Part Two: Community Gardens: How People Take Land From the Rich to Feed Themselves

the answer is that everyone here just drinks. And but yeah, I refuse to all that education as a kid actually worked on me. I'm like the one person that dare worked for it. That's not true. I did a bunch of drugs when I was younger.

and all this shit. Guess what, I don't have to drive drunk. And I also don't have to go live in a house that has molding that's going to fall off within eight months.

what I know? I know it's in data. I wouldn't believe it if it wasn't in data.

Often they relied on welfare to do this, because low cost mortgages were provided through the GI bill.

social cause. In nineteen fifty eight, the social scientist named Morton Grodsen's said quote, once the proportions of non whites exceed the limits of the neighborhood's tolerance for interracial living, whites move out. Studies in the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties showed that black Americans are fine with a fifty to fifty ethnic composition, but white people, the white people who were willing who checked the yes, I'm willing to live inter racially, were mostly only willing to do so

if they were still the majority. So it's like what we all kind of knew, we now have. Well, you know, for the past forty years, we've had data showing that white people are like, yeah, yeah, as long as there's only a couple people of color around them, chill, you know. So white people left the cities because suddenly there was no white people in the cities. Because the people were the white people were able to leave the cities because of a combination of welfare and racism, and with less

financial investment in the cities, the cities got poor. By the early nineteen seventies, there was something like ten thousand vacant lots in New York City that had become public property as a result of unpaid property taxes. So those are just the ones that were abandoned by people who stop paying taxes entirely. People started taking over and I'm going to talk about the squad and scene there sometime, but today is not that day. People started gardening the

lots and it started with a meeting. I think community organizing meetings have to be the biggest like discrepancy between how cool the stuff they get done is versus how boring it is to go to the meetings in all of history, or I'm too fidgety to sit through them. I'm not sure. I've been in a lot of meetings in my life. Often what you plan to do is very exciting, but it takes a certain kind of thinking to decide. The meeting itself is exciting. But this meeting.

You shouldn't be afraid of meetings, because this meeting in nineteen seventy three started a movement that has fed uncountable millions of people across the globe since it started. Because at this meeting, they started the Green Gorillas, which in turn started the modern community garden movement. I haven't have you ever heard of the Green Gorillas.

or violence. I actually looked up there's like basically a squatty museum and Lower East Side, and some of their photos and exhibition stuff is online and there's a photo of kids playing in one of these abandoned laws. It looks like a war zone. There's way more than I expected as someone who lived in New York in the early odds. So the neighbors got together and they were like,

we're going to garden this space. And they posted flyers in multiple languages because again that's the important thing to do, and they started raising funds for equipment, but mostly they ended up paying for everything out of their own pockets. They actually tried to do this properly. They talked to the city about their plans and they even paid for insurance, and the city was like, nah, you can't work this

property because you don't own it. And the people were like, hey, we were asking to be polite, we're going to do it anyway. And so they hauled out trash, they hauled in soil, and they split the place into lots for neighbors to have gardens. They called it the Bowery Houston Community Farm and Garden, And so the city came rushing in and was like, all right, if you're going to do it anyway, well, now we wanted to be proper

and have paperwork. They got a one month, one dollar a month lease from the city.

about like how words formed. There's like this giant library where you can just pick the books off the shelves and sit there all day. It's pay what you wish. It's all donations, and it's in this old big schoolhouse in the middle of DC. And the city gave them a I think it's ten dollars a year rent for the next hundred years.

trees and ponds of fish and turtles and shit. But it's never enough with these hippies, right, they saved one vacant lot, and now they're trying to save all the other vacant lots in the city. When will they read these people? I know, I know. So they started the Green Gorillas, and sometimes they ask for permission from the city,

but quite famously, they often didn't. If you ever want to read a one sentence description of their tactics, it's usually they went around throwing condoms full of tomato seeds over fences into empty lots.

they're developed from an ancient Japanese practice. And if I see a lot of articles that say in ancient Japanese practice without sources, I'm going to side eye the shit out of that. They were rediscovered in nineteen thirty eight by a Japanese gardener who seems pretty cool, and so it is a practice that has come out of Japan and might be ancient. The guy who reinvented them, his

name was Masanobo Fukuoka. And in the West, you've got these early organic moves, like he's doing this stuff at the early twentieth century, right, and that's before the organic mat movement really kicks off. It's during this period where everyone's like, we want to turn agriculture into industry because we're really excited about destroying the entire world. And so one of the Western version of hey, what if we didn't do that was this Austrian guy who invented biodynamic

farming named Rudolph Steiner, and he's real fucking strange. His thing is organic farming meets wingnut religious stuff, and it is considered one of the antecede into the modern organic farming movement. Have you ever heard of this stuff?

But it's like it's also like not always great in a lot of ways, and it's like not particularly scientific. So the Japanese antecedent to the organic farming movement seems cooler overall and has had a little bit more staining power. Japan seemed pretty head in terms of alternative agriculture. Masanobu was an early advocate of stuff that's becoming more popular today,

like no till farming and organic farming. He called his method and do nothing farming, and basically he was like, what if we don't do any work, doesn't that seem like a better way to live, and I can't argue with him. He was a scientist who had a religious experience that made him be like, I think Western agriculture is no good, which is true. At first, he kind of tried to go like a little bit too far. He was like, well, what if I just don't even

prune the tree? And then he was like, oh shit, insects are fucking it up and all the things and doesn't make his good fruit, and so he has to do like a little bit of cultivation. But he did a lot of no till farming of rice and barley. His most famous book is called The One Straw Revolution, and it doesn't work necessarily for feeding people at scale, but it is a really interesting concept. He traveled around the world with his life.

a lot of stuff without tilling. I don't know enough about it yet. Cool, but yeah, he I don't know. It's interesting. I fell down a rabbit hole about it, and I've like read about it a whole bunch before, but I like don't feel like I'm an expert at at any any level. And so with his life, he traveled around the world trying to do cool shit, like you vegetate deserts that were expanding and things like that, and he just like did that. He went on to do it until he died at the age of ninety

five in two thousand and eight. He's enough of like a interesting and wing nutty guy that I'm like waiting to find out that he's like some terrible you know, there's like something going on, but I I'm not aware of it yet. And he was into seed bombs. You throw him everywhere you see what grows up on its own. The classic seedball is five parts clay to one part seeds. You dry it out and then you toss it somewhere

and then the seeds may or may not stick. When I was a baby activist, gorilla gardening was all the rage and all the big protests would regularly have like seed bomb workshops the day before so people could toss seeds into abandoned lots along the march routes.

for fun. And by that I mean because I want people to make their own seed bombs, although don't do it exactly this way because it involves a little bit of glittering. I'm going to read from the Green Gorillas fact sheet that they circulated about how to make the seed bombs that they made. You take an ornament, you take pelletized time release fertilizer, peat moss, crumbs, tissue, and seeds.

You start with the seeds in the fertilizer, then you add wet peat moss, and then you stop it up with tissue, and then quote choose a lot that has a fence and is legally inaccessible. Calculate in advance how many grenades will be needed to cover the area. Check carefully before throwing, observe all normal safety precautions. Suggested throwing techniques are for Christmas ornaments and underhand throw. For water balloons,

use an overhand throw. And then they have a list at the bottom of suggested seeds based on the season, mostly flowers, sometimes grass or soybeans. And they just went around and flour bombed New York.

throw a condom full of seeds over a fence. Don't do that, by a way, unless you find biodegradable condoms, which.

attract tourists and gentrify the city. So the kids only tagged because it didn't raise property values and it didn't lead to the displacement of squatters and low income homeowners and residents. Basically, they were like, we're going to fight gentrification by fucking up the city. Visually. But I went back eight years later and those same folks, who I could no longer call kids at this point, were doing beautiful street art. They were still squatters and anarchists, but

they had changed their perspective on this issue. I asked one guy what changed, and he shrugged and he was like, ah, I grew up. I wanted to make something pretty. And that's just a tension that is going to exist whenever people take direct action to beautify their environments. But what isn't attention is the tension of running an anti capitalist podcast sponsored by capitalist products. I feel no tension whatsoever, she said, while lying.

In nineteen seventy three, the Green Gorillas got their start, the gardeners expanded like wild and the Green Gorillas were working eighty four gardens by nineteen seventy five. They intentionally went around and taught everyone how to do what they were doing and helped new gardens do surveys and get plants. By nineteen eighty six, they had two hundred and fifty volunteers. By nineteen ninety one, they were working four hundred and fifty gardens out of the about seven hundred gardens total

in the city. It wasn't all just peaceful and non destructive. Bolt cutters were as much a part of their Arsenal's paperwork was those kind of this thing, we're in retrospect because all this is very above board, and the Parks Department runs it now, and so everyone's like wacky, like they threw some seeds around and doesn't like to talk about like the crime and property destruction part of it,

as if they're ashamed of that was. I think it's part of what made it cool in nineteen seventy eight, the Parks Department started to step in more formally, seeing how popular all this shit was. And I don't want to necessarily say that the people at the Parks Department were being opportunistic or that their goal was recuperation, because I think that all of these people were looking for ways to try and make it last, right. You know, when you have a squatted space, you're waiting for the

cops to come and take it from you. And so they wanted to work with the city. But of course the Parks Department's involvement has in some ways sheltered and in some ways imperiled many of these gardens. The Green Gorillas were anxious to get formal recognition so that the gardens could survive bureaucracy, and it sort of worked. In nineteen seventy eight, this Parks Department started its Green Thumb program,

originally called Operation Green Thumb. And there's no space between green and Thumb, but there is between operation and green and that annoys me.

mafia man. This is the broken Windows mare. If you brutally crack down on minor infractions like graffiti, turnstile jumping, loitering, et cetera. Somehow that stops all the murder and robbery and shit. I lived in New York City during his reign, and I had friends spent three days in jail for like hopping turnstiles or getting caught with a joint on them. The idea is that if someone sees a broken window, they figure it's not a place where the law is enforced,

so you can kind of do whatever you want. I mostly I used to hop turnstyles all the time, and it was like fucking crazy adrenaline rush because I was like, if I get caught, I'm gonna spend three days in jail just to save like a dollar fifty or whatever. I wasn't. I wasn't the smartest person when I was younger, like cost benefit analysis, poor whatever. I also believe that it's lush every day. It would keep you young.

there was no statistically significant effect on major crime. Broken window theory is a crackdown on loitering, not on property that you leave derelict. Rudy Giuliani fucking hated the community gardens because he wanted development. Most of the community gardens were on city owned property, and he wanted to buldoze the green space to build housing.

gardens just doing communism like whatever. In January nineteen ninety nine, one hundred and fourteen gardens were put up for auction by this city with the intention of selling the land to developers. And when they would sell it to the land to developers, it was not to build low income housing. It was eighty percent market rate housing and twenty percent

moderate income housing. I saw this myself a few years later while I was living in a squad in the Bronx, and it was the squad was run by an Indigenous run nonprofit had been around since I think the mid eighties. We are in a tenement building surrounded by project buildings. The city wanted to bulldoze the building to put in market rate housing that would have a few low income units as available as well, which would massively increase the

overall cost of living in the area. So they wanted to gentrify that area by bulldozing a squat to build quote unquote low income housing, most of which was market rate, and then in two thousand and four they burned the squat down to get the squatters out because we kept tying them up in the courts, and once it was burned down then there was no thing to fight about legally anymore. But that's a different story that I don't have. I was just there. I don't know. I haven't looked

up the details a very long time. Fuck those twenty years ago, I feel old. Whatever. So one hundred and fourteen community gardens were put up for auction without doing a round of community input, like they're supposed to fucking do lip service to, you know, when they pretend like they care what the community has to say, so they like community meetings and everyone can wait to say they're like bit to city council and then get ignored. You know. Yeah, they didn't bother even doing that.

the day along with some other people. She had been a New York City activist for decades. At that point, she was heavily involved a supporting game end during the AIDS crisis. In nineteen ninety five, she founded the New York Restoration Project a trust which went to that auction and bought sixty of the one hundred and fourteen community gardens and put them into a trust. And a trust is a way more secure thing than the green Thumb program with like the month a month leases and shit

like that. I think Middler herself put millions of dollars into that. Another fifty two were purchased by another trust. The total cost of buying a one hundred and twelve out of one hundred and fourteen was like four point two million or something. That people raised, and these are probably still the most legally protected community gardens in New York City, the ones that are in these trusts.

initials of its founders. They squatted a place with some former Black Panthers in nineteen seventy nine, and then they left it in exchange for being given a different building. Basically, the city was like, oh, fuck, not that one here. Do you want this empty schoolhouse instead? And they're like, yes, we'll take this empty school whose which they built into the Elboheo Community Center, which means the Hut. It is a five story former public school. That community center they

ran as a community center. They taught classes, they lent out bicycles, they offered meeting space. A ton of local theater companies practiced in that space for years. In nineteen ninety eight, a Giuliani supporter bought it for three point one five million dollars and then didn't do anything with it, and it is still empty as of twenty twenty two.

Young Lord's movement that did amazing things. Armando Perez was murdered in nineteen ninety nine in a murder that people tend to assume was a political hit because of his fight against development. It's also possible that he was killed by some folks who are dealing drugs that he confronted about dealing drugs, which apparently would have been in character

for him too. The most telling line in the New York Times article about his death is quote, because mister Perez had been drinking, the police did not initially treat his death as a homicide. Fuck, yeah, is this bad? Yeah?

It's also possible that he was confronting. He apparently was known for trying to convince people that they should not be dealing drugs on the project building where his wife lived. But La Plaza Cultural de Amando Perez is one community garden that's still around in the East Village and it's named after him. Charis first started that garden in nineteen seventy six. It wasn't named after him. To start, it was like all the groups coming together to start that garden.

You had the green gorilla seed bombing it for them, and Charis was like really into geodesic domes. This is some seventy shit that you probably had to be there, right.

more about it. Yeah, the fights to defend all these community gardens in the nineties and the early aughts were creative, theatrical and confrontational, which was the style at the time. It's kind of the stuff that built into I'm sure there are other things that built into it, but it built into the alter anti globalization movement of the late nineties and early aughts, which set up a ton of the protest culture around the world that we still have today.

All of the like horizontal direct action, like theatrical protest movement stuff that's been going on all over the world. A lot of that comes from the anti globe era stuff, and this stuff immediately preceded that and then tied into it. And it just makes me happy that it like when I find these like lineages that then carry all over the world. There's an article about this particular fight written

by Civil Eats in twenty twenty two. Quote. At the height of the protests, as a city was preparing to bulldoze the East Village's Esperanza Garden, organizers built a structure shaped like a cookie, a small tree, frog, and a cultural symbol of Puerto Rico, with enough room for five people, so we slept in it every night, said Bill de Payola, a longtime community organizer amid a court battle to prevent

the auctioning of gardens. He recalls how the city bulldozed the land in two thousand and one with the help of the police, forcing out one hundred protesters. And so they did all of this, like civil disobedience and all these things to try and protect these While they were also working in the courts, the green guerrillas would like dress up as vegetables and raid city hall. Folks kept

starting new gardens. One of the best articles about all of this was written by an anarchist journalist named Brad Will who was and it was written in I want to say these articles written in two thousand and one and two thousand and six. Brad Will was murdered by the Mexican government while covering the teachers uprising in Ohaka in two thousand and six. He filmed his own death, he wrote down at the Fifth Street squat, which I

think is where he was living at the time. We cleared out the adjacent lot of rubble, drunk carts, piss, bottles, and rot. We started a green space. The neighborhood kids ran wild between the fragile beds. The nuns from the Cambrini old folks Home came across the street to praise

our goodly green emergence. The year before they had been lobbying for our viction like because so basically, the nuns didn't like the squad and then they opened a garden and now the nuns are like, hey, these squaders are cool. He went and taught Earth First blockade techniques to the gardeners at the Chico Mendez Mural Garden and they set up barricades and they named it Fort Chico. It was eventually bulldozed. Activists were doing things like chaining themselves across

the street. And it was like all of these techniques that have been developed and forced defence and by Earth First brought into community garden defense in the middle of one of the densest cities in the country. And it, I don't know, makes me happy. Because in two thousand and two the movement one again, sort of four hundred or five hundred gardens depending on your source were transferred into the Green Thumb program, while one hundred and fifty

were developed. And I have no clean and clever transition from this sentence into an ad and yet I'm doing it anyway, because now here's ads and we're back. So basically what happened is right. So these four hundred five hundred gardens are now part of that Green Thumb program, and this is the one where it's like a month a month lease where they can get fucked over at any time. But it still was the like they were

about to all be destroyed. And now they're like, oh, it's like safe until we specifically come up with reasons why we want the land, you know. Yeah, And the Green Thumb gardens are precarious. Disaster capitalism, for example, took out a Coney Island community garden. It had been running for years and having green space actually mitigated some of

the worst flooding from Hurricane Sandy in twenty twelve. That it destroyed a whole bunch of that area well, and it buried the storm buried it Undersand I wonder if they knew that when they named it Sandy. Anyway, the storm, the community came together immediately and restored the garden, and then the mayor was like, yeah, but what if we put a music venue here? And the gardeners watched their work bulldozed in twenty thirteen. The death cycle of the

community garden is the cycle of gentrification. An area gets poor and is neglected and often winds up trashed. Community residents clean up that trash and beautify the neighborhood, which invites new wealthier residents, which displaces people who cleaned up the neighborhood. Eventually, the property is too valuable to leave vacant, and the people who move there because of gardens are

no longer there. This is the cycle we see. Like, you know, artists move to a place because it's affordable, and then richer artists move there, and then all the artists have to leave and whatever, you know, to quote Robert Gottlieb, writing for the MIT Press, quote in a neoliberal age, private property, Trump's community benefits once private owners and sometimes public entities decide that the land value has improved, often due to the community gardens, and that development can proceed.

Gardens are plowed under, even when developments are then postponed, with the former gardens sometimes reverting to public land, and of course recuperation comes for us. All there's now a real estate company that I'm not going to name that. In twenty fourteen, trademarked the term agrihoods for agricultural neighborhoods, and then I need you to unsay that. Thank you,

thank you, thank you, yep. For the low cost of half a million bucks or five million bucks, in the right neighborhood, you can buy a house around a centrally planned farm with composting in solar panels. Isn't that exciting?

There's a nonprofit that runs an agricultural neighborhood in Detroit where the meati the in home value is under twenty five thousand dollars and is run by a guy born and raised in the neighborhood whose grandmother lived in that neighborhood.

People living there share tools and can harvest whatever they want from the farm once a week, and that's like the tech billionaires get all the stuff that we should all just have, that we develop as ways to live despite being poor, and then they're like, oh, we want all that stuff. It seems classy and interesting, like all the fucking boho chic stuff, which whatever I mean it. I'm not above like making farmhouse style furniture because you

can make it out of two by four us. But I guess I am above paying ten thousand dollars for farmhouse style furniture. Yeah, that sounds right, ten thousand dollars. Furniture should be old as shit and really interesting in card with ornate, weird scenes. That's my one day. I'm going to start an interior design show and no one will listen to it, but I'll be happy.

early odds. It's the people who dressed up like tomatoes and ran into city Hall, the people who released crickets, the people who locked down to things, the people who wrote hit songs that you all don't appreciate and then donated money. And the gardens still exist and they still do essential work. For example, rather than shut down during COVID despite being ordered to, gardeners formed the Bronx Community Farm Hubs to grow and donate food to places that

needed it. They gave away forty three thousand pounds of food in twenty twenty, then one hundred and sixty two thousand pounds of food, and twenty twenty one then they also just started feeding people, but then Green Thumb shut them down for that because they were like, couldn't social distance properly or whatever, even though it's all outside and they regularly donate to community fridges. Also, I know, it's just like I love these legacy projects that are still

around because of the work that people did. These gardens help compost the city's waste. The governor recently cut all the compost programs funding, but a private, anonymous donation kept it going. I assume, as Betty Midler, the nonprofit Grow NYC runs fifty two food drop offs and composts eight

point three million pounds of organic waste every year. And I don't know there's You could also tie this story back to Detroit, where their entire urban farms that grew up after white flight and the oil crisis left the city derelict. And one day we'll talk about them too, but we're not going to talk about today because today we're out of script. I'm at the end of it, because I did the thing that I was going to do and now it's the end of this episode.

else is worth being involved with is your content. In the plugs section of the episode.

make sure to keep you all updated on that. So please keep an eye out and follow them and hire them if you have a job that's open.

Sapling Cage Margaret Kiljoy or whatever. I'm sure you can figure out how to find the kickstarter page and you can sign up there to get information about when that kickstarter lunches so you can get copies of it. And I'm really excited about it's the best book I've ever written, and I have written a good number of books, and so that's saying something. Well, I don't know. I mean, all my books could be trash, but I think they're good.

And Sophie, you got anything like, is there any new podcasts coming out from her network?