[Lapg] August 2009 Food Among the Ruins /Detroit, the country's most depressed metropolis by Mark Dowie/ Guernica Magazine

[Wesley Roe and Santa Barbara Permaculture Network]

August 2009
Food Among the Ruins
http://www.guernicamag.com/features/1182/food_among_the_ruins/
by Mark Dowie

Detroit, the country's most depressed metropolis, 
has zero produce-carrying grocery chains. It also 
has open land, fertile soil, ample water, and the 
ingredients to reinvent itself from Motor City to 
urban farm. Mark Dowie's immodest proposal...
  Image by Jonathan LaRocca

Were I an aspiring farmer in search of fertile 
land to buy and plow, I would seriously consider 
moving to Detroit. There is open land, fertile 
soil, ample water, willing labor, and a desperate 
demand for decent food. And there is plenty of 
community will behind the idea of turning the 
capital of American industry into an agrarian 
paradise. In fact, of all the cities in the 
world, Detroit may be best positioned to become 
the world's first one hundred percent food 
self-sufficient city.
Right now, Detroit is as close as any city in 
America to becoming a food desert, not just 
another metropolis like Chicago, Philadelphia, or 
Cleveland with a bunch of small- and medium-sized 
food deserts scattered about, but nearly a 
full-scale, citywide food desert. (A food desert 
is defined by those who study them as a locality 
from which healthy food is more than twice as far 
away as unhealthy food, or where the distance to 
a bag of potato chips is half the distance to a 
head of lettuce.) About 80 percent of the 
residents of Detroit buy their food at the one 
thousand convenience stores, party stores, liquor 
stores, and gas stations in the city. There is 
such a dire shortage of protein in the city that 
Glemie Dean Beasley, a seventy-year-old retired 
truck driver, is able to augment his Social 
Security by selling raccoon carcasses (twelve 
dollars a piece, serves a family of four) from 
animals he has treed and shot at undisclosed 
hunting grounds around the city. Pelts are ten 
dollars each. Pheasants are also abundant in the 
city and are occasionally harvested for dinner.

Detroiters who live close enough to suburban 
borders to find nearby groceries carrying fresh 
fruit, meat, and vegetables are a small minority 
of the population. The health consequences of 
food deserts are obvious and dire. Diabetes, 
heart failure, hypertension, and obesity are 
chronic in Detroit, and life expectancy is 
measurably lower than in any American city.

Not so long ago, there were five produce-carrying 
grocery chains-Kroger, A&P, Farmer Jack, Wrigley, 
and Meijer-competing vigorously for the Detroit 
food market. Today there are none. Nor is there a 
single WalMart or Costco in the city. Specialty 
grocer Trader Joe's just turned down an 
attractive offer to open an outlet in relatively 
safe and prosperous midtown Detroit; a rapidly 
declining population of chronically poor 
consumers is not what any retailer is after. High 
employee turnover, loss from theft, and cost of 
security are also cited by chains as reasons to 
leave or avoid Detroit. So it is unlikely grocers 
will ever return, despite the tireless 
flirtations of City Hall, the Chamber of 
Commerce, and the Michigan Food and Beverage 
Association. There is a fabulous once-a-week 
market, the largest of its kind in the country, 
on the east side that offers a wide array of 
fresh meat, eggs, fruit, and vegetables. But most 
people I saw there on an early April Saturday 
arrived in well polished SUVs from the suburbs. 
So despite the Eastern Market, in-city Detroiters 
are still left with the challenge of finding new 
ways to feed themselves a healthy meal.

The most intriguing visionaries in DetroitŠwere 
those who imagine growing food among the ruins.

One obvious solution is to grow their own, and 
the urban backyard garden boom that is sweeping 
the nation has caught hold in Detroit, 
particularly in neighborhoods recently settled by 
immigrants from agrarian cultures of Laos and 
Bangladesh, who are almost certain to become 
major players in an agrarian Detroit. Add to that 
the five hundred or so twenty-by-twenty-foot 
community plots and a handful of three- to 
ten-acre farms cultured by church and non-profit 
groups, and during its four-month growing season, 
Detroit is producing somewhere between 10 and 15 
percent of its food supply inside city 
limits-more than most American cities, but 
nowhere near enough to allay the food desert 
problem. About 3 percent of the groceries sold at 
the Eastern Market are homegrown; the rest are 
brought into Detroit by a handful of peri-urban 
farmers and about one hundred and fifty freelance 
food dealers who buy their produce from Michigan 
farms between thirty and one hundred miles from 
the city and truck it into the market.

There are more visionaries in Detroit than in 
most Rust-Belt cities, and thus more visions of a 
community rising from the ashes of a moribund 
industry to become, if not an urban paradise, 
something close to it. The most intriguing 
visionaries in Detroit, at least the ones who 
drew me to the city, were those who imagine 
growing food among the ruins-chard and tomatoes 
on vacant lots (there are over 103,000 in the 
city, sixty thousand owned by the city), orchards 
on former school grounds, mushrooms in open 
basements, fish in abandoned factories, 
hydroponics in bankrupt department stores, 
livestock grazing on former golf courses, 
high-rise farms in old hotels, vermiculture, 
permaculture, hydroponics, aquaponics, waving 
wheat where cars were once test-driven, and 
winter greens sprouting inside the frames of 
single-story bungalows stripped of their skin and 
re-sided with Plexiglas-a homemade greenhouse. 
Those are just a few of the agricultural 
technologies envisioned for the urban prairie 
Detroit has become.

There are also proposals on the mayor's desk to 
rezone vast sections A-something ("A" for 
agriculture), and a proposed master plan that 
would move the few people residing in lonely, 
besotted neighborhoods into Detroit's nine 
loosely defined villages and turn the rest of the 
city into open farmland. An American Institute of 
Architects panel concludes that all Detroit's 
residents could fit comfortably in fifty square 
miles of land. Much of the remaining ninety 
square miles could be farmed. Were that to 
happen, and a substantial investment was made in 
greenhouses, vertical farms, and aquaponic 
systems, Detroit could be producing protein and 
fibre 365 days a year and soon become the first 
and only city in the world to produce close to 
100 percent of its food supply within its city 
limits. No semis hauling groceries, no 
out-of-town truck farmers, no food dealers. And 
no chain stores need move back. Everything eaten 
in the city could be grown in the city and 
distributed to locally owned and operated stores 
and co-ops. I met no one in Detroit who believed 
that was impossible, but only a few who believed 
it would happen. It could, but not without a lot 
of political and community will.


There are a few cities in the world that grow and 
provide about half their total food supply within 
their urban and peri-urban regions-Dar es Salaam, 
Tanzania; Havana, Cuba; Hanoi, Vietnam; Dakar, 
Senegal; Rosario, Argentina; Cagayan de Oro in 
the Philippines; and, my personal favorite, 
Cuenca, Equador-all of which have much longer 
growing seasons than Detroit. However, those 
cities evolved that way, almost unintentionally. 
They are, in fact, about where Detroit was 
agriculturally around one hundred and fifty years 
ago. Half of them will almost surely drop under 
50 percent sufficiency within the next two 
decades as industry subsumes cultivated land to 
build factories (à la China). Because of its 
unique situation, Detroit could come close to 
being 100 percent self-sufficient.
First, the city lies on one hundred and forty 
square miles of former farmland. Manhattan, 
Boston, and San Francisco could be placed inside 
the borders of Detroit with room to spare, and 
the population is about the same as the smallest 
of those cities, San Francisco: eight hundred 
thousand. And that number is still declining from 
a high of two million in the mid-nineteen 
fifties. Demographers expect Detroit's population 
to level off somewhere between five hundred 
thousand and six hundred thousand by 2025. Right 
now there is about forty square miles of 
unoccupied open land in the city, the area of San 
Francisco, and that landmass could be doubled by 
moving a few thousand people out of hazardous 
firetraps into affordable housing in the eight 
villages. As I drove around the city, I saw many 
full-sized blocks with one, two, or three houses 
on them, many already burned out and abandoned. 
The ones that weren't would make splendid 
farmhouses.

Even without local production the food industry 
creates three dollars of job growth for every 
dollar spent on food-a larger multiplier effect 
than almost any other product or industry. Farm a 
city and that figure jumps over five dollars.

As Detroit was built on rich agricultural land, 
the soil beneath the city is fertile and arable. 
Certainly some of it is contaminated with the 
wastes of heavy industry, but not so badly that 
it's beyond remediation. In fact, 
phyto-remediation, using certain plants to remove 
toxic chemicals permanently from the soil, is 
already practiced in parts of the city. And some 
of the plants used for remediation can be readily 
converted to biofuels. Others can be safely fed 
to livestock.
Leading the way in Detroit's soil remediation is 
Malik Yakini, owner of the Black Star Community 
Book Store and founder of the Detroit Black 
Community Food Security Network. Yakini and his 
colleagues begin the remediation process by 
removing abandoned house foundations and toxic 
debris from vacated industrial sites. Often that 
is all that need be done to begin farming. Throw 
a little compost on the ground, turn it in, sow 
some seeds, and water it. Water in Detroit is 
remarkably clean and plentiful.
Although Detroiters have been growing produce in 
the city since its days as an eighteenth-century 
French trading outpost, urban farming was given a 
major boost in the nineteen eighties by a network 
of African-American elders calling themselves the 
"Gardening Angels." As migrants from the rural 
South, where many had worked as small farmers and 
field hands, they brought agrarian skills to 
vacant lots and abandoned industrial sites of the 
city, and set out to reconnect their descendants, 
children of asphalt, to the Earth, and teach them 
that useful work doesn't necessarily mean getting 
a job in a factory.
Thirty years later, Detroit has an eclectic mix 
of agricultural systems, ranging from three-foot 
window boxes growing a few heads of lettuce to a 
large-scale farm run by The Catherine Ferguson 
Academy, a home and school for pregnant girls 
that not only produces a wide variety of fruits 
and vegetables, but also raises chickens, geese, 
ducks, bees, rabbits, and milk goats.

Across town, Capuchin Brother Rick Samyn manages 
a garden that not only provides fresh fruits and 
vegetables to city soup kitchens, but also 
education to neighborhood children. There are 
about eighty smaller community gardens scattered 
about the city, more and more of them raising 
farm animals alongside the veggies. At the 
moment, domestic livestock is forbidden in the 
city, as are beehives. But the ordinance against 
them is generally ignored and the mayor's office 
assures me that repeal of the bans are imminent.
About five hundred small plots have been created 
by an international organization called Urban 
Farming, founded by acclaimed songwriter Taja 
Sevelle. Realizing that Detroit was the most 
agriculturally promising of the fourteen cities 
in five countries where Urban Farming now exists, 
Sevelle moved herself and her organization's 
headquarters there last year. Her goal is to 
triple the amount of land under cultivation in 
Detroit every year. All food grown by Urban 
Farming is given free to the poor. According to 
Urban Farming's Detroit manager, Michael Travis, 
that won't change.
Larger scale, for-profit farming is also on the 
drawing board. Financial services entrepreneur 
John Hantz has asked the city to let him farm a 
seventy-acre parcel he owns close to the Eastern 
Market. If that is approved and succeeds in 
producing food for the market, and profit for 
Hantz Farms, Hantz hopes to create more 
large-scale commercial farms around the city. Not 
everyone in Detroit's agricultural community is 
happy with the scale or intentions of Hantz's 
vision, but it seems certain to become part of 
the mix. And unemployed people will be put to 
work.
I tried to imagine what this weedy, decrepit, 
trash-ridden urban dead zone would look like 
under cultivation.
Any agro-economist will tell you that urban 
farming creates jobs. Even without local 
production, the food industry creates three 
dollars of job growth for every dollar spent on 
food-a larger multiplier effect than almost any 
other product or industry. Farm a city, and that 
figure jumps over five dollars. To a community 
with persistent two-digit unemployment, that 
number is manna. But that's only one economic 
advantage of farming a city.
The average food product purchased in a U.S. 
chain store has traveled thirteen hundred miles, 
and about half of it has spoiled en route, 
despite the fact that it was bioengineered to 
withstand transport. The total mileage in a 
three-course American meal approaches twenty-five 
thousand. The food seems fresh because it has 
been refrigerated in transit, adding great 
expense and a huge carbon footprint to each item, 
and subtracting most of the minerals and vitamins 
that would still be there were the food grown 
close by.




I drove around the city one day with Dwight 
Vaughter and Gary Wozniak. A soft-spoken African 
American, Vaughter is CEO of SHAR, a self-help 
drug rehab program with about two hundred 
residents recovering from various addictions in 
an abandoned hospital. Wozniak, a bright, 
gregarious Polish American, who, unlike most of 
his fellow Poles, has stayed in Detroit, is the 
program's financial director. Vaughter and 
Wozniak are trying to create a labor-intensive 
economic base for their program, with the 
conviction that farming and gardening are 
therapeutic. They have their eyes on two thousand 
acres in one of the worst sections of the city, 
not far from the Eastern Market. They estimate 
that there are about four thousand people still 
living in the area, most of them in houses that 
should have been condemned and razed years ago. 
There are also six churches in the section, 
offering some of the best ecclesiastical 
architecture in the city.

I tried to imagine what this weedy, decrepit, 
trash-ridden urban dead zone would look like 
under cultivation. First, I removed the overhead 
utilities and opened the sky a little. Then I 
tore up the useless grid of potholed streets and 
sidewalks and replaced them with a long winding 
road that would take vegetables to market and 
bring parishioners to church. I wrecked and 
removed most of the houses I saw, leaving a few 
that somehow held some charm and utility. Of 
course, I left the churches standing, as I did a 
solid red brick school, boarded up a decade ago 
when the student body dropped to a dozen or so 
bored and unstimulated deadbeats. It could be 
reopened as an urban ag-school, or SHAR's 
residents could live there. I plowed and planted 
rows of every imaginable vegetable, created 
orchards and raised beds, set up beehives and 
built chicken coops, rabbit warrens, barns, and 
corrals for sheep, goats, and horses. And of 
course, I built sturdy hoop houses, rows of them, 
heated by burning methane from composting manure 
and ag-waste to keep frost from winter crops. The 
harvest was tended by former drug addicts who 
like so many before them found salvation in 
growing things that keep their brethren alive.

That afternoon I visited Grace Lee Boggs, a 
ninety-three-year-old Chinese-American widow who 
has been envisioning farms in Detroit for 
decades. Widow of legendary civil rights activist 
Jimmy Boggs, Grace preserves his legacy with the 
energy of ten activists. The main question on my 
mind as I climbed the steps to her modest east 
side home, now a center for community organizers, 
was whether or not Detroit possesses the 
community and political will to scale its 
agriculture up to 100 percent food 
self-sufficiency. Yes, Grace said to the former, 
and no to the latter. But she really didn't 
believe that political will was that essential.

"The food riots erupting around the world 
challenge us to rethink our whole approach to 
food," she said, but as communities, not as 
bodies politic. "Today's hunger crisis is rooted 
in the industrialized food system which destroys 
local food production and forces nations like 
Kenya, which only twenty-five years ago was food 
self-sufficient, to import 80 percent of its food 
because its productive land is being used by 
global corporations to grow flowers and luxury 
foods for export." The same thing happened to 
Detroit, she says, which was once before a food 
self-sufficient community.
I asked her whether the city government would 
support large-scale urban agriculture. "City 
government is irrelevant," she answered. 
"Positive change, leaps forward in the evolution 
of humankind do not start with governments. They 
start right here in our living rooms and 
kitchens. We are the leaders we are looking for."

All the decaying Rust-Belt cities in the American 
heartland have at one time or another imagined 
themselves transformed into some sort of exciting 
new post-industrial urban model. And some have 
begun the process of transformation. Now it's 
Detroit's turn, Boggs believes. It could follow 
the examples of Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and 
Buffalo, and become a slightly recovered 
metropolis, another pathetic industrial has-been 
still addicted to federal stimulus, marginal 
jobs, and the corporate food system. Or it could 
make a complete break and become, if not a 
paradise, well, at least a pretty good place to 
live.
Not everyone in Detroit is enthusiastic about 
farming. Many urbanites believe that structures 
of some sort or another belong on urban land. And 
a lot of those people just elected David Bing 
mayor of the city. Bing's opponent, acting mayor 
Ken Cockrel, was committed to expanding urban 
agriculture in Detroit. Bing has not said he's 
opposed to it, but his background as a successful 
automotive parts manufacturer will likely have 
him favoring a future that maintains the city's 
primary nickname: Motor City.

Now [Detroit] offers itself as an opportunity to 
restore some of its agrarian tradition, not fifty 
miles from downtown in the countryside where most 
of us believe that tradition was originally 
established, but a short bicycle ride away.

And there remains a lasting sense of urbanity in 
Detroit. "This is a city, not a farm," remarked 
one skeptic of urban farming. She's right, of 
course. A city is more than a farm. But that's 
what makes Detroit's rural future exciting. Where 
else in the world can one find a 
one-hundred-and-forty-square-mile agricultural 
community with four major league sports teams, 
two good universities, the fifth largest art 
museum in the country, a world-class hospital, 
and headquarters of a now-global industry, that 
while faltering, stands ready to green their 
products and keep three million people in the 
rest of the country employed?

Despite big auto's crash, "Detroit" is still 
synonymous with the industry. When people ask, 
"What will become of Detroit?" most of them still 
mean, "What will become of GM, Ford, and 
Chrysler?" If Detroit the city is to survive in 
any form, it should probably get past that 
question and begin searching for ways to put its 
most promising assets, land and people, to 
productive use again by becoming America's first 
modern agrarian metropolis.

Contemporary Detroit gave new meaning to the word 
"wasteland." It still stands as a monument to a 
form of land abuse that became endemic to 
industrial America-once-productive farmland, 
teaming with wildlife, was paved and poisoned for 
corporate imperatives. Now the city offers itself 
as an opportunity to restore some of its agrarian 
tradition, not fifty miles from downtown in the 
countryside where most of us believe that 
tradition was originally established, but a short 
bicycle ride away. American cities once grew much 
of their food within walking distance of most of 
their residents. In fact, in the eighteenth and 
early nineteenth centuries, most early American 
cities, Detroit included, looked more like the 
English countryside, with a cluster of small 
villages interspersed with green open space. 
Eventually, farmers of the open space sold their 
land to developers and either retired or moved 
their farms out of cities, which were cut into 
grids and plastered with factories, shopping 
malls, and identical row houses.
Detroit now offers America a perfect place to 
redefine urban economics, moving away from the 
totally paved, heavy-industrial factory-town 
model to a resilient, holistic, economically 
diverse, self-sufficient, intensely green, 
rural/urban community-and in doing so become the 
first modern American city where agriculture, 
while perhaps not the largest, is the most vital 
industry.



Mark Dowie is an investigative historian living 
in Point Reyes Station, California. His last 
piece for Guernica, Human Nature, (an excerpt 
from his book Conservation Refugees: The 
Hundred-Year Conflict between Global Conservation 
and Native Peoples), appeared in May.
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