Working in partnership with the City of Milwaukee, the MMSD and the Fund for Lake Michigan have invested billions of dollars to expand both “grey” and “green” infrastructure for storm water management—not only increasing the capacity of pipes and underground storage tanks, but also adding trees and bio-swales and preserving open spaces so that more rainwater can be absorbed into the ground rather than flowing into the sewer system. In 2019 alone, MMSD spent $5 million from its capital budget on green infrastructure . In the last two decades, MMSD has supported garden improvement projects such as the installation of rainwater catchment and cisterns at numerous gardens in the city. In the process of restoring the Kinnickinnic River, MMSD has partnered with the Sixteenth Street Community Health Center to operate community gardens along the green space that will become part of the river basin. The City also contracts with Groundwork Milwaukee to maintain green infrastructure as part of its youth employment work, and on the City’s “Green Infrastructure” web page they highlight Groundwork’s network of community gardens as a stormwater management asset . Of the many potential benefits that community gardens offer, flood table stormwater management is neither the most celebrated in the media nor the most sought after by gardeners themselves; nevertheless, it has become an important angle for funding community gardens in Milwaukee .
The share of resources that urban agriculture attracts for its value as green infrastructure, relative to the resources it receives for its other potential benefits, may seem puzzling given that this is not one of the main benefits for which urban agriculture has gained legitimacy as a land use. Understood through the lens of urban political ecology, the outsizedrole of green infrastructure as a funding mechanism for urban agriculture highlights how all social processes exist within a material environmental system, and fundamental ecological limits on this system cannot be ignored. When it rains, the water is going to go somewhere. If an urban environment has too much impervious surface, the rainwater will cause flooding and, in cities with combined sewer systems, overflows of sewage and industrial wastewater. The health and economic consequences of water flows then become too large for social actors to ignore. While it may be tempting to view this dynamic as evidence of nature asserting its dominance over humankind, the social response has been to further commodify nature and attempt to bring ecological processes into line with economic relations . The massive fines that the EPA levies for combined sewer overflows demonstrate how political entities are attempting to price in ecosystem services to keep the capitalist economic system functional, in spite of its inherent tendency to deplete and degrade ecosystems . For community garden advocates, stormwater mitigation presents a convenient multi-functionality that helps bolster the economic value of urban agriculture, at least in combined sewer overflow cities in the US context.
Ultimately, funding community gardens as stormwater mitigation is another example of how urban agricultural spaces are largely surviving through the ongoing commodification of nature and advocates’ amplification of arguments that conform with market logic. In Milwaukee’s tight fiscal context, city officials do not play an active role in expanding the city’s community garden network. As reflected in the urban agriculture policies that have passed and the way that city officials talk about gardens, they can mainly envision meeting the public demand for more cultivation on vacant lots through commercial urban agriculture. In Philadelphia, as in Milwaukee, extreme poverty and an eroding tax base are critical concerns within the local political economy that constrain possibilities for public investment in gardens. Like Milwaukee, Philadelphia has struggled to recover from economic setbacks brought on by capital flight and globalization, but Philadelphia differs in the primary ways that land has figured in its political-economic problems—and the ways that urban agriculture has figured in proposed solutions. As the City of Philadelphia has worked to regrow its economy and resolve strain on the city’s budget, land has come to be seen as a liability due to the scale of tax delinquency and the staggering number of vacant parcels that the city has had to deal with. My analysis shows how PHS was instrumental in distilling this land-as-liability narrative and involved in advocating for a land bank to address the issue.
Describing the land bank advocacy, resulting policy, and its ultimate impact on gardens, I reveal how Soil Generation’s framing for urban agriculture has fundamentally diverged from PHS’s and informs robust organizing that maintains pressure on city officials as a counterpoint to the forces of financial constraint and growth interests influencing land bank implementation. Philadelphia has suffered from the same processes of white flight and deindustrialization that have contributed to budget crises in Milwaukee and many other US cities. As the loss of manufacturing jobs impacted urban centers in the US, Philadelphia’s population declined from over 2 million people in 1950 to 1.5 million in 2000. As in Milwaukee, the steepest contraction occurred between 1970 and 1980, the same decade that the city’s major community gardening programs were launched. Unlike Milwaukee, however, the city’s population has begun to increase again. After a slight increase from 2000 to 2010, Philadelphia saw 5% population growth between the 2010 and 2020 Censuses. While the population has started to rise—an indication that Philadelphia may be starting to “win” again in attracting the key elements needed for economic growth—Philadelphia is still afflicted by high levels of poverty and unemployment. Nearly a quarter of the city’s residents live below the poverty line, and median household income is less than $46,000 a year. The unemployment rate in 2021 was over 9%, with even higher rates for the city’s Black population . Just as Philadelphia and Milwaukee have similar economic problems, they have both faced budget challenges that threaten essential city services. Philadelphia has a large debt load: in 2018, general obligation bonds totaled $1.6 billion and the city’s overall debt through 2047 stood at $5.5 billion . The School District of Philadelphia does not have taxing authority or an elected school board; instead, it seeks funding annually from the city and state, who appoint the five-member School Reform Commission that governs the district. In 2013, just as City Council was considering the Land Bank bill that will be the focus of this section, the school district’s financial woes reached a crisis point . Digging $50 million deeper to make up for cuts in state funding and keep their schools staffed, City Council’s protectiveness over property tax revenue was heightened at this moment . The school budget crisis played a role in shaping how the Land Bank would ultimately function, and the significant consequences for the city’s gardeners will be discussed more below. As in Milwaukee, the budget crunch from an eroding tax base means that public resources are barely covering essential city services, making investments in urban agriculture less of a priority than they might be if the city’s revenue was greater. In Philadelphia, the city’s status as “losing” in the global competition for urban growth became physically evident across the built environment in the form of vacant lots. Due to high levels of tax delinquency and property abandonment, Philadelphia accrued around 40,000 vacant lots, 4×8 flood tray creating pockets of blight that have invited crime and further drained municipal resources. By comparison, Milwaukee has around 3,000 vacant lots; Philadelphia has 1.4 times the land area and 3 times the population of Milwaukee, but 13 times the number of vacant parcels. The problems associated with vacant lots weigh particularly heavily on Philadelphia’s political economy, and the issue has had a significant impact on the direction of the city’s garden programs and preservation efforts, as will be discussed below. While the undeveloped and abandoned lots are a visible testament to Philadelphia’s economic woes, political dimensions of the vacancy issue are harder to see but equally important to understanding the organizational environment in which city officials and urban agriculture advocates operate.
The 40,000 vacant lots in Philadelphia form a complex patchwork of used, unused, city-owned, and privately-owned land. In Milwaukee, tax delinquency is resolved through a process called in-rem taking, whereby the City simply gains ownership of the abandoned property. In Philadelphia, however, the city doesn’t have authority for in-rem taking, so delinquent properties remain in private hands, complicating any redevelopment efforts the city might attempt. For a long time, city officials did not even know which lots were privately owned and which were in the city’s inventory . Furthermore, gardens that were made visible through advocates’ mapping efforts have still been put up for auction despite their supposed visibility; since this has happened repeatedly, gardeners and organizers in the urban agriculture community have understandably become frustrated and suspicious of the disuse— or misuse—of the information they provided. Preserving gardens that sit on multiple lots is especially difficult if any of the lots have privately held tax liens. In 1997, to raise badly needed funding for the school district, the City bundled tax debt from more than 30,000 parcels and sold it to US Bank. However, when debt collection didn’t bring in the expected revenue, investors sued the City for over $40 million that it has not been able to pay . Properties with US Bank liens have been gradually sold off for development, but close to 3,000 parcels remain in private-lien limbo. As Garden Justice Legal Initiative attorney Ebony Griffin testified to the City Council Housing Committee, around half of the inquiries that her office gets for garden preservation include parcels with a US Bank lien . While Griffin has trained an army of lawyers in the city to represent gardeners pro-bono, law firms won’t take the cases with US Bank liens in order to avoid a conflict of interest with the bank. Furthermore, buying a parcel with a private lien costs three or four times as much as the original lien—quite often a sum more than the property itself is worth—due to penalties and interest imposed by the bank . Gardeners seeking to purchase these lots are confronted with exorbitant costs and scant assistance, all because of a failed financialization experiment that has ultimately frozen thousands of properties across the city in vacancy and impeded revitalization efforts for entire neighborhoods. The depth of the vacant lot problem helps explain why the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society worked to maintain legitimacy for its Philadelphia Green program as a strategy for addressing urban blight. In analysis of documents and interviews, I applied the code for vacant lots to data from Philadelphia twice as often as that from Milwaukee, and more than four times as often as that from Seattle. As explained in chapter 2, orienting Philadelphia Green toward cleaning up vacant lots helped PHS win contracts with the city that provided a stable funding source and a positive narrative to share with their membership. However, for the city’s community gardeners, this orientation has imposed limits as much as it has helped to legitimize gardens as a use of vacant lots. Through their association with PHS’s “clean-and-green” treatment, the gardens are seen as a temporary strategy to address blight until development comes along. This view ignores the reality that very different people work to maintain the clean-and-green lots—paid landscaping crews—than those who build and maintain community gardens—local residents volunteering their own time to improve their surroundings, increase neighborhood social cohesion, and grow food for themselves and others. When a clean-and green lot is sold and developed, the landscaping crews likely do not notice; according to a PHS employee interviewed, the crews are dispatched to roughly 13,000 vacant lots across the city each year. In contrast, when a garden is sold, those who have invested their time and labor into the garden will certainly feel its loss. Framing neighborhood greening as a solution to blight and a strategy for economic development helped PHS garner resources that have contributed to building community gardens across the city, and the organization has helped legitimize urban agriculture by their promotion of Philadelphia Green. However, when the city’s problem is framed as one of blighted vacant lots, community gardens can be seen as a temporary fix and will not be automatically prioritized among the range of solutions, despite offering many other benefits that can simultaneously address different dimensions of the city’s problems in addition to blight.