George Nemeth · Imagining East Cleveland as Urban Farmland

June 24th, 2008

From Norm Roulet:

The question I want to explore is how an East Cleveland full of farms and farmers would differ from today, in East Cleveland and anywhere else in the world. Through urban farming, the most destroyed, demolished, abandoned neighborhoods would become the most green, healthy and prosperous, and would generate significant property and income taxes for the city. Consider if 100 “lots” in East Cleveland that are currently in their landbank, and 100 other city, county and other government owned lots, and 100 lots to be cleared through foreclosures, and 200 home lots of current East Cleveland residents (like my lot), are optimized for farming and placed in the hands of trained urban farmers. If all farmers are required to live in East Cleveland, 500 lots=500 tax-paying local farmers, where there are now none… creating $15,000,000 per year in new taxable income for 500 households in East Cleveland… making prosperous 5% of the households of East Cleveland. And, East Cleveland will be filled with fresh local food and people who know how to produce and appreciate that for themselves and their community, which is as valuable a life skill as I may imagine…

NEO Excellence Roundtable: Urban Farming with Maurice Small | REALNEO for all

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Category: Economic Development

3 Responses to “Imagining East Cleveland as Urban Farmland”

  1. michael feigenbaum Says:
    June 24th, 2008 at 7:50 pm

    george i have been saying for years the abandoned inner city cleveland will become farmland eventually because that is the lowest value use for land.it is ironic once surrounded by farm and woods cleveland is surrounded by suburban sprawl from medina to geauga to hudson to rockside and the inner core is almost empty of people and business except the “nonprofit” clinic and exempt from tax churches i do believe we are 10-20 yrs out for the whole cycle to completely evolve and become real. like a good kurt vonnegut story.

  2. Ben C Says:
    June 25th, 2008 at 11:35 am

    I’m sure that having a local market for crops grown in the backyard might get an urban farmer a better $/acre than a large agribusiness that’s dependent on distributors,etc. However, the dollar figures mentioned here ($30K from a typical urban lot of 0.1 acres) have my BS meter pegged.

    A bit of checking shows that it’s approximately 100X the typical yield per acre given that bare Ohio cropland averaged $3886 per acre for top land, $3280 for average land and $2693 for poor land according to a report by Barry Ward at OSU Extension & OSU Agricultural, Environmental and Development Economics.

    http://aede.osu.edu/resources/docs/pdf/O5W0OWRJ-TM0K-Y99T-FBJJ2QIF808OR3A2.pdf

    Again, I get that there is a lot of markup between the field and Giant Eagle, but I’m not convinced.

    One cash crop that this guy might be growing (and smoking) could come close to that yield, but the risk/reward ratio is suboptimal.

  3. How About Greening Our Air Rights and Rooftops? | Cleveland Real Estate News Says:
    July 14th, 2008 at 5:16 am

    [...] BFD brought up some creative and wonderful ideas about increasing the numbers of urban gardens by making use of vacant city spaces in east Cleveland neighborhoods. Since I have been thinking about how to best use air rights and rooftops, George’s ideas [...]