Last month, Lisa Rogers closed her Feed Denver organization, which promotes urban farming. The fact that her farms’ beautifying effect actually endangers them is a bitter pill to swallow. “Developers will call and say, ‘We have a piece of land. Can you pretty it up for two years?’ ” Rogers said. “As available land gets squeezed and prices go through the roof, like in Denver, it’s nearly impossible to find land and stay there.”
Urban farms such as Rogers’ are being evicted from cities across the nation where they’ve become a much-remarked-on driver of urban revival in recent years, having brought healthy food, commerce and eye-pleasing greenery to dreary neighborhoods.
During the Great Recession, downtown landowners and leaders offered up plots for free to get new vitality on empty streets.
No estimates exist on the number of urban farms across the U.S., but their popularity soared in the past seven or eight years. Many started as community projects.
Now the thriving farms are being routed by another urban phenomenon: the hordes of people moving back downtown to live, which is turning green spaces into prime real estate.
Plots where low-income residents raised vegetables, where community groups trained at-risk youths and where small garden businesses took root are being snapped up for construction of apartments and townhouses.
Earlier this year, the Denver Housing Authority told three urban farms in Sustainability Park that they were being evicted so the land could be sold to a private developer.
One of the three, GreenLeaf, a nonprofit organization that engages at-risk youths in agriculture and farming, will move about four miles east to the Smiley campus in Denver’s Park Hill neighborhood with plans to be up and running there by the spring.
“We’re going to have to look for new customers, and our old ones are going to have to look for a new produce source,” said Cody Meinhardt, the group’s executive director.
Meinhardt said changes in land ownership are something urban farmers are used to. When GreenLeaf moved into Sustainability Park in 2011, the group expected to stay for three years and instead got five. With a deadline to leave the park by month’s end, the group is working to raise $12,000 for its move.
At its new location, GreenLeaf will have a quarter acre to farm — about twice as much land as the location it’s leaving — and is talking with McAuliffe International School, which is on the Smiley campus, about working with the students there.
“It’s a great opportunity not only to grow more food but also work with more youths,” Meinhardt said.
The drawback to moving: GreenLeaf will no longer share space with the two other urban farms in Sustainability Park — Granata Farms and Produce Denver — both of which also have to leave.
Evictions are sad but inevitable, said Amy Brendmoen, a City Council member in St. Paul, Minn., which recently booted an urban farm from city land to make way for housing construction. Even the most robust farms can’t earn enough to compete with a real estate development.
“You couldn’t help but smile when you went by,” she said of the ousted Stones Throw farm. “They were working so hard. You could see the harvest. It was incredible.”
In many city centers, residents are lamenting the disappearance of the farms, or their move to the suburbs.
Laura Staugaitis regularly bought produce-filled boxes from a local farmer near Denver but said she can’t justify the 45-minute trip the purchase now requires.
“The drive made it a negative experience rather than an enriching experience,” she said.
The Denver Post contributed to this report.
