For many organizers this international connection is essential to their work advocating for changes in Berkeley and across national borders. Another organized garden project based in the East Bay discussed their complicated relationship with the municipal government that supports them. The garden is located on public land and the initial agreement between the organizers and city was informal and imprecise regarding the exact area the project could use. Gardeners, neighbors, and organizers gathered, planted a large area with vegetable beds and fruit trees, and made art in the public space. A couple of neighbors were concerned and complained to the city that the project was “people parkifying the park”, provoking the city to impose limits on area and activities of the project. The organizers, seeing the ‘people parkification’ as a positive use of the space, responded by mobilizing over 200 neighbors and a two-year process to gain approval for this full space they had occupied. Occupations, guerilla gardening, and the use of vacant lots without the permission of landlords go beyond a practical political interest in securing land on which to garden. These strategies engage gardeners in oppositional politics challenging municipal agencies, private landlords or developers, public universities, and other landholders to consider what is the “best and highest use” of the land. Activists work to make visible the ideologies of development, questioning the need for more housing or more commercial supermarkets without addressing the inequality of housing or food distribution. They work to question the authority of the owner in deciding how best to use the land inherent in dominant private property relations.
While these collectives or projects may sometimes be led by a small group of activists,drainage collection pot their narratives emphasize the importance of more horizontal governance of urban space. For one occupation gardener the work is equally about ecological food production and reshaping urban imaginaries: “I saw a need both to defend urban spaces for growing food and teaching people how to do that, especially in a regenerative way. And also a great opportunity to call attention to the idea of land access being a most important first step in any kind of food justice or environmental sustainability… it’s a viable way of kind of inspiring people to try to create common space again” . Several garden projects have focused on creating a collective form of development, support, learning, and exchange for home or backyard gardens. Backyard gardens have been embraced to achieve a variety of social goals including cultural empowerment, food security, and transformation of the urban ecology . The scale of the work of these projects is significant. The combined efforts of La Mesa Verde, Valley Verde, and Planting Justice’s have resulted in the development of over 1000 home gardens since 2008. Collectively coordinated backyard gardening projects can be grouped into three forms with several projects engaging in multiple forms. The first are projects aimed at building gardens to support self-sufficiency for low-income families. Typically these groups work with families that are renting, although some families may be homeowners. An emphasis is placed on promoting health, opportunities for increasing access to culturally relevant foods, and addressing inequality through individual family empowerment to change their food landscape.
The second are projects aimed at creating networks of support and communication to increase knowledge and food sharing opportunities for backyard gardeners. These gardeners frequently see a social value in the act of gardening on private properties and aim to place home gardens in the context of community sustainability, resiliency, and alternative economic networks. The third form consists of projects that build home gardens for paying customers as a means to provide employment or fund gardening projects in low-income areas. These groups use sophisticated design, permaculture, and aesthetics to transform the lawns of most frequently home owners interested in more sustainable, edible landscapes. La Mesa Verde is an example of one gardening project that has developed a complicated relationship to the way land access is conceived and practiced within their work. In its ambitious beginnings, former executive director Raul Lozano used LMV to advocate within city government. His vision included placing urban gardening prominently in the city plans the aim to revive the “Valley Verde” by encouraging the development of 20,000 home gardens by 2020. At least half of the gardens would be in homes of lower-income residents. He has since formed another project, Valley Verde, with this aim. This type of political engagement complicates a simplified understanding of backyard food production on rented land. Planning documents that would mandate or support the use of backyards for gardening in rental property could challenge the autonomy of property owners.
Lozano viewed the work of LMV apart from that of other gardening organizations: “We are going to the families” by placing the gardens in participants’ yards. Current LMV staff member, Patty Guzman, believes that while many program participants might want to participate in community gardens, it is unrealistic with their other commitments and time constraints and community gardens “may not be culturally relevant to some” . Residents may ask ‘why go far from home to grow food in a community garden when there is land right here in my backyard?’ Guzman acknowledges that the strategy of using backyards does limit who can engage in the program: “It’s a double edged sword. Backyard gardens aren’t accessible to some, many people who live in apartments or projects and just don’t have the space. On the same token, a lot of people who do have the space and have their own homes don’t have the luxury of time or the ability to pay the fee to go to a community garden” . The program requires the participant to have yard space with sufficient sunlight where the raised beds can be built. Of the over 350 families that have participated in LMV, the vast majority have been home renters. Participants are expected to have the discussions or negotiations necessary with their landlord to gain permission. Program staff currently do not have the capacity to offer assistance to participants when they are seeking permission from their landlords. Interested families have been turned away because they were unable to get permission or find an adequate space in their yard. Program staff see this as an unfortunate parameter that they must work within. Guzman explains, “We just haven’t approached the beast of landownership and rights around land access. We’re trying to get the program up and running and get everyone the materials. We just can’t address the issue of land rights. Ultimately, it’s their responsibility to deal with the land question. We can only go so far when we have 100 families to work with. I feel like I’ve had nothing to offer. I do feel like that is a shortcoming in our program” . She goes on to explain that several families, including one of the primary leaders in the program who had previously hosted a demonstration garden,round plastic pot have lost their gardens due to being evicted or having to move. In 2013, LMV worked with student-researchers to develop a set of tools to assist interested families in approaching their landlords. La Mesa Verde has recently engaged the Sustainable Economies Law Center to support their work and help change the legal landscape of home gardening for renters. In 2014 SELC launched a legislative campaign and introduced a California bill, AB 2561 – the California Neighborhood Food Act, to ensure renters have access to using yard or property space for home food production. The bill passed and was approved by the governor in September 2014. Initially the aim of the bill was to make significant gains for tenants’ rights to grow produce on rental property land and make it illegal for Homeowners Associations to prohibit backyard food gardens.
Through the legislative committee process and significant resistance from the homeowner lobby, the bill was amended in several significant ways restricting gardens to backyards for single family and duplex homes, requiring tenant gardens to be in movable containers that the landlord approves, and allowing the landlord to restrict the number and location of containers. While these amendments are significant, SELC organizers believe this is an important first step in shifting the landscape of rights for non-property owners to grow food on rented land. Neil Thapar, SELC staff attorney and lead staff on the California Neighborhood Food Act campaign, was encouraged that many legislators were surprised that there would be resistance to allowing tenants and HOA members to grow food to feed themselves. While some assume the work of promoting sustainable home food production is universally supported, SELC made visible the tension of landlord concerns of liability and decreasing property value in contrast with the long-held ideal of a backyard garden providing supplemental food resources and a space for family betterment. In spite of the primacy of the “ownership model” of private property, this legislative work from SELC and the gardening of La Mesa Verde participants resulted in some resistant property narratives, as described by Rose. For instance, several gardeners expressed a lack of concern about normative property boundaries. They explicitly rejected the need to ask permission to access space in the houses they inhabited. Many gardeners claimed to plant outside of the agreed upon planting areas or to use the yard space for other gardening related projects. In a few interviews, Mexican American gardeners cited long-held beliefs that they deserved access to the land for after all, they were those who worked it in order to produce food for survival. One gardener cited Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata: “La tierra es de quien la trabaja con sus manos/the land belongs to those that work it with their own hands.” This was echoed by vacant lot gardeners of Mexican descent in Oakland as well. In other words, the gardens became sites for nurturing alternative expressions of property relations. Thus, while LMV has thus far had a limited impact on shifting actual access to land for San Jose renters, the work of program participants cultivating backyard gardens has a powerful potential to empower property subjectivies that decenter the landlord. The greatest promoters of LMV are the program participants themselves. Ramirez and Guzman note that participants enthusiastically recruit neighbors, family members, and friends to join the program. When gardeners encourage other San Joseresidents to cultivate their backyards, cultivate the medians between their home and the city street, or to do what’s necessary to be able to start their own garden, they are not focusing on the landlord as gatekeeper. Gardeners are promoting an engagement with space much more concerned with the desire to take back land for food production.Contrary to advocates of occupation or guerilla gardening approaches, several organized garden projects and support organizations have positioned themselves as allies to private landowners and developers. At a minimum, many advocate for clear expectations and agreements with landholders. The East Bay Urban Agriculture Alliance published the Willow Rosenthal and Novella Carpenter checklist for obtaining land to garden, that included developing a clear agreement with the landowner as to the tenure duration, scope of use, and exist strategy for any project .Through strategies such as the passage of new legislation incentivizing developed-urban farm partnerships, the use of portable beds, and embracing interim use agreements, gardeners claim they are facilitating relationships that will open greater opportunities for land access. Through improved trust and demonstrations of successful mechanisms for the use of private lands that meets the needs of the landowner and gardener, more owners will opt to benefit the city through the expansion of urban gardens on their land. One such effort was the successful passage of AB 551, the Urban Agriculture Incentives Zones legislation, which incentivizes the use of urban land for agriculture by allowing a property to be assessed at a lower tax rate, i.e. the ability to tax at the agricultural value rather than market value, in exchange for a five year commitment to using the land for farming or gardening. This legislation was envisioned by members of the San Francisco Urban Agriculture Alliance working with San Francisco based, California Assembly member Phil Ting . SPUR and Little City Gardens, both significant supporters of the legislation, were inspired by the ideas of Nicholas Reed and Juan Carlos Cancino to bring the Williamson Act to the city .