89 as a strategy to return vacant lots to “higher and better” use. A community leader at Dudley Street Neighbors Inc. (DSNI), an organization with an interesting history and considerable involvement with urban farming in Boston, explained to me during our interview that Article 89 came about at a time when the city was becoming quite focused on the disposition of vacant land, as demonstrated more broadly by the City’s policies for the inner city districts of Boston. He told me that when the new director of the DND came on the scene, and in light of the fact that her predecessor hadn’t moved a substantial amount of vacant land off the City’s tax rolls,

she came in with a mandate like, I want to see things moving. And so there’s rumors about staff meetings at the Department of Neighbourhood Development now where she’ll come in and say, before we get started, has anyone done anything today to move anything off of the city land, off the rolls? No? You know what, let’s not do this meeting, why don’t you go off and do that.

He explained that this attitude towards vacant land was the result of a political shift that had impacted a “change of mindset and leadership” at the City level that would have vaguely coincided with the end of Menino’s twenty-three years as Boston’s longest running mayor, and the election of Marty Walsh in the fall of 2013. However, an employee of the DND responsible for the disposition of several of the vacant lots that have been converted to urban farms denied that there was anything especially timely about developing vacant land at the current moment, suggesting instead:

I think [the disposition of vacant land] has always been important. I just think it’s always the time, you know, we’ve got to make it important now, we’ve got to do something about it. It’s always been important and it always will be important. Like I said, we have 1400 parcels of land, that’s 1400 parcels of land that are underutilized and not being cared for the way that they should be…We’ve got to get these parcels back into productive use.

This quotation exhibits the kind of enumeration of vacant land that we often see municipalities engaging in, and in several of the quotations included in the discussion above from respondent interviews and media accounts there are comparable examples of the accounting of vacant land in the city. What is interesting and pertinent for this discussion is that the amount of vacant land

182 can be quite divergent from one account to another. The DND agent, for example, suggests there are 1400 parcels of city-owned vacant land, while the City Growers website suggests there are “hundreds of acres.” The Boston Globe (Harris and Lyon, 2013) enumerates more vaguely, proposing that the city owns “significant quantities” of vacant land, potentially because, as the authors acknowledge later in the article, “estimates in the aggregate of small vacant plots vary widely, from 600 to a few thousand acres” (n.p.).

The fact that reports of vacant land diverge so dramatically across stakeholders, and even that a widely-read newspaper would report estimates rather than absolute numbers supports the thesis that vacancy is not an ontological truth that can be objectively measured, but rather changes depending on who you ask. This echoes the comment by the Parks and Recreation agent who suggested that measurements of vacancy depend on what is included in definitions of “vacant land” – e.g. parks, woodland, open space, etc. Enumerations also vary widely depending on if only publicly-owned land is included, or if privately-held land is also counted. At least one city representative even suggested to me that entrepreneurs in support of urban farming and with the ear of the City and other stakeholders may knowingly overestimate the amount of vacant land in order to produce support for their projects. This individual exclaimed in an evidently infuriated tone that estimates of the amount of vacant land floated in the for-profit farming community had risen initially from 650 acres, then to 750, and finally to 900 acres of vacant land that could be used for urban farming.

Wide variations in counts of vacant land may partially be an effect of the fact that not all vacant lots are created equal, a topic explored in depth in Chapter 4 on community gardens. For example, while some plots of land utilized for urban farms are buildable for housing and other higher and better uses, some lots are considered unbuildable. Depending on the role and perspective of the individual doing the accounting, some may only include those lots that are buildable, while others (particularly if they are attempting to emphasize the size of the problem of vacant land in the city) may cast a much wider net and include all sorts of other types of empty land, both buildable and not. The reason for a lot to be considered by the City as undevelopable is often physical, such as being awkwardly shaped, too graded, too small, or having no road access (Perez et al., 2004). These reasons cannot be divorced from the modern principles of urban design and planning that govern land uses, however. For example, a DND official I spoke with explained that the primary reason for a lot being considered unbuildable by

183 the City is size, but when he explained further it became clear that size is actually more about constructing land usability based on local context than an absolute principle:

…[w]e have several hundred parcels that are between 2 and 4 thousand square feet which really aren’t big enough for housing, especially if you look into the neighbourhood context…and you have a lot of grand triple deckers, you know, large stately houses. And then you have a few small sites that just aren’t consistent, you’re not really going to be able to build on those sites in a way that’s consistent with the current context. You might build a farm on it though.

Article 89 can thus be seen as creating a new land market for previously unbuildable land in the city, and the enumeration of that land signals it as open for development by private business owners for for-profit farms.

A key to the creation of this new land market is the fact that, at least in the social imagination, Article 89 makes the process of building a farm easier and less prohibitive (the reality, of course, is not quite so simple; this will be explored in more depth in Chapter 6). For instance, a Boston.com article notes that the City’s move to “convert vacant city-owned lots into commercial urban farms” is “part of recently approved zoning that streamlined the process of developing farms in neighborhoods” (Rosso, 2014). In effect, Article 89 can make previously unbuildable land buildable and, like community gardening, urban farming can thereby assist in achieving the full and productive use of all plots of land in the city by constructing a use that does not have the same requirements of grading, openness, and size as does housing construction or other traditional development projects. It’s in this sense that the same DND official explained to me that

…urban farming can be a great answer to the vacant sites in the community and blight. If we can find a way to focus on sites that don’t have any other potential. Because if we can identify a site that has no other potential then it’s going to be stuck and a continual vacancy and blighted conditions. If we can find a way to focus urban ag on those sites then I think it will have a great impact.

On the part of farm developers, relying on access to otherwise unbuildable land for developing urban farms is a smart strategy since the municipality will grant access to unbuildable city- owned vacant land with considerable subsidies on its cost, just as it did during the earlier era of community gardening. A representative from the Trust for Public Land told me, for example, that “vacant city owned land [is] the low hanging fruit” for urban farms, often because the land is not considered to be usable for other developments. This means that the land is devalued by the

184 municipality, and potential farmers can access the land cheaply or even for free as a part of the push to develop the inner city of Boston.

Indeed, in order to be successful in accessing land, it is important that farm developers and business owners acknowledge the balancing act that the municipality is constantly engaging in as the inner city increasingly becomes the focus for the development of middle class housing. This highlights the extent to which the municipality is dealing with a new era of vacant land governance, since these neighbourhoods are increasingly subject to development pressures that mean that balancing housing and other types of development is key, and a constant challenge for the City. This issue was highlighted by the same representative from TPL when they described their strategy for getting access to subsidized land for farms:

… we don’t want to pay market rate for this land and the city owns so much land…And then the trick is to kind of match up the ones that are probably the best ones for farming with politically what the city and what the DND is willing to get rid of for a farm as opposed to housing.

Indeed, the City is clearly more readily willing to provision otherwise unbuildable lots as permanent farms under Article 89 rather than giving away land that would be ideal for farming. This fact illuminates the municipality’s strategy to employ urban farming as a way to address vacant land and to increase the productive use of its land, rather than as a method of urban sustainability or the amelioration of food deserts. The TPL agent highlighted this when he continued:

There’s huge pressure to take City owned parcels and use them for housing. So the reality is we’re probably never going to get the one acre perfectly flat beautiful site that would be great farms because they’re plum for housing. So we’re going to get little scrappier pieces and so that’s fine for now.

In terms of development, farms cost far less than other commercial or residential developments, which also increases their attractiveness for potential farm developers or business people. Indeed, one respondent who had been involved with the development of several urban farms in the city suggested to me that

…the good news is that the capital investment to turn that thing into a farm is really peanuts compared to the capital requirements for anything else.

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On the other hand, however, he also acknowledged that there was far more potential financial support for other types of development in comparison to farming, which could still make it a financial challenge:

Now the thing about turning it into housing is that there’s a million ways to get financing to turn vacant lots into housing and there’s not a million structures for how you get financing to turn it into a farm, that’s the challenge.

And indeed, as will be discussed in further depth in Chapter 6, the idea of urban farms as economically viable commercial land uses is largely a capitalist myth, with many for-profit farms struggling considerably to stay “in the black.”

While unbuildable land is prioritized by the City for the development of farms, in some cases land that is suitable for other higher and better developments has been provisioned for urban farms in Boston. This has occurred mostly when the City imagines that the land will eventually be utilized for housing, and so let the land be used for farming as an interim use. An agent who works at the BRA and was heavily involved with the development of Article 89 explained this state of affairs:

…these [farm] sites ultimately are supposed to be housing sites, and DND said, you know, that’s fine, we don’t think they’re going to be ready for housing for five or ten years so in the meantime we’ll put them out there for farming. That was the idea.

The organizations like Trust for Public Land that have raised money to develop farms in the city have also been able to persuade the City to recognize farms on otherwise buildable sites in a more long term way in exchange for the influx of development money on those sites. A TPL agent explained to me that a farm being temporary would be

…problematic for a group like Trust for Public Land which is going out and raising money, and it’s like well, we’re raising $40,000 to renovate something that’s going to be a farm for 2 years? That doesn’t make sense.

Though clearly not ideal for many investing in the development of urban farming, Article 89 actually makes it easier to utilize otherwise buildable plots of land as farms for short periods of time until houses or other higher and better developments are built. This is because prior to Article 89, a zoning variance for farming was needed in order to build a farm legally on a plot of land, meaning that the zoning would have to be returned to a residential or commercial use

186 before a house or other commercial development could be built there. This state of affairs similarly provides support for the idea that while Article 89 appears to demonstrate the City’s staunch support for urban farming in Boston, the ordinance has been imagined primarily as a programmatic fix for waste lands in racialized areas of the city.

5 Conclusion

This chapter laid the foundation for the work of deconstructing the development of Article 89 and urban farming in Boston. The evidence presented herein suggests that urban farming is not simply an innovative urban activity that pushes the boundaries of what has historically been acceptable within the urban milieu. Nor has it been envisioned primarily for the benefit of the low income racialized populations who live within proximity to the farms, although undoubtedly the City has relied on a widespread belief about the community benefits of urban farms in order to produce support for the project. Rather, the characterization of urban farming as a radical or innovative endeavour needs to be challenged and inflected with a more nuanced understanding of the historic and concurrent contexts within which urban farming has been designed and imagined. The discussion presented in this chapter demonstrates that rather than pushing against modern rationalities of city building, urban farming staunchly recapitulates both historic and modern logics underlying urban development, and highlights the shift to neoliberal urbanism and its integral relationship with the municipality’s desire to resolve uneven capital development within the urban milieu.

In the historic sense, urban farming reflects earlier logics of urban revitalization that underscored community gardening, occurring on a seemingly “soft” parcel-by-parcel scale of development but nevertheless accentuated by an understanding of racialized neighbourhoods of the city as problematic and needing intervention to return its “wasteland” to productive use. Indeed, urban farming is a new programmatic fix for vacant land that takes place in the identical spaces of the city as did community gardening before it, and is similarly understood as beneficial to the same populations while enabling the distribution of land and financial resources to urban elites and developers. In the modern sense, urban farming simultaneously expresses the growing emphasis placed on the development of the racialized and low income inner city as the last bastion of “underutilized” land in Boston.

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The interweaving of the now twin ideologies of vacancy-as-problem and vacancy-as-asset demonstrates the transitory state of these neighbourhoods as they grow from the historic “wasted” landscapes of revitalization and become reimagined as future spaces of ideal urban development. Article 89 participates in this vision by effectively creating a new land market by constructing a mode of development of unbuildable land, and thus the productive densification and sanitization of the inner city. The next chapter extends the work of this chapter to analyze the establishment of a growth coalition in Boston for the development and operation of commercial urban farms in the city.

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Chapter 6 City Growers, the Garrison-Trotter Farm, and Growth Coalition Farming in Boston

1 Introduction

Chapter 5 presented an analysis of Article 89 and the development of urban farming in the racialized low income neighbourhoods of Mattapan, Dorchester and Roxbury in Boston. I argued that Article 89 is an important aspect of the municipality’s plan to reimagine these spaces as dense “urban villages,” and ultimately heralds the desire of the City to sanitize and develop these areas for the middle class. This chapter analyzes the development and operation of the first urban farm in Boston that opened following the passage of Article 89, the Garrison-Trotter Farm, and the consequences for the local community of the current municipally-driven model of commercial urban farming. The Garrison-Trotter farm was the first to be developed via a partnership between national and local organizations – the Trust for Public Land (TPL), the City of Boston, the Urban Farming Institute (UFI), and Dudley Neighbors, Inc. (DNI) – that together constitute a significant growth coalition that has come to be a preferred developer for commercial ground-level urban farming businesses on vacant land in the inner city. While City Growers is not technically a partner in the growth coalition, they have contributed considerable resources to the cause and set the tone for the goals of the partnership in many ways; they are a partner “in action” rather than “on the books.” Due to this fact, I will consider City Growers to be a player in the growth coalition for ease of explanation throughout the remainder of the chapter.

The question of community benefit is important because farms like Garrison-Trotter are commonly thought to provide significant economic, social and environmental advantages to low income communities, and these claims bolster local and municipal support for the growth of the for-profit urban farming industry in inner city neighbourhoods. An abundance of existent literature celebrates the positive impacts of urban farming, including its ability to ameliorate food deserts and increase food security (Gudzune et al., 2015; Orsini et al.; 2014; Parece, et al., 2017), produce economic benefits for low income communities including jobs in the new “green

189 economy” (Franklin, 2016), mitigate the effects of climate change (Tienhaara, 2014), and even increase community empowerment and cohesion (Dubbeling et al., 2009; Smit and Bailkey, 2006; Obach and Tobin, 2014). As I will show, these imagined benefits are similarly reflected by the shared understanding of stakeholders in the urban farming industry in Boston. Further, urban farming’s ability to address some of the symptoms of social inequality – e.g. poor access to healthy food, unemployment, “wasted” urban land, etc. – means that it is often attributed the power to dismantle the foundations of social injustice more broadly. As Reynold’s (2015) has so insightfully suggested, however, “there is a distinction between alleviating symptoms of injustice…and disrupting social and political structures that underlie them” (243).

The analysis presented in this chapter illuminates Reynolds’ (2015) contention that, while urban farming can indeed have positive impacts on local communities and on the urban realm more broadly, urban farming may ultimately reinscribe class and race-based patterns of social and economic exclusion and inequality rather than challenging social injustice at the urban scale. In this chapter I argue that the municipality’s prioritization of urban farming as a tool for redeveloping the inner city as outlined in Chapter 5 means that the promise of urban farming for inner city communities has largely gone unrealized. Indeed, not only is there little evidence to suggest that ground-level farms in Boston have the power to, for example, ameliorate food deserts, create good jobs in the new “green economy,” or provision economic returns to the community, the development of urban farms has consequences that extend various social and economic exclusions for residents of the racialized low income neighbourhoods where urban farms are located.

Importantly, the belief held by a wide array of stakeholders that the legalization of urban farming via Article 89 will enable community members in low income racialized neighbourhoods of the city to develop urban farms and own their own farming businesses, despite evidence to the contrary, also demonstrates what might be called the “fetishism of zoning.” Fetishizing zoning entails an inordinate pressure placed on the tool of zoning, which is in fact a rather blunt instrument, to achieve a wide variety of challenging and often delicate social and economic outcomes associated with the sociospatial expression of the urban milieu. Such an understanding occurs, however, without a thorough consideration of the wide array of legal, political and economic contexts and policies beyond zoning that impact and constrict the actualization of those outcomes. The analysis presented in this chapter contributes to the urban planning and

190 sociolegal literatures by exploring the fetishism of zoning in the American context, and interrogating the limits of zoning for achieving social justice ends.

The chapter proceeds as follows. First I discuss the literature on urban farming, presenting both the celebratory and critical narratives of urban farms and identifying my contribution to the conversation. I then briefly discuss the concept of the fetishism of zoning within American urbanism, how it fits in with broader neoliberal urbanist characteristics, and begin to sketch its position with regards to Article 89 and the case study of urban farming in Boston. Next I provide an account of the groundbreaking ceremony of the Garrison-Trotter farm, illuminating the threads of analysis that will be carried through the rest of the chapter. I then move on to discuss the narratives of urban farms in Boston introduced in the previous section, highlighting the ways in which the celebratory tone regarding urban farming is reflected in shared understandings amongst stakeholders in urban farming. The last section analyzes the development and operation of the Garrison-Trotter Farm within the context of the growing urban farming sector in Boston. I emphasize the ways in which the prioritization of the Garrison-Trotter Farm as urban development that expresses the broader municipal goals of economic growth and sanitization of the inner city challenges the production of community benefit, and actually generates a variety of social and economic exclusions for local residents.

2 A Note on Sources

Like Chapter 5, this chapter draws largely on the semi-structured interviews that I conducted with a wide range of stakeholders in urban farming in Boston during 2013 and 2014. The chapter also draws on the ethnographic work that I conducted while working on the farms in Boston, and meeting notes from community and city meetings pertinent to urban farming in addition to documents collected from the City and local community and other organizations.

3 Urban Farming as Community Benefit?

The vast majority of literature on urban farming celebrates its many benefits, and its ability to address a wide variety of social, economic, and environmental problems (Cohen and Reynolds, 2014). For example, urban farming has been heralded for its capacity to increase access to fresh and healthy food (Gudzune et al., 2015; Orsini et al.; 2014; Parece, et al., 2017), and to enable public education about positive food and nutrition practices (Hanson et al., 2012; Allen et al.,

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2008). Urban farms can assist in developing and maintaining green spaces in increasingly urbanized global cities (Contesse et al., 2018), and play a role in mitigating climate change and other problematic impacts of population growth and urbanization (Thornbush, 2015). The progression of jobs and training in the new “green economy” are also often linked to urban farming projects, underscoring the idea that both the financial and environmental crises can be mitigated concomitantly (Tienhaara, 2014). The amelioration of vacant land is, of course, also considered to be a major benefit of urban farming, which can invite capital and shift unproductive land into taxable property (Voicu and Been, 2006; Kaufman and Bailkey, 2000; Hodgson et al., 2011). As a result, various barriers to urban farming have been met with a proliferation of “how to” books for urban farmers, practitioners, community members and others designed to overcome challenges and build the sector (e.g. Hanson et al., 2012; Hodgson et al, 2011; Kaufman and Bailkey, 2000).

Many of these benefits are understood to occur at the local level, and urban farming has been characterized as a local response to crises of capitalism occurring on the global scale (McClintock, 2010). As a result, urban farms are often considered to bring a diversity of tangible benefits to the low income communities where they are generally located. Beyond increased access to fresh and healthy food and the potential amelioration of food deserts, urban farms have been linked with the augmentation of community capacity and engagement in low income communities (Dubbeling et al., 2009; Smit and Bailkey, 2006; Obach and Tobin, 2014). Jobs and training in the green economy are similarly understood to have particular benefits for residents of low income communities, particularly working-poor and low-skilled workers experiencing chronic under- and unemployment (Franklin, 2016; Tienhaara, 2014). The potential growth of the local economy due to the proliferation of urban farms is an important aspect of the understanding of urban farms as catalysts for community economic development. As Vitiello and Wolf-Powers (2014) argue, however, the economic benefits of urban farming are the least well- evidenced. Rather, “softer” benefits for the community, including place-making, increasing human and social capital, and supplemental income generation should be highlighted (Vitiello and Wolf-Powers, 2014).

The celebratory tone that surrounds urban farming regularly emphasizes the idea of urban farming as a “movement” sweeping the United States (Myers and Sbicca, 2015; Reynolds, 2015; Hanson et al., 2012) that has the potential to “[profoundly transform] the way America views

192 urban development and food systems” (Hanson et al., 2012: 16). Further, the movement is viewed as able to galvanize relevant political activism (e.g. Eizenberg, 2012), as well as to forever change how residents of cities think about and interact with the urban environment (e.g. McClintock, 2010). Entrenched within this idea of urban farming as a movement is a political quality that emphasizes the potential empowerment of low income communities that echoes at times the narratives of community gardening as bottom up “urban renewal.” Hanson et al. (2012) draw on imagery of the deteriorated inner city to produce a positive vision of urban farming, for example, highlighting the vines “creeping across vacant lots” and “[engulfing] trees and abandoned buildings” that “reflect[] the unraveling of a community’s fabric” (10).

In recent years, there has also been a growing proliferation of scholarship that is much more critical of urban farming and its benefits. For instance, studies have shown that while urban farms may help to produce food within low income urban neighbourhoods, residents may experience access challenges due to location of sales or price point, or may not find what is on offer appealing or suitable for their dietary needs or requirements (e.g. Poulsen, 2017). Access to fresh food in low income neighbourhoods is only one aspect of addressing food insecurity, and farms, just like grocery stores, may not alleviate injustice and food access issues if they do not produce good jobs (Myers and Sbicca, 2015). There are reasons to doubt whether urban farming has the capacity to produce sustainable jobs with good wages, however, as most urban farming jobs, like those within the broader agricultural sector, are seasonal, temporary, low-paid, and have little chance of upward mobility (Kaufman and Bailkey, 2000). This suggests that, while urban farming is often seen as an integral part of the new “green economy,” jobs on urban farms may not qualify as “green-collar,” which Gordon and Hays (2008) suggest are high-quality and long-term, offer a family-supporting wage, and opportunities for promotion. Indeed, the positive economic aspects of urban farms for low income communities are questionable at best, and even community capacity building through urban farming can be a challenge considering the lack of real community engagement in any private urban development projects (Kaufman and Bailkey, 2000; Vitiello and Wolf-Powers, 2014).

Challenges to the existence of community benefits may be a consequence of the fact that urban farming has been highlighted as an aspect of the neoliberalization of urban space (McClintock, 2014). Urban farming demonstrates, for instance, the role that non-profit organizations and NGOs have adopted under neoliberalism to fill the gaps created by the rolling back of the social

193 welfare net, and are an expression of the “neoliberal discourses of personal responsibility and market-based solutions” to non-market problems (McClintock, 2014: 149); we will clearly see these dynamics at work within the story of the Garrison-Trotter farm and the development of the urban farming sector in Boston in this chapter. If urban farms are actually manifestations of modern capitalist development rather than a reaction or resistance to it, it follows that structural forms of social and economic inequality characteristic of the neoliberal era may similarly be expressed within the diverse contexts and characteristics of urban farming developments. Indeed, while the positive impacts of urban farming have led to an overarching recognition of its social justice implications amongst some camps, “there is a distinction between alleviating symptoms of injustice…and disrupting social and political structures that underlie them” (Reynolds, 2015: 243). In other words, there is nothing inherently just about urban farming, even if it done within a particular mode of production, location, or business model. As Reynolds (2015) explains,

even the most well-intentioned initiatives may exist within, and reinforce unjust systems, and without attention to the oppressive structures that lead to social inequities, urban agriculture may perpetuate or even reinforce the injustices that practitioners and supporters aim to address (243).

Issues with access to food and beneficial employment for low income communities are potentially an expression of this dynamic, as are the relations and politics of race entrenched not only within broader society, but the urban farming sector as well.

For instance, racial disparities and subsequent power hierarchies within the urban farming movement have been highlighted (Cohen et al., 2012; Cohen and Reynolds, 2014; Ramirez, 2015), as have the predominance of white gardeners and farmers in neighbourhoods of colour and at farmers markets, suggesting the existence of farms and farmers markets as “white” spaces within otherwise black and Latino places (Meenar and Hoover, 2012; Hoover, 2013; Guthman, 2008a, 2008b). The assumption of whiteness of farmers and others within the urban farming and alternative food movements and the “colour blind” mentality that accompanies it may negatively impact the participation of communities of colour within related farming and food spaces (Guthman, 2008b). While this research clearly points to the existence of “white privilege” within the urban farming movement (Reynolds, 2015), the movement itself may regularly ignore these disparities in power across racial and class divides in favour of highlighting the benefits of urban farming like those outlined above (Myers and Sbicca, 2015). Further, urban farming movements

194 engaged in by white people on behalf of people of colour risk exacerbating the very systems of inequality that they attempt to fight against (Passidomo, 2014). In this sense, urban farming and its social relations parallel the community gardening movement, which, as I argued in Chapter 4, is similarly characterized by white privilege and the paternalism of engagement on behalf of people of colour. Urban farming may thus similarly reinscribe the foundations of settler colonialism for communities of colour (Safransky, 2014).

Despite McClintock’s (2014) recent call for a more complex scholarly treatment of urban farming that appreciates its contradictions as inherent and unavoidable, much of the literature continues to be somewhat simplistically celebratory or critical of urban farming. Optimistic studies about the diverse benefits of urban farming undoubtedly overwhelm the literature, however, and have influenced a sustained conception of urban farming as socially just and as contributing positively to “community food security, public health, and environmental justice” (Reynolds, 2015: 242). Indeed, urban farming and other forms of urban greening are regularly treated as a kind of “panacea” for urban problems (Lawson, 2005), and there is a significant dearth of “real politics” surrounding urban farming and other forms of urban sustainability (Swyngedouw, 2013). There is certainly much that remains unknown about the question of urban farming, and the extent to which it has the potential to challenge, or to reinscribe, patterns of social, economic, political, and racial inequality remains an open question that necessitates further study. The remainder of this chapter focuses on examining this topic within the context of urban farming as neoliberal urban development.

4 Article 89 and the Fetishism of Zoning

As I will show in this chapter, an important aspect of urban farming as neoliberal urban development in the Boston context is the primacy of Article 89 for stakeholders’ optimistic beliefs about the availability of farming and farm ownership for low income and racialized residents of the city. What might be called the “fetishism of zoning” can be utilized to ideologically resolve what are entrenched race- and class-based patterns of economic and social opportunities, and exemplifies an attitude of legal formalism that dominates mainstream ideas

195 about law.1 Legal formalism treats law as an impersonal system of rules that is objective and by which, through application of the correct legal principles and procedures, “truth” is uncovered. Law itself is thereby fetishized as an autonomous subject itself rather than an object that is in fact constructed by autonomous subjects (Balbus, 1973). In this sense, the law takes on a life of its own, is rendered seemingly politically neutral, and seen as acting upon society rather than being a product of society itself. An analysis of Article 89 following a legal formalist framework may suggest the potential for Article 89 to transform the urban landscape, opening new possibilities for economic prosperity and property ownership for relatively impoverished populations in the city. Further, the common sense nature of legal formalism in American society helps to account for the prioritization of this narrative regarding Article 89 and urban farming in Boston.

The fetishism of zoning more specifically as a particular type of administrative legal apparatus is a common characteristic of North American urbanism, and originates partially because zoning is regularly regarded as a powerful planning tool that has had enormous impacts on the urban form over the last hundred or so years. Indeed, Hirt (2013) suggests that “most urban development control in the United States has been exercised through functional or use zoning” (204). Fischel (2004) points out that zoning became increasingly favoured by homeowners in single-family neighbourhoods in the 1910s to 30s – the land use most aggressively protected by zoning ordinances historically – to ensure that businesses and apartments did not decrease the value of their homes. Though restrictive covenants existed prior to the decision of Euclid v. Ambler (1926) that supported the constitutionality of municipal zoning, covenants were often seen by residents as offering limited protection from incompatible uses because they did not protect land that edged covenanted developments (Fischel, 2004). Zoning was thus initially adopted to exclude certain uses from single-family residential areas, and was thought to proffer greater power to municipalities than other planning tools alone to achieve these ends. From its inception, then, zoning was awarded priority status within the realm of urban planning.

Since home ownership is undeniably patterned by race and class, exclusionary zoning has had large impacts on the racialization of space in the urban milieu. Indeed, restrictive zoning that prioritizes single-family dwellings has been utilized historically to enable and maintain racial

1 This attitude exemplifies Ewick and Silbey’s (1998) legal schema “before the law” explored in their book A Common Place of Law.

196 segregation by, for instance, influencing racialized patterns of suburbanization throughout the middle decades of the twentieth century, as discussed in Chapter 3 (Manning Thomas and Ritzdorf, 1997). Restrictive covenants were similarly racialized, and were regularly used to restrict the sale of residential property to African American and Jewish populations; unsurprisingly, the case that upheld the constitutionality of racially restrictive covenants, Corrigan v. Buckley, was decided in 1926, the same year as Euclid (Ibid.).

Though zoning has been praised for its ability to organize the urban realm in efficient and economically valuable ways (Boyer, 1983), it has also been criticized for a myriad of environmental, social and economic issues that it has brought to American cities (Hirt, 2013). For instance, zoning has been blamed for driving urban and suburban sprawl by limiting people’s choice of residence (Fischel, 1999), and thus mandating car travel and creating pollution, as well as “producing aesthetically deficient, cookie-cutter environments” (Hirt, 2013: 210). Although zoning was originally intended to produce the separation of uses and populations (Fischel, 2004), in modern cities such separation by class (Frug, 1996) and race (Silver, 1997; Manning Thomas and Ritzdorf, 1997) is seen as problematic. As a result, some innovative forms of urban organization have been developed to replace restrictive zoning, and “mixed use” principles of design have become increasingly favoured as a part of “Smart Growth” (Grant, 2006; Talen, 2009a, 2009b). Nevertheless, Hirt (2013) suggests that the system of zoning that has predominated in the US for the last hundred years has yet to be fundamentally challenged or changed in practice. Indeed, rather than eliminating zoning entirely, it has even been proposed as the antidote to exclusionary developments and the answer to the affordability housing crisis (Lerman, 2006). In this sense, zoning still reigns supreme as a key tool for urban planning and the organization of the urban realm according to the most efficient and productive land uses.

To the extent that the academic discussion about zoning has generally emphasized zoning as an enormously influential tool in the urban planning arsenal, zoning can be said to be fetishized within American urban planning circles and society more broadly. Yet it is also evident that there are numerous policies and practices that contribute to the construction of urban space that go far beyond zoning. For example, in her book Everyday Law on the Street, Valverde (2012) uses the example of one street corner in Toronto to explore the layered, contradictory, and complex nature of laws, policies, and practices that apply to and act upon urban spaces, and that help to account for their spatial expression and organization. A pertinent example for this dissertation of

197 the complex ways in which urban space becomes organization over time is the racial segregation of American cities. As discussed at length in Chapter 3, racial segregation has been actualized over the course of the twentieth and into the twenty-first century by a wide array of policies and practices at the federal, state and municipal level, as well as by the financial sector, developers, and the education system, amongst others. The entrenchment of racism within and across institutions in society accounts for the racialization of urban space, an outcome that cannot be accounted for entirely via zoning practices.

The fact that there are locations that have never utilized zoning, such as Houston, TX (Qian, 2011), as well as places in the world where zoning was done away with decades ago, as in the case of England which eliminated zoning after WWII (Hirt, 2013), also provides support for the fetishistic outlook regarding zoning in most American cities. These locales are nevertheless arranged by local governments via master plans, the promotion of mixed-use developments and public-private partnerships, tax increment financing zones, land assembly tools, and ad hoc policies to govern the use of particular spaces, amongst others (Qian, 2011).

As I will show in this chapter, just as zoning is not the only law, policy, or practice that shapes the urban milieu, it is also problematic to believe that zoning is a significant answer to challenges within the neoliberal urban city. Indeed, there are a myriad of other bureaucratic and political structures beyond zoning that contribute to the entrenchment of social and economic inequalities within urban space and society more broadly. Just as Reynolds (2015) argues about urban farming, we must understand law as existing within and expressing broader economic, social and political realities, rather than existing outside of or necessarily challenging them.

5 Breaking Ground at the Garrison-Trotter Farm

The first urban farm in Boston to launch after the passing of Article 89, the Garrison-Trotter Farm, officially opened in July 2014 but did not begin operations until later that fall (Figure 6.1). Garrison-Trotter is located on a previously vacant lot on Harold Street in Roxbury about twelve thousand square feet in size where two triple decker houses once stood side-by-side (Figure 6.2).

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Figure 6.1 The Garrison-Trotter farm, Summer 2015.

Figure 6.2 The vacant lot on Harold Street that would become the Garrison-Trotter farm, July 2014.

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Both houses burned down at the height of municipal divestment in the area in the early 1970s, likely by arson, and resulted in the demolition of the properties by the municipality shortly thereafter. Harold Street is a residential street lined with classic Boston triple-deckers and large old-growth trees in the heart of an area of Roxbury known as the “H Block,” named for a collection of local streets that start with the letter H – Harold, Humboldt, Harrishof, Holworthy. The H Block is a part of Boston that has been known for its gun violence since the 1980s, the result of a decades long gang war between the H Block Gang and their two rivals, the Heath Street Gang based in nearby Jamaica Plain, and a gang from Orchard Park in Roxbury (Harmon, 2013). As discussed in Chapter 5, the neighbourhood of Roxbury is one of the most racialized and lowest income areas in Boston, and about 80% of its population is non-white (black and Hispanic) while the per capita household income is about half of Boston’s as a whole (Boston Planning and Development Agency, 2017). The name “Garrison-Trotter” was chosen as a nod to the local Garrison-Trotter neighbourhood association, which in turn picked their name to signify the pre-eminence of two historic figures in the fight for African American emancipation in the United States, William Lloyd Garrison and William Monroe Trotter. The Garrison-Trotter Farm’s name thereby signifies both the support of the local community in its development, as well as the promise of the farm in catalyzing the (political, social, economic) liberation of the local black community.

While Roxbury continues to be widely recognized as one of the most economically and socially distressed neighbourhoods in Boston, in the past decade or so it has also become the focus for various municipal policies designed to attract new residents and developments to the area, and to redesign the neighbourhood as a densely-populated, well-connected “urban village” in the city. As suggested in Chapter 5, some of the focus on Roxbury in recent years is a result of the fact that it is the location for much of the land that has been identified by the municipality and other stakeholders as “underutilized.” Indeed, the area is known for its vacant land, and the vacant lot on Harold Street that eventually became the Garrison-Trotter farm is the very lot that inspired the owner of City Growers to initiate the development of Article 89 in the first place in order to grow lettuce for his catering business, City Fresh Foods. Garrison-Trotter was the first farm subsequently developed via the partnership between the Trust for Public Land (TPL), the City of Boston, the Urban Farming Institute (UFI), and Dudley Neighbors, Inc. (DNI). TPL received the land from the Department of Neighborhood Development (DND), raised funds for the farm, and

200 then managed the design and construction of the farm. The property was then transferred to the DNI land trust, and farm operations were managed by UFI with plans for City Growers to be the eventual operator of the farm. Rather than becoming a City Growers farm, however, Garrison- Trotter is currently utilized as a training farm for UFI farm trainees. But City Growers remains a kind of behind-the-scenes partner, influencing the tone of the partnership and many aspects of farm construction and operation despite not being a growth coalition partner “on the books.”

The groundbreaking ceremony for the Garrison-Trotter farm happened on a bright and sunny day in early July 2014, just after I had begun volunteering for City Growers. The ceremony is an excellent place to start to highlight many of the celebratory narratives about urban farms, as well as the complicated land and community politics that lay beneath the event, both literally and figuratively. Indeed, the ceremony was a physical event as much as it was a symbolic one, an event that was both a window into the realities of the individuals and communities who were present, as much as a demonstration of the ambiguity and conflict within them (Manning, 1984).

In preparation for the groundbreaking, I had been working to ready the site for the event for several days alongside a group of ten young people who were enrolled in the farmer training program run by the Urban Farming Institute that summer. Although the trainees were officially registered with UFI, they spent some of their training hours each week working at City Growers sites, highlighting the informal interconnections between the two organizations. I showed up to meet the trainees at the large vacant lot on Harold Street just days before the groundbreaking, and we proceeded to dig and rake into the dirt to remove what seemed like endless debris and garbage from the site. A backhoe had been rented to remove some of the larger pieces of debris buried deep in the soil – the partial remains of the houses that once stood on the site but which, according to City records, had burned down in the early 1970s and were demolished by the City shortly thereafter, leaving behind two large craters in the earth. A large garbage bin had also been rented and placed on one end of the site to contain the debris (Figure 6.3).

The other debris on the site consisted of thirty-plus years of leaves and other organic matter, and a variety of objects, some of which seemed rather predictable – a baseball, liquor bottles, even a syringe – and others that seemed out of place – a cassette tape, a book. These objects seemed to tell the history of this space in a rather eloquent way. The trainees and I did the work of removing the smaller debris with gloves covering our hands and little other protection, or even

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Figure 6.3 Debris from the Garrison-Trotter site, with UFI farm trainees in the background.

without gloves at all. On the first day of work, after a few hours of shoving waste into large black garbage bags, I looked down at my arms to discover they were covered with a fine dusting of fiberglass insulation. It was challenging and somewhat disquieting work, and gave me a window into Roxbury’s past in a more material way than I had had up to that point in my research. The work also provided me, like the other farming work that I did in Boston, with an interesting foil to the bureaucratic and legal processes of governing land, highlighting the parallel reality of the physical dimension of land and of farming. And, just as the bureaucratic process of building a farm can at times seem like navigating a labyrinth, I remember feeling overwhelmed by the sheer enormity of transforming the site into a working farm.

Indeed, when I showed up to the site just days before the groundbreaking, I wondered how we would ever complete the work needed to make the site presentable before the event. While the point of the ceremony was to officially open the first farm launched after the passing of Article 89 and to celebrate the blooming of the urban farming sector in Boston with the help of this new legal infrastructure, the site was far from farm-ready, even on the day of the groundbreaking. In fact, as I assisted the farm trainees to physically rehabilitate the land over the course of those three days, it became clear that the groundbreaking was more a symbolic event than it was about

202 opening the farm, and some of the work was rushed to accommodate the timing of the event and the exhibition of the site to the politicians, community, and public who had a stake in farming in the city.

On the day of the groundbreaking, I arrived at the site on Harold Street around midday along with several of the farm trainees. We had been working that morning to fill small plastic bags with salad mix from one of several City Growers farm sites in Dorchester to give away at the ceremony to those in attendance, to showcase the fruits of the labour of urban farming. Though just the day before the site had looked more like an empty lot than an urban farm, the site was now leveled with pale brown woodchips that filled in the twin chasms in the land left behind by the demolished houses, sanitizing the site, both physically and symbolically, with one fell swoop. The backhoe that had been used to remove the burned remains of the houses and to distribute the woodchips had been positioned at the rear of the site with a banner that read “Trust for Public Land – Land for People” on its side (Figure 6.4). The banner seemed to validate the participation of the organization in the transformation of the site while simultaneously legitimizing the project as one undertaken by an organization with the financial resources and knowledge to successfully

Figure 6.4 The Trust for Public Land backhoe and the shovels in a line of fresh soil at the groundbreaking ceremony.

203 bring the farm to life. There was a large white tent that had been erected in the middle of the site with a variety of informational posters, large pots of flowers, and rows of folding chairs set up under it. At the front stood a wooden Boston City podium, also seeming to legitimize the site itself as well as the event. Behind the tent was a long pile of fresh soil nearly a foot deep with about ten brand new shiny shovels dug into it and standing erect with their handles directed to the blue sky above us.

The trainees and I arrived at the site as the set up for the event was still occurring, and I watched as the newest farm site in Boston became occupied with many of the voices and faces of urban farming in Boston come to celebrate the spectacle of the Garrison-Trotter farm: representatives from the organizations involved in the development partnership for building the farm (TPL, DNI, UFI, the City of Boston and, of course, City Growers); community members; local and state government representatives; media; and many others interested in the growth of urban farming in the City. Over the course of the next hour or so, the site became packed to the brim with excited revelers. Many of these individuals were dressed in formal attire despite finding themselves at a farm site, which, in combination with the white tent, shiny shovels, podium, and presence of politicians, lent the entire event an air of officiousness. It was quite a drastic contrast to the rough-and-tumble work of rehabilitating the site in the days leading up to the event.

As the ceremony got underway, a representative from TPL was the first to speak. He took to the podium and announced the event as the crowd quieted down, then triumphantly held a piece of paper aloft, announcing it as the first permit to be issued for an urban farm in the City under Article 89 (Figure 6.5). As he raised the seemingly ordinary single piece of crumpled paper in the air, the audience erupted in thunderous cheers and applause. This moment underscored rather poetically the ways in which, even in the digital age, paper continues to exist as a material expression of governance and bureaucracy (Hull, 2012). The moment also stressed the fetishism of zoning as a powerful tool of government and as a means, in the case of urban farming, to maximize capitalist utilization and occupation of urban land.

Mayor Walsh then took to the podium, highlighting a variety of the imagined community benefits of urban farming in the City: “healthy” jobs, the reclamation of vacant land, community development, access to healthy food in communities often challenged by poor health outcomes, the creation of “food entrepreneurs,” and increased food knowledge (Figure 6.6). Like the

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Figure 6.5 A representative from the Trust for Public Land presenting the permit for the Garrison-Trotter Farm.

Figure 6.6 Mayor Walsh at the groundbreaking ceremony.

205 speakers who followed, Walsh peppered his speech with farming metaphors to stress his points, suggesting, for instance, that farming would give neighbourhood children the opportunity to become farmers, and that urban farming could help them to “plant the seeds” of their lives. He also offered anecdotes about the place of gardens in the lives of average Americans, and the power of urban growing to change lives. This tone echoed in many ways the paternalistic vision of community gardens as bottom up “urban renewal” with the power to solve the problems of the inner city with dirt and elbow grease. Walsh also emphasized the importance of community engagement and partnerships between urban farms and the community, without whom, he suggested, urban farming would have been impossible to realize. Representatives from UFI, community members, and several urban farmers also spoke, similarly highlighting the positive impacts of urban farms on the inner city including the general health of the neighbourhood, increased access to fresh produce, and the ability of urban farms to address the problem of vacant land. The entire event had a celebratory mood, with many of the speeches showered with shouts and cheers from the audience.

After the speakers were done, many of them joined the Mayor, several key players in state and municipal politics, and community and farming representatives at the back of the site where the shovels stood at attention in the pile of fresh soil. They each grabbed one of the shovels, counted to three and then threw the dirt up in the air like they were literally “breaking the ground” of the farm (Figure 6.7). Everyone in attendance cheered and clapped and took lots of pictures. This moment in particular seemed to symbolize the imagination of the widespread support for urban farming shared across political and social divides, as owners of for-profit corporations stood shoulder-to-shoulder with bureaucrats, farmers and even Mel King himself, one of the local heroes of the black community in Boston. The group repeated this performance several times so that everyone could get a good picture, with the “Trust for Public Land” bulldozer in the background. The event came to an end fairly shortly thereafter, with the remainder of the event spent in excited conversation amongst the attendees.

Not everyone at the groundbreaking was so impressed, however, and there were instances at the event when undercurrents of tension momentarily surfaced. As I stepped out of the car in arrival for the event, for instance, one of the farm trainees, a young black man from Dorchester named Terrell, questioned wryly under his breath, “you want a side of gentrification with your salad mix?” Surprised, I asked him, “is that what you think is happening here?” to which he replied,

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Figure 6.7 “Breaking the ground” at Garrison-Trotter.

“it’s what I know is happening.” Later, as the event was ending, Terrell commented to me that the event had been “another day, another 25 cents,” showcasing his frustration with the low wages he was receiving via the farmer trainee program, and which will be explored in more depth later in the chapter. (Notably, Terrell was the only trainee to drop out of the training program later that summer.) During the event, I chatted with a young white man named Fred who worked with a local composting company whose owner and operator had been hired by UFI and TPL to plan the outlay of the farm site. I asked him what he thought of the event, and Fred explained to me that while he was really excited about the potential of urban farming, he was also waiting to see evidence that it was actually as wondrous as many in the community seemed to think. He also suggested under his breath that the photo op moment was a chance for politicians like the mayor and state representatives to put a “feather in their cap” by publicly performing their support of urban farming, particularly since it is widely considered particularly beneficial for low income racialized communities. These moments occurred alongside the celebratory overtones of the event, yet only in whispered tones, suggesting the lack of real opportunities to interrogate the reality of urban farming. Indeed, I found on that day, and during my time investigating urban farming in Boston more generally, that it seemed almost taboo to

207 directly question the idea that urban farming was exclusively advantageous to inner city communities.

6 Narratives of Urban Farming in Boston

The benefits of urban farming that surfaced repeatedly at the groundbreaking ceremony for the Garrison-Trotter farm clearly parallel those found in the celebratory literature discussed above. The purpose of this section is to delve into more detail regarding how urban farms and their benefits to low income racialized communities in Boston have been imagined by the urban farming community. An excerpt drawn from a guide to Article 89 developed by the BRA in 2014, for example, highlights many of the significant aspects of the narrative of urban farms in Boston:

Urban agriculture holds the promise of boosting food access in Boston’s underserved communities, providing new opportunities for local business growth, and developing knowledge and education about healthy eating. Urban farms in Boston can be a source of fresh produce for neighborhoods, local restaurants and shops, as well as an opportunity for community-supported enterprises to fill valuable educational and social roles. The practices addressed in Article 89 allow Boston residents to grow and access healthy foods while ensuring farming activities remain compatible with their urban surroundings (BRA, 2014: 5).

6.1 Access to “Local” Food

One of the primary benefits linked by scholars as well as those in the farming community in Boston with urban farms is increased access to local, fresh produce. The neighbourhoods in Boston where urban farms are located are characterized by low access to fresh and healthy food options like produce and meat, and are sometimes referred to as “food deserts,” defined as any urban location where 500 people or at least 33 percent of the population within a census tract lives more than one mile from a large grocery store or supermarket (ANA, 2010). Roxbury, for example, has approximately 0.4 grocery stores per 1000 population, less than the 0.6 grocery stores per 1000 population of Boston as a whole, and considerably less than the 0.11 grocery stores per 1000 population in the Back Bay, one of the wealthiest and whitest neighbourhoods in the city (ICIC, 2015). Urban farms in Boston are thought to assist in addressing this issue and to increase “local” access to fresh and healthy produce. The idea of special benefits of “local” food for low income communities has been exemplified in numerous national-level programs

208 designed to increase access to healthy food in impoverished urban areas where rates of diet- related diseases continue to skyrocket (Lightner, 2011). The late Mayor Menino emphasized the food-related benefits of urban farming for low-income neighbourhoods in particular during our interview when he explained that

a lot of these folks, they have more heart attacks in low socioeconomic neighborhoods because they all eat junk food, they’re overweight…It’s the diet. By having these Article 89 things it helps us get more distribution of healthy vegetables, I think.

The narrative link between urban farms and food is clear, and this sentiment is featured in many of the documents, discussions, and events relevant to Article 89 and urban farming in Boston. The initiation of the process to develop Article 89 came on the heels of the creation of a food policy council in Boston, and one of the central municipal agencies originated to integrate urban farms and farming practices into the city was dubbed the “Office of Food Initiatives.” An annual celebration of agriculture across Massachusetts including urban farming led by the Massachusetts Department of Agricultural Resources (MDAR) is called “Food Day.” Many stakeholders that I interviewed also referenced the important food-related benefits that the farms would have. For example, a representative from TPL described farms as “food-creating plot[s] of land,” and at the Garrison-Trotter groundbreaking ceremony many in attendance discussed the way in which access to “local” food would increase after the farm was in full production (Rosello, 2014). A Boston Globe article reflected the promise of “local” food accessible to the community, suggesting that the owners of the farms “whoever they turn out to be…will put up farm stands where they’ll sell fresh, affordable, and nutritious produce to neighbors” (Neyfakh, 2014). Similarly, in a televised interview about the development of urban farming in Boston, representatives from TPL and the Department of Neighborhood Development (DND) who were heavily involved in building the Garrison-Trotter Farm – two individuals we will be hearing from again later in the chapter, and who we’ll call David and John, respectively, for narrative simplicity – maintain that urban farming would “bring healthy food back to the communities to make it more accessible” (video available at Boroyan, 2014).

Importantly, “local” food is understood to have special benefits for low income communities, and there is a way in which an assumption is made that more produce being grown automatically means better food access for underserved communities. A blog post published by a young man

209 who had visited Garrison-Trotter farm nearing the end of its first full growing season exemplifies this assumption, and he suggests that

When you think of all the empty lots you come across in the city and how they could be turned into small urban farms to feed people with no or little access to fresh food, the benefits of urban farming are obvious and necessary (Sager, 2015).

Similarly, a report on urban farming in Boston published by Leading Cities in 2014 indicates that a farming operation in Somerville that assists individuals and corporations to grow on their own land, Green City Growers, has alone

grown over 175,000 pounds of organic produce over less than 2 acres of land combined… Therefore, if 14.9% of Suffolk County residents are food insecure, or 117,000 individuals, just 1.6% of Boston’s 57,363 acres of land would be needed to meet the needs of at-risk Bostonians…Considering Boston’s 2,600 vacant lands, urban agriculture can do a great deal to assuage food insecurity… (8)

These resources equate the production of more food in general with more food specifically for underserved communities, an understanding that forms an important part of the narrative of urban farms.

The BRA’s guide excerpted above also proposes that an important aspect of urban farming’s food-related benefits is the attainment of education and knowledge relevant to healthy eating and farming. Food researchers have repeatedly recognized knowledge about food as a barrier to increased consumption of healthy food in low-income neighbourhoods (Lightner, 2011), and it is an important feature of the ideology of urban growing that has long-accompanied various “greening” activities including community gardening. For example, the non-profit company The Food Project, the first organization to build several urban farms in Boston in the 1990s, was designed to engage youth growing up in low-income racialized neighbourhoods in Boston’s inner city in urban agricultural practices to teach them about social responsibility and how to “build a sustainable food system” (Borisova, 2005: 1). Also reflecting the idea of farming as educational, a City Growers report (2012) suggests that through urban farming,

both young and old can obtain a broader knowledge base about the challenges, rewards, obstacles, and community benefits of transitioning unused urban space into viable farm land (2).

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6.2 Training and Jobs

Tangential to the benefit of education is that of urban farming as an important source of job training. As a BRA representative suggested at the BRA meeting to petition the Zoning Board to pass Article 89, an important benefit of urban farming is the ability for “citizens [to] learn new skills and trades,” and, as maintained by a DND employee, to “create jobs and give opportunities to folks who would like to get into farming” (transcript from televised interview available at Boroyan, 2014). In consideration of this idea, UFI was founded specifically with job training in mind, and has taken on ten to twelve farm trainees like those I worked alongside in the summer of 2014 over the last several years to train in the art and science of farm practice and management. This training program positions those who participate, mostly under- and unemployed youth from Boston’s inner city neighbourhoods, for jobs in the new “green economy” (Franklin, 2016) and as potential “agropreneurs” with hopes of eventually owning their own land and small farming businesses. Several of the farm trainees I spoke with suggested that they had plans to one day own and operate their own farms.

The potential for farm trainees or even community members to attain relevant education and to eventually build their own urban farms is purported to be the growth of a new industry (City Growers, 2012) that draws on skills that aren’t traditionally of use in cities (Neyfakh, 2014). Several stakeholders I spoke with pointed out that those with the most opportunity to benefit from jobs in the new “green” economy were those in the process of learning such untraditional agricultural skills – the farm trainees – or newcomer immigrant populations from countries with largely agrarian economies such as Vietnam, Cambodia, Cape Verde, and the Caribbean who have settled largely in Dorchester and Roxbury (Stakeholder interviews, 2013, 2014). Whether underemployed youth or new immigrants, those who were predicted by the City and other stakeholders to take jobs working on or building urban farms shared a neighbourhood and a comparably smaller chance of financial independence than their middle class, white counterparts in Boston (Muñoz et al., 2015). This demonstrates the sense in which urban farming is sometimes held up as a new and innovative key to success, and reflects the centrality of the achievement of financial and propertied independence in the achievement of the “American Dream” (Rohe and Watson, 2007). The conception of urban farming as representative of a new path to the fulfillment of such a dream partially accounts, I think, for its common status as an

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“innovative” urban form. After all, as Tom Menino told me, urban farmers are “pioneers” (allusions to the colonial frontier aside, of course).

6.3 Farms as Economic Engines

A related significant aspect of the narrative of urban farms is the idea that they can serve as economic engines for otherwise impoverished urban neighbourhoods. While urban farms may walk and talk in many ways like community gardens, they are nevertheless primarily entrepreneurial enterprises with sole proprietorship, and the understanding of their role as nexuses of innovative training and jobs for immigrants and underemployed youth is an important aspect of this notion. The prioritization of for-profit enterprise farming and the significance of the “agropreneur” in the imagination of urban farming in Boston emphasizes this reality. This idea is also supported by the fact that the Garrison-Trotter Farm has come to be held up as the first legal urban farm in Boston – as highlighted by the thunderous applause when the farm’s permit was unveiled at the groundbreaking ceremony – despite the fact that there were several non-profit farms in operation prior to the passage of Article 89.2 As Mayor Menino maintained as Article 89 was designed and passed in the city, “urban farming is a great way to encourage small scale agricultural entrepreneurism in our city” (quoted in MDAR, 2011), and Lloyd himself noted during a meeting of the Mayor’s advisory committee for urban farming that “each property needs to be a self-sustaining business enterprise, able to compete in the larger community business enterprise” (Urban Agriculture Working Group, 2010).

As discussed in Chapter 5, an essential aspect of the understanding of urban farms as economic engines is their ability to ameliorate unproductive and wasteful vacant land in the inner city. The municipality has reimagined the utilization of vacant land throughout the inner city as contributing to the creation of a dense and walkable gentrified landscape, evoking a new ideology of vacancy as an asset to the modern metropolis rather than merely a waste to be reused

2 As noted in Chapter 5, there were other urban farms in operation before Article 89, particularly the well-known non-profit youth organization The Food Project, which has several large farm sites in Dorchester and Roxbury that have been running since the 1990s. There were also the two pilot farms developed during the first phase of Article 89 operated by Revision House and City Growers respectively. The farms that existed prior to Article 89 would have had a zoning variance granted to them, which can be a very difficult and time-consuming process. Since Article 89, urban farming is possible by right in most areas of the city, and no longer requires a zoning variance. See Chapter 5 for more detailed information about the development of Article 89.

212 in any way possible. As a kind of “social enterprise” with both “soft” and “hard” benefits, urban farming fits perfectly into this vision of the future of the inner city, which evokes the existence of the close-knit, safe, and well-networked urban community. The use of vacant land for the maintenance of green space in the cityscape also speaks to this vision, as suggested by a representative of TPL when asked about the benefits of urban farms during our interview:

One [benefit] is just simply…neighborhood greening. These lots are covered in vegetation so they’re not bare dirt trash-strewn things but they’re still not super attractive. So we’re taking something that’s been kind of a negative space in a neighborhood and converting it into a positive active space where productive things are happening. 6.4 “Soft” Community Benefits

Beyond “hard” measurable benefits to local neighbourhoods and residents like food, jobs and economic growth, urban farms are also understood to benefit communities in “softer” ways, including access to land, and increasing community cohesion and empowerment. For example, Mayor Menino explained to the Boston Globe in 2013 that on urban farms, “people come together, they become friends, they network and understand each other’s problems” (Harris and Lyon, 2013). On urban farms, suggested a BRA representative at the meeting to petition the Zoning Board to pass Article 89, community is built because people come together around common goals. Similarly, according to a City Growers Annual Report, urban farms “serve to create ideal conditions to link people with land” (City Growers, 2012). The Garrison-Trotter groundbreaking ceremony was an ideal place to demonstrate this sentiment, and a diverse array of stakeholders repeatedly highlighted the extent to which urban farming is good for communities, utilizing a variety of garden-related metaphors in emphasis – for example, that on urban farms “we plant a seed and grow a community.” Community control of the land was also emphasized by a UFI representative as a significant advantage of urban farming at the event. This outlook is also reiterated in the quotation presented in the section on local food above that suggests that in growing their own food, a community can become more “self-sufficient.”

This rhetoric echoes in a significant way the idea of urban growing as a kind of bottom up urban renewal that puts control of the land back into the hands of the community, and that is associated with the earlier era of community gardening as discussed in Chapter 4. Indeed, common narratives exemplified by stakeholders in urban farming evoke memories and narratives of

213 community gardening as a political activity with the power to “take back the land” during the decades of municipal divestment of racialized neighbourhoods during the middle decades of the twentieth century. I found that many stakeholders I spoke with equated the two forms of urban growing, or were at least somewhat unclear about the differences between them. Though, as Chapter 4 suggested, much of the political promise of community gardens in the 1970s and 80s in Boston was dampened by the municipality’s utilization of gardens as tools for federally- backed redevelopment of the inner city, the fact that urban farms “piggyback” onto existent positive beliefs about community gardens is significant. Even as urban farms maintain their prioritization as business enterprises and thus their attraction for the municipality and their place in the commercialized landscape of the capitalist city, their ability to walk a tightrope between “hard” economic benefits and “soft” community benefits is a central key to the narrative of farms. It also foreshadows the power of that narrative to construct widespread consent to farming.

An important aspect of the narrative of urban farms as beneficial to the community is the direct accessibility of the practice of farming to non-expert community members and residents of the city. As discussed in Chapter 5, many city bureaucrats and other stakeholders believed that Article 89 would reduce the red tape associated with farm development and construction, and that an important part of the work of the municipality in supporting the burgeoning urban farming industry in the city is to make it accessible and easy for everyone. This sentiment was expressed by a City employee I interviewed who worked for the Mayor’s Office of Food Initiatives when he suggested that a significant goal of their office was to make urban farming

…as easy as possible for farmers, for people…[the City is] hoping to get people that are either immigrants or low income community members from the areas where they’re located, where they’d like farms to be.

The issue of the accessibility of urban farming was also reflected in a discussion that occurred during a panel at the 2013 Urban Farming Conference in Boston about Article 89 and the process of accessing land for farming when a participant suggested that

…the idea [of urban farming] was to make those processes available to everyone. You didn’t have to work in city or state government, be a lobbyist or an expert to engage in that process.

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The impression of the “openness” of farming to everyone, and the resultant benefits of a strong tightly-knit community, is reflected as well by the common understanding of the parallels between urban farming and community gardening, and highlights the fetishism of zoning that is implicit within these discussions.

For their part, the City seemed to make attempts to actualize urban farming’s accessibility to community members. Announcements of the initial Request for Proposals (RFP) for the Pilot Farm Project, the first phase of the development of Article 89, suggested that proposals were sought from “qualified individuals, businesses, and/or organizations to farm these properties, either as for profit or not-for-profit enterprises,” and it went on to assert that “local community members are strongly encouraged to submit proposals” (City of Boston [DND], 2013). The “community benefits” aspect of farming was also emphasized, and the same announcement suggested that “the RFP includes incentives for partnerships between the farmers and local community organizations to encourage farming that is responsive to community needs and interests” (Ibid.). Discussions and announcements for later RFPs in the development of urban farming in Boston retained similar rhetorics.

The City also attempted to highlight the ease with which anyone might start an urban farm, entitling the guide they designed to detail the bureaucratic process of starting a farm “Article 89 Made Easy.” Local media picked up on this narrative, and a Boston Globe article published shortly after the passage of Article 89 suggests that “a new ordinance makes it legal, even easy, to start a farm in the city” (Neyfakh, 2014). The City also translated the “Article 89 Made Easy” guide into several immigrant languages spoken by the most common immigrant languages spoken in the inner city neighbourhoods of Boston – for example, Haitian Creole, Cape Verdean, and Vietnamese. This seemed in some way to confirm the possibility of actualizing the vision that urban farming could provide financial independence and property/business ownership to populations who often face social and/economic barriers to such opportunities through more conventional means. Similarly, UFI offered support in the form of financial resources and technical assistance for the graduating farm trainees to build their businesses as commercial farmers, a type of “business incubation” (Interview with UFI representative, 2014).

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This discussion has illustrated the extent to which urban farms are commonly understood by stakeholders in Boston to fill many of the voids, both physical and systemic, that exist in the urban realm. They can grow food to feed the masses, increase jobs training, and provide a general economic engine that will utilize vacant land in a productive way, thereby addressing multiple issues that face municipalities in an age of reduced federal financial support. Of course, it is attractive to believe that one development can achieve all of these ends. Notably, the idea that urban farms can produce both economic and social benefits is reminiscent of the ideology surrounding “social enterprise” corporations, several of which are at the heart of the development of urban farms in Boston – City Growers, for instance, as well as DNI and UFI. In some instances, stakeholders I spoke with seemed to characterize these organizations as reflective of the community itself, often because they employ inner city residents, or simply because of the understanding of the other economic and social benefits that are geographically focused in these same areas of the city. The problem with this view is that corporations – whether non-profit or for-profit – are not beholden to the community in terms of transparency of decision-making processes and other aspects of their operation as are public agencies. While they may indeed offer community benefits or work on behalf of the community in special ways, corporations are not “of” the community, and nor are they legally and politically designed to replace city agencies in building social support networks and other aspects of the welfare state that have been rolled back in the neoliberal era of urban development – though, as McClintock (2014) and others have observed, non-profit corporations in particular are often utilized to do just that. This understanding of the “social enterprise” model of corporations may in itself help to produce the narrative of urban farming as particularly beneficial for low income inner city communities, and for the widespread support of for-profit commercial urban farming enterprises in Boston.

There are many reasons to be skeptical of the narrative of farms as beneficial for low income racialized communities in the ways outlined in this section, however. The next section seeks to query the various threads that make up this narrative of urban farming. I demonstrate that, rather than provisioning myriad benefits to the low income racialized communities where they are located, for-profit ground level urban farms often maintain and actualize social and economic exclusions for the residents of these neighbourhoods.

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7 The Development of the Garrison-Trotter Farm and the Operation of For-Profit Farms in Boston

The prioritization of the for-profit model of urban farming on vacant lots in Boston has many significant impacts on both the process of developing farms and the model of operation employed by for-profit farming enterprises. Though urban farms may look like community gardens, and have consequently “piggybacked” narratively on the idea of urban growing as politically empowering and advantageous to racialized urban communities, urban farms are primarily urban developments more akin to housing and other commercial constructions than to open space projects like community gardens. Indeed, RFPs for urban farms are regulated by the same legislation as other urban developments, Chapter 30B of the General Laws of Massachusetts, which sets out the processes by which city-owned land is provisioned to new owners including the rules and regulations regarding competition for development contracts. Urban farms also necessitate a complex series of laws and procedures that must be navigated across several municipal agencies, and though Article 89 has simplified the zoning procedures applicable to farms, it has no impact on these other bureaucratic processes “that accompany sale and transfer of land or review and permitting for construction” (Davison, 2015).3 This fact is precisely why it is necessary to question the reality of Article 89 and its ability to “open” land and entrepreneurship to the community while avoiding its fetishization. This section will analyze the development of the Garrison-Trotter farm, as well as the operation of the for-profit farms in Boston, utilizing City Growers as a case study. Though Garrison-Trotter is not itself a City Growers farm, the process of its development is representative of all urban farms built in the city.

Like other developments, urban farms require an influx of myriad resources – financial, material, and human, including knowledge and experience of the development process – to win contracts

3 This excerpt comes from a document shared with me by one of my respondents who is involved on many levels with urban farming in Boston, including sitting on the board of UFI. Just as I was undertaking my own analysis of Article 89, she had also written a document that summarized the process of development and construction of the Garrison-Trotter farm in detail from the perspective primarily of the bureaucratic steps that had been navigated to build the farm. Like my own, her analysis concluded that the “development, design and construction of urban farms by individuals is prohibitively complex and costly” and that “although the zoning change has expedited one aspect of farm development, significant systemic barriers remain.” This document was helpful for me in understanding some of the more complex steps to construction that had occurred in building the Garrison-Trotter farm. I have anonymized this stakeholder as Sarah Davison; all future references to this document will be cited from Davison (2015).

217 and successfully complete development. Indeed, all told, Garrison-Trotter’s construction took countless hours, many experienced individuals knowledgeable in navigating urban development, and cost approximately $200,000. As I will show, the process of assembling the Garrison-Trotter farm demonstrates the intense challenges of building a farm in the city despite a favourable political environment, simplified zoning practices, and a coalition of agencies and organizations – non-profit, for-profit, and municipal – working together toward a common goal. To a great extent, these challenges are the result of the complex municipal system that exists for urban development in general, and not for farms in particular, though the novelty of farms meant additional headaches wading through a bureaucracy not yet accustomed to this particular form of urban development. This process of development, and the business model of for-profit farms that prioritizes the production of profit, effectuates the prioritization of growth coalition actors in the construction and operation of farm sites, the enclosure of vacant land, and ultimately the exclusion of the local community in the accumulation of capital and other economic and social resources from urban farming.

7.1 The Growth Coalition Partnership

The development of the Garrison-Trotter Farm began after a community meeting in early December 2013 at which the development of an urban farm at the lot on Harold Street – the one that Glynn Lloyd had spotted and that had inspired his call to then-Mayor Tom Menino to initiate Article 89 – was discussed. With the community members who attended the meeting in favour of the idea of building the farm, the City released an RFP by mid-December that offered to sell the lot at a nominal price to a qualified organization, business, or individual who could demonstrate their ability to successfully build and operate an urban farm on the lot. Even before replying to the RFP, the organizational partnership between the Trust for Public Land (TPL), Dudley Neighbors, Inc. (DNI), the Urban Farming Institute (UFI), and City Growers had begun to materialize.

The centrality of this partnership arrangement to the development of urban farming in Boston is fundamental to actualizing the municipality’s vision of a sanitized landscape built on vacant land in the inner city. The non-profit organizations are able to provision essential assistance to City Growers and substantially reduce the risk and the cost of many of the aspects of farm development and operation that City Growers alone might face. Though Garrison-Trotter itself

218 did not become a City Growers farm, City Growers is the major operator for ground-level urban farms in Boston, and the development and operation model outlined in this section characterizes the partnership arrangement more generally. This social enterprise model in which non-profit organizations assist for-profit corporations was undertaken in light of the narrative of urban farms as socially and economically beneficent for underprivileged communities outlined in the previous section, which helped to build support for the partnership and this model of farm construction. Each organization took on some limited aspect of the access, administration, preparation, ownership, and eventual farming of the Garrison-Trotter site that aligned with their expertise, organizational mission, and available resources.

7.1.1 Trust for Public Land (TPL)

The national multi-million dollar non-profit land conservation organization the Trust for Public Land was tasked with replying to the RFP, and they would be the first steward of the site, undertaking much of the physical and bureaucratic work of building the farm site. TPL is an extremely successful and experienced fundraiser of private and foundational support to assist private and public landowners to conserve various lands considered to have public benefit – e.g. wetlands, forests and other natural lands, parks, and sometimes rural farms. Indeed, TPL is the most well-resourced and -recognized of the organizations in the coalition, and it was their banner that was affixed to the backhoe at the groundbreaking ceremony. It is telling that TPL’s mission is to conserve land with public benefit – their byline is “Land for People” – highlighting the narrative of farms as community benefit. Garrison-Trotter was, notably, TPL’s first foray into conserving urban rather than rural farm lands.

By early February 2014, TPL had submitted the RFP to the City and was designated as the chosen developer for the Garrison-Trotter farm, with a community meet-and-greet planned for early March. The coalition agreed that after the site was ready, TPL would transfer title of the land to DNI who would act as the long-term steward of the site, and TPL’s role in the development partnership would more or less come to an end. Their role in the construction of the farm cannot be overstated, however, as it was a TPL employee who navigated the intricate bureaucracy of Boston’s municipal agencies to garner permissions and permits to build the farm. (Remember that it was also a representative from TPL who presented the permit at the groundbreaking ceremony.) Highlighting the critical role of TPL in this process, a young black

219 man named Billy who runs the farm trainee program for UFI commented in a video produced by TPL to highlight their work on the urban farm in Boston that

going through that process of getting land through the city is very complicated, and you do need a partner that knows what they’re doing. Without a partner like Trust for Public Land, we would not be able to actually make this happen (Trust for Public Land, 2015).

7.1.2 Dudley Neighbors, Inc. (DNI)

DNI is the urban development and community land trust arm of Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI), a nationally recognized community association founded in the Dudley Triangle neighbourhood of Roxbury in the 1970s by local residents and activists who wanted to take an active role in restoring their neighbourhood after decades of divestment had left it physically and socially devastated.4 An important aspect of the success of DSNI has been the creation of a community land trust under DNI that holds title to many parcels in the Dudley Triangle and provides affordable housing to residents who would not otherwise be able to afford to purchase a home by retaining title to the land upon which the homes are built (Interview with stakeholder, 2014). Interestingly, DNI is the only community organization in the United States that has the power of eminent domain, although those powers are limited in scope to the Dudley Triangle, a triangular shaped area contained within Blue Hill Avenue to the west, West Cottage Street to the south, and Dudley Street to the east (Medoff and Sklar, 1993; Interview with stakeholder, 2014). As discussed in Chapter 3, eminent domain is a power held by Redevelopment Authorities like the BRA in most cities in the US, and legislated in Massachusetts by Chapter 121A of the General Laws. Having the power of eminent domain in this area enabled DSNI to threaten private owners with appropriation if they were not maintaining their properties. Since most of the land that was once vacant in the Dudley Triangle was city-owned, however, DNI has never actually had to utilize eminent domain, but rather utilizes it as a kind of “back pocket” bargaining chip (Interview with DSNI representative, 2014).

The role of DNI in the Garrison-Trotter partnership is to hold the land in trust over the long-term so that it can be farmed continuously without the threat of being taken back by the municipality

4 See Medoff and Sklar’s (1993) excellent book on the founding of DSNI and its projects, Streets of Hope.

220 for some “higher and better” development. DNI thus plays a similar role in urban farming as the Boston Natural Areas Network (BNAN) in their entrustment of community gardens in Boston from the early 1980s. Like TPL, DNI is also somewhat out of their usual comfort zone with the Garrison-Trotter Farm, as this was the first time that DNI had held land outside of the Dudley Triangle in their community land trust.5

7.1.3 Urban Farming Institute (UFI)

The third organization in the partnership is the Urban Farming Institute (UFI), a non-profit organization that was co-founded by Glynn Lloyd, the owner and operator of City Growers, soon after the creation of City Growers in 2012. UFI was founded with two central missions. The first of these is to train under- and unemployed young people from in and around the inner city neighbourhoods of Boston where City Growers farms are located in a wide variety of skills relative to urban farming.6 Called the “Enterprise Team,” UFI has trained ten to twelve young people every year since 2012 in both the business and field aspects of farming practice, like the group I worked with in 2014 to rehabilitate the lot that became the Garrison-Trotter Farm.

UFI’s second mission is to access state and foundational funds for farm construction in Boston. Originally, these funds were to be allocated exclusively to build and fund City Growers farms, since for-profit enterprises are not eligible for many of the programs that might be utilized to finance urban farms, such as grants through the Massachusetts Department of Agricultural Resources (MDAR), and in this sense UFI was founded as City Growers’ non-profit arm. Indeed, at least initially, UFI was founded to provision human and financial resources to City Growers in order to keep the for-profit operation afloat, and in the early years of both organizations their affiliation lacked real boundaries to a large extent. For instance, when I was volunteering at City Growers, UFI farm trainees worked almost exclusively on City Growers farms, and staff who technically worked for City Growers workers on UFI projects, and vice versa. The organizations did eventually come under scrutiny for this relationship, which lead to some important changes and more transparency between them. The role of UFI in the Garrison-Trotter farm partnership

5 DNI now also holds a site on East Cottage Street where the largest Food Project farm is located.

6 There are an additional twenty or so individuals who participate in the classroom learning portion of UFI’s training each year, but who do not become part of the “Enterprise Team” and learn the field aspects of farm training.

221 was to oversee the physical construction of the farm, and eventually to sublease the farm site from DNI as the manager of farm operations. UFI also assisted TPL initially with the physical rehabilitation and building of the farm by lending the labour of their farm trainees, as I described above. The Garrison-Trotter farm eventually became a training farm site for their Enterprise Team members and not a City Growers farm, which I suspect may have happened partially because the relationship between City Growers and UFI was under scrutiny at the time. If UFI had provisioned the farm site to City Growers, it could have confirmed the lack of boundaries between the organizations and the prioritization of City Growers without competitive bidding contracts with the municipality. Nevertheless, the stakeholders I spoke with suggested the likelihood that the trainees would work on City Growers farms once they had completed their training.

7.1.4 City Growers

The fourth and final organization that is important for the urban farming growth coalition in Boston is City Growers. By the time the Garrison-Trotter farm was opening, City Growers was already operating 8 farm sites across the inner city, making it the most experienced farm operator in the city at the time. Though City Growers was not directly involved with the development of the Garrison-Trotter farm, because of the nature of the relationship between UFI and City Growers, it was nevertheless involved in a behind-the-scenes sort of way. It was City Growers salad mix that was given away at the groundbreaking ceremony, for instance, and the UFI trainees often came to work at the City Growers farms, especially when City Growers needed an extra hand to fill some last minute orders. City Growers also set the tone for the vision of urban farming in the city, and though Garrison-Trotter would not itself become a City Growers farm, it was acknowledged that the UFI farm trainees may end up working for City Growers and thus help to expand the brand and the business more generally.

City Growers’ vision was to expand their business by developing as many farms on vacant plots as possible, creating a kind of “patchwork” of small farms across the inner city neighbourhoods of Boston. City Growers also imagined expanding their reach to branding future farms and produce grown on them, which would be possible considering City Growers was by that point already a well-recognized and -respected name in urban farming in Boston. A representative from City Growers told me that he envisioned the possibility of independent operators paying to

222 utilize the City Growers brand to build and legitimize their farms, a kind of franchise model that would enable the company to expand its market and become an unparalleled urban farming operation in the city (Interview with stakeholder, 2014). City Growers had already begun the process of building their brand when I volunteered with the organization: the bags of salad mix they sold at local co-ops and other stores were branded with their logo, as were merchandized City Growers tote bags and t-shirts.

At the time that I was actively researching City Growers and their farms in 2013 and 2014, the company was operating eight farms mostly located in Dorchester and into the eastern portion of Mattapan. Two of the farms were located on privately-owned land, one was located on a plot of land previously designated as a community garden entrusted under BNAN’s land trust, and the remainder were located on city-owned vacant land. The company had two full-time and one part- time employees, and were often assisted by the UFI farm trainees in planting and harvesting their crops.

7.2 Preference for Growth Coalition Actors

Though the Garrison-Trotter Farm was the first, this growth coalition between TPL, UFI, DNI and City Growers has come to be a preferred model of development for urban farms in Boston. The fact that a farm is closer akin to other developments than to open space projects like community gardens means that farm construction and operation is an activity available to very particular players to the exclusion of others. The preferential treatment of some players over others begins with the RFP process, which favours applications from organizations with vast resources and experience since the administrative and human resource capital required to successfully navigate the bureaucratic and physical development of a farm site is so high. A representative who worked at the Mayor’s Office for Food Initiatives (OFI) who we’ll call Marcus explained to me that this was partially because the City didn’t want the projects to fail and the land to be returned to a vacant state:

I think especially in the beginning DND is very careful because they don’t want to sell this plot of land and then have it turn into a vacant plot a year later, so they want to make sure the people are experienced and they’re able to start a business that is …economically sustainable as well as environmentally sustainable. So we’re not going to have to down the line repossess these plots of land and let them out for, you know, whatever the sort of ‘in vogue’ land use [is] at that point.

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Due to the high cost of farming and the fact that non-profit organizations can access funds from grants and foundational donations, non-profit organizations with immense amounts of expertise and capital (like TPL) who could successfully navigate the challenging process were particularly preferred. David from TPL, who did much of the bureaucratic work of developing Garrison- Trotter, noted this when he said

I’m a part of a national non-profit and…we have an 86-million-dollar budget and I have a master’s degree… So there’s sort of that, the difference between us and just your average shoe-string non-profit.

Indeed, even other for-profit business owners already involved in urban farming were daunted by the cost of beginning an urban farm. A farmer based in Somerville whose business model revolves around building and maintaining gardens and farms in backyards and for corporations like Google told me about her experience inquiring with the DND about the potential of getting vacant land to operate a farm:

They gave me a list of every vacant lot in the city and were like, you can have whatever you want. So the space is really not the issue. It was the funding. It was like, where are we going to get the money? And I personally don’t think, I know we don’t have the leverage for me to walk into a bank and go, ‘we want this project,’ and then have them give me a two hundred-thousand-dollar loan. There’s no way. It would have to be through the City or it would have to be a grant or something.

As Garrison-Trotter was being built, it became clearer that the possibility of individuals rather than large organizations accessing land and building a farm was extremely unlikely, if not nearly impossible. David from TPL expressed this to me when he noted during a long discussion on the accessibility of farming that “there’s the difference between… organization as applicant, organization as proponent, versus individual.” John from DND concurred with this evaluation when he told me

Unfortunately, a lot of individuals have come to me and said, ‘I'm just one person, I’m just one farmer, but I’d love to respond to the RFP.’ And while they’re not necessarily precluded from creating a non-profit and responding, if they haven’t gone through the development process in the City of Boston and they haven’t actually transformed a previously developed site that’s now vacant into a growing site, then there’s probably more challenges and obstacles than they’re aware of, and ultimately, it’s not likely that they would be a success. And being a City agency we have to be cognizant of one’s likelihood for future success or failure, and not put someone in a position for failure.

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One of the leaders of UFI was even doubtful about the possibility of their own “Enterprise Team” farm trainees ever building and owning their own farms, trainees that were, at least publicly, being ideally positioned as the new urban farmers:

You can’t just give someone a certificate in October and say, okay, go…We’ve given the information in training for example, on how to work with the City, how to get a piece of land from the City, we’ve given that information out. But how easy is it for that person that I’m just giving a certificate to, okay, go get a city lot? And…would they have the money? …What we’ve also found, and are still just finding is that the costs are big…So we’re now working to create a good model to get those costs down, because…that model is not going to work and we know that now.

If even those individuals who have been trained in the business and administrative aspects of farm development were unlikely to be successful, it is even less likely that individuals from the community without any farming or development experience would be able to access land and turn it into a functioning farm. David from TPL emphasized this when he said to me that the accessibility of urban farming for “anyone off the street...is flat out just not accessible.” It was also recognized by David and a representative from OFI that the barriers to farming development would be especially acute for particular individuals, such as those who did not speak English and/or those who lived in the neighbourhoods where the farms were located, and who were likely to face especially large barriers to accessing the kind of capital necessary to build a farm:

So I would say even for a, say English first language, decent amount of money in your pocket kind of farmer, very challenging. This is not even getting into anything about, if English is not your first language, if you are from a background that would make it uncomfortable for you to show up at the various city permit granting places you have to go. In all honesty just to show up at these places, it’s daunting, you know? (David from TPL)

Obviously price is a huge issue because many of the farmers that we want to see farming in Boston and in many of the neighborhoods that we want to see more food access points, more farms, there’s not traditional capital and there’s not access to programs, you know, no interest loan funds for purchasing the land. And so it’s just a matter of getting over that barrier. (Marcus from OFI).

7.3 Building Garrison-Trotter and the Municipal Labyrinth

As the quotations above allude to, it was not only the financial cost of constructing a farm that made it out of the reach for most individuals and organizations outside of the growth coalition,

225 but also the bureaucratic complexity of urban farm development. TPL was the first to discover the immense challenges of building an urban farm in Boston despite the legalization of farm construction after Article 89. David from TPL was responsible for organizing the preparation of the Garrison-Trotter farm, and he explained to me in almost painful detail the process that he had gone through to turn the vacant lot on Harold Street into a farm site. David’s narrative highlights just how labyrinthine the process of development in an urban landscape is, particularly for new and innovative developments like urban farms. The entire process took several long and arduous months, and involved numerous municipal agencies including Water and Sewer, the BRA, the DND, and Inspection Services. Each of the agencies had their own guidelines and procedures applicable to one of the discrete steps in farm construction, which had to be navigated with little guidance or explanation, and there was little to no horizontal or vertical integration across or within the agencies that might assist in coordinating the project.

The challenges that confronted the construction of the Garrison-Trotter farm challenge the common view of City bureaucrats, as discussed in Chapter 5, of Article 89 as a means to reduce or remove the barriers to farm construction that existed prior. This idea is demonstrative of the fetishism of zoning, the conception that changing zoning alone may actualize whatever reality the legislative body is attempting make legal or “by right” via those zoning changes. The important thing to understand, and a point evidently missed by many municipal representatives in Boston, is that while Article 89 creates the potential for land to be used legally for farming, it does not alter any of the other complex processes that govern land uses in Boston. As John from DND so astutely observed, in opposition to many other stakeholders I interviewed from the City,

I don’t know that [Article 89] reduces the red tape. What I would say is that it establishes the red tape, which is important. Before there was no red tape, before if you wanted a piece of land and you wanted to farm on it you couldn’t…Now there’s red tape. Now there’s a clear and defined set of rules. So I wouldn’t say it makes it simpler, I wouldn’t say it makes it easier. It doesn’t I don’t think eliminate the red tape or reduce it. I think that it creates the red tape, it creates the process.

As David from TPL explained to me, the complicated process of building Garrison-Trotter began with the DND, who identified the project site, consulted the local community about interest in the farm, and then oversaw the approval process for acquiring the site. After land acquisition but before construction could begin, a permit for building from the Inspection Services was necessary, and not just for the farm itself, but any structures that might be built at the site. Boston

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Water and Sewer set up a water connection only after the submission of engineering plans. (The water connection was a particular challenge at the Harold Street site because there hadn’t been an existing connection for so long that it would require a considerable amount of work and cost to get the water running at the site.) The BRA would oversee the entire operation, but this did not mean internal horizontal integration or communication across agencies. Rather, the individual doing the development would have to visit the BRA in person for approval and “rubber stamping” in between each step, which had considerable costs and time attached to them, and had to be navigated in a particular order. The best practices set out in Article 89, particularly the requirement for clean soil and the raised bed method7, added other complexities and costs to the process. David from TPL exclaimed to me after the process had nearly coming to a close, “I still can’t say with any certainty, I couldn’t write down for you the exact order of rights steps I should have taken. So that’s a problem…”

Even if an individual did understand the “exact order of rights steps” to follow in navigating the complex bureaucracy of development with little horizontal integration between departments, David also suggested that the novelty of urban farming and the poor vertical integration of municipal agencies added an additional challenge to the process. He describes this perfectly in this excerpt from our interview:

So I went today to go and file my building permit and the first person I talked to at window one was totally confused that I had shown up with a long form. [They said], ‘well, you could have handled this on your use of premises permit.’ And that was back in July. The second person I talked to again was sort of baffled, no three of them had the same answer. All very much wanting to help me, so it’s not like apathetic bureaucracy. It’s like, ‘how can we help you? Help me understand. Is this a single-family house?’ ‘No, it’s an urban farm.’ ‘A what? An urban farm?’

These bureaucratic and resource issues made the construction of the Garrison-Trotter Farm extremely time-consuming and challenging, and David realized the importance that a well- resourced organization like TPL had taken the reigns in the construction of the farm site. Human resources, including knowledge and experience of the development process, in addition to

7 The raised bed method is required for urban farming to ensure that any contaminants from the soil do not leach into the produce being growth. The method requires that a geotextile barrier by placed onto the site, and that fresh uncontaminated soil be brought in and laid down on top of the barrier. Water is able to move down through the barrier into the earth underneath, but not to leach up into the soil where the produce is grown. New soil is one of the largest costs for urban farms due to this requirement.

227 financial resources were an important aspect of TPL’s eventual success in building the Garrison- Trotter farm. “We’re a national organization,” David explained, continuing:

…we’ve managed to raise enough money to make this make sense, to pay for some of our time and to pay for all the out-of-pockets. We have staff attorneys, fundraisers, media people, a bunch of people like me. We have people in other parts of the country that, if I have not run into it, I call our people in Philadelphia who are doing a huge park program, or New York or San Francisco.

Of course, this was the first time that a for-profit urban farm was built in Boston after Article 89, and the municipality has since attempted to streamline the stages of development and the order of steps in a publication called “Article 89 Made Easy,” available both in print and online. Nevertheless, as John from DND explained to me, even with the support of the administration, developments in a complex urban centre are inevitably challenging to some extent:

There’s always going to be some inherent complications with taking a previously developed vacant site and turning it into a farm through some sort of physical land improvements. If it requires a permitting process it’s going to be complex.

This analysis highlights in a meaningful way the fetishism of zoning and the blatant falsehood of assuming a reduction in the complexity for farming based solely on the development of a rezoning ordinance.

7.4 Accessing and Enclosing Vacant Land

An important aspect of the development of the farm was accessing the land itself, which was owned by DND and conveyed to TPL for a nominal fee (about $100). While the process of building the farm was complex and expensive, the acquisition of property is an entirely separate process with its own costs, challenges, and bureaucracy to wade through. After the RFP was released in the winter of 2013, the proposal for the Harold Street site was due at the end of January, 30 days from the date of the issuance of the RFP. Once TPL had submitted the proposal, the City predicted that the review would only take one week (Davison, 2015). However, the conveyance of the property to TPL could only take place after a team to develop the site had been chosen, and a meeting for the local community to meet the developer had occurred. These events did not take place until early March. Before the conveyance of the lot could occur, TPL and DND also had to negotiate a Purchase and Sale agreement that had to be completed within 90 days, which required a title search and Phase 1 Environmental Assessment to be completed

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(Davison, 2015). After the submission of these documents, a six-week due diligence period commenced, and the conveyance of the site to TPL finally happened in mid-May 2014. By that time, much of the behind-the-scenes work of farm construction was underway, including engineering consultations, planning and approval for storm water removal via Boston Water and Sewer, permitting for farm construction via the Inspectional Services Department, and a Comprehensive Farm Review completed by the BRA (Davison, 2015). These steps required a high level of coordination between the various relevant agencies and TPL, and constitute an important rung of the complex bureaucratic ladder that David from TPL had to climb to construct the farm site.

In addition to the challenges building the site that resulted from the labyrinthine bureaucracy of the City, the complexity of the process of conveyance and the distinct and restrictive roles of each of the partners in the growth coalition partnership also contributed to delays in the ability to farm the site. Indeed, the operation of Garrison-Trotter commenced months after the groundbreaking ceremony in October of that year, nearly at the end of the growing season, and though the plans for the farm were initiated in December 2013 the first full growing season did not occur until 2015. These challenges were perfectly revealed in the aftermath of an event that I have come to call The Day of the First Legal Vegetables in Boston.

Shortly after the groundbreaking while the farm was still under construction and the bureaucratic process of building the site was still underway, the farm trainer from UFI, Shawn, and the Enterprise Team decided to seed the Garrison-Trotter farm and get the farm up and running. On that day in August, about a month after the groundbreaking, the work to get the farm ready for growing was still only partially done – the geotextile barrier had been lain over the woodchips spread over the site prior to the event, but the top layer of woodchips designed to cover the site had not yet been completed. Nevertheless, several long beds of fresh soil had been positioned in long lines across the rear of the two-parcel plot, fresh and black in the warm summer sun (Figure 6.8). I arrived at the site that day to witness Shawn and the farm trainees using a manual seeder

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Figure 6.8 The partial completion of the Garrison-Trotter farm shortly after the Day of the Legal Vegetables in Boston.

to run long lines of lettuce and other brassicas down the length of several of the growing beds while Shawn proclaimed repeatedly in an animated tone that these were “the first legal vegetables in Boston!” There was an atmosphere of excitement and celebration, with the farm trainees posing in pictures with each other with the imagined “first legal vegetables” in the background. Like the idea that Garrison-Trotter was the first legal farm in Boston, this event signaled the narrative significance of Article 89 and the extent to which the legal shift had impacted how people thought about farming and other growing activities in the city.

The aftermath of this event, however, demonstrated the limitations of Article 89 in actuating the regulatory changes needed to make farming a less restrictive activity in the city. Days afterward, I was working at one of the City Growers sites when the farm manager, Brian, told me that both he and Shawn had received calls from one of the leaders of UFI, Brenda, after the seeding at Garrison-Trotter had taken place. Brenda had been angry that the seeding had taken place without the permission of either TPL or UFI, and before the site was technically “farm ready.” It was particularly problematic because the site at that point was owned by TPL, but TPL did not have a role to play in the actual farming of the site, meaning that the seeding had crossed the boundary of TPL’s designated role in the farm project. Further, TPL didn’t have insurance to

230 cover the work that had been happening at the site, or indemnity agreements in place with the Enterprise Team in case of accident or emergency. It was also problematic because, though the plan was that UFI was to be designated the farm manager and UFI had already done much of the work on the site, it had been stipulated in the partnership agreement that DNI, the eventual land trustee, was to choose the farm manager in a transparent and fair process. The event had thus inadvertently uncovered the behind-the-scenes planning that had been going on between the organizations, and challenged the conception of the farm site as an economic opportunity for local residents and independent entrepreneurs.

Brenda’s frustration over the event angered Brian, who told me that he “wasn’t down” with the fact that that the partnership organizations were clearly attempting to make it look like the process of choosing a farm manager and operator was fair when, in his estimation, the process wasn’t fair at all. He suggested that if they wanted to make the process fair, then the application process should actually be open, rather than pre-planned in favour of the organizations within the growth coalition. The partnership, he told me, clearly didn’t mean open access to land and to farming for many individuals, including local residents and independent farmers, but rather the continuation of the land being accumulated in a few hands and not by the local community.

Others were less concerned by this state of affairs, however, and thought that the imagined benefits to the local community more than justified the use of vacant land for business farming rather than the use of those lots by residents and others. On the day of the groundbreaking, for instance, I left the farm site with Shawn who was visibly frustrated that during the event numerous people, including community members and others with little to no experience in urban farming, had been asking him how they could get access to land for farming. “It annoys me,” he explained, “because it’s like, this isn’t for you, this isn’t for you to do. This isn’t a community garden! This is a business and we’re trying to make money.” Shawn’s sentiment demonstrates his perception, shared with many other stakeholders I spoke with, that the conception of farms as local economic development justifies the enclosure of vacant land for enterprise farming. A similarly justificatory sentiment about the “soft” benefits of urban farms for communities was shared by a representative of the BRA when he told me

A farm is theoretically privately owned and not accessible to the public. You can see it, so it may be a visual amenity to the community. But it’s not accessible to the community…in the sense that you can use it.

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Another City representative shared a similar idea about farms when he stated

Does the public go [to urban farms] and recreate? Not really. But the neighborhood benefits from the clean air, clean water, from the nice view, from the fact that the kid down the street works for the farm. So we are creating all these great amenities that you can put dollar figures on or you can’t, but they’re all there. And doing that through this conservation activity.

Both of these respondents espouse the idea of the “borrowed view” that gardens can represent a blurring of the boundaries between private and public and “[denote] the obligation placed on owners to open up their gardens to the view of others, in order to promote shared beauty and the civic good” (Blomley, 2005: 626). It is interesting that this idea of the “nice view” here acts as a kind of validation for the privatization of what previously may have been publicly shared spaces; if the neighbours or passersby can “borrow the view” of the garden so-to-speak, then it remains in some way within the public domain.

The potential for accumulation of vacant land amongst growth coalition players also occurred by the enclosure of some vacant lots that had, until the passing of Article 89 and municipal prioritization of urban farming, been utilized by local residents for informal agricultural uses. The first that I heard of informal growing on vacant lots around the inner city was in conversation with Brian during the same discussion about the fallout from the Legal Vegetables episode. He explained to me that a family member had previously worked for the City and that it was commonly known amongst City workers that local residents often grew informal gardens on city-owned vacant lots in their neighbourhoods without formal permission. The City, he told me, would often “look the other way” because they saw growing food as better than the land just sitting there and not being used. Brian wondered aloud if the new attention that vacant land in the city was getting as a result of the passing of Article 89 would mean that informal farms that didn’t have the legal status of farms like Garrison-Trotter would be shut down in order to move the land back into the RFP process and eventually to build a “legal” urban farm.

When I asked John from the DND about residents using lots for gardening without formal permission from the city, he confirmed that it was a relatively common occurrence (Figure 6.9). He also substantiated Brians’ query, suggesting that before Article 89 the DND was much more able to turn a blind eye to informal growing. Since the “best practices” had been laid out in the ordinance, however, the DND had clear direction from the Boston Health Commission regarding

232 methods for safe and healthy growing in the city. A representative from the Mayor’s Office of Food Initiatives spoke to this when he said

We have a lot of what DND was calling “guerrilla farmers,” people who were farming on these vacant lots without [permission]…But some of the problems with people growing on the lots, while it’s great that they were producing their own food, it’s just the soil’s not tested which could be dangerous because of all the lead in urban environments.

One case of “guerrilla farming” was particularly notable when I was undertaking my research in Boston, and highlights the enclosure of informally-used lots after Article 89. Located on Callender Street in Dorchester, the city-owned vacant lot had been being gardened over a relatively long period of time by neighbourhood residents who abutted the property, led by an

Figure 6.9 A “guerrilla garden” in Boston located on a vacant lot in Dorchester, Summer 2014.

elderly man who, as John explained, “was kind of like a patriarch of the community who believed in gardening and farming…he was the one who took up all of the initiative to grow in it originally.” While the DND knew for years that this property was being gardened and were tolerant of this activity despite the fact that, as John put it, the residents were “trespassing” on the site, once Article 89 had passed the DND became increasingly “concerned about them using the

233 site because it didn’t appear that they were utilizing any best management practices or testing the soils.” DND resolved to “go in and do some prep of the site and actually turn it into a site that was appropriate for growing.” This involved tearing up the garden that had been a local institution on the site, and then prepping it for growing regulated under Article 89 in a model similar to Garrison-Trotter. While they had consulted the community prior to this and found that they were interested in pursuing formal “legal” growing at the site, in the months that it took the DND to destroy the old garden and prep the site, the elderly man who had been gardening the site for decades passed away. Unfortunately, as John explained, “since his passing there really hasn’t been anyone to take his place.” The DND was forced to put the site out for public competition via an RFP, and John wasn’t sure when I spoke with him “if that community involvement portion will still be a part of it.”

The story of the Callender Street garden demonstrates the ways in which Article 89 makes legible and, in this case, illegal, land uses that previously existed in a kind of legal limbo. While Article 89 may increase the potential for formally legal for-profit and even non-profit farming in Boston, it simultaneously challenges the coexistence of other informal growing activities that may more directly benefit the community. In this case, when a local resident had been utilizing the land for many years and thus could potentially have claimed adverse possession, in which property rights are awarded to an encroacher if they have been consistently using the land – often proven via the cultivation of the land (Blomley, 2005) – the regulations laid out in Article 89 nulled the question of adverse possession by rendering the land use in itself illegal.

8 Querying Community Benefits

Even if urban farming is not literally open and accessible to community members, it could nevertheless conceivably produce benefits like those espoused by the celebratory narratives of farms. In the case of for-profit urban farms in Boston, however, my research showed that there were few real benefits to the local community of Garrison-Trotter and the other ground-level urban farms built on vacant land by growth coalition actors. In this section I will query the benefits to the local community in terms of access to fresh local food, and training and jobs.

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8.1 Access to “Local” Food

My research on the production and consumption of produce on City Growers’ farm sites confirmed what scholars of food have long suggested, “that trying to end food access inequities only through the creation of new sites for market transactions such as farmers’ markets or supermarkets does not address core poverty and disinvestment issues in these communities” (Block et al., 2012: 204). Indeed, the prioritization placed on profit manufactured through sales of produce by City Growers and many other farms mean that the economic interests of the farmers end up trumping the interests of the very consumers they purport to help. In order to maximize profit, City Growers focuses on growing the highest yield crops – leafy greens otherwise known as “brassicas” like lettuces, kale, and mustard greens that are generally used to create salad mixes – and sells them primarily outside the “food desert” neighbourhoods of Mattapan, Dorchester and Roxbury, including in the South End, Jamaica Plain, and even the far- flung suburban fringes of the city like Lexington and Newton. These areas are generally stable, middle-to-upper income majority white areas not characterized by food access issues, where residents want to buy and consume organic produce from “local” farms, both for the health benefits and the cachet.

A great example of this dynamic is a rather pricey restaurant in Newton called Lumière which prides itself on its “local, organic” salad mix grown and created specifically for them by City Growers farms, which their menu indicates is suitably called the “Lumière Mix.” (Ironically, City Growers do not, in fact, create catered products specifically for any of their customers.) In this case, Lumière’s “local” salad mix is utilized as a cultural signifier for the high status of the restaurant and may put it, and its salad mix, even further out of the hands of the low income residents who live near the farms. Labeling City Growers’ sales as “local” enables the business to sell at a premium at a geographic scale that many would still consider “local” while downplaying the fact that they are not selling much of their fresh produce to the residents in the neighbourhoods where their farms are physically located. These dynamics highlight the conflation of “local” with “good”, and the importance of interrogating the assumption that “local” assures ethical production (Block et al., 2012; Anderson, 2008).

City Growers’ motivation to grow and sell in ways that would produce the highest profit margins also limits the reach of their produce to residents in the surrounding community at local farmers

235 markets. In addition to their sales to restaurants, co-ops, and their CSA program, City Growers also sold produce in 2013 and 2014 at the Bowdoin-Geneva Market, a farm stand at the Dorchester Health Centre in the heart of Fields Corner in Dorchester. This area of the city is home to a high proportion of Vietnamese and Cape Verdean immigrants, as well as to many African American and Latino residents. The farm stand was open for a few hours one afternoon a week, and sold whatever produce the farm had on offer – usually a lot of brassicas in addition to a variety of vegetables and herbs. Like other farmers markets in and around Boston, the farm stand accepts Bounty Bucks, a plastic currency created by MDAR (the Massachusetts Department and Agricultural Resources) to subsidize purchases of fresh produce for low-income residents who participate in other food subsidy programs; they are akin to food stamps, but particular to farmers markets.

When I worked at the market stand there were individuals from the neighbourhood who purchased items, including many who used Bounty Bucks, suggesting that the farm stand was indeed doing a better job of delivering the farm’s produce to the surrounding community. However, I also realized that the vast majority of customers who frequented the market came not from the surrounding neighbourhood but were employees of the health centre where the farm stand was located. From my experiences working at the farm stand, it seemed that the lack of attraction for local residents to the farm stand was not just about cost, which could be reduced by the use of Bounty Bucks, but more frequently because of what was actually being sold at the farm stand – high yield crops designed to produce high profits through sales to restaurants outside of the neighbourhood. It was a common occurrence for people to inquire about the sale of a specific item at the farm stand, and it was often things frequently used in particular cultural dishes: green tomatoes and corn, for instance, which are common in Caribbean and Southern American cuisine, and a variety of Asian herbs often used in Vietnamese dishes. Other vegetables that were regularly requested by the local residents were tomatillos, eggplants, and collards. These dynamics fit Alkon’s (2008) suggestion that the perceived “whiteness” of farmers markets, including the food on offer, can influence diminished interest and participation on the part of racialized residents. My research shows that there may have been other race-based barriers for residents purchasing produce at the farm stand, and one of my respondents who lived in the neighbourhood suggested that black residents perceive purchasing food from under a white tent in a parking lot to be reminiscent of “charity,” which he suggested would detract residents

236 from the farm stand. Additionally, the farm employees were often rather unimpressed by having to work at the farm stand, and perceived it more or less as a “waste of time” when they had many other more profitable duties to perform; this attitude also could have coloured the dynamics between the farmers and the local residents at the market.

8.2 Training and jobs

The narrative of urban farms idealizes the potential for low-income youth of colour and immigrants to access financial independence, entrepreneurial opportunities, and land ownership via farming. I have already argued that the possibility of individuals or independent business owners accessing vacant land and building profitable entrepreneurial farming operations is highly unlikely given the current bureaucratic and regulatory environment in the city. The reality of paid employment is little better, however, as the jobs produced within the sector are primarily low paid, low status, precarious and seasonal with few benefits and little job security. City Growers employees, for example, work physically demanding jobs at long hours on multiple sites over the course of any given week and are often stretched thin. The jobs offer little to no employment protection or benefits – even an employment contract, the suggestion of which was laughed away by the farmers when I inquired – and the farmers are forced to apply for unemployment benefits during the off-season (from about December to March). Non-profit farms like Revision House and The Food Project offer somewhat less seasonal and more secure positions since they are able to access more foundational and governmental funds to keep their employees afloat in the off season, but, like for-profit farms, these organizations still have very few jobs available. These facts suggest that the potential for job growth within the industry is limited, and, importantly, that most urban farming jobs in Boston do not fit the description of “green collar,” which Gordon and Hays (2008) argue are high-quality, long-term jobs that produce a family-supporting wage and opportunities for upward mobility. Rather, urban farming jobs are comparable to those within the agriculture industry more broadly, which are often nonstandard (precarious, temporary, contract, etc.) and characteristic of other “bad jobs” in the US (Kalleberg et al., 2000).

Despite the poor potential outcomes for employment in the urban farming sector, the training program at UFI has been held up as a key to growing the industry and to producing more “green collar” jobs in the urban farming sector in the city. Each year since Article 89 was passed, the

237 program has trained several under- and unemployed young people, mostly from in and around the inner city neighbourhoods where the farms are located, in urban farming practice, techniques, and business skills. The goal has been to move these individuals into leadership positions within the burgeoning industry, ideally as owners and operators of independent farming businesses. The training program doesn’t do much to set these individuals up for success as entrepreneurs, however, paying them a weekly stipend that is less than the minimum wage and drawing parallels to internships that have grown exponentially in recent years across North America with the promise of accessing training and networks that will increase competitiveness in the job market (Curiale, 2009). Considering the unlikeliness of these individuals ever owning their own farms, however – a fact that was admitted to me by Brenda, one of the leaders of UFI, during our interview and discussed in the previous section – and the potential that they will end up working a “bad job,” the real value of the investment of time into the farmer training program is questionable at best.

The reality of urban farming jobs in Boston was a dawning reality for one of my respondents, an older African-American woman from Mattapan, and a source of frustration for her when she attended one of the neighbourhood meetings about Article 89 presented by the BRA in Mattapan in 2013. She explained to me that at the meeting, City representatives had suggested that urban farming would create jobs for the communities where they were located, demonstrating the extent to which the narrative of urban farming as beneficial for inner city communities was leveraged to create support for the farming projects in the city. She was skeptical, however, and when pressed the City representatives clarified the actuality of employment in the growing sector:

And they said, ‘oh, well, there will be jobs for the community.’ And we’re like, really? How many jobs? And it was like, ‘well, part time, seasonal jobs, you know, at close to minimum wage.’ So we’re like, well then don’t bill that as a kind of community investment. There may be other reasons for doing it, but that’s…people left the farm so if they’re going to go back to it, it is has to be something that carries their life forward.

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9 Conclusion

This chapter demonstrates that, rather than producing economic, social, and environmental benefits for local communities where for-profit farms are located, urban farming in Boston maintains social and economic exclusions for community residents, and produces the potential for capital and land accumulation in the hands of growth coalition actors. The social and economic exclusions for the community are a product of the fact that urban farms are akin to other complex urban developments that require immense quantities of bureaucratic, financial, and human resources, which means that corporate and foundational actors are prioritized in farm building. These barriers to farm development and construction exist despite the passing of Article 89, which legalized and simplified zoning reviews for farms, but did not “have any impact on the laws and procedures that accompany sale and transfer of land or review and permitting for construction” (Davison, 2015).

Indeed, the challenges of building an urban farm, and particularly one that is economically viable, implicates a particular model of entrepreneurial farm construction while diminishing the possibility for community-based farming models to surface, partially because the complex bureaucratic steps to building a farm necessitate “the work of design and development professionals who are able to negotiate solutions based on repeated experiences” (Davison, 2015). In short, urban farming is not open to individual or community actors without experience or capital, despite the municipality attempting to demonstrate their inclusion. As a result, urban farming actuates the movement of vacant properties into the hands of growth coalition actors while enclosing previously common spaces that in some cases were historically used for unregulated and informal community forms of subsistence agriculture.

This chapter builds on the work of Chapter 5 and contributes to the literature on urban farming by analyzing urban farming primarily as a form of capitalist city development, and thereby highlighting an important aspect of urban farming’s entrenchment within broader processes of urban governance and development. As neoliberal urban development is inherently political and characterized by sometimes stark power imbalances between groups (Brenner, 2004; Blomley, 2004), the development and operation of urban farms reproduces, rather than challenges, patterns of inequality in the urban realm (c.f. Reynolds, 2015).

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An important aspect of urban farming as neoliberal urban development is the participation of growth coalition actors and particularly non-profit organizations, which are regularly tasked with filling the gaps left behind by the rolling back of the social welfare net under neoliberalism (McClintock, 2014). This chapter explores corporations as urban actors and developers, which is needed work at this juncture in urban studies. The analysis presented in this chapter suggests that “social enterprise” corporations may be given more praise for supporting the production of both “hard” and “soft” community benefits than actually occurs in reality. The understanding of community benefit in the case of urban farming in Boston is at least partially a result of the fetishism of zoning, which suggests the increasing ease at which anyone can develop and own an urban farm without a thorough consideration of the intense bureaucratic, political, and financial challenges that continue to accompany the development of urban farms.

Interestingly, City Growers and other for-profit urban farms in Boston have not been particularly successful at generating large amounts of capital, evoking the myth of capitalist production and the idolization of for-profit entrepreneurial enterprises in urban development. Indeed, UFI was initially founded on behalf of City Growers to collect government, private, and foundational funds that would not be available to a for-profit business in order to help keep the business afloat. Nevertheless, when I returned to Boston several times over the years following my initial research trips to the city, it was evident that City Growers was troubled economically, and considering shifting into a non-profit organizational model. While urban farming is envisioned as a primarily economic activity, the reality is that selling produce is not particularly viable, not least because it can only occur about a maximum of eight months out of the year. Still, the understanding of urban farms as a method by which to both “green” and “clean” the “wasted” inner city continues unabated.

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Chapter 7 Conclusion

1 Introduction

The goal of this study was to investigate the racialized politics of utilizing vacant land in Boston for urban growing activities, including community gardening and urban farming, by querying the social, political, and economic histories that have resulted in the racialization of space and the spatialization of race in the neoliberal city. While other scholars have investigated vacant land as a tool of municipal governance in cities with a vacancy crisis like Detroit, this study demonstrates that narratives and ideologies of vacant land as an urban problem underscore the development of policies and projects designed to “fix” vacancy, like community gardening and urban farming, even in cities that aren’t in crisis. I found that vacancy, like “blight” before it, is a municipal tool that helps flag problematic conditions of land that are not its “highest and best” and thus assists the municipality to justify programmatic interventions theoretically derided under neoliberalism to return land to private and productive use. I argued that the “problem” of vacancy, also like blight, is constructed alongside and through the construction of the “waste” of racialized populations and their spaces. I also found that the programmatic interventions designed to return vacant land to “higher and better” uses maintain sociospatial and economic inequalities along lines of race and class at the urban scale while often seeming to ameliorate such inequality.

In this chapter, I revisit some of the key findings from my study about the governance of vacant land in Boston from about 1950 and gesture to some of the overarching ways in which vacancy works as a tool of governance in modern American cities. I also offer a brief disclaimer and a note on the study’s limitations, as well as propose some avenues for future research. Ultimately, I suggest that urban scholars urgently need to participate in the advancement of an agenda to illuminate race as a central organizing principle in modern cities, and to position race at the centre of scholarly studies of cities and the geographies of governance.

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2 Summary and Key Findings

Utilizing a governmentality approach combined with a deep appreciation for the importance of narratives as productive of the social world, and drawing on multiple historic and modern sources of qualitative data, this study points to the myriad ways in which urban land vacancy has been both constructed and wielded over the course of the twentieth century and into the twenty- first in the United States. One of the most significant findings of this study is that vacant land is not an objective reality but rather a social and an administrative process that forefronts vacancy as a municipal object of governance. I suggest that the foundations for vacancy as an object of governance were formed in the colonial settlement of America, and that vacant land in the modern city is a new “frontier” whose existence helps to justify state-based interventions to return vacant land to its highest and best uses. This justification occurs via the construction of the hegemonic narrative of vacant land as an urban problem, investigated centrally in Chapter 2. I present evidence throughout the study that supports the argument that vacant land is an object of governance rather than an objective reality. For instance, I point out the variability in counts of vacant land not only in Boston but across the United States, and trace the ways in which the City of Boston has variably tracked and measured vacant land in the city via the production of vacant land surveys and maps. In Chapter 3 I also explore in depth a variety of events, policies, and practices on behalf of the federal and municipal governments that occurred over the course of the twentieth century that contributed to the co-constitution of the physical and ideological existence of vacant land.

A second key finding of this study, following closely from the first, is that the physical production and ideological construction of vacant urban land as “waste-able” land that must be returned to higher and better use occurs alongside the production of the “waste” of racialized populations and racially segregated urban spaces, as argued in Chapter 2 and detailed in Chapter 3 in the case of Boston. The participation of both the federal and municipal governments in the production of vacant land, for instance, occurred throughout the middle decades of the twentieth century via various racist policies and practices that simultaneously actuated the segregation of racialized populations in urban centres. These policies and practices are discussed mainly in Chapters 3 and 4 and include, amongst others, local divestment of low income racialized neighbourhoods, municipal demolition programs, urban renewal, federally backed mortgages, redlining/blockbusting, and the racial segregation of the education system. An important aspect

242 of these policies and practices is that they not only contributed to the material creation of vacant land, but that they also assisted in the assemblage of rhetorical narratives of racially segregated spaces and their populations as “wasted” and in need of interventions. The existence of vacant land is thus a necessary precondition for various interventions that would return such “wastelands” to higher and better uses, and vacancy is produced through the very processes of governance that purport to address it.

Importantly, this finding also points to another significant contention of this study: that processes of spatial governance are often integrally related to, and mutually constituted by, the governance of populations. This contention suggests that, while tactics of spatial organization in cities including tools of planning like zoning may seem on the surface neutral and relatively disinterested in populations (c.f. Valverde, 2011), the ways in which vacancy is constituted as a tool of municipal governance throws this conviction into question. The evidence that I present in this dissertation illuminates vacancy both as an effect of its ideological and spatial proximity with racialized populations and their spaces, and as a means to maintain racial segregation and the related “waste-ability” of racialized spaces and populations. This finding presents an important challenge to the characterization of land use planning tools as fundamentally unbiased.

Another important finding of this study is that the preoccupation with ameliorating the modern urban problem of vacant land is an important expression of the shift to neoliberal urbanism from the early 1970s, a finding that also buttresses the claim of vacancy as an object of municipal governance. While eradicating urban “blight” was a significant preoccupation during the urban renewal decades of the twentieth century, the political untenability of “negro removal” combined with the progression from managerial to entrepreneurial modes of urban governance meant the rescaling of urban development to the scale of property, i.e. individual municipally-defined parcels or lots – the scale at which vacant land occurs. In Chapter 4, I explored this burgeoning era of municipal redevelopment via the Revival Lots program in Boston, which hinged on the construction of the ideology of vacant land as problematic and needing municipal interventions. During this era, the municipality utilized the community gardens program funded by the federal government as a special tool of urban revitalization that seemed on the surface gentler than previous urban renewal programs, but that relied on similar logics of the “wasted” racially segregated inner city landscape.

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Relatedly, as I suggested in Chapter 5, the shift to neoliberal urbanism also spurred the evolution of the parallel ideology of vacant land-as-asset that stresses the potential for vacant land as a significant resource for future development and the generation of revenues, residents, and density for the city. This evolution occurred as the entrepreneurial mode of urban governance continued and the “return to the city” ensued from the 1990s and into the early 2000s and beyond. The vision of vacant land as asset sits in rather stark contrast to the narrative of vacant land as physically deteriorated and dangerous that characterized earlier eras of renewal and revitalization. Despite their differences, however, it is significant that a similar kind of invitation to capital occurs – to unlock the value of the land and actualize its highest and best use – that influences a set of outcomes in which particular stakeholders are prioritized and rights to land are potentially reordered. I argued in Chapter 5 that the type of funding source that the municipality centrally relies upon in each era of development may help to account for the differences between these twin ideologies of vacancy. For example, under revitalization schemes the distribution of federal CDBG funds was tied to problem areas of the city, meaning that the City was required to construct, label, and identify areas as problematic to generate financial support for the redevelopment of the inner city, influencing the recognition of vacant land as an urban problem. Under modern neoliberal urban development, however, the private developer is king and the attractiveness and marketability of the land as well as the potential for returns on investments are prioritized, inspiring the consideration of vacant land as asset. It is in this sense that the ideology of vacant land as asset can be seen as integrally linked with the shift to entrepreneurial neoliberal urbanism.

Another significant finding of this study is the fact that vacancy effectively highlights several meaningful aspects of the role of uneven development in the urban milieu. For instance, vacancy helps to illuminate the integral relationship between uneven development and race, a relationship that Fox Gotham (2014) suggests has not been sufficiently recognized or investigated in urban studies to this point. Further, the crisis of vacancy that characterized many urban centres from the early 1970s represents an important method by which anxieties about unfettered uneven development were expressed during that period of time. The hegemony of the understanding of vacant land as an urban problem particularly throughout that era of urban development was partially a result of the overgrowth of sociospatial inequality that had led to political destabilization during the 1960s and 70s, especially with regards to the place of black people in

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American society. In turn, the development of community gardens on vacant lots during the 1970s and into the 80s, as discussed in Chapter 4, was an ideal response to the breakdown of the central city because it began the work of bringing capital back into those spaces. Decades later, as the return of population and capital to the central city has continued, “the revalorization of the inner core and the devalorization of the inner suburbs” (Hackworth, 2007: 81) that occurs as a central feature of the uneven development of the urban landscape under neoliberalism is evident. Part of this revalorization has been the development of commercial urban farms by growth coalition actors on vacant lots in inner city neighbourhoods, as explored in Chapter 5. By flagging conditions of land that exemplify uneven development in variable ways, vacancy has been and remains an integral part of the dialectical process of the neoliberalization of urban space in modern American cities.

One of the most important findings of this study is the fact that ideologies of vacancy produced alongside the racialization of space in the neoliberal city help to manufacture consent to the various municipal interventions designed to address the problem of vacant land. Consent is key for the continuation of the system of capitalism, and the discourse of vacancy as an urban problem and its association with blight is a central way in which consent has been produced to the various assemblages of power focused on the capitalist development of “wasted” urban spaces. As I argued in Chapter 4, in the case of community gardening the scale of the problem of revitalizing the deteriorated inner city neighbourhoods of Boston in the 1970s seemed so immense and daunting that it produced a widespread hegemonic conception about the dangers of vacant land and the necessity of returning it to productive use. While community gardens were important for the municipality because they helped to invite capital back into devalorized spaces, they also simultaneously offered an ideal response to the crisis of the “ghetto” during that period because they were perceived as empowering to the local community. By seeming to benefit the community, gardens also helped to dampen the potentially explosive dissent of the populace against the growing social and economic inequality that existed along lines of race and that was thrown into relief by Boston’s busing conflict in the 1970s (Formisano, 1991). Relatedly, the various benefits – both “hard” and “soft” community benefits – of community gardening and, later, urban farming under Article 89 also help to produce consent to these projects, even as evidence shows the lack of real community benefits of either of these urban growing activities, as discussed in Chapters 4 and 6. Another important way in which consent to both community

245 gardening and urban farming has been produced is via the invitation to neighbourhood residents to participate in these activities, making both gardening and farming seem focused on the realization of community benefit. However, as I suggested in Chapters 4 and 6, this invitation on behalf of the municipality can also be interpreted as demonstrative of citizen responsibilization characteristic of neoliberal urbanism, and thus as part and parcel of the maintenance of the system itself.

3 Disclaimers and Limitations

I would like to take a moment to consider the process of undertaking this study, and its potential drawbacks and limitations. An important part of such a consideration is being self-reflexive about the necessary specificity of my experience undertaking the study as a white, middle-class, Canadian woman, and what that may have illuminated but also hidden from my view as a researcher. My identity undoubtedly presented particular kinds of challenges to the work and to the claims that I make, particularly with regards to race and the racialization of American cities. What, you might ask, do I have to add to this discussion, and what makes me able to speak or write on these subjects with any kind of authority? As I suggest in the introduction to this study, I went into this project asking questions about processes of land governance related specifically to the rezoning of Boston for urban farming via Article 89. I was not at that time a scholar of race, nor had I intended for my study to delve as deeply as it does into the historic social, economic, and political contexts of the governance of vacant land in Boston. Rather, I became more and more interested in these issues, and with the question of the racialization of urban space, as I delved more deeply into the governance assemblages that I came to see were entrenched within the social, economic, and political realities of Article 89. While land governance was the question, it became clearer and clearer to me that race was an essential and vitally significant part of the answer. Even after writing this study, I would not consider myself to be anything of an expert on race nor on the experiences of racialized individuals and populations in the United States; there are undoubtedly things that I will always be woefully ill- equipped to fully comprehend. However, I do think that my positionality as a scholar of urban governance and of critical urban geography enables me to recognize the racialization of space as part and parcel of broader governance processes in a way that brings a unique and necessary perspective both to studies of governance and of race in the US.

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Further, my identity as a white Canadian female student also presented certain advantages in the process of undertaking this dissertation. When I was living in and researching the inner city neighbourhoods of Boston in 2013 and 2014, I was regarded as an outsider to the many stakeholder groups that I interacted with, but one that was undoubtedly trusted with insider knowledge. When I lived in Dorchester, I was regularly the lone white person on public transportation and in other public spaces; when I worked on the farm sites I was the only Canadian; and when I spoke with municipal and state bureaucrats I was the student researcher. I believe that this “outsider” positionality provided me with a valuable perspective into the worlds of my respondents (cf. Bucerius, 2013). I often found myself drawing on these various outsider statuses to ask questions and make inquiries that others who were assumed to have shared knowledge would not have as easily been able to ask; I regularly found that I was able to uncover foundational assumptions and the most basic understandings about respondents’ worlds without seeming odd or out of place. However, it is highly likely that a researcher with a different positionality would have uncovered different kinds of information during interviews, and may have interpreted the data in a different way; my identity must thus be considered as a key facet of the findings that I present in this study.

I would also like to reflect here briefly on the experience of writing at times rather critically about a place and a set of actors that I grew to appreciate quite a lot during the research process. Indeed, as I was analyzing my data and writing the study I often felt considerable conflict about making the arguments presented in this thesis about various organizations that I know have often attempted to do the most they can to make change, particularly for low income communities in Boston. Organizations like BUG, BNAN/F, the Urban Farming Institute, and City Growers have shown immense commitment to the projects of empowerment and resource reallocation, and I believe that they genuinely want(ed) to make a difference in the communities that they serve(d). Individuals who work with these groups sometimes spent considerable time speaking with me and sharing their stories, and I genuinely hope that they don’t take my arguments overly personally, or feel that I have undermined their efforts. Those who have committed their resources and time to assisting in low income racialized communities, whether now or in the past, need to be recognized and thanked for their contributions. When the system within which these organizations and individuals are entrenched is itself flawed, they can only do much and unfortunately, as my work shows, they often end up inadvertently reproducing the very issues

247 that they are trying to push against. I hope I have done justice to their stories and that I have not offended anyone in the process of writing about these issues and the challenge of making change in the era of neoliberal capitalism.

4 Recommendations for Future Research This study gestures to several areas of investigation that present fruitful avenues for future research. The lack of dissent or “real politics” (Swyngedouw, 2009) related to either community gardening or urban farming on vacant lots in the inner city of Boston suggests the ways in which urban growing could be placed within discussions of the development of the politics of urban sustainability, which Swyngedouw (2009) has suggested is characterized by what he and others (e.g. Davidson and Iveson, 2015; Zizek, 2002) term the “post-political moment.” Because there has come to be a scientific consensus about climate change and the necessity of policies addressing sustainability issues within cities including municipal support for urban greening activities, decision-making regarding socio-ecological practices within the urban realm have become “reduced to the sphere of the police” (Swyngedouw, 2009: 609). What Swyngedeouw means by this is that the development of such policies now generally occurs “…through allegedly participatory deliberative procedures, with a given distribution of places and functions,” while the “stakeholders…are known in advance and…disruption or dissent is reduced to debates over the institutional modalities of governing…” (Swyngedouw, 2009: 609). Investigating the production of the post-political moment relevant specifically to urban sustainability and climate planning is extremely important as urban settlements around the globe face growing climate-related challenges and as policies to address the issue in the United States are increasingly developed at the municipal scale. Indeed, Swyngedouw (2009) suggests that attention to the politics of urban sustainability planning “requires urgent attention” (604). Investigating the place of urban growing activities both in the production of the post-political moment and in the development of a greater socio-ecological politics at the urban scale presents an exciting avenue for research that has not yet been given much scholarly attention.

This study also illuminates the necessity of paying more attention to the relationship between race and urban land governance processes. There is undoubtedly more to be learned about vacant land and its relationship with racialized space, for instance, and scholars interested in this topic may wish to query in a more in depth way how land comes to be recognized as vacant, and the

248 particular political and bureaucratic processes involved in identifying and managing vacant land. Focusing on the variegations of such processes by factors such as geographical location, neighbourhood or city demographic composition, and administrative or legal form may help to deepen knowledge of the constitution of state power via land governance processes and, specifically, findings of vacancy. Contestations over the labeling or use of vacant land amongst various stakeholders, at both the state and community level, may also be of interest, though to be useful these studies must include a consideration of the constitutive relationship between society and vacant land. Studies of vacancy could also usefully contribute to this project by contextualizing findings of vacancy alongside other tools of urban planning and governance. Interrogating the place of vacancy within the historical continuum of city building by considering its developmental and genealogical trajectories, and by paying special attention to its relationship with racialized populations and spaces, is also of interest. Scholars may wish to pay particular attention to the discursive power of policies and legal texts, for example. These studies would contribute to a broader understanding of the role of vacancy in the development of the capitalist city, and the ways in which that development has historically empowered the articulation of white space and power.

Beyond the continued scholarly investigation into vacant land and its relationship with the racialization of urban space, this study elucidates the vital significance of urban scholars positioning race more generally as a central organizing principle of the urban realm. Indeed, this study presents a persuasive argument for the advancement of a scholarly project that more holistically interrogates the dynamic relationship between race and the governance of urban space. An enormous variety of urban issues are both patterned according to social and racial inequality, and have implications for the sociospatial organization of the urban milieu: property and real estate; poverty; access to education; and policing and the criminal justice system, amongst others. It is in this sense that Fox Gotham (2014) has recently suggested that the uneven development of modern cities must be recognized as integrally related and mutually constituted alongside racial segregation, which is experienced both via the organization of urban space and through the lived realities of urban residents. It is my sincere hope that urban scholars will pay more heed to race as a central organizing principle of the urban realm, and continue to query the methods by which social, economic, and political inequalities expressed along lines of race and space are constituted, as well as the ways in which they may be challenged.

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Methodological Appendix

PARTICIPANT INFORMATION/INFORMED CONSENT FORM

I am a doctoral student at the University of Toronto in the Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies and am currently involved in a project studying urban agriculture in Boston. I am particularly interested in the urban farms operating in the Boston neighbourhoods of Roxbury, Dorchester and Mattapan, and any possible effects they have had on these neighbourhoods, as well as the way they are managed by the city. I am being supervised in this project by Dr. Mariana Valverde at the University of Toronto.

If you have been involved with these farms in any way, or live in Dorchester, Roxbury or Mattapan and have thoughts on the operation of these farms that you would like to share with me, I would like to invite you to participate in this study. The study will recruit participants to discuss their involvement with or thoughts about the farms in Boston. Participation is voluntary and you may refuse to participate or withdraw from the study at any time without penalty. If you do choose to participate, you will be asked to take part in a face-to-face interview with me that will take approximately one hour and that will be tape recorded with your permission.

There are no direct personal benefits to you in your participation in this project. However, there are some limited risks, and I am aware that you may have had negative experiences with the farm in your neighbourhood or be opposed to the operation of this farm. I will certainly try to be sensitive to that throughout the interview process and you are welcome to steer the conversation away from any topics that you do not wish to discuss. You have the choice of carrying out the interview anonymously and all personal information will be kept strictly confidential, locked in a drawer that only I will have access to, and all data will be securely stored after the final project is complete. If you so desire, you can request to be informed of the results of the final project, which I intend to publish in a scholarly journal at a future date and/or to include as a portion of my doctoral project. If the results of the study are to be published, however, if you so choose your identity will remain anonymous and all identifying details will be removed.

You are welcome to contact me, Brenna Keatinge, or Dr. Mariana Valverde for further information regarding the study:

Brenna Keatinge – xxx-xxx-xxxx or xxx-xxx-xxxx or [email protected]

I consent to participate anonymously.

Signed: ______Date: ______

I consent to participate and my identity can be used.

Signed: ______Date: ______

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MODEL INTERVIEW SCHEDULE

As explained in the Methods and Analysis section of Chapter 1, specific interview questions varied based on the type of stakeholder being interviewed. However, all respondents were first asked questions specific to their organization or business (e.g. questions about the operation of the organization and their role), and then queried about their views on urban farming and city land development (e.g. how urban farms impact the local community and the city, the development and passing of Article 89 in Boston, their views on vacant land, and their perception of how the new law may impact farming in the city). Provided here is a selection of interview questions that were commonly asked of respondents in this study; additional questions were tailored to the experience, knowledge, and expertise of the individual stakeholder.

Background

What is your educational background?

How do you identify yourself racially/ethnically?

Tell me about the neighbourhood that you live in. What is its general character? Who lives here? How long have you lived here? Do you like living here?

Where are you currently employed? What is your role? What are some major projects you are working on at the moment?

Who are some major partners (either individuals or organizations) that your organization works with?

What is the role of your organization in urban farming and/or community gardening in Boston?

Urban Farming and City Development

What do you know about Article 89? What is your opinion on Article 89? Do you think that urban agriculture is a good idea in Boston? Why or why not? Who do you think Article 89 stands to benefit the most? Is there anyone who could be put at a disadvantage by Article 89?

What kinds of effects do you think urban farms have on the city as a whole? What about the specific community where they’re located?

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What do you hope to see in the future for urban farming in Boston? What would be the ideal? Do you think this will actually happen? Why or why not?

What is the role of the organization where you work in building the future of urban farming in Boston?

Can you tell me some of the reasons why urban farming is important for Boston? What kinds of positive impacts can urban farming have on the city? Are there specific communities that you think will benefit from urban farming? Are there any drawbacks or negative impacts potentially?

Urban farms are often said to address the issue of vacant and neglected land in Boston. How do you think vacant land is viewed in Boston? What are your opinions or thoughts about vacant land?

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Figure 1.1 Boston’s Neighbourhoods. Map created by Dexter Locke.

Figure 4.1 A rubble-strewn vacant lot in 1975 on Ashton Street in Mattapan. Courtesy of the Boston City Archives.

Figure 4.2 Another vacant lot in Mattapan, 1975. Courtesy of the Boston City Archives

Figure 4.3 Boston residents clearing rubble and making a garden, 1970s. Photo courtesy of Julie Stone.

Figure 4.4 An anti-dumping campaign in Boston. Photo courtesy of Julie Stone.

Figure 4.5 An early community garden in East Boston. Photo courtesy of Julie Stone.

Figure 4.6 A community garden in Mattapan, 1970s. Photo courtesy of Julie Stone.

Figure 5.3 The four original urban farming sites in Dorchester/Mattapan. Prepared by the BRA and posted online by Agyeman (2014).