The strong economy in Seattle has been critical to the expansion of its community gardening program

While Philadelphia definitely needs more affordable housing, the threshold set for “affordable” is 120% of the area median income, or about $73,000 a year. Yet nearly 25% of the city’s population lives under the federal poverty line of $12,490 a year . No housing under the new policy is guaranteed to be affordable for this quarter of the population, nor for anyone in the bottom half of the income distribution, for that matter. Without guaranteeing that it will go to community uses or housing for those most in need, the Land Bank will likely move property back into use at a much higher rate with the new disposition policy. As their recent documents and public statements make clear, Land Bank officials are attempting to respond to criticism from Soil Generation and other community advocates that the process is too slow. However, they are doing so in a context where few resources are flowing toward community housing and the city’s poorest residents, while large amounts of capital are being mobilized for any profitable ventures. Thus, the agency’s reforms are limited by economics and market logic that still hold sway over where and at what price it makes sense to develop land. As it stands in 2021, through the Land Bank and outside of its purview, additional gardens are preserved every year in Philadelphia. These results are achieved through tremendous effort and expense on the part of gardeners, program leaders, and urban agriculture advocates. However, other gardens continue to be lost under the intense development pressure in gentrifying neighborhoods, flood tray and many more gardens still remain vulnerable. Professionalized nonprofits such as PHS and NGT use large donor networks, foundation grants, and insider strategies to nurture political support for urban agriculture and to preserve gardens incrementally.

Soil Generation and the Garden Justice Legal Initiative continue to mobilize and reframe the public conversation around vacant lot disposition, seeking to transform the narrative from one of financial efficiency to one of justice and community control of land. Throughout the implementation of the Land Bank and its biennial strategic planning process, ongoing outsider strategies from these two organizations alongside the Philadelphia Coalition for Affordable Communities , a successor coalition of the CTBVL, have accomplished meaningful progress toward more a transparent and community-oriented land disposition process. Political and economic conditions in Philadelphia still present barriers to garden preservation, and well-resourced developers continue to have advantages in securing vacant land, but the organized efforts underway in Philadelphia—especially the work of Soil Generation and PCAC—represent the most radical movement toward structural change in land use policy of any in the three case-cities at this point. If successful, their work will have an impact on the lives of marginalized Philadelphians that goes far beyond the benefits of well preserved community gardens.Compared to Milwaukee and Philadelphia, Seattle has had both political and economic conditions more favorable to community garden development and preservation. The economy and the revenue-generating tools available in Seattle created opportunities for the city to fund desired public investments, including gardens. With the city’s tech sector thriving, Seattle has been a “winner” in the global competition for urban growth for the last 30 years. In this time, public investments in community gardens, green space and other neighborhood amenities have redoubled Seattle’s appeal to the “creative class” . The favorable political economy in recent decades has helped solidify the status of community gardens as a legitimized, permanent feature of the urban landscape. That said, the popularity and security of Seattle’s gardens do not ensure that they are providing the potential benefits most needed by the city’s marginalized residents.

If the city were facing the kinds of budget crises that Milwaukee and Philadelphia currently confront, open space improvements might not win approval from voters or City Council when tax revenue was direly needed for basic services such as police and schools. Seattle’s city budget contracted in 2000 with the bursting of the dot-com bubble, and again in 2008-2010 during the Great Recession. Otherwise, since the early 1990s, the city budget has increased fairly steadily. The growing technology sector has served as a stronger economic base than more traditional industrial manufacturing during this period, in which outsourcing has led to significant economic impacts in cities like Milwaukee and Philadelphia as described above. Seattle faced population loss between 1960 and 1980, including a steep economic downturn during the “Boeing Bust” when the city’s major manufacturer shed thousands of jobs. However, Seattle began to grow again as the information technology sector expanded, with major companies like Microsoft and Amazon headquartered in the area. The city’s population grew 4.5% from 1980 to 1990, then 9% from 1990 to 2000 , 8% from 2000 to 2010, and a whopping 21% between 2010 and 2020. Economic conditions in Seattle differ significantly from the other case-cities: the poverty rate is 11% , and the median household income of $92,263 is greater than that of Milwaukee and Philadelphia combined. A stronger economy and reasonably comfortable city budget have made allocating public resources to community gardens easier in Seattle than in Milwaukee or Philadelphia. The P-Patch Program is administered by the City, as explained in chapter 2, and public resources have undergirded its entire existence. Seattle has supported gardens as part of its budget since 1973, at first agreeing to pay $950 to cover the property taxes of Rainie Picardo so that his land could continue serving neighbors as a community gardening space. City Council then expanded the program to 10 other sites around the city and took over administration .

For the P-Patch program’s first two decades, the city budget allocated roughly $15,000-50,000 to the program for 1-2 staff positions, plowing costs, and money for tools and materials. In 1983—in part due to contracting federal support for local governments that affected all of the cities in this study—a municipal budget crunch forced cuts in the P-Patch program that led to the first notable site vacancies in the program’s ten-year history. With two part-time staff working far more than the hours they were paid for, and significant volunteer contributions to make up the difference, the program survived and continued to add new sites through the late 1980s. When the city was facing budget cutbacks again in 1992, gardeners organized a letter-writing campaign and visited council members to advocate for fully funding the program. Successful in this effort, they received a $50,000 budget increase for 1993. For the next 14 years, as Seattle’s economy and city budget saw gradual but nearly uninterrupted growth, the P-Patch program garnered increases in staff and funding that enabled them to administer more and more sites. During this period, the program more than doubled in size—from 30 gardens and 2 staff positions in 1993, to almost 70 gardens and 7 staff in 2007. Although the city froze the program staff size during the Great Recession, funding from open space tax levies continued to facilitate expansion in the number of gardens. As of 2021, there are nearly 90 P-Patches reaching across every neighborhood in Seattle. The program is well known and popular, in part because of its expanse and its stable administrative capacity; these features result from the substantial public resources that the City of Seattle has been able to dedicate to the program over the last 40 years. In addition to the annual budget allocation that supports P-Patch administration, the garden program has been able to expand because of funding from tax levies. Washington state allows cities and counties to raise revenue through taxes of different types; many such tax increases require voter approval with turnout requirements and at least 60% support at the ballot. Seattle voters typically see at least one tax levy question on their ballots every year, 4×8 grow tray either for the City of Seattle or for King County. Not all of these measures receive the necessary 60% support, but since 2000 voters have approved several tax levies related to parks and open space improvements at both the city and county levels. These measures have raised hundreds of millions of dollars for parks and open space, including at least $4 million specifically for the acquisition and improvement of P-Patches. Such an infusion of cash into citywide community gardening efforts has only been possible because a) the P-Patch program is a public entity; b) county and city governments in Washington state have the ability to raise revenue with tax levies; and c) the citizens of Seattle and King County are willing to pay higher taxes in order to improve and secure open spaces. The levy funds have been used for the City to acquire land for P-Patches in high-demand parts of the city and, importantly, levy funds have also been used to enhance existing P-Patches with features such as picnic tables, gazebos, or benches designed to make the sites more inviting for the general public. As discussed in chapter 3, the P-Patch gardeners and program administrators undertook a concerted effort to design community gardens so that they are accessible, usable and therefore valued by the general public. This effort ramped up in 1998, shortly before the first of the munificent open space bonds was approved in 2000, putting P-Patch advocates in a perfect position to apply the flush funding in a way that would yield visible returns for the public at-large. Seeing the benefits of improved P-Patch gardens likely made voters more amenable to approving the next open space tax levy that came before them—a positive feedback loop made possible by the particular political-economic conditions in Seattle.

The City of Seattle was willing to dedicate resources to the P-Patch community gardens in part because of the stable city budget and revenue from tax levies, and in part because of how local garden advocates have framed the value of urban agriculture. In addition to legitimizing urban agriculture as a community-building tool and source of food for those in need, leaders of the P-Patch nonprofit built a narrative around the value of community gardens as an amenity that would keep Seattle neighborhoods green and livable as the city took on more residents. Building off of existing ideas about what made Seattle special, such as its environmental amenities and pleasant neighborhoods, the P-Patch advocates constructed an effective framing for the value of community gardens in contributing to Seattle’s place-legacy . As the city grew and neighborhoods densified, community garden advocates argued that the P-Patch program should also grow as a way to maintain residents’ quality of life . Essentially, garden advocates used a framing that would appeal to the growth coalition: exchange value could continue to increase along with concession of a relatively small amount of the city’s land preserved for use value. Seattle’s garden advocates had constructed this sophisticated narrative by the mid- 1990s, and in the early 2000s Richard Florida outlined a theory of “creative cities” that essentially describes the alignment of certain kinds of use value with exchange value. As the US economy is shifting away from manufacturing, Florida argued, continued growth derives from an ascendant group of workers he called the “creative class”—people who work in science, technology, engineering, design, and other knowledge-based sectors . Because their work is intellectual rather than physical, these individuals are not as tied to particular locations, and they can choose to live in whichever cities they find attractive; in other words, particular types of use value can serve as a basis for increasing exchange value. The types of use value most important to the creative class include diversity, individual expression, and loose community with many weak social ties . Indeed, Florida highlighted Seattle as a creative city with all the ingredients to attract the creative class, and the P-Patches are exemplary of the urban character that Seattle was offering: they are filled with art and with all different kinds of people getting to know one another in loose communities . Without having the vocabulary of creative cities, P-Patch advocates in the 1990s framed the value of their gardens for city leaders in terms that align well with attracting the creative class. While the theory of creative cities appears to offer a resolution to the tension between use and exchange value in urban growth dynamics, in reality the tension is simply displaced. Urban growth entrepreneurs were quick to take up Florida’s ideas in their development strategies, and critics were equally quick to decry the downsides .