In vacant lots and abandoned houses in Buffalo's poorest neighborhoods, people are cultivating new ways of living.

They grow their own food. Bake bread. Fix instead of shop. Share everything from cars to homes. Turn garbage into treasure.

Some do it for the sake of the environment. Others do it to be healthy. Many see it as a way to reinvent Buffalo. And there are those who feel it just makes sense.

. . .

Five years ago, a group of young people set their sights on an abandoned mansion on the corner of Bird and West avenues. They tore down the boards, hauled away garbage and got the plumbing back into working condition. It became home.

They were squatting, no doubt about it. But it marked the beginning of their journey toward becoming stakeholders in their West Side community.

Rich Majewski, now 25, recalled his first few days in the mansion that would come to be known as the Bird House.

"The second day I was there, the neighbors called the cops because they saw me going into a place they knew to be abandoned," he said. "They thought I was trying to steal the pipes."

Majewski spent the night in the Erie County Holding Center. But the next morning, police let him go.

"The owner was dead, and he couldn't show up in court for some reason," he said wryly. So he went right back to the house.

Majewski, who grew up in South Buffalo, learned about squatting while hitchhiking around the country. But he never squatted in Buffalo until he and his friends found the house on Bird.

Among them was Carrie Nader, who had just moved back to Western New York from Arizona.

"I was paying a lot of money in rent in Tucson," she said. She didn't want to do it again.

"It didn't make sense when I could live here for free," she said.

As they continued to fix up the house, the squatters took their approach to living free to other aspects of their lives. They rode bicycles everywhere. They "Dumpstered" -- went into Dumpsters looking for food -- at nearby grocery stores.

"We won't buy your crap, but we'll take your scrap," Lia Knoer, 21, a former Bird House squatter explained.

More and more young people came to the Bird House, with some living long term and others crashing for a few nights.

After returning from one winter away, Majewski and Nader decided they wanted to move on from the Bird House.

Majewski soon found a house for sale by auction on Normal Avenue. They bought it for $2,500, money he raised doing a couple of months of construction work. He and Nader then went on to buy two more houses together on Normal.

About the same time, another Bird House resident began proceedings to buy the mansion.

Staying frugal

Back on Normal Avenue, Nader bought a vacant lot on her own for $500 where she started a vegetable garden and keeps a bee hive. She has also bought the house next to it for $1 through the city's homesteading program.

Over the next few years, Majewski, Nader and friends who began renting from them devoted themselves to fixing up the properties.

They've continued some of their old Bird House ways.

They still "Dumpster" for food. Knoer went on a grocery run recently behind a West Side store. She carted away armloads of food: garlic, Caesar salad, cereal, tomatoes, cherry cola and 100-calorie snack packs -- items thrown out because of expired dates or not considered salable for other reasons -- were part of her bounty.

"This is probably a week's worth of food for five people in the house," she said.

They furnish their homes with furniture and appliances they find on curbs. Earlier this summer, they found a new plasma screen TV on the street.

Nader also helps organize a free market, in which participants must bring something they want to give away.

Majewski said he can't imagine living any other way.

"Most people my age are heavily in debt," he said on a recent evening as he and his friends stood outside one of his properties. "They've got nothing to their names and owe everyone else in the world an average of $50,000. Why would you do that? That doesn't work."

Nader feels their frugal ways give them freedom.

"If I don't spend money on all that crap, I can work less and I can have my life," she said.

Their friend, Samuel Kivelowitz, 24, said the lifestyle makes even more sense in a city like Buffalo.

"The amount of time and the amount of resources you have to spend to be the king of your own castle here is less than pretty much everywhere else in the country," he said.

Their neighbors on Normal are happy to have these young people on their street. They took one man on a Dumpster run; in return, he showed them how to make ricotta cheese from milk that had been thrown out.

Another neighbor, Carlos Cipolla, says he's glad they're on Normal.

"It's good for the neighborhood. It's something positive rather than all the drugs and activity and everything else that goes on around here."

A farm on the East Side

Mark and Janice Stevens, and their seven children, lead a life of simplicity in a century-old house in the Broadway-Fillmore District.

They grow vegetables on a plot of city-owned vacant lots behind their house using natural farming methods. They make almost all their food from scratch. Just about everything in their house was either given to them or found at a thrift store. They drive a 12-year-old van with 240,000 miles.

"Our society encourages us to consume and throw away," Mark Stevens said. "And we try to live our lives where there is very little waste."

The Stevenses became famous last year for their successful fight against City Hall for the right to start their urban farm on the vacant land. Two summers later, tomatoes, peppers and herbs are bursting on land now dubbed the Wilson Street Urban Farm.

They believe in living a pared-down life. They have few modern appliances -- they don't have a microwave, dishwasher or food processor. They do use a washing machine, but no dryer. They have a TV, but no cable. Sometimes they'll break out the rabbit ears, but usually they just watch DVDs borrowed from the Central Library.

While the family tries to eat mostly food from their own farm or otherwise grown locally, they also shop at Wegmans for staples like toilet paper and butter. The parents also make sure to enjoy a "date night" about once a week.

"It's about making decisions and not allowing things to control you," Mark said.

They don't have a name for their lifestyle.

"Intentional poverty?" Mark offered. "But that sounds monastic. ... It's just the way we live."

Community gardening

The Stevenses have become heroes to urban green space advocates in Buffalo who have been turning vacant lots into farms to empower local youth and to provide healthful food in low-income neighborhoods where fresh produce is hard to find.

Grassroots Gardens since 1992 has helped people start community gardens in Buffalo's vacant lots by setting up leases from the city and providing insurance. They've helped start about 50 gardens throughout Buffalo.

At first, the gardens were mainly flower and plant gardens. But recently, they've taken on urban farms as well.

"It's taking off in Buffalo," said Linda Berti, a coordinator for Grassroots Gardens. "We have thousands of vacant lots. We need to figure out what to do with them."

Massachusetts Avenue Project started Buffalo's first urban farm back in 2003. The organization has a large vegetable garden on Massachusetts Avenue that's tended by young people hired through its Growing Green program. They're also developing a sustainable fish farm, where they hope to eventually raise tilapia, catfish and perch to sell to area restaurants.

Over the last few years, other urban farms and organizations have cropped up, including the Queen City Farm on Glenwood Avenue; the Curtis Urban Farm Foundation, which has 30 lots near the Central Terminal; and Curbside Croft on Vermont and West streets.

Last year, Community Action Organization of Erie County received a $3 million stimulus grant, part of which is being used for urban farming.

Daniel Ash, a Grassroots Gardens board member, recently became involved with Buffalo Growing, which brings together groups interested in urban greening.

He also tends to a large vegetable garden on a vacant lot on Masten Avenue and Southampton Street, which he calls the Cold Spring Community Garden. He's trying to turn all four corners of the intersection into green space.

Ash is working on ways for urban farmers to pool their resources. Earlier this year, he arranged to truck in four 18-wheelers full of horse manure to his farm and three others.

"It was a mass migration of manure into the city, and we're going to do it every year," he said.

Ash also started a pilot project growing seedlings in the greenhouse at the Darwin Martin House that were distributed to community gardens this summer. He hopes to expand the program to provide vegetable seedlings to people in the community who want to try to start their own gardens.

"You can see the neighbors start to grow stuff in their yards," he said.

Unconventional bakers

While many people are growing food, others are discovering -- or rather rediscovering -- the art of making food by hand, particularly baking bread.

Kevin and Melissa Gardner started the Five Points Bakery a little over a year ago on Rhode Island Street, in the heart of the lower West Side more often associated with gangs, drugs and poverty. At their airy bakery, they hand-grind their own whole wheat to make delicious, tender whole-wheat bread.

They live with their four daughters just a couple of blocks away. They have taken over a vacant lot across the street from Five Points to grow herbs and vegetables for their bakery.

Ardent believers in whole foods, the Gardners refuse to make anything with white flour, even if it would mean attracting a broader base of customers. They insist on using the best ingredients, often local, organic, and produced using fair trade practices even if they're more expensive than conventional items.

They are not the only unconventional bakers in town.

In a handcrafted outdoor oven made with clay, bricks, and glass bottles that's nestled in the backyard of a friend's East Side house, Maura bakes wholesome loaves of crusty, wheat breads. She agreed to talk to The Buffalo News on the condition that her last name and the name of her baking operation not be used, given the underground nature of her business.

Bakery shareholders pay a sum to receive a loaf of bread once a week for 12 weeks. The money barely covers the costs of materials. She also holds bread-baking workshops for her friends and people in the community.

Maura sees her bread-baking operation as a communal project, not just a business. She encourages people to participate in work trade for her bread, through helping with the baking or fixing the property where the oven is located.

"Fancy bread doesn't have to be expensive -- learning to bake it yourself can be an economical and delicious way to bring nutrition home," Maura said.

Creative reuses

There's more to this movement than food.

People are also taking on issues from housing to transportation. Creighton Randall, 26, does both. He and a group of University at Buffalo students and other young people started Buffalo CarShare two years ago. The nonprofit organization's members rent vehicles parked throughout the city at hourly rates.

Randall is also homesteading. For the last year and a half, he has been fixing up a home on Dodge he got from the city for $1.

"I'm still working on it," he said. "It's a big project."

He sees what he's doing as "something that's environmentally sensible but is also practical and affordable."

Buffalo is the perfect place to try experiments such as the car-sharing program and homesteading, he said.

"There's no way I could afford to own my own house and make a modest income at a nonprofit at the same time," he said. "That's not doable anywhere else."

Another local nonprofit finding creative uses for abandoned homes is Buffalo ReUse. The Northampton Street-based organization does "green demolition." It dismantles old houses and then either reuses the parts or sells them at its store.

Buffalo ReUse also participates in greening projects, from planting trees on streets to community gardens on vacant lots they've bought up around their store, including a children's garden teeming with creeping vines in unusual vessels and one made up of raised beds that community members can adopt.

They also have a composting operation on an old vacant lot, dubbed ReDoo, which uses vegetable scraps from the Lexington Co-op and coffee grounds from Spot Coffee shops. They also recently opened two tool libraries, which lend secondhand equipment, from rakes to power tools.

"Most people feel some twinge of guilt when they set things on the curb," said Caesandra Seawell, community coordinator for ReUse. "We want to be that relief."

On the lower West Side, People United for Sustainable Housing Coalition has found an array of creative new uses for vacant lots they've purchased from the city.

Some have been transformed into urban farm plots, with the help of the Massachusetts Avenue Project, for community residents to garden and grow their own food.

One lot has been planted with clover, to help support the dwindling honeybee population. Another is a rain garden that soaks up water: The goal is to keep storm water from overwhelming the sewer system.

 PUSH bought three properties in a row on Winter Street, a vacant lot sandwiched between two abandoned houses. In the lot, they've laid out a geothermal heating system about eight feet below the surface, which will be used to heat the houses on either side.

"We want to make this the most sustainable neighborhood in the country," said PUSH executive director Aaron Bartley.

Diane Picard, the Massachusetts Project's executive director, believes the trend of reusing the city's abandoned land, houses and neighborhoods is just getting started.

"For a long time, nobody had a plan for what to do with all our vacant land," she said. "This is a way of citizens trying to take control of what they want their neighborhoods to be."

mbecker@buffnews.comnull