Last night I attended the meeting of the Mountain View Parks and Recreation Commission.
When I lived with my grandmother in Illinois after college, I was working for a publishing house, working closely with the National Gardening Association, a pretty much awesome bunch of people. During that period, I got all into gardening and garden planning and growing veggies in my grandmother's back yard. I think she wasn't too thrilled with my compost heap, but humored me in every aspect. Ten years later, the tomato plants are long since history, but the Italian parsley runs riot where the compost heap used to be.
After that I lived in an apartment in New York, and we didn't even try. I guess there was some greenery in the shower, but the fern leaves kind of tickled when you shampooed.
So I was excited to come to California! Zone 9?? Awesome!!
But since moving here I've tried growing all kinds of things in all kinds of pots on all kinds of balconies and front steps, in my "yard" when I lived up on a mountain (that ended up being cloaked in fog 10 months of the year), in my entranceway and in our shady, disappointing back yard - it's really been an exercise in frustration and yearned-for sunlight and tillable earth. I find it unbearable that anybody could live in this climate and be in a position to take advantage of it and not!
About a month ago, I saw a solution and tried to sign up for a Mountain View community garden spot. I didn't try to sign up last year, partly because I wanted to see what our back yard could do; mostly because MV has two community gardens: one is reserved for Senior Citizens (grump grump, they get ALL the good stuff), and the other is far enough I'd have to drive there - it's four times as far as the farmer's market or even the Milk Pail - kind of defeats the purpose of being all green and stuff.
But this year, after the Great Zucchini Disappointment of 2007, I checked again, and discovered that a new community garden was being planned just a couple of blocks from my house! I immediately attempted to sign up, and learned that I'd be put on the waiting list. How long could it BE, right? So I sent my name in.
I never heard back, so I checked the web Sunday, to learn that there'd be a commission meeting regarding the proposed (not 'planned') site on Wednesday. I decided to go, just to make sure I'd get a plot. I still kind of assumed the garden was a given. What's not to love??
Apparently, a lot, if you're one of the 95 neighboring homeowners who signed a petition opposing the garden. The petition detailed a parade of horribles: logjam traffic and parking, noxious chemical pesticides leaking into back yards, power tools, plummeting property values, vagrants hovering for the purpose of snatching eggplants, and, make no mistake about it, the unsightliness of growing vegetables.
*Sigh.*
The meeting was to review the rationale for choosing the location, in a residential neighborhood (cf. the current garden, on the far side of the highway), and a revised garden design intended to address the petition's concerns. The Mountain View budget had some $100,000 set aside for the project, which money would disappear and be directed to other purposes if it wasn't snatched for this project.
Public commentary was earnest and heated (one of the gardeners sitting behind me harrumphed every time a neighbor stated something he found preposterous; one of the neighbors seemed near tears). The gist of the neighbors' complaint seemed to be, we're in a neighborhood of single family homes, we have our own backyards for growing vegetables, so the only people coming to this garden will be, almost by definition, not our neighbors, but people who don't have backyards. (You know, the poor.) Hence: abysmal upkeep, eyesore plots, loiterers, noise (presumably from the belligerant alcoholic gardeners carousing and swilling their paper bag covered 40s), using the gardens as a restroom (this was actually one of the stated fears), chain link fences and everything that goes with anybody who can't afford a $1.5 million dollar home-with-yard in Mountain View.
The gardeners for their part went on about community and the organic-and-local movement and the pleasure of a tended garden and so forth, mainly making the case that there were policy reasons in favor, and hey, look at us, we're really nice people.
Oh yes, and I was dismayed to learn that the waiting list was 120 people long. I did speak, but I hadn't yet had time to absorb all of the debate (I hadn't been expecting any, viewing the garden as an unmitigated good - indeed, as a potential homebuyer I would be drawn to a neighborhood with such a community asset, but these homeowners saw only negatives). So my only remark was a question, had a study been done of how property values had changed for homes surrounding other community gardens? I.e., was the fear well founded? The community garden in Palo Alto is just lovely, and I envy that town for it, and had assumed that hippity dippity gems like that are luxuries that workaday cities like Mountain View are not interested in - and indeed a reason why PA costs so much more. But these homeowners were so convinced, I wondered whose perception was right.
But no one had done such a study. (I also wondered, but did not ask, whether the earmarked $100,000 was meant to cover the cost of lawsuits/compensating homeowners whose property values did suffer, if they did.)
Long story short, the commission ended up voting against. They all were in favor of the idea of a community garden, but were not persuaded that they had identified a good location (but had no viable alternatives, either). One commissioner reasoned, ultimately, along the lines that having a community garden was probably "not reasonably foreseeable" by the homeowners when they bought their homes, and that he felt uncomfortable making a public land use decision that engendered such vehement opposition.
Indeed, it's not the same as the inhabitants of a brand new sprawling subdivision complaining about the neighboring pig farmer whose operation pre-existed the conversion from farmland to tract housing. However, I'm not sure that a homeowner should really be shocked that a city should take a patch of unused, unmaintained and weedy, city-owned land that has always been there (it's land that goes over the Hetch Hetchy water pipes, so there can never be permanent structures all along that corridor) and seek to convert it to a wholesome public purpose. Moreover, I think the same economic forces that have promoted the dense housing that makes a community garden such a needed relief are the very same pressures that have caused their homes to increase in value exponentially in the last 30 years. I'm talking $50,000 homes that are now worth $1 million. They want the benefits of this booming economy and scarcity of land without the remedial measures that ought to come with it.
So we were all there for selfish purposes. Me, because I wanted a plot! (I was quickly disabused of this hope - if they were to go forward, the garden wouldn't be operational till next year; and there were 119 people on the wait list in front of me.)
Ultimately, the gardeners attended and advocated because they stood to gain (a patch of land, nourishment of the body and betterment of the soul), but the neighbors attended because they stood to lose (their sense of privacy, I suppose - I'm not really convinced they stood to lose anything that was theirs to begin with; they felt a sense of ownership of the plots because they took for granted their being vacant, but I don't think it was a well-founded feeling). And as we all know, loss aversion is a stronger drive than the pursuit of reward.
I came away from the meeting thinking that it was the right decision. It was not for the commission to spit in the faces of all of those distressed neighbors (and invite a lawsuit, or 95). And if the one commissioner was persuaded that the garden was not a foreseeable use of that city property, well, maybe the neighbors had the right to shoo the public away from that land and could win such a case in court. But I don't think there's any question that their motivation was wholly selfish. To throw their arms protectively over neglected land because, well, they already HAD backyards to grow food in, they shouldn't have to sit by and watch others have the same opportunity, well, I think it's a shameful attitude. Anybody who owns a home with a backyard in Mountain View is rich by my measure. And shame on those who are so privileged, who want to deny that pleasure - which may soon enough become a necessity - to others, when it isn't even theirs to begin with.
Though I came away from the meeting shrugging (I wasn't going to get to garden in the foreseeable future anyway, no skin off my nose, who wants to be in a garden surrounded by resentful "neighbors" anyway), by the time I drove home I was mad, and sad, that what purports to be my community should be so shortsighted and pessimistic and, let's face it, unloving, that they could only see the downside of "allowing" the city to spread its wealth to all of its members.
Maybe Target could help.
Well, you know those poor people and vagrants. All they want to do all day is raid other's community gardens to secretly plant and harvest -- shhh -- vegetables!
Idiots. I'm sorry.
That said, I have a couple books around here about container gardening. Interested?
Posted by: africankelli | January 11, 2008 at 07:11 PM