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Silicon Valley Tech Geeks’ Newest Neighbor? The Urban Farmer
San Jose and Santa Clara County were once part of the “Valley of Heart’s Delight,” a verdant paradise filled with orchards and flowers.
That all changed as San Jose began to grow (its population increased from under 100,000 in 1950 to over 400,000 in 1970). Not to mention a couple of guys named Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard whose little company started in a garage in Palo Alto. Santa Clara County was never the same.
It’s not surprising then that Santa Clara County may be the first county in California to take advantage of a new statewide law allowing counties and cities to encourage urban agriculture through tax incentives to landowners. Two county supervisors, Ken Yeager and Mike Wasserman, passed the proposal on for study in February, but the measure is expected to be a shoo-in, Yeager says.
“This is a great idea, and it doesn’t really cost you [the county] much. You lose a little bit of property [tax] revenue, but not anything significant.”
The statewide bill, AB 551, allows counties and cities to provide tax breaks for landowners who use vacant lots from .1 acre to three acres in size for agriculture. The end user could be a hobbyist farmer, a for-profit farm, or a nonprofit working to get fruits and vegetables into the hands of low-income community members.
Many of those parcels are vacant simply because a developer has purchased them and is waiting for market conditions or city approval to build whatever is planned for that site. Why not turn them over to farmers in the meantime?
It seems perhaps counterintuitive that a region known mostly for its digital products — Google, Facebook — would spawn a generation that wants to work with its hands, but that’s what’s happened. “My sense is,” Yeager says, “it just brings a lot of personal satisfaction to young people who really want to make this kind of investment in their community.”
It could also be a boon for the county’s low-income residents. While San Jose has one of the highest median incomes in the U.S. for any large city, there are still thousands of families living in food deserts and/or under the poverty line. “We really have to do better in those areas,” Yeager says.
Santa Clara County’s ordinance would affect only the unincorporated lands in the county, but Yeager notes that cities within the county would then be free to pass their own version of the ordinance, and city council members from the county’s 15 cities have already expressed interest.
One person who’s very into the idea is Zach Lewis, executive director of a nonprofit called Garden to Table. Garden to Table, which runs a one-acre farm in downtown San Jose and a number of other projects related to urban food systems, studied what would happen if San Jose — which is now the 10th-largest city in the U.S. — implemented AB 551. The upshot: The city and a few surrounding unincorporated areas have 370 acres of vacant land that could be turned into farms.
“Prior to [this ordinance], there was really no incentive for the developer to give that land up,” even for a temporary period of a few years. “Unless they’re a nice person,” Lewis says. And with the real estate market in Silicon Valley the way it is (“Good lord,” is the way Lewis put it), a little financial incentive can’t hurt. “If we know [a developer] isn’t going to build for five years, why not turn it over to an urban ag organization to do something in the meantime?”
Lewis says one challenge urban farmers will have to overcome is the potential of backlash once a developer really does decide to build — even if that means ripping up the greenhouses and raised beds that neighbors have come to take for granted. “We want to be pretty transparent,” he says. “These are temporary projects, but they can do a lot of good in the short term.”
He should know. While writing his master’s thesis on urban agriculture on vacant lots, he snagged an interview with Barry Swenson, one of the largest real estate owners in the Valley. “He’s like, ‘I’m not doing anything with that land for the next 10 years. You can have it.’ And that’s literally why my nonprofit exists.”
The Equity Factor is made possible with the support of the Surdna Foundation.
Rachel Kaufman is a journalist covering transportation, sustainability, science and tech. Her writing has appeared in Inc., National Geographic News, Scientific American and more. She also manages Elevation DC, a local site covering city issues in Washington, D.C.
Will Post-Earthquake Rebuilding Lead to a Healthier Nepal?
A Nepalese rickshaw puller pedals past buildings in Kathmandu’s Basantapur Durbar Square, damaged in Saturday’s earthquake. (AP Photo/Bernat Armangue)
The photos of Nepal are everywhere: a glimpse into the excruciating pain of the people trapped in rubble, and images of those watching their relatives, who were alive just days ago, burn on improvised funeral pyres. Videos show survivors running when aftershocks shake the capital. A colleague uploads an image of the crowded football pitch where he is sleeping, captioning it “a misery.”
The tough work ethic of Nepal is also just as clear. People pull living humans from rubble and carry the injured on sledges. At Kathmandu’s Bir Hospital, medical staff are working around the clock on a floor slicked with blood. Outside, NGOs are already distributing emergency supplies, despite damaged and poor-quality roads. A nation in ruins is already at work coping with its tragedy.
Amid the broken ground, possibilities for change have opened too. In Nepal, where informal economies and calls for equitable distribution of resources have dominated for years, what new order will the 2015 earthquake bring?
During a disaster, much work seems neither informal nor formal. Rather, the situation recombines formality (of medical professionals, not-for-profit operations and international diplomacy) with informality (the participation of locals in saving others, the crowdsourced global flood of donations and the sheer scramble to survive however possible). The muddling is surprisingly profound, offering openings for social and health-related changes that are unlikely under ordinary constraints. As Rebecca Solnit wrote in her 2009 book A Paradise Built in Hell: “In the moment of disaster, the old order no longer exists and people improvise rescues, shelters, and communities. Thereafter, a struggle takes place over whether the old order with all its shortcomings and injustices will be reimposed or a new one … perhaps more just and free … will arise.”
Often, these post-disaster revisions begin with informal initiatives by ordinary people. As Solnit describes in her book, a group of informal “street medics” opened Common Ground Health Clinic in New Orleans on the heels of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, attempting to improve upon the shuttered Charity Hospital and eventually formalizing as a federally qualified health clinic. (Full disclosure: I was once a street medic and helped train one of CGHC’s founders.) Widespread public demands after the Rana Plaza atrocitymade factory inspections standard in Bangladesh for the first time.
Nepal differs from the Bangladesh garment industry and New Orleans healthcare, though, because of its overwhelming informality and poverty before this week’s catastrophe. According to a 2004 assessment by the International Labour Organization, two of every three workers in Nepal are informal agricultural workers, and just 2.26 million workers in this country of 23 million people have non-agricultural jobs. Most of these jobs are clustered in urban areas — including Kathmandu, which in recent years has been experiencing rapid growth — and 73.3 percent of them, or 1.66 million jobs, are informal. The country is well-known for its poverty — a tremendous block to any public health goal. Men earn an average of 2400 Nepalese rupees per month ($23.59 U.S.); women, just 57 percent of that, or $13.62. The same report notes child labor is common, and says, “It is reported that almost half of the [child labor] work involves slave-like conditions.”
If an earthquake strong enough to move the entire capital 10 feet southward foments substantial economic changes, it’s not because crisis is novel here. In the 1990s, a Maoist insurgency sought to violently overthrow the Nepalese monarchy. The ensuing civil war killed tens of thousands, interrupted the country’s development and ultimately resulted in the monarchy’s dissolution. (Maoists lead the current democratic parliamentary system.) Unsurprisingly, some in Nepal have responded to another pending crisis — climate change — by calling for a “radical shift in the flow of finance” toward a more equitable distribution of money.
Survivors of the earthquake in Nepal sleep on a football pitch. (Photo by Kiran Bam)
But as a first guess, the current disaster in Nepal might result in a more equitable distribution of people. Labor conditions impel so many people to work abroad that very few Nepalese men fail to emigrate. “Here in Nepal, either you don’t get work or even if you get work the payment is very low,” a participant said in “a research study on migrant labor, “so we follow the tracks of other friends and neighbors and migrate to India.” (Disclosure: I am a co-author on this study, along with the colleague now sleeping at the sporting ground in Kathmandu.) At any one time, one in four Nepalese men is abroad, often working in India or the Middle East in the construction industry.
But construction is the job their country now needs them to perform. While Kathmandu’s monuments have attracted the most attention so far, thousands of other buildings in Kathmandu have also been damaged or destroyed. International aid currently focused on immediate human needs could shift toward longer-term solutions — and funding rebuilding may be a top priority. The men working in informal positions abroad might soon find opportunities back home.
If they do, building standards may change as well. Rapid urbanization in an impoverished nation is a suboptimal milieu for upholding safety standards, and commentators have noted the poor quality of many structures in the capital, a problem which resulted in excess mortality. Amid people frightened by aftershocks and bereaved of loved ones, the enforcement of up-to-date building codes could become highly popular — a move thatNGOs have already been promoting.
For now, lasting changes in Nepal are difficult to identify from afar. But even as the death count is shifting higher and the living continue to struggle through nights in tent cities or the open air, lasting changes are already on their way. On Facebook, A Paradise Built in Hell author Rebecca Solnit offered a prayer of sorts about this shift: “May casualties be minimal. May rescues be swift and effective. May people be allowed the agency to take care of themselves and others and organize what comes next, as they so often have so beautifully in disasters around the world … ”
She added a worthwhile observation: “Even if all that happens as well as it possibly can, it’s still terrible.”
The “Health Horizons: Innovation and the Informal Economy” column is made possible with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation.
M. Sophia Newman is a freelance journalist whose writing has been published in the U.S., U.K., Bangladesh, Nepal and Japan. See more at msophianewman.com.
Job-Seekers Withering on Waiting Lists? Not on This Philly Woman’s Watch
A myPLACE learning coach helps a student with an online course at the Philadelphia literacy program. (Credit: The Mayor’s Commission on Literacy)
Getting people out of poverty and providing families with financial stability isn’t as simple as job creation or even workforce training.
“I can draw a straight line between poverty and low literacy,” says Judith Rényi, the executive director of the Mayor’s Commission on Literacy in Philadelphia. In that Pennsylvania city — where there’s a 26 percent poverty rate — over 550,000 adults are functioning below the education standards that would qualify them for the most basic-skills jobs.
When Rényi joined the Commission in 2011, she observed how, across the state, adult literacy programs aimed at getting tens of thousands of people ready for stable careers were mostly decentralized and scattershot.
“I saw several issues that I thought technologies could, if not solve, at least make less horrendous,” she says. With that in mind, she oversaw the creation of the myPLACE(Philadelphia Literacy and Adult Career Education) program.
Prior to myPLACE, she says, the Commission was “doing referrals into a black hole.” Every couple of months, they’d do a phone survey to ask education service providers about class schedules and open seats for people who wanted help. There was no way to follow up on referrals or track progress.
With the registration and enrollment management system created through myPLACE, the Commission now acts as a central “registrar” to what Rényi likens to a multi-campus, citywide open university. There are three myPLACE campuses across Philadelphia that handle intake, assessment and case management once an adult learner makes the initial phone call or walks in to ask for assistance.
Jacqueline Vazquez, a myPLACE learner, began the program while unemployed and aspires to earn herGED. (Credit: The Mayor’s Commission on Literacy)
“Getting up the courage to call for help is a huge deal,” says Rényi. “We want to help you immediately. We don’t want you to wither away on waiting lists or send you off to make another phone call, because maybe your courage will have failed you before you make a second call.”
Denise Brunker is a learning coach at the myPLACE outpost of North Philadelphia’s Congreso de Latinos Unidos. Brunker says that since July of last year, around 700 people have sought out literacy services there, mostly thanks to word-of-mouth recommendations.
“A lot of them need to learn English to help their children in school,” says Brunker. “A lot of them simply want to get on track in order to get their GED. Some of them want skills to continue at the job they’re currently in or they are looking for employment.”
Each incoming student completes an assessment that measures where they are in their education and their job skills. They’re then assigned a learning coach and enrolled in an intro course that covers computer skills, career exploration, resume building and the creation of a learning plan. Students can take the course online from home. After passing that, a student is placed in appropriate classes, either at a myPLACE campus or one of the 23 myPLACE literacy partner institutions around the city.
Rényi says that the ultimate goal is to “try to get them back into the mode where they see themselves as learners,” even if it takes a significant amount of time and effort for someone who might be reading at a fourth-grade level to get on the pathway to completing their GED.
Over a 10-month period in 2014, 3,115 people were tested through myPLACE. The goal is to scale that number up to 8,000 in 2015 and 15,000 in 2016. According to Rényi, the program’s technology makes it highly scalable. Only a couple of thousand dollars is needed per intro class to pay for licenses and facilitators, though the Commission and its partners still have to work quickly to meet the demand of students rapidly finding myPLACE through personal referrals.
“I think the Mayor’s Commission realizes that one of the patterns that happens in education of adults is that they get bounced to different services, or they don’t know what’s available to them,” says Congreso de Latinos Unidos’ Michael Thompson. “Being able to connect them to these services and for them to have a record of their accomplishments was something that was sorely needed.”
The Equity Factor is made possible with the support of the Surdna Foundation.
Alexis Stephens is Next City’s urban economics fellow. She’s written about housing, pop culture, global music subcultures, and more for publications like Shelterforce, Rolling Stone, SPIN, and MTV Iggy. She has a B.A. in urban studies from Barnard College and an M.S. in historic preservation from the University of Pennsylvania.
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