Keywords

A primary critique of urban agriculture (UA) is that it will never provide for the full caloric needs of all city residents. The critique implies that urban farmers and their supporters think that UA should feed all city residents, including supplying restaurants and retail stores, when very few would make that claim. But the framing of UA as a business-oriented endeavor is rooted in white supremacy culture that privileges capitalist activity over individual and community actions of self-determination. The privileging of whiteness in urban agriculture is visible in which UA projects receive press coverage, funding, and local jurisdiction support. More insidiously, whiteness in UA obscures that white urban farmers benefit from the legacy of racist urban policies, while at the same time overshadowing the work of Black and brown farmers who use UA as a means of community and social transformation.

The uprisings for racial justice sparked by the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis, MN, police officer on May 25, 2020, were and continue to be a powerful reminder that Black and brown communities struggle for just and equitable treatment by the institutions that are supposed to protect them. To that end, Black and brown urban farmers cope with compounding inequities in access to land, capital, and resources while making a case for urban agriculture that subverts capitalist expectations of return on investment from local governments and other authorities.

Our 2019 study of commercial urban agriculture (Rangarajan and Riordan 2019) found a racial divide between farms that operated as businesses and those that operated in service of community. For-profit urban farms were primarily operated by white farmers, predominately located in economically devastated neighborhoods. Black and brown farmers were more likely to be associated with community-focused urban farms located in similarly disinvested neighborhoods, but with the goal of community transformation.

In reality, the separation between commercial and community-focused urban farms is arbitrary, as the primary output of both types is community transformation. But how the community transforms is predicated on who is allowed to farm in it. In this chapter, we argue that planners and policymakers must acknowledge how white supremacy created the conditions for and informs the support of white urban farms over Black, Brown, Indigenous, and other persons of color-led farms. By disentangling the value of a farm from its dollar-based output and fully valuing UA’s transformative potential, local government officials can more appropriately address the resource needs that continue to oppress communities of color.

This chapter illustrates the divide between white urban farmers who aim to build businesses, and Black, brown, and Indigenous farmers who grow food in cities to transform their neighborhoods and provide for their communities. The divide is not absolute—people of all races participate in both profit-focused and community-focused UA—but in illustrating the divide the authors hope to redefine UA for its potential to contribute to a socially and racially just food system. We illustrate the divide by (1) recognizing the history of Black leadership in urban agriculture; (2) examining whiteness in urban agriculture; (3) broadening the definition of return on investment; (4) illustrating the tension between building commercially viable farms versus serving local food needs; and (5) reframing the value of UA. We conclude with recommendations from our original study that can specifically support city planners and policymakers to develop racially just and inclusive UA policies and programs.

1 Methods

The authors conducted a study of commercial urban farming in the United States, conducting interviews with over 160 UA advocates and visiting dozens of urban farms across the country. Farms presented as case studies (14) were located in the mid-Atlantic (Brooklyn, NY; Philadelphia, PA), South (Atlanta, GA; Austin, TX), Great Lakes (Buffalo, NY; Cleveland, OH; Detroit, MI; Chicago, IL), Great Plains (Kansas City, MO; Lawrence, KS), and West Coast (Portland, OR; San Francisco, CA). While the focus of the study was necessary conditions for creating commercially viable urban farm businesses, the findings from interviews and site visits naturally expanded to UA’s transformational potential and the racially complex history and current state of UA in the United States.

2 Recognizing the History of Black Leadership in Urban Agriculture

The segregation of urban agriculture is the result of the segregation of urban areas. In the twentieth century, six million African-descended people moved north during the Great Migration (1910–1970). Prosperous northern cities, and the Civil Rights Movement they supported, seemed an antidote to the life of poverty many Black sharecroppers left behind.Footnote 1 But “white flight,” declining urban manufacturing jobs, and decades of disinvestment in urban communities of color left swaths of Midwestern and Northeastern cities—Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, Buffalo, Philadelphia, and others—dilapidated, vacant, over-policed and unsafe (Eichenlaub et al. 2010).

Urban agriculture sprouted up in these cities in part due to plentiful vacant land, and in part as a path to self-determination for communities of color (Raja 2024; Hall et al. 2024; Griffin et al. 2024). Food and farming activists used urban farming as a way to increase access to fresh food, build community capacity, celebrate inherited food cultures, and as a starting point to discuss larger, more insidious systems that undermine the health of individuals and undercut the economic vitality of communities of color (Meenar and Hoover 2012).

For many, UA represents more than just growing food. It plays a role for communities of color in the struggle for social justice through food justice; that is, the equitable distribution of benefits and risks of what, where, and how food is grown, processed, transported, distributed, accessed, and eaten (Gottlieb and Joshi 2010). Communities of color disproportionately suffer from political, economic, environmental, and social disenfranchisement that limits not only food choice, but also the capacity and social capital to overcome those injustices, including as owners of the means of food production (Gottlieb and Joshi 2010; Mares and Alkon 2011).

Perhaps because of the food justice movement’s continued struggle to distribute power and achieve a racially just food system, some urban agriculturalists of color have adopted the language of “food sovereignty.” The concept comes from the Global South, through which peasant farmers aim to define the terms of their labor separate from the exploitative global food production system (Clendenning et al. 2016). The ability to grow and provide affordable, culturally appropriate food for oppressed communities is attractive to those who feel both the modern conventional and “alternative” (local, organic, etc.) food systems have left them behind (Block et al. 2012).

“Food sovereignty is a condition that exists when you have access to land and resources from which food is produced. It is important that we tie the struggle for food justice, food security, and food sovereignty to larger struggles for human rights, self-determination, and the elimination of poverty,” said Malik Yakini, long-time urban farmer and founder of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, at the 2016 Detroit Food Summit (Yakini 2016). The two-day summit, like a growing number of conferences and events around the country, had a strong focus on dismantling structural racism and racial privilege to empower healthier, more resilient communities through food justice work. Urban farming and gardening, particularly learning to grow one’s own food, was presented as a potential solution for improving health outcomes, increasing self-reliance, strengthening community, and achieving social justice.

“Black and Brown people need their voices heard in this food movement. We’re not here to replace rural farmers. We’re here to get a piece of the pie and make sure this food system is inclusive,” said Karen Washington, an urban farmer who led early community UA efforts in the Bronx, NY, at George Washington University’s Food Institute Urban Agriculture Symposium (Washington 2016). Now farming commercially in rural NY, Washington continues to be a nationally recognized voice for the power of community gardening to improve nutrition, foster entrepreneurship, and strengthen neighborhoods for urban residents.

Washington also co-founded Black Urban Growers (BUGS), a national network of farmers of color from urban and rural areas, which she says allows farmers and food activists of color to organize around issues of empowerment and food justice. BUGS advocates for Black leadership on food system and UA issues, particularly in areas where white-dominated leadership have set priorities that do not meet the needs of non-white urban farmers. Imbedded within its mission is improved access of farmers of color to land, training, funding, agriculture networks, and policymakers, as well as expanded representation on boards of local governments and foundations.

3 Whiteness in Urban Agriculture

The “local” food systems movement, which includes urban farming, is observed to attract proportionally more white participants and consumers than people of color (Guthman 2008; Meenar and Hoover 2012; Passidomo 2014; Ramírez 2015). Community food efforts aim to be inclusive, but inclusivity is predicated on voluntary participation. As Ramírez (2015) finds, it is unlikely that people of color will voluntarily participate in white-led local and community food and agriculture efforts where they must grapple with the power asymmetries embedded in the whiteness of such spaces.

“It seems like an increasingly unfunny joke to note that most people working in the sustainable/fair/green/organic/local/urban food production world are white,” writes urban farmer, activist, and journalist Antonio Roman-Alcalá (Roman-Alcalá 2015). Roman-Alcalá has written on the race and class differences in how urban farms operate, and privilege—having the time, alternative income, and access to resources to subsidize and support urban agricultural pursuits—is at the core (Roman-Alcalá 2013). White urban farmers are also less likely to experience discrimination in access to land or financing, or criminalization of growing food in non-traditional spaces (front yards, abandoned lots), which are common for many Black and brown urban farmers.

White privilege is evident even in UA organizations that ally themselves with people of color in food justice and food sovereignty movements. Nonprofit organizations begun by white people with the aim of supporting Black and brown communities often make it impossible for the people they aim to serve to work for the nonprofits. Structural impediments, like education or experience requirements and low entry-level salaries, are superficial demonstrations of whiteness framing the organization’s efforts. When whiteness frames an organization’s mission, it breeds suspicion among those communities of color it aims to serve.

For example, Allison Boyd, former director of the Baltimore Farm Alliance, expected to find in Baltimore even greater diversity than she had experienced while working in rural North Carolina’s farming community. She quickly learned that in Baltimore as elsewhere, “the resurgence of small-scale and urban ag was being typically led by young, white, educated, middle-class people” (Boyd 2015). Boyd worked to increase membership in the Baltimore Farm Alliance that reflected the diversity of the city. She also worked to change the composition of the leadership: she arrived to an all-white staff and an all-white membership, and left the Alliance with more diverse membership and three Black women at the helm of the organization.

Some white urban farmers working in communities of color are aware of the fraught circumstances their farms create. When Elisa Lane began farming in the majority-Black Whitelock neighborhood of Baltimore, everyone who helped with the project that became Whitelock Community Farm was white like her.

“We were friendly with everyone, but I think it does make a statement, even unintentional, that white people are creating this space. And I think about it: were we able to start this farm because we were the white residents of the neighborhood? What would happen if the Black residents tried to do it? Would the neighborhood association have been as supportive? Would they have gotten as much funding?” (Lane 2016). Lane says Black neighbors warmed up to the farm eventually, but it took a long time.

White farmers benefit from institutional and systemic racism because they are able to farm in cities as a result of explicitly and implicitly racist policies and practices. The right mix of circumstances—vacant properties, inexpensive access, low regulatory oversight—for urban farming occurs in disinvested neighborhoods, often those with large non-white populations (Guthman 2008). When the (white) Stevens family moved from rural western New York state to Buffalo’s predominantly Black East Side to start Wilson Street Farm, for example, they chose their home because a friend living nearby suggested the 25 empty lots on the next block may be the right size for the Stevens’ homestead garden (Rangarajan and Riordan 2019, p. 115). The city planning agency, eager to make improvements and decrease the burden of maintaining vacant land, leased the land to the Stevenses for just a few dollars a year. Though not long-term residents of the Black neighborhood, the white Stevens family obtained access to land with relative ease: vacant land is readily available as a result of decades of disinvestment in the East Side.

Glenn and Paula Foore of the now-closed Springdale Farm in Austin, TX (Rangarajan and Riordan 2019, p. 169) were similarly drawn to East Austin by an offer of inexpensive land: a federal-local partnership for economic development helped the Foores purchase the five-acre parcel that housed their landsca** business since 1992. At the time East Austin was suffering from decades of disinvestment, and its residents—primarily Black and Latino, a demographic legacy of the city’s segregationist policies in the first half of the twentieth century (Hill 2016)—experienced a poverty rate of 52% (GeoLytics 2000).

During the Great Recession of 2008, the Foores started to farm their land as a means to keep their staff employed. Springdale Farm became one of several urban farms in the area, all owned by white couples, as East Austin began to see a new wave of gentrification. Latino neighborhood leaders rallied against the farms as symbols of their larger battle against gentrification, leading to a multi-year zoning battle that split East Austin along racial lines: white farmers on one side, Latino community-activists on the other.

Andrew Smiley, former deputy director of Austin’s Sustainable Food Center, says the imbroglio was about more than farming, or even race: “What confounded [these disagreements] was the economic divide: urban farms are taking advantage of vacancies and low property prices in lower-income neighborhoods” (Smiley 2016). In Austin as elsewhere, white-owned urban farms site themselves largely based upon land availability, but that availability is a result of the disinvestment and neglect that result from racist policies including segregation, redlining, school closures, low transit access, and more.

Michael Conard, Columbia University professor and adjunct researcher for its Urban Design Lab, maps urban farms and the deployment of funds to support urban farming projects. His research shows that vacant urban land that could be used for farming maps directly onto under-resourced minority communities. Conard (2016) suggests that such maps, which show clear evidence of disinvestment in neighborhoods of color, could be used to prioritize urban agriculture investments to benefit communities. Alternatively, they can also be used by developers looking to cash in on neighborhoods on the verge of gentrifying. For example, planners supporting the City of Philadelphia’s urban agriculture plan found through a map** project that one in three active gardens or farms are in areas with the highest intensity of new construction (City of Philadelphia 2023).

Yet many analyses “do not consider deeply enough how entrenched power structures exacerbate and reinforce landscapes of access” (Passidomo 2014). Rather such analyses tend to attract the attention of those people with ‘missionary impulses’ to increase healthy food access in communities that are not their own. Without recognizing their white privilege, white urban farmers who aim to increase food access may inadvertently “undermine the well-being of people of color” by not acting to support food justice and food sovereignty movements that require a redistribution of power and resources (Ramírez 2015). A white-managed urban farm without deep community connections can also obscure and distract from embedded racism and poverty, and in so doing make neighborhoods ripe for gentrification. White privilege includes the naiveté to believe that healthy plants in a gritty city landscape are a sign of social progress, without having to grapple with one’s own role in perpetuating an inequitable system.

4 Broadening the Definition of Return on Investment

Leaders of community-driven urban farms are concerned that the positive social impacts of urban farming on food justice and community empowerment could be undermined by a growing focus on commercial UA or high-tech controlled environment agriculture (CEA) by investors worldwide. A narrow focus on the commercial viability and return on investment of urban farming can obscure the social accomplishments achieved by urban farms, community gardens, and other noncommercial UA efforts.

The tendency for planners, investors, and other local decision makers to focus on economic return on investment (ROI) is pervasive in UA policy discussions. Even urban planners aware of UA’s social and community benefits often struggle with setting aside land for UA because it does not represent the land’s “highest and best use” or greatest potential for economic return. For example, city officials and investors privilege large, expensive CEA projects that promise jobs for residents and increased food security. In reality, these projects create a very few highly skilled jobs and limited food output (leafy greens) that must be sold at a high price to make the economics work. CEA and its investors use the language of ROI, but have yet to deliver the promised return to communities, while city officials confuse investment dollars with ROI potential.

The focus on quantifiable returns often discounts or ignores strategies to promote long-term economic resilience grounded in social change. Favoring those UA projects that seem to have the highest economic ROI may reinforce existing socio-economic disparities rather than improve community economic development or quality of life, as very few, if any, of the benefits of such UA projects accrue to the surrounding community. According to former University of California Cooperative Extension Associate and Urban Agriculture Specialist Rob Bennaton, an excessive emphasis on economic ROI “almost completely ignores equity issues that have arisen in terms of historic disinvestment in low-income communities” (Bennaton 2015).

Michael Roberts, president of the First Nations Development Institute (Longmont, CO), an organization dedicated to strengthening Native American economies and communities through grants and technical assistance, observes that commercial urban farming is not a good fit for Native-led urban farming efforts. Roberts says most UA efforts on Tribal lands are intentionally run as nonprofit enterprises that focus on hel** struggling families gain access to healthy food. Even in the few cases where Native Americans are operating a commercial urban farm, the business model intentionally seeks to use economic activity as a way to drive community-level transformation. The strategy is institutional—few Native American institutions have the access to capital to invest in commercial urban farms—but also practical: Native communities with high poverty rates are not likely to have the expendable income to support commercial urban farms.

One of the closest-to-commercial Native American-operated urban farms is Dream of Wild Health outside of Minneapolis, MN. The youth education nonprofit includes a production farm that sells food at farm stands and through its CSA. But, as Joy Persall, former Executive Co-Director, says, “We don’t want to grow food just to grow food and make money. The primary impact has to be on the community: to serve, educate, and create change in the community, driven by the community.” (Persall 2016) Despite these important development goals, the farm enterprise at Dream of Wild Health has struggled to secure grants because it did not show a high enough return on investment through the dollars earned from sales.

5 Serving Commercial Viability or Supplying Food?

The urban farmer’s strategy to achieve commercial viability requires optimizing crop and financial output from a limited growing area. Eight of 14 case study farms specialized in high-value, quick-succession, niche crops like salad greens and microgreens. Greenhouse-grown sunflower shoots were the “bread and butter” for Rising Pheasant Farm (Detroit, MI, now closed), while Our School at Blair Grocery’s (New Orleans, LA, now closed) Nat Turner said his farm earned $7 per pound or more for field-grown arugula (Rangarajan and Riordan 2019).

“You may get pushed toward [growing] more expensive, high-end [products],” says Brooklyn Grange’s Ben Flanner, who, like many farmers featured in the case studies, struggles to keep their produce affordable and attractive to lower-income customers while earning enough revenue to sustain the farm, their employees, and themselves (Flanner 2015).

Building an economically viable urban farm often leads to the production of crops that are lucrative and well-suited for sale to restaurants and high-end retailers, who are competing for high-spending customers driving “foodie” culture. In several cases, this requires specializing in one or two rapid cycling crops (e.g., sprouts, herbs, or greens) in the small production area of the farm. Many farms profiled in our report also grow other crops that round out their offerings for farmers markets or CSAs in smaller quantities, but farmers state that it is the high-value crops that subsidize the greater variety for these urban farm businesses. Thus, commercial viability by default often depends on production and sales of niche crops that do not impact local community food needs, access, nutrition, or anti-hunger goals; success ends up being rooted in the privilege that food justice activists seek to dismantle.

The critique is particularly acute for CEA urban farms. These specialize in niche crops like salad greens, tender herbs, and microgreens, which typically cost more than field-grown greens and are sold primarily at retail stores that cater to higher-income customers. Their specialization in high-value crops and ever-advancing technology has made CEA a darling of investors, who believe the ROI in CEA will be obtained from both crop sales and from a replicable franchise of growing technology that can be deployed in other cities (Brin et al. 2016).

Green City Growers (Cleveland, Ohio) is one example of a CEA social enterprise that is betting its return on investment will better the lives for its member-employees. Most of their employees, who are primarily Black and first-generation immigrants, come from the local area. The employee-owned cooperative grows head lettuce and herbs for the typical high-end markets, but also gives member-employees the opportunity to participate in programs that assist with owning a home, purchasing a car, and investing in their futures. The investment, made collaboratively with other Cleveland businesses, is in individuals and the community, hel** to stabilize families and provide jobs that can bring them out of poverty.

6 Reframing the Value of UA

The white, U.S.-born urban farmers interviewed for the study were acutely aware of their privilege and its role in supporting the development of their own farms. These farmers are proud of their work, but do not argue that commercial urban agriculture is the only way to farm in the city. In fact, most of these commercial urban farmers struggle with the desire and expectation that they take on myriad social missions. This is in sharp contrast to the lack of demand for rural commercial farmers to do the same. Most commercial urban farms are highly visible to curious local citizens, which can be an opportunity for education but also a burden for time and business management.

For some enterprises, like Green City Growers and Growing Home (Chicago, IL), social mission is embedded in their business models. Growing Home, a nonprofit commercial urban farm, uses urban farming as job training to help recently incarcerated or otherwise displaced individuals develop job readiness skills to re-enter the work force (Rangarajan and Riordan 2019, p. 135). Others, like Springdale Farm, adapt and add nonprofit arms to their organization to provide youth or adult education or agriculture experience. Still others, like Brooklyn Grange, create separate nonprofit businesses that can best manage and truly engage a non-farming public about agriculture; since its founding, more than 20,000 students have visited the Grange. This decision allowed the farm management team to focus on the business of growing food without compromising the social impact their farm can offer (Rangarajan and Riordan 2019, p. 177).

Tezozomoc (Tezo), organizer for the now-closed South Central Farm in Los Angeles, dismisses the division between commercial and non-commercial urban farming: both, he says, are the result of a failed political and economic system (Tezozomoc 2016). South Central Farm became famous for the manner in which it was eventually closed, a symbol of local government’s privileging of whiteness and wealth over community needs. From Tezo’s perspective, by encouraging resource competition and granting resources to one type of farm (commercial) over another (nonprofit farms, farming for one’s own consumption), it is the grantor that decides which farms succeed and which farms do not. Even with the best intentions, resource providers, including local governments, can further entrench the structural racism and disinvestment they may be trying to mitigate.

The full promise of urban food production and community transformation can only be realized when people in power recognize the value of diverse approaches to UA and create intentional policies to support that diversity. Acknowledging that UA will never entirely feed cities, urban farms’ greatest output may be the way they transform communities. The question of who farms will determine how a community transforms. Whiteness in urban agriculture ingrains the idea that urban farming is for a privileged few who benefit from the legacy of racist urban planning policies and practices. The transformation, then, is toward gentrification and embedded white supremacy. But when Black and brown communities farm, the transformation is political, upending white supremacy through self-determination and self-reliance that is the foundation of food justice and food sovereignty.

Therefore, to unravel the historic and systemic injustice that makes UA both possible (from a white farmer’s land access perspective) and necessary (from a Black and brown community’s food sovereignty perspective), planners and policymakers must rethink how they value UA. In valuing and supporting community transformation, local government officials must necessarily improve access to land, capital, and resources, and acknowledge and celebrate that community self-determination is the highest and best return on investment for urban agriculture.

7 Recommendations

Most urban farmers interviewed for this study, no matter their racial or ethnic background, mention that race and racial inequality pervade and destabilize UA, making it excessively difficult for local Black, brown, or Indigenous residents to enter the profession. Implicit bias pervades extant agricultural policies, including municipal UA policies.

Promotion of agriculture types and scales that require privileged access to resources (e.g., capital, investments, loans, education, and political connections) undermines lower-resourced people, including people of color struggling to overcome the systemic racism of our nation’s institutions. The below recommendations underscore strategies needed to bridge the racial divide in urban agriculture.

8 Recommendation: Ensure Local Plans and Funding for UA Engage and Respond to Community Input

Local planners, policymakers, and funders are not necessarily UA experts, though their decisions determine the course of UA in local communities. Robust and culturally sensitive community-engagement processes, while cumbersome and time-consuming, build trust among community members who are rightfully distrustful of institutions and systems that discriminate against them. Community participation in the design of UA programs and policies ensures that proposed UA activities best fit the needs of the surrounding communities. Engage directly with marginalized or underrepresented communities, including by partnering with Black and brown community-based organizations that advocate on their behalf, to solicit recommendations on how to design or modify programs that promote UA and ensure access to programs by all residents.

Many UA programs and incentive zones target areas with a lot of vacant land and few traditional economic development prospects. Though Rustbelt cities like Detroit, Cleveland, and Buffalo are proving that this can result in viable commercial urban farms, it is important that residents’ voices are leading the conversation, says Detroit planner Kathryn Underwood (2016). Participatory planning processes that treat local residents and business-owners as partners and key informants in redevelopment planning can ensure new land use, including UA, is neighborhood-appropriate.

Kim Scott, city planner for the City of Cleveland agrees. After the 2008 housing foreclosure crisis left thousands of homes and properties vacant and abandoned in Cleveland, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) authorized $9.4 million in Neighborhood Stabilization Program funds to knock down blighted homes and provide incentives for people to purchase vacant land for creative reuse. But, says Scott (2015), “in areas that have been disinvested, people who see opportunities to get funding to support projects are not necessarily reflective of the people living in challenged neighborhoods. As the city considered applications for program funds, it looked at whether applications were submitted by residents living in close proximity to the area.”

Scott and other Cleveland planners started talking with neighborhood residents about redevelopment, including UA. “While some of us on staff thought that people probably were not aligned with food movement conversation, we were pleasantly surprised that some were,” says Scott (2015). This helped inform their planning direction, and the development of the Urban Agriculture Innovation Zone in the city’s Kinsman neighborhood.

9 Recommendation: Conduct a Critical Analysis of Policies to Ensure that Racial Inequality in Access to Land and Resources Is Addressed when Creating New Urban Agriculture Policies

Land access and secure land tenure are two of the most critical conditions for urban farms to thrive. While land access is difficult for many farmers, Black farmers have been systematically removed from their land (Daniel 2013). Access to available vacant urban land parcels is too often limited to those prospective farmers and farm managers (mostly white) who are already well-resourced and politically well-connected. Meanwhile, Black farmers report greater difficulty accessing land in urban areas (Guzman 2016).

A critical analysis of urban agriculture land policies could include land inventories. City planning agencies and other departments have inventories of land that include demographic, economic, residential, and environmental characteristics. Inventories should be judged for their agricultural suitability (e.g., zoning, historical use, utility connectivity, proximity to other buildings, contiguity with other vacant parcels, etc.) and optimal sites should be specifically promoted to Black and brown farmers. This is particularly true in Black and brown-majority neighborhoods where poverty and land vacancy would otherwise make it easy for well-resourced (and likely-white) farmers to get first access to land.

To ensure that vacant lots or other available land for farming are promoted to all aspiring farmers and avoid perceptions of bias, municipal governments and planning organizations should consider some of the following practices:

  1. 1.

    Evaluate existing UA land policies and requirements for obtaining vacant land parcels and determine whether or not they eliminate barriers for low-income, low-resource, or otherwise disadvantaged residents most impacted by food system inequities.

  2. 2.

    Evaluate whether information about UA policies and land access opportunities is distributed in a way that ensures fair and equitable access, including language (simplicity, available in multiple languages) and distribution (not only available on a website).

  3. 3.

    Collaboratively design programs addressing equity in land access with Black and brown farmers and communities, urban farmer advocates, and the local, state, or federal agencies that direct and monitor such programs.

  4. 4.

    Compile an inventory of all available vacant or underutilized land that might be used for food production, using the resources of municipal planning agencies and other departments.

  5. 5.

    Examine available vacant land inventories for their agricultural suitability (e.g., zoning, historical use, utility connectivity, proximity to other buildings, contiguity with other vacant parcels).

  6. 6.

    Promote and facilitate access to suitable agricultural sites to long-term residents in neighborhoods where parcels are available.

10 Recommendation: Focus Resources and Grant Funding in Support of all Benefits (Social, Economic, Ecological) of Urban Agriculture and Promote Sustainable Development of Urban Agriculture

Most jurisdictions have programs that support small businesses, community-based organizations, or local organizers and volunteers. Local officials should consider the maximum extent to which these resources can be used to support UA efforts, including but not limited to land banking, adopt-a-lot programs, small business grants, street front improvement grants, forgivable loan programs, stormwater programs, soil improvement and conservation programs, and general greening programs. Evaluate the extent to which these programs rely on quantifiable metrics (e.g., dollar-value returns) or otherwise create obstacles for urban growers (e.g., having title to land, proof of tax payments) and remove barriers to maximize their use by UA advocates.

11 Recommendation: Recognize that Urban Farms Can Drive Neighborhood Revitalization and Increase the Tax Base, with Positive and Negative Consequences to Local Community Residents

Beyond their direct and indirect social and ecological benefits, urban farms may also drive neighborhood revitalization. Community gardens were employed in the second half of the twentieth century for similar reasons: connecting neighbors, increasing the presence of “eyes on the street” to ward off crime, inspiring neighborhood beautification projects, and providing a space for overall social capital cultivation. These effects can make neighborhoods more attractive to other businesses or new residents, particularly those who view an urban farm as a valuable part of the bundle of goods and services one “purchases” when renting or buying a property. Thus, urban farms can be a benefit similar to parks, grocery stores, or good schools.

As such, urban farms, including those with social missions, risk contributing to gentrification and pushing out the people who started farming (because of desire or necessity) or the residents that the farms were meant to serve. Urban planners, community groups, and future urban farmers may consider working together to site new urban farms to best achieve the outcomes of all groups.

12 What Do Urban Farmers of Color Want?

Urban agriculture farmer and leader Karen Washington presented a list of policy changes that would improve UA opportunities for diverse farmers at an UA symposium hosted by George Washington University’s Food Institute on September 30, 2016. Among that list she named the following where planners can play a role:

  1. 1.

    Designate specific land in cities to be protected specifically for UA into the future.

  2. 2.

    Help create micro-food hubs in the most impoverished neighborhoods that lack supermarkets, and create a food economy based on entrepreneurship rather than charity. Food hubs can be equipped with infrastructure such as commercial kitchens and refrigeration.

  3. 3.

    Increase investment in commercial soil-based urban farms and community gardens, to support entrepreneurship and small business development.

  4. 4.

    Support programs that train urban farmers, including those that train them to become rural farmers.

  5. 5.

    Create food business incubators in neighborhoods for development of value-added products from urban-grown food.

Through comprehensive plans, corrective zoning, planned economic clusters, and collaboration with other local agencies to support programming, planners have the tools to achieve these five recommendations that will support UA and equitable food system development. Ultimately, Washington has one simple request for people in white-led and white-dominated institutions as they consider actions to support UA: “Ask us what we want.”