"Stop right there. You ... with the concrete block.
Put it down. Put it down, and back away. This is a no build zone. You hear those birds? 25 Years ago there were no Baltimore Orioles and about 20 Red Wing Blackbirds in the City of Detroit. Detroit is a native species habitat now. Put the block down, have an apple, and walk ... not drive ... away"
It sounds wonderful to me! But we might have to wait a while. There are some concrete blocks in the road.
Imagine the City of Detroit 20 years on when the blight is mopped up and traded in for new blocks of urban farm land. It's something new. Project planners aren't talking about completely de-volving back to our earliest Pioneer roots by suggesting some land plots are used for agriculture. They're suggesting something that's never quite been done before on the scale and dynamic that's being suggested in Motown. Urban Farming.
It would be the co-habitation of busy city streets, mowed lawns, street signs swaying over head ... and also apple trees, nodding fields of wheat, grunting pigs and quivering tufts of anise and oregano.
It's not that its never been done before. There certainly are past examples of urban gardening. Greening of Detroit has been breaking ground on urban gardens for years now.
Chicago's done a bit of it, mostly outside the city limits. Urban gardening is a smidge different from full on agriculture. But it's an excellent start. And the partnership between DTE Energy and the urban gardening community is now legendary in the City of Detroit.
But imagine seeing the city that twisted the iron and boiled the chrome that made the cars of the world go from smoke-belching industry monolith ... to a city dotted with rooftops and fruit crops in equal measure.
A lot of this is old hat to some of you watching for Detroit to roll over and wipe the sleep out of her eyes. Here's what's new. In order for any of this to happen in a way that would change the city's future and continue to be the Metropolis of Michigan, there has to be some amendments made to an old farming law that was originally enacted to protect farmers from unfair competition, and to protect residents from unchecked abuses. It was called The Michigan Right to Farm Act. And you'll excuse my non-legislatively inclined mind because I can't make heads or tails out of this law. But you'll just have to read it, or trust me. It's standing in the way of a couple of projects by some folks who are ready to start right now! Shovels in hand! Backers convinced they can make money and get it going immediately! One of them is Hantz Farms.
But the council imposed restrictions on the sale of the land, which lies behind a warehouse owned by businessman John Hantz at 17403 Mt. Elliott. Hantz Farms, a subsidiary of the larger Hantz Group of financial service firms, cannot grow crops or sell any produce from the site without the city's permission.
Instead, Hantz Farms will beautify the roughly 5 acres of blighted land behind the warehouse with landscaping, either with grass or some small plants, as a demonstration of how it can clean up an abandoned site, said Michael Score, the president of Hantz Farms and a former Michigan State University agricultural extension worker."
The Hantz folks are staying positive though, and insist that they and the City Council, and Mayor Dave Bing can come to an agreement by Spring. Another hitch though is that this large scale kind of farming wasn't what the new Mayor had in mind when he devised his Detroit Works Project. Except for the highly anticipated High Speed Rail slated to crack concrete in the Spring of 2012 to roar down Woodward Avenue, the Detroit Works Project has been focused primarily more on tearing things down, and clearing things out, and less on changing existing law to make room for new growth.
It may seem counter intuitive that an administration whose head swears he's dedicated to seeing Detroit grow and come back stronger than before is actually saying "No" to instant jobs, new business, and an exciting new industry for the whole country to watch. But perhaps they're doing it right ... taking it slow. This is an exciting moment for Detroit, even as she remains buried in the chalky dust of broken concrete blocks waiting to be rescued.
Let me just say as a caveat, that if I thought for a moment that this was the gateway for the Michigan Corn Growers Association to have more places to produce cow feed and High Fructose Corn Syrup, I'd rather sleep on a pile of rocks. If this were an idea eventually gobbled up by Monsanto Corporation to become more places to hide their genetically modified greed poisened seed, I'd sooner grow thistle. But if it represented diversity and true community involvement and benefit, it would be something I could be proud of.
A time for cities to build ... down? To stop piling the blocks so high? Maybe to bring back a tree line here and there, to invite some species back in and surrender a little land to them? I don't know. Wouldn't it be a kick in the shins of Detroit was the place that taught the country how to do it!