Nevertheless, an ethic of straightforward and transparent policy making in the interest of the general public has endured from the days of sewer socialism, contributing to the development of some bottom-up governance infrastructure. One notable element of the city’s governance infrastructure that serves to actualize resident ideas is the Community Improvement Projects program administered by the Neighborhood Improvement Development Corporation. Through this program, the city provides matching grants of up to $4,000 for resident-proposed projects that “stimulate resident engagement and support sustainable projects within a small geographic area” . Community gardens across the city have won these grants to support garden improvements, increasing the legitimacy of these sites because of the city’s endorsement and financial backing as represented by the CIP award. In recent years, particularly through its Department of Community Development, the City of Milwaukee has paid attention to residents’ ideas and priorities and has brought them into consideration in their urban planning. In 2012 and 2013, cannabis drying rack the Barrett administration conducted a survey and outreach meetings with residents to develop a sustainability plan for the city.
One interviewee stressed that the prevalence of food in public opinion was unexpected: “when surveys have been taken over the years around Milwaukee, and there are issues around sustainability, I think the City people were shocked how much food came up” . The ReFresh MKE Plan produced in 2013 showed that residents identified “empty lots and abandoned buildings” and “access to healthy food” as two of the city’s greatest sustainability challenges . Furthermore, “Fresh local food” was the single most common response given for “ideas that you think Milwaukee should focus on in its Sustainability Plan.” At the same time as ReFresh MKE was being drafted, the Department of Community Development was compiling a Vacant Lot Handbook with ideas for how residents could work with the city to repurpose unused land, based on examples of existing neighborhood projects that residents had initiated—including community gardens. As they developed these plans with attention to resident activities and priorities, city officials gained appreciation for the potential for urban agriculture to address important public needs. Thus, urban agriculture increased its legitimacy in the eyes of city officials as a tool to address public priorities developed from the bottom up. Adhering to civic conventions supporting governance in the public interest, Milwaukee city officials have been receptive to many proposals related to urban agriculture. The Common Council has approved land transfers to some formally organized community gardens located on unbuildable lots or in the city’s most economically depressed neighborhoods.
When Will Allen, a local celebrity and nationally renowned director of Growing Power, sought to build a 5-story vertical farm and urban agriculture center, the city’s planners and Common Council worked with him to make necessary changes to the zoning code. The Common Council also approved a $250,000 forgivable loan for the expansion of Sweet Water Organics, an aquaponics business that hoped to scale up its operations and create more urban agriculture jobs. In 2012, in pursuit of a $5 million award in the Bloomberg Mayors Challenge, a competition to support innovative ideas for city improvement, the Barrett administration sketched out a proposal around addressing foreclosed properties while growing the local food system. When they made it to the semi-final round of the challenge, the administration set up a website to receive project ideas from Milwaukee residents, and then held a public forum to hear presentations for the top ten ideas. In all of these situations, the city showed its interest in urban agriculture and openness to advocates’ proposals for new initiatives. Demonstrating the favorable political opportunity structure for garden advocates in Milwaukee, the city government has also been amenable to broader policy changes that facilitate urban agriculture. In 2010 the Common Council and city planners collaborated with the Milwaukee Food Council to revise the city’s zoning policy in a way that would permit urban agriculture in almost all parts of the city.
In 2010 the city’s planners and Common Council worked with the Milwaukee Food Council to revise the city’s zoning policy in a way that would permit urban agriculture in almost all parts of the city. Following the zoning update, Common Council also passed ordinances permitting residents to keep bees and chickens in the city. The policies were not highly controversial; while a few residents were vehemently opposed to the chicken ordinance in particular, the Council incorporated realistic concerns into the final rules and proceeded without much resistance. With government officials so receptive to advocates’ input, the leaders of urban agriculture organizations my not have felt it necessary to mobilize the public around preserving community gardens, as doing so would potentially step outside the city’s civic conventions. While ideas about good governance are widely shared, they largely assume that the city officials will act in the public interest without needing constant vigilance and the pressure from grassroots mobilization and protest. Ideas about the value and need for active civic participation are not as widespread in Milwaukee as, for example, I found them to be in my investigation of Seattle. The difference in civic conventions is evident in interviews and documents from the three cities’ garden programs. Over the history of the Milwaukee Urban Gardens / MKE Grows program, gardeners have been asked at a few moments to call or write to their Aldermen or to attend a particular public hearing. However, at no point did the program or other advocates in the city appear to sustain any outsider political strategies, as has occurred in both Seattle and Philadelphia. Out of the three cities, Milwaukee interviews and archival materials demonstrated the least engagement with neighborhood associations or citizen advisory committees. In my qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews and community documents, codes for civic participation, citizen voice, organizing and mobilization, and political pressure or influence were also the least frequent in Milwaukee documents and interviews, while the code for assumed city support had its highest frequency in Milwaukee. As mentioned above, the city sold some land in its inventory to community gardening groups; this happened between 2013 and 2017, with very little public engagement. In the six Common Council meetings where these land sales were approved, the only people who showed up to speak were the purchasers themselves and Yves LaPierre, an official from the Department of Community Development’s real estate division who manages the city’s garden leases. Apparently, LaPierre’s presence alongside the purchasers served to confer adequate legitimacy on the transaction for it to win council approval. Additional supporters of the purchasing organization, community gardeners or other urban agriculture advocates did not participate in any of the hearings. Their absence aligns with the city’s civic conventions that suggest grassroots political pressure is not a normative aspect of the local public’s civic expectations or repertoire. Indeed, the city has acted favorably toward urban agriculture without much public pressure. With Will Allen forming personal relationships with Mayor Barrett and other city officials and bringing a national spotlight to Milwaukee as a place using urban agriculture to improve people’s lives, government support for urban agriculture appears to have been greater than for other types of resident-driven activity. The city’s multimillion-dollar HOME GR/OWN program demonstrates a belief in the potential of urban agriculture as a community investment. This “catalytic project,” designed to meet goals in the ReFresh MKE sustainability plan, leverages public funds, vertical grow system land and staffing along with private investments and philanthropic support specifically to repurpose vacant lots and help people grow food. In Milwaukee, the prestigious national awards that Will Allen has won for his innovations in urban agriculture have helped to bring urban agriculture additional legitimacy along with that accrued due to the city’s baseline receptivity to resident interests. City officials have come to appreciate how urban agriculture could be used to define the city, attract outside funding, and build the local economy. However, this appreciation has its limits.
As Chapter 4 will illustrate, city officials are loath to remove potentially developable properties from the tax rolls by transferring ownership to a tax-exempt organization. Eight out of my 18 interviewees, both garden advocates and city officials, stated this as if it were a matter of fact. One garden program leader, recounting a time when they were previously told to move their garden from a city-owned lot, explained that the city was prioritizing a potential development over the garden “because the city of course is looking at their tax base. And being a nonprofit, whether we purchase the land or whether we’re leasing the land, the city’s not making any money that way” . Like other interviewees from Milwaukee, this program leader took for granted that the city’s primary interest in land use decisions is tax revenue. Widely recognizing the limits to the city’s appreciation for urban agriculture, garden advocates in Milwaukee have rarely mobilized to resist garden removal. Both before and after MUG was established, when particular gardens have faced development threats, the more common reaction has been a sense of inevitability. Thus, while government support for urban agriculture is often assumed in Milwaukee, the people involved in urban agriculture projects understand that support only extends so far. In line with the city’s civic conventions, advocates have used the political opportunity structures available to them, such as Community Improvement Projects funding and the Barrett administration’s receptivity to citizens’ ideas about urban agriculture, to advance pragmatic policies to improve residents’ lives through urban agriculture. However, Milwaukee’s discursive opportunity structure does not support more confrontational strategies or radical, redistributive demands.The civic conventions in Philadelphia present a different context for legitimizing urban agriculture projects and mobilizing to protect threatened gardens. In Philadelphia, as evidenced by prior work and my interviews, cynicism about the local government runs high. There are fewer opportunities to seek public resources for resident-driven projects, and land is controlled by a complex web of bureaucracy that seems to require professional skills to navigate successfully. Philadelphia’s civic conventions have not produced a political opportunity structure as conducive to bottom-up governance. However, the widespread cynicism about government, especially among Black residents who make up the majority of the city’s population, has created a discursive opportunity structure more receptive to social movement mobilization and demands for far-reaching policy changes. Ideas about good government and resident input have translated into infrastructure for bottom-up governance in Milwaukee and also, as the next section will illustrate, in Seattle; however, Philadelphia’s civic conventions are different. The city does not have a matching grant program to support neighborhood improvement initiatives, a tool which has proven valuable for developing and legitimizing community gardens in Milwaukee and Seattle. Like other cities in the US, Philadelphia receives Community Development Block Grants from the federal government, and over time some of these funds have been used for greening vacant lots. This investment, however, was directed by the city in collaboration with the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society rather than being driven by residents. Most of the CDBG-funded greening has involved removing trash, laying down fresh sod, and putting up a small wooden fence to deter future dumping—the “clean-and-green” treatment—whereas resident-driven projects on vacant lots tend to establish community gathering spaces such as gardens, playgrounds or pocket parks. Residents have built hundreds of gardens across Philadelphia with assistance from PHS, the County Extension office, and other entities; however, the funding for these projects has come mostly from private foundations and fundraising efforts rather than from the city. While PHS has established its legitimacy as a provider of greening services , until recently most individual gardens were not viewed as legitimate even if PHS was involved in their development. The majority of the city’s gardens have operated without formal permission; the city’s revocable garden licenses were hard to obtain and their revocability did not engender much trust in their value . Even for gardens that secured a revocable license , the city did not keep a record of which lots contained gardens and long categorized all of the city’s agricultural spaces as “vacant” . Without the bottom-up governance infrastructure that Milwaukee and Seattle have for facilitating neighborhood initiatives, gardens in Philadelphia have not been able to gain much legitimacy by seeking support from the city government.