This panoramic view of St. Mary's Urban Youth Farm shows the Alemany Housing Development and community garden at left, new crops and excavation for restored wetland at center, and the composting area at upper right near Alemany Boulevard and Interstate 280.
Mohammed Nuru, ASLA, at right, briefs SLUG work crews each morning before sending them out to work and often visits work sites like the farm, above, during the day. Nuru was the team leader for the site plan, below, that evolved with input from community residents.
Site plan including community garden, composting area, bee habitat, fruit orchard, windmill, greenhouse, creek, waterfall, and proposed animal farm.
The flower production area supplies flowers that are sold at farmers' markets and health-food stores as part of SLUG's entrepreneurial outreach.
Raised beds adjacent to the housing development are tended by the residents and garden interns.
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Organic farming may be an emerging national trend, but in a blighted inner-city neighborhood? Yes. Fifty at-risk teenagers from low-income public-housing developments in San Francisco are proving—with guidance from landscape architects and community leaders—that they can turn a former dump for construction waste into the city's only working farm.
Until May of 1995 the four-acre site, which spans the grounds of the Alemany housing project and St. Mary's Park in the Bernal/Hunter's Point neighborhood, was used primarily by contractors for dumping spoil dirt and waste concrete. Old refrigerators, wrecked cars, and household garbage
found their way to the site as well. But that began to change when teenage garden interns from the San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners (SLUG), in collaboration with the Alemany residents' council and other groups, filled several sixteen-foot-long dumpsters with debris, cleared away exotic vegetation, and broke ground for the St. Mary's Urban Youth Farm.
Today the site has begun its transformation into thirty raised beds and extensive garden plots planted with collard and mustard greens, potatoes, chard, lettuce, broccoli, peas, garlic, and herbs. Snapdragons, calendula, and sweet peas bloom in the flower garden. Approximately one hundred fruit trees—apple, avocado, peach, pear, and loquat—have been planted on the up-land portion of the site; the loquats yielded their first crop this year, according to Mohammed Nuru, ASIA, a Nigerian native and Kansas State-educated landscape architect who serves as the executive director of SLUG.
Most important, perhaps, working on the farm is planting seeds of hope among the garden interns themselves—in effect, using the connection with the earth and the plant kingdom as a means of turning lives away from crime and despair. “We find that the garden is a very simple tool to reach people about issues of responsibility, nurturing, health—all those things,” says
Jeffrey Miller, the landscape architect who is the president of the SLUG board.
For some of the interns this project represents their first legitimate employment; for most of them, it is their first experience in making a contribution that connects them to their communities. Many of the interns have histories of involvement in drugs and crime—like the seventeen-year-old girl who was referred to the intern program by her probation officer. They earn from minimum wage to $5.50 an hour for working twenty hours a week during the summer and ten hours a week during the school year, less than many of them could earn peddling drugs—but, as Miller puts it, “the word is out in their communities that that's a dead end.” At the groundbreaking ceremony, in fact, garden intern Bhanica Adams said, “We're not selling drugs like we used to [and] we're not dead like we're supposed to be.”
St. Mary's Youth Farm is only one of several SLUG programs aimed at improving conditions for San Francisco youth, low-income adults, and community gardeners. In fact, SLUG crews create gardens and green spaces throughout San Francisco while employing and training teens and young adults in landscape construction and carpentry (see “Design by Community,” Landscape Architecture, October 1989 and “San Francisco's Gardens of Diversity,” Landscape Architecture, January 1993). Many of the teens receive additional training in landscape planning and construction from the Ornamental Horticulture Department at San Francisco City College, where they also take classes in African-American studies and career development.
Nuru is one of the few landscape architects in the country who are employed fill-time seeking solutions to inner-city problems. He came to SLUG in 1991 from a more conventional practice that involved drawing master plans for subdivisions and other large-scale developments. “I really liked the big stuff,” Nuru remembers. “But working with SLUG has been, I think, the most rewarding. I'm changing people's lives on a daily basis.”
Miller's involvement in SLUG is a logical extension of his professional practice, which often entails working with community groups. “I actually started out believing that the landscape was a vehicle for changing the world,” he says. “The kind of social transformation that we're working toward in SLUG is something that I've been committed to ever since I've been a landscape architect.”
The involvement of professional landscape architects is critical to groups like SLUG, says Miller, not only to draw up a site plan that can be submitted to city agencies but because of the need for permits that only professionals can obtain and because of contractual requirements on federally funded projects that a licensed professional serve on the project.
The Youth Farm represents exactly the kind of community involvement in rebuilding neighborhoods that another SLUG landscape architect, visionary board member Karl Linn, ASLA Emeritus, has preached for years. While teaching landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1960s Linn pioneered a “learning-through-service” approach that brought graduate students into poor neighborhoods in Philadelphia to work with community residents designing and building playgrounds and parks. Linn calls his approach “urban barn raising.” (A good introduction to a philosophy and techniques for creating productive landscapes out of urban desolation is his illustrated booklet From Rubble to Restoration: Sustainable Habitats Through Urban Agriculture [Earth Island Institute, 1991], available for $4 from the Urban Habitat Program at the Earth Island Institute, 300 Broadway, Suite 28, San Francisco, California 94133.)
Linn believes that “nonprofit organizations like SLUG can serve a design-research function that can open up new territory for the profession, particularly in disenfranchised communities and communities of color that are not reached by standard landscape architecture practices.” And, because organizations like SLUG work with much lower budgets than conventional landscape practices, Linn says that they can establish precedents for more affordable ways of building landscapes—for example, by creatively recycling landscape elements from salvaged materials. One such precedent at St. Mary's is the recycling of the waste concrete that was strewn around the site into a handsome retaining wall, pedestrian paths, and other elements. SLUG plans to show other community groups in San Francisco how to build walls on the city's steep slopes with inexpensive, readily available materials. Such precedents, says Linn, are vitally important in terms of energy conservation as well as economics—particularly in a field like landscape construction in which the standards for materials and site furnishings have become so expensive that they are beyond the reach of many less affluent groups.
The SLUG interns at St.Mary's are also working to restore the site itself—specifically to restore a wetland and stream that were cut off and virtually destroyed by the construction of nearby Interstate 280. SLUG is excavating and defining the seasonal creek and intends to plant the area with native riparian vegetation. Water from the wetland may also be recycled to irrigate the orchard and crop areas.
But isn't an organic farm adjacent to a low-income housing project somehow out of place? Daniel Green, SLUG's farm manager, doesn't think so. “It seems very fitting to me,” he says. “Part of SLUG's mission is to look at the urban landscape as one that's productive—a place where people can work and grow food, particularly in an area next to a housing project where people have historically been dependent on faceless institutions. And this is a type of agriculture that doesn't involve a lot of costly petrochemicals—just simple, age-old practices like crop rotation that seem appropriate to these circumstances.”
“It is terrible that good food is sometimes exclusively open to rich people,” garden intern Satti Odeye wrote in the spring 1995 issue of SLUG Update, the organization's newsletter. “Natural food should be available to everyone, and it's sad to know that most of the time it isn't. I believe a good objective is to educate the masses to control their own lives, their own resources, their own food.”
The food is clearly welcome at Alemany, where eighty-four percent of the residents are unemployed. In fact, Green notes that planting must be scheduled so that some food can be harvested toward the end of each month, when public-assistance money is running out for many residents. Vegetables from row crops are distributed to soup kitchens in other low-income communities, says Nuru.
The garden interns are also being schooled in entrepreneurial skills. They are in the initial stages of marketing a line of such food products as Urban Herbals, a salad vinegar that uses garlic and rosemary grown on the farm. Currently, these are being produced in a certified kitchen in a school; SLUG hopes one day to have its own production unit. SLUG has also begun to market soil amendments and mulch produced in the farm's composting operation. San Franciscans are invited to bring their branches, brush, and other woody debris to the farm to be chipped into Tough Mulch, a bagged product for use in home gardens. When compost piles at the farm mature the farm will also market two other products, Mighty Mulch and SLUG's Quality Compost.
Although Congress threatens to cut job-training programs that have historically benefited SLUG and groups like it, Nuru and Linn note a few hopeful developments for the national community-gardening movement. Congress recently passed the Community Food Security Act, which will fund collaborative grassroots projects that produce food for low-income urban and rural communities. The Department of Agriculture's Urban Resource Partnership (URP) has granted $500,000 to several cities for grassroots programs. Finally, Seattle is setting a precedent by passing an open-space ordinance requiring that land be set aside permanently for community gardens so that they are not, as in most cities, temporary land uses.
Certainly, the Youth Farm is no temporary use but a project with a long-range intent. “There is a tremendous educational opportunity at the farm,” says Miller, “in that we actually are bringing groups of young people to learn about soil preparation, large-scale composting, installing an irrigation system, and plant propagation. The other lessons—about work, nurturing, and responsibility—are actually more profound. That's where we see the Youth Farm having a long-term effect on the community.”
© Landscape Architecture
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