Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution (28 page)

Hantz was impressed and asked for a longer six-year projection. Again, Score delivered. Little did Score know that this had been a job interview, John Hantz-style. In December of 2009, Score was announced as president of Hantz Farms, and a major part of his job in the past two years has been to “change the dialogue.”

“There'd been some ugly rhetoric,” said Score. “A big white farm in an African American city…it sounds familiar, you know.” But Score had been meeting with and talking to critics of the plan, listening to concerns and answering questions. He went door-to-door in the neighborhoods, asking the people who were left how they'd feel about having a farm in their community. According to Score, the unanimous response was a resounding “yes, please.”

The frustration now is familiar for anyone who understands civic politics.

I pressed Score for a launch date of the project that had created so much buzz in urban-agriculture circles around the world. “We used to guess,” he eventually replied. “We're three years into this now—over one million dollars of development costs for the project—and we're just now getting to the point where we might be able to buy 1.8 acres from the city's inventory.” That is a mere drop in the forty square miles of inventory (and counting) of foreclosures that had been absorbed back into the city land bank.

“If there's a filter to help keep bad projects from happening in the city of Detroit, then I would say that it's a very effective filter. Probably too effective,” laughed Score. I imagined, however, that humor was just one reaction to the glacial pace at which most cities, even the ones that run efficiently, operate.

I suspected that Score is an optimist. Most people in agriculture are, so I kept pushing for even a wild guess at planting. “The best-case scenario is that we'd get approval on the first block of land this spring. By fall of 2011, a substantial part of the site prep and the first perennial crops would be in the ground.”

The initial project proposed by Hantz Farms was seventy acres. It was too big and too much for the city to digest all at once, Score conceded. It has since been split into bite-sized parcels that will be implemented in phases. The first trial farm site is planned for the immediate area surrounding Hantz Farms’ office, if it can get the go-ahead from city hall.

Behind a desk, taped to the wall in his office, Score had three surveyor's maps of the areas surrounding the office showing property lines and legal descriptions, about twenty acres in total. There were green dots indicating properties that Hantz Farms had already bought, amounting to about one acre, but the dots were piecemeal at this point. I noted that the yellow dots were the majority. “The yellow dots are
city-owned,” explained Score. The rest of the parcels were privately owned, but Score's scribbles on almost every one indicated how far behind they were in taxes. “There are only a few houses in this whole area where people are current on their property taxes. Everyone else is two-to-three years behind and heading for foreclosure.” Despite the twenty acres immediately surrounding the Hantz Farms head office that will come under the ownership of the city in the next few years, the scaled-down first phase of Hantz Farms will be a five-acre test site.

We had been discussing plans and roadblocks for over an hour in the office when Score proposed “a field trip.” He suggested a drive through those neighborhoods we'd been discussing, so I could see the landscape for myself.

Score narrated nonstop as we crept along the streets in his Ford® Focus. The houses that were still standing—“It costs $10,000 to demolish a house”—had roofs that had caved in, front doors swung open, and furniture strewn on front porches. “The median house price in Detroit is $8,000 right now,” Score said, echoing the figure of around $7,500 as an average house price that I kept hearing over and over again while in Detroit. But in this part of town, houses that sell usually do so for less than $1,500. Yet “it costs the city nine million dollars per square mile, that's $360 million in Detroit per year, just to provide basic city services.” That's why the city's deficit just keeps ballooning.

As we drove up and down the streets, a mishmash of residential teeing-off of main roads where abandoned commercial properties now sit, I commented that there were basically no people left to displace. “We won't evict anybody from their property,” Score said and then pointed out a single home that was maintained. “Mattie can stay if she wants to.” But in truth, there aren't too many people to work around. In the ten-acre area that we drove through, Score remarked that only two houses were occupied.

Houses that hadn't been burned by random acts of arson or during the annual Devil's Night frenzy the night before Halloween have been
left for looters to destroy and for time and elements to do the rest. We passed by houses with their roofs caved in. There were streets that were completely abandoned. One house was only half torn down; a toilet and sink were still intact on the second floor like a cross-section had been taken from the house. Empty lots had become dump sites. It was the kind of landscape you normally associate with either war zones or disaster areas.

Score's optimism was remarkable. I couldn't get past the half-standing and burned-out homes. “We'd like to plant Christmas trees here for a U-pick,” he cheerfully remarked as we drove through a neighborhood that I wouldn't want to find myself in past dark. The soils in residential areas, Score continued, are actually in good shape because they've been covered in grass and have not been exposed to industrial waste. Soil remediation will be easy; fruit trees and vegetable gardens can be planted. In some cases, raised beds with barriers between the existing contaminated soils and the new growing soil might be needed.

The former industrial and commercial land is a different story, but there's a plan for that, too. Score says that because of all the concrete and plaster used in the city over its history, the soils in certain areas are typically quite alkaline now, with a pH of around eight. “It changes the range of crops we can grow without radically changing the soil,” which is what puts forestry crops on the map, even in inner-city Detroit. “They'll do just fine here.”
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Current plans are for a U-cut Christmas tree farm, U-pick apple orchards, and even morel mushroom fields among the orchards. The idea of hardwood forests being planted in the middle of Detroit intrigued me, as I imagined stands of oak, beech, and maple where nothing but a few sad structures were left. Perhaps Score's upbeat optimism was rubbing off on me.

Curious as to where a man like John Hantz would live, as well as wanting to see these islands of prosperity in Detroit, I asked Score if we could drive to Indian Village. Within minutes, we were there. Indeed, grand mansions lined a handful of streets. “This is three hundred acres with only three streets of prosperity,” Score said. Indian Village is literally hemmed in on all sides by abandoned homes and vacant lots.

We had been driving through neighborhoods for well over an hour. Score had made his point. I was not getting a tour of a small pocket of blight—it was literally everywhere. “We could drive for two more hours like this,” he said.

Instead, we returned to the Hantz Farms office to continue what Score called our “urban adventure” by foot. We crossed a back lane, ankle-deep in snowdrifts that showed a few rabbit and other animal tracks. Clearly nature was quickly retaking what had been a very large
warehouse or factory not all that long ago. We wiggled through a small gap in a chain-link fence and then through an opening in the metal siding of a massive abandoned warehouse. The idea is to use existing structures—such as the 45,000-square-foot building we were in—for indoor hydroponics and a market retail location. A rainwater collection system from the roof will feed into a large pond because when streets and curbing are removed, the area will be home to a reconstructed wetland area. Score has been in talks with a company that wants to cover large portions of the roof with solar panels. Another company is interested in installing a biodigester to produce methane as an alternative energy supply.

Standing inside the abandoned factory, with only a shaft of sunlight streaming through and debris strewn from various “occupants” of this space, Score summed up the goal of the farm: “We'd go from blighted residential and abandoned industrial to scenic agriculture, indoor growing systems, research on brownfield remediation, driven by alternative energy.”
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The plans have been pored over, the outside interest and investment is poised to leap onboard, and the ideas are still on the drawing board, testing both Score's and Hantz's patience. In late 2009, Detroit elected a new mayor, businessman and former NBA point guard for twelve seasons with the Detroit Pistons Dave Bing, now in his late sixties. It has taken time for the new mayor to get a handle on just how dire the city's finances are, and to come up with a plan for urban revitalization. The plan currently on the table for revitalization is called the Detroit Works plan. It will essentially relocate the existing population, or “aggregate residents,” into a few select communities, creating denser neighborhoods. In other words, move the people who are left in Detroit together. Score pointed out that this will open up even more space, making the Hantz Farms project even more appealing, perhaps essential, to city hall.

Yet, the plan to launch Hantz Farms has been in a year-long holding pattern. The city is still working out if it wants to sell land to Hantz, and
if so, under what conditions. The smaller five- or twenty-acre farm site (whatever it ends up being) will be a prototype for the kind of impact a farm can have on Detroit.

“What we've said to the city is to let us show you what it looks and feels like over here,” Score said, referring to the smaller test parcel. “After we've started and after most of the work has been done, you can get feedback from the people who didn't move. What's it like living next to this farm? Is the area cleaner? Is it safer? Are people saying nice things about Detroit because we've got this new farm in the city?”

“If everything that we are promising will happen, happens—that this isn't bad, it's good—let's take a look at this area. Hantz has made it clear that he'll buy as much land as the city wants to sell him. “And if another buyer wants to pay more, John won't be offended. But in essence, he'll set the floor on the price.” Hantz, according to Score, has said that he'd buy ten thousand acres if the city wants to sell.

Farming, as I've come to learn, is a marginal business. It's not the way to make money, so I asked Score outright what the projected return on this project might possibly be. Depending on the models and the mix of products (meaning direct retail versus wholesale, percentage of high-value crop versus others, grant money for research on brownfield cleanup, urban-agriculture “tourism” that might result), “somewhere between minus 2 percent and a 5 percent profit,” Score replied. If the project can just carry itself forward throughout the years on the initial thirty-million-dollar investment, said Score, Hantz will be happy. “It's a legacy project for him.”

It's a lot for me to absorb mentally—hardwood forests and morel mushroom fields where half-crumbling houses and dump sites now stand. No wonder the politicians are moving slowly and carefully. But in the end, something has to happen to turn Detroit around. On my visit there, I heard over and over that “Detroit needs a win.” That's an understatement. It needs a miracle. But Detroit has been waiting for a miracle for several decades. It's finally at the point where something radical has
to happen or it will be a ghost town with a famous past and no future. Hantz might be a visionary or a profiteer; only time will tell. For now, urban agriculture is the only offer on the table. If the city gives Hantz Farms the go-ahead, the world will watch to see if Detroit becomes the most radical experiment in transitioning to a postindustrial city. And if it does, it will emerge as global center for urban agriculture.