Legacy of Shortcuts - community gardens
Anyone catch this article in the the D&C? Seems you need permits in to grow community gardens in the City. Why? contaminated soil.
Rochester resident Ken Sato planted the tomatoes along with other fruits and vegetables this spring, expecting to take advantage of a garden permit program that allows city residents to cultivate unused city property.
The city initially granted him a permit, then revoked it, citing the need to monitor for probable pollution.
Since 2002, the city has demolished a Hallman’s Chevrolet warehouse building and removed two underground fuel warehouses at this site. Sato and other community garden promoters want the city to clean up this vacant lot and others for the purpose of allowing urban dwellers to grow their own food. But there are differing opinions on when soil found in industrialized areas can be considered “safe” for farming.
The city issues about 700 garden permits each year for plots of city property and instructs gardeners to use raised beds and bring in their own clean dirt for anything they plan to eat.
Why clean soil? Well, lead paint, industrial chemicals and all that.
The point here is that decisions we make today affect tomorrow. So, turning vacant land in the City - “green” is a wonderful idea - community gardens and all that but there is a cost to doing such things - a cost we must bear because some of the environmental decisions made back then were not the best.
What decisions are we making today that will affect the next generation?
Related posts:
- Community Gardens
- Community garden established in Victor
- Put community back into the community college - Guon over the line
- Community Organizing: They didn’t say Obama did a bad job. They said the job was bad.
- Carrie Andrews on the Intercept. It can’t be a community solution if the community is not involved
Plants don’t really absorb lead. Maybe the folks over at the city’s real estate office aren’t the best ones to ask about growing plants. Or maybe after the city’s success at preventing vacant building redevelopment downtown they are stepping up their efforts to prevent anyone from doing anything useful with any blighted area of the city.
At the risk of a cross post, it seems like the city is going out of its way to define “suck”.
Perhaps not. and perhaps putting plantings in that soil may be just what’s needed to clean up the contamination.
Oh, look at you channeling your inner RenSquare.
Plants absorb contaminants -at different levels.
Sure stlo7, we can all agree that not building RenSquare was a stupid move, but we have to move on.
In this case, it seems like a the city is making up reasons (lead contamination being chief among them) to prevent someone from doing something positive in the city because it is easier to say no than to look deeper into the perceived issues. The bioremediation benefits aside (although they are great), it’s not like these vacant lot are being used for anything other than collecting trash.
I just don’t see any downside to someone cleaning up a property full of trash that nobody else is doing anything with and trying to grow something there.
I’ll leave your defense of the RenSquare albatross to you.
If you read the article - no one is being discouraged from growing things - the point was edible plants. The recommended course was a raised bed with “clean” dirt.
Then if you read this post the point was we make decisions today that affect us tomorrow - so environmental dumping and all that or lax laws that contribute to brownfields are part of the problem.
Finally the article went on and highlighted that there aren’t real standards on what exactly is “safe” or not.
Your point about the decisions we make today is wasn’t lost on me. Sadly, much of the contamination that has occurs in city lots was done unintentionally when people just didn’t know any better. Now, when someone is trying to do something positive, the same ignorance is preventing them from working to mitigate the mistakes of the past.
In this case, these people were definitely discouraged by the city: the city pulled their permit.
The city then went on to justify their actions by saying that they had to monitor the area for probable pollution. What does that mean? Who has a job working for the city to monitor an area for probable pollution? What is the day to day on keeping track of an area that may be polluted, but never doing anything to find out if it is actually polluted?
Here are a few of the city’s options with this lot:
1. Test the area for actual pollution.
2. Let someone else take care of the place and assume the risk.
3. Don’t do anything and don’t let anybody else do anything.
What decisions are we making today that will affect the next generation?
How about no decisions and no actions?
How is that like RenSquare? Only in the final product.
If they don’t already do so, the City should just give out two different permits-one for non-edible plants and one for edible plants.