[Community_garden] The City Hates Community Gardening

[cordalie.benoit at aya.yale.edu]

Education is what is called for here.

There is a terrific paper by a professor at NYU Law School and the Robert 
Wagner School of Public Policy which sets out the tax increasing potentials 
of community gardens.  See:
Vickie Been

New York University School of Law
40 Washington Square South, 314H
New York, NY 10012
Telephone: (212) 998-6223
Facsimile: (212) 995-4341
E-mail: vicki.been at nyu.edu



Her paper is terrific and shows how short sighted it is to try to convert 
community gardens into "taxable uses."   Why not do it with Park Land too? 
of course we know that well maintained parks increase the tax value of 
surrounding properties.

You might also try The Trust for Public Land.   Best, Cordalie

----- Original Message ----- 
From: <Jamie4fish at aol.com>
To: <community_garden at list.communitygarden.org>
Sent: Friday, January 11, 2008 12:27 AM
Subject: [Community_garden] The City Hates Community Gardening


>
> A few weeks ago I queried ACGA membership via listserve about the wisdom 
> of
> our gardens administrator (City of San Ramon, CA) deciding to drastically
> change the current procedure of assigning our garden plots on an 
> indefinite
> duration basis. The City now proposes to rotate assigned garden  plots 
> among
> community gardeners each year on a “lottery” basis;  ostensibly to satisfy 
> a long
> "waiting list." [although in fact more than 10  percent of the garden 
> plots
> remained vacant for the past year and were not  assigned to anyone on any
> waiting list.]
> The ACGA listserve response was unanimous and specific: Forcing gardeners 
> to
> participate in a lottery each year to see if they will get a garden plot 
> for
> the following season is against all principles of community gardening and 
> the
> more appropriate municipal answer to a waiting list was to build more
> gardens.
> After discussing this issue with the City for the past several weeks,
> however, some chilling insights have been gained among the gardeners. What 
> we  local
> community gardeners initially thought was simply an innocent, perhaps
> incompetent, ignorance of organic gardening processes on the part of the 
> City  has
> now evolved into a suspicion that the City administrators know exactly 
> what
> they are doing.
> By demanding implementation of such ludicrous and inappropriate gardening
> procedures the City knows full well that it will ultimately chase off all
> serious organic gardeners, allowing the City to have an unfettered hand in
> utilizing the land now dedicated to community gardening for other, more  “
> municipally-desirable, tax-generating” pursuits such as office buildings, 
> commercial
> enterprises, etc. [In fact the majority of gardeners, many of whom  have 
> been
> here for decades, have indeed indicated they will leave, rather than  try 
> to
> garden under such a "merry-go-round", rotational type of  environment.]
> Has anyone in the membership dealt with such political situations  before? 
> If
> so, what are the most effective tactics we can employ to  preserve our
> community gardens against such municipal expansion? Put  another way, how 
> can we get
> the City to embrace community  gardening?
> Thank you.
> Jim Conner,
> Community Gardener
> Crow  Canyons Community  Gardens
>
>
>
> **************Start the year off right.  Easy ways to stay in shape.
> http://body.aol.com/fitness/winter-exercise?NCID=aolcmp00300000002489
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