Proposal for urban farming clashes with hopes for new housing along vacant stretch of Wilson Street near Broadway Market
City says no to family's proposed East Side farm
Published: April 05, 2009, 12:30 am
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An empty two-acre plot stretches along Wilson Street, just north of Broadway on Buffalo’s East Side.
To most, the weed-covered property — technically 27 contiguous city-owned lots—looks like any of the thousands of vacant parcels of land that pockmark the city.
But to the Stevens family, it is farmland.
Mark and Janice Stevens want to transform it from a dumping ground into an urban farm.
They want to buy the entire two acres, put in a series of raised beds and grow vegetables, which they would use to feed themselves and to sell to their community, perhaps at the Broadway Market a couple of blocks away.
Last year, the Stevenses formally asked to buy the land.
The city turned them down. “We got a letter of rejection
that said the city might have plans sometime in the future for this, so they didn’t want to sell it to us,” Mark Stevens said.
He and his wife were disappointed and perplexed.
With 14,100 vacant lots, more than a third owned by the city, they couldn’t understand why the city won’t part with the two-acre parcel on Wilson.
“Why would they hold on to that many?” Mark Stevens asked. “Why? If someone wants to do something positive with it. . . . It doesn’t make sense.”
The Stevenses aren’t alone in desiring a closer connection with their food.
On the West Side, two urban farms are being cultivated, and a woman is seeking permission to raise chickens for eggs. Across Western New York, farmers’ markets are gaining popularity. They include the Elmwood-Bidwell Farmers’ Market, which requires that vendors produce what they sell.
It is part of a trend in other U. S. cities, especially those in the Rust Belt laden with empty lots.
Urban farms, some commercial and others nonprofit, have been popping up in Milwaukee, Chicago and Detroit, as well as New York City.
Advocates say the farms turn eyesores into green space while providing fresh produce, often a scarcity in inner-city neighborhoods.
The Stevenses aren’t the only ones facing roadblocks.
The West Side woman who wants to raise chickens was forced to remove her hens after the city informed her that domestic fowl aren’t allowed in the city.
And two Brooklyn men who want to open a slaughterhouse in Buffalo met stiff resistance from the community. Their original plan to build it on Broadway was scuttled last year. Their new plan for a William Street operation recently won approval, although 300 people signed a petition against it.
“I don’t understand it as a threat to urban life at all,” Janice Stevens said of efforts to bring rural life to the city. “I see it as an enhancement. Farmers are selling off land to build houses, and in the city, we have all these vacant lots where we want to farm.”
To be simple
The Stevens family is not your typical East Side household.
Mark and Janice Stevens have six children and a foster child. They also have taken in a woman and her child they consider part of their family.
The Stevenses are part of a nondenominational Christian group.
“We believe that the best way to live our faith is to love other people,” Mark Stevens explained.
They moved to their Fillmore Avenue home about 1z years ago from their small farm in eastern Wyoming County with a desire to minister to people in the city.
“We loved living out in the country,” Mark Stevens said. “But there were more cows than people there.”
They learned about the house, a large century-old home with a big barnlike garage, from fellow members of their Christian group who lived next door. Another couple from the group followed. They bought their house at a city auction.
The Stevenses liked their new house, not only for its size, but also because of the yard next to it. Technically, it belongs to their neighbors — not the ones from their group — but they gave the Stevenses permission to garden on it. The Stevenses also were intrigued by the large empty lot behind their property on Wilson Street.
The family believes in living simply. They dress modestly. The girls wear long skirts and their hair in braids. Mark Stevens keeps his beard long.
And growing their own food is part of that lifestyle.
“I just like to know where my food comes from and have control over that and to be able to share that with the next generation,” Janice Stevens said. “To have that connection with the earth, I think, is very important.”
The family wants to share their food-growing experience with their new neighbors in the city.
“Children don’t even know where eggs come from except from what they see in pictures in a book,” Janice Stevens said. “When we first came here, we were talking to one of the children in the neighborhood who talked about chickens being from the zoo. . . . They have no idea.”
After Mark and Janice Stevens received their rejection letter in September, they set up a meeting with City Real Estate Director John P. Hannon Jr. During the November meeting, the Stevenses said Hannon reluctantly agreed to reconsider.
They have yet to hear back from him.
They began talking to other people in the community and won supporters. They include Common Council President David
A. Franczyk, who represents the Fillmore District and lives close to the proposed farm.
Norman Bakos, a former Lovejoy Council member and now chairman of East Buffalo Good Neighbor Planning Alliance, has also taken up the Stevenses’ cause.
Pleading their case
At a recent Community Development Committee meeting, Bakos pleaded their case.
This is precisely the type of “stonewalling” that makes many residents increasingly frustrated, Bakos said at the meeting. With thousands of other vacant lots in the area, holding up development of these parcels makes no sense, he said.
Vacant parcels are nothing but neighborhood headaches, Bakos continued, describing them as unsightly, weed-infested and a source of rodent problems.
“[The urban farm] is a very positive way of relieving the City of Buffalo of liability for that property,” Bakos said.
Franczyk expressed similar views, saying the city Real Estate Division is standing in the way of a project that aims to capitalize on a growing national trend. That, he said, simply is “not acceptable.”
“It’s just a great concept, what they have in mind,” Franczyk said. “It’s very innovative for the city.”
Niagara Council Member David A. Rivera, who mentioned the two urban farms in his district, is convinced such farms have helped to strengthen the neighborhoods while putting fallow land to productive use.
“They’re actually marketing the goods locally,” he said.
Buffalo should encourage more urban farms and community gardens, Rivera said. But he added that they should be located in spots where other development is unlikely.
City wants new homes
What does the city have planned for the Wilson lots?
City Economic Development Commissioner Brian Reilly defended the decision by his department’s Land Use Planning Committee to reject the Stevenses’ request to buy the land. Some of the parcels on Wilson Street will likely be used for new homes through the Habitat for Humanity program, he said.
Reilly said the city is “very supportive” of urban farms, but that they must be set up on parcels that have no potential for being developed into homes or other projects.
“It’s very difficult to assemble large tracts of land for development,” he said.
“I’m sure we can find something and work together to see this happen,” Reilly added, referring to the proposed urban farm.
City development officials stressed that they do not oppose urban farms. The city, Hannon said, works with Grassroots Gardens, a not-for-profit group. He said the Stevenses might be able to work out a lease with this organization for the parcels.
But leasing the land for what could end up being only a short period wouldn’t be a good option, Mark Stevens said.
“We wanted something that we were confident that we could put the effort into that we weren’t going to lose,” he said.
If he can purchase the land, Stevens said, he would be willing to give the city the right of first refusal to repurchase the parcels in the event the family ever phases out the farm.
From a legal standpoint, the Stevens family might need to obtain variances before establishing the two-acre farm, said Assistant Corporation Counsel Timothy Ball, the Common Council’s chief legal adviser.
Franczyk called Reilly last week, in hopes of finding some type of compromise regarding the Wilson parcel. Franczyk said if Habitat for Humanity is eyeing the land, perhaps the group can work with the Stevens family on a plan to accommodate some housing along with an urban farm.
Reilly told Franczyk he would get back to him on his request for a meeting.
Mark Stevens said he has been astounded by the resistance to the farm.
“The whole political situation in Buffalo is new to me,” he said. “I’m not used to dealing in those realms.”
But he said he was hopeful he and his wife, aided by their allies, will be able to plow their way through to success.
“I think there’s a lot of support there for it,” he said.
mbecker@buffnews.com and bmeyer@buffnews.com
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