San Francisco Community Gardens

By David Hess

Copyright © 2005 David J. Hess   All rights reserved.  Permissions and restrictions are listed at the end of this document. 

            In San Francisco many of the community gardens are on public lands, mostly held by the city’s Recreation and Parks Department.  There are also community gardens in public housing areas, lands held by government divisions other than Recreation and Parks, and even one community garden in the Golden Gate National Recreational Area.  There appear to be few "guerrilla gardens," that is, gardens that have been appropriated by a neighborhood to make use of abandoned lots that are owned by absentee landlords or have been taken over by the city for failure to pay taxes.  Given the high value of real estate in San Francisco, there are few vacant lots in the city.

            For many years the San Francisco League of Community Gardeners (SLUG) managed the city’s community gardens.  The organization was founded in the 1980s after the demise of CETA, the federal jobs program sponsored by the "Comprehensive Employment and Training Act."  By the early 2000s SLUG had a budget of about $1.6 million, largely from city contracts for management of the gardens on public lands.  With the budget the nonprofit organization employed 70 youth as well as about 50 part-time and full-time staff and garden crew workers.  In the world of welfare-to-work legislation, SLUG became known nationally as a model of urban job creation and training for low-income residents.  However, the city did not renew the contract with SLUG in the summer of 2004. Various reasons have been given for the non-renewal.  Some claim that the organization did not have a good record of job placement, that there was a high drop-out rate, and that it was having difficulties meeting its financial and contractual obligations. In addition, in the fall of 2004 the city attorney’s office alleged that the organization coerced its workers to vote and campaign for Mayor Gavin Newsom.  SLUG’s leaders denied the allegations and contested the fairness of the investigation, but the organization disbanded.¹

            Subsequent to the implosion of SLUG, the city’s Recreation and Parks Department took over the management of the forty community gardens on city park lands and other public lands such as the Department of Public Works and the Public Utilities Commission.  Although the funds for low-income jobs have disappeared, under the city’s Proposition C, which voters approved in 2000, an annual fund of $150,000 is set aside for community gardens.  Marvin Yee, the Community Garden Program Director of the Department of Recreation and Parks since 1996, affirmed the city’s commitment to developing community gardens.  He cited demand from the citizens, benefits to the neighborhoods, and increased safety for parks as some of the reasons why the city supports continued development of community gardens on public lands.  He was working with San Francisco Garden Resource Organization (SF GRO)—an organization of representatives of public community gardens that was formed after the demise of SLUG—to inventory gardens, assess needs, and work out policies.  In an inventory completed during spring 2005 of the department’s gardens, they found approximately forty gardens in the city with approximately 700 gardeners .²

Equity and Sustainability

             Until 2004, community gardening provided an employment mechanism for low-income people, but the city appears not to have replaced the jobs program for low-income residents that it had offered through SLUG.  Although the jobs program is defunct, there is still an equity dimension to community gardening, because the gardens provide access to fresh food for some low-income residents.  About half of the city’s community gardens are located in the southeastern and central part of the city, which coincides with some of the moderate to low-income neighborhoods.  In the central and southeastern portion of the city the population density is higher, and residents may not have access to private gardens, whereas in the northern, western, and southwestern parts of the city there are more single-family residences with private backyards.  The weather is also sunnier in the southeastern and central part of the city.

One result of the discontinuation of the funding for low-income residents is that some of the hallmark programs supported by SLUG have suffered.  For example, the Alemany Youth Farm had attracted national attention and a write-up as a "success story" on the U.S. Department of Energy’s Smart Community Network web site.  The four-acre farm is located on a portion of the St. Mary’s Recreation Area, a city-owned park that is between a middle-class neighborhood and the Alemany Housing Project.  Given its location, the community garden/farm was ideally situated to bring in youth and adults from the housing project to grow their own food.  At its peak in the early 2000s, the Alemany Youth Farm had a budget of about a half million dollars.  It employed 30 teen-agers at $6 to $8 per hour and offered them training in sustainable agriculture as well as access to classes at the City College of San Francisco.  Many of the teen-agers who ordinarily would not have gone to college finished the program and went on to college.

Although successful while it was funded, the Youth Farm was overgrown with weeds when I visited it in March, 2005.  Without the funding for youth jobs, it was impossible to attract the low-income teen-agers and keep the farm running.  It was also hard to attract middle-class residents who lived up the hill from the site, because they were afraid of crime due to farm’s location next to the housing project.  Meanwhile, the beehives had been overturned, and the greenhouse showed signs of vandalism and illicit uses that were far from the original vision.  Unfortunately, at the time of the visit the Youth Farm was unable to get help from the city to clean up the space, either from city gardeners or from the sanitation people.  Notwithstanding the tragedy of the collapse of the Alemany Youth Farm, the manager, Naomi Goodwin, had a bountiful vision of the potential of the city’s largest urban farm, and she was looking for new sources of volunteer help, foundation support, and assistance from the Recreation and Park Department.  Although the Youth Farm could be converted into the conventional model of community gardening (rental of small plots), Goodwin was trying to find ways to maintain the original vision of paying low-income youth to work in the garden and receive training that would open doors for them in the future.⁴

Policy Issues and Recommendations

            San Francisco has not faced the sell-off of publicly owned lands that has occurred in some other cities, such as New York.  This is because the gardens are not located on abandoned lots that have come under city ownership.  Conversion to private property of land that is under the jurisdiction of the Recreation and Parks Department would require a decision by voters, so land tenure is stable for the gardens that are on public land.  In a few cases city Recreation and Parks Department is also acquiring the title to community gardens on private or nonprofit land that may be in jeopardy of losing the gardening rights. The Department’s planning division conducted a needs assessment, which revealed that community gardens were one of the top three needs in the city. Government support is widespread for community gardens on public lands, including from the mayor’s office, the board of supervisors, and the Recreation and Parks Department. Instead of the land tenure problem that is common elsewhere, two other types of policy issues have emerged in the San Francisco case.⁵

First, the city government has recognized a need to develop policies for community gardens that set standards of management.  For example, Marvin Yee is developing a list of tasks for which gardeners are responsible and the city is responsible.  One key is to develop policies that ensure equity.  Part of the tasks of the managers of each garden will be to keep a reliable waiting list for people who want plots and to assign plots fairly as they become open.  By keeping fees at a reasonable level and imposing a fair, standardized policy on waiting lists, issues of access are being addressed more fairly.  In some cases people who arrived first have very large plots that are not completely utilized, and yet there are waiting lists. The city’s policies will ensure more equitable use of the land, and the new policies will also set priorities for the Recreation and Parks Department’s work.  Another key issue related to equity and access, which is being addressed by the city’s policy committee, is the general public’s access into the community garden, particularly into gardens that are locked due to rampant vandalism, theft, or illicit activities.  Gardens may need to set up an equitable access structure to allow other members of the public to share the space in other ways. For example, a community type of space (such as an amphitheater) may be incorporated into the community garden to stage community events, or the community garden may schedule bi-annual garden days to invite the general public into the garden space.⁶

As of 2005 there were no comprehensive policies on sustainability or techniques of gardening, but such policies may develop as well. Many of the city’s community gardens were organic or used low levels of synthetic, industrial inputs, but policies regarding sustainability were determined by each garden. ⁶ 

A second type of policy issue is the problem of configuring jobs programs so that they are not vulnerable to criticisms that training and placement rates are a failure. The Alemany Youth Farm did achieve the vision of bringing in low-income youth and providing them with an avenue out of the housing projects and into college education.  However, critics have claimed that at least some of SLUG’s other programs did not have a sufficient job training component to allow the workers to make a transition to better-paying jobs.  In a context where federal, state, and local budgets are tight for any kind of jobs program, policies are needed to develop non-state sponsorship and to help such programs through periods of conversion from government funding to other sources.  Otherwise, they can undergo collapse and abandonment, as occurred in the Alemany Youth Farm, where a vibrant and successful program has been lost.

Update, summer 2005:  There still was no support for the Alemany Youth Farm and no sign of activity on the farm, other than the beehives.

           

Web sites:

http://www.parks.sfgov.org/site/recpark_index.asp?id=27048

http://www.sffoodsystems.org

Update, 2007:

An email from Bill Goedecke states that there has been some progress on the Alemany Farm.  For more information, see www.alemanyfarm.org and also www.sfgro.org.

Sources:

1.  Fort Mason Community Garden. n.d. "Garden History." Retrieved March 18, 2005 (http://www.butterflute.com/history.html).

Grassroots.Org. n.d. "San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners (SLUG)." Retrieved February 24, 2005 (http://www.grass-roots.org/usa/slug.shtml).

Lelchuk, Ilene. 2004. "City Confirms Workers’ Charges: SLUG Employess were Coerced to Vote for Newsom." San Francisco Chronicle, September 10, 1p. Retrieved March 18, 2005 (http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/09/10/MNGTQ8MS7G1.DTL).

Thompson, A.C. 2005. "Help Wanted." The San Francisco Bay Guardian, March 9, p. 18.

Thompson, A.C., and Tali Woodward. 2005.  "Nonprofits Gone Wild!" The San Francisco Bay Guardian, March 9, p. 20.

2.  Interview by David Hess of Marvin Yee, March 10, 2005.

3.  U.S. Department of Energy. 2005.  "Alemany Youth Farm." Retrieved February 24, 2005 (http://www.sustainable.doe.gov/success/alemany_youth_farm.shtml).

4. Site Visit by David Hess to Alemany Youth Farm, Naomi Goodwin, March 17, 2005.

5.  Interview by David Hess of Marvin Yee, March 10, 2005.

6.  City of San Francisco, Recreation and Parks Department. 2005.  "Community Gardens Task List." Retrieved March 18, 2005 (http://parks.sfgov.org/site/uploadedfiles/recpark/CommunityGardens/ResponsibilityList.pdf).

     City of San Francisco, Recreation and Parks Department. 2005.  "Community Garden Program." Flyer received from the Recreation and Parks Department.

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