What to Do With Philly’s Vacant Land: An Idea
In the process of evaluating Mayor Street’s NTI legacy, the Nutter administration uncovered causes for concern.
In late May Nutter froze acquisition of new property through NTI. The city now holds large tracts of vacant land in many neighborhoods. Nobody’s quite sure of the land’s value, and it’s suspected there’s a $30 to $40 million shortfall in the funds needed for acquisitions already on the books.
Though deputy chief of staff Wendell Pritchett is adamant that no wrongdoing on the part of the Street administration is in any way suspected or implied, NTI acquisitions must now undergo an audit.
Andrew Altman, for one, is concerned about what to do with all the land the city now owns. “It’s one thing to acquire land and it’s another thing to look at how you’re going to dispose of it, what’s going to be built.”
Altman laments the difficulty of attracting investment in a down market with scarce government incentive.
—Michael Fichman, “Community Development: Slowing Initiative, Philadelphia Weekly 7/16/08
For those readers who don’t live here, Philadelphia has more unused land than it knows what do with, from abandoned factory sites to slums that have been raised by the aforementioned NTI (Neighborhood Transformation Initiative). And as Mr. Altman points out, with a crappy real estate market, a credit crunch, decreasing wages and a higher cost of living some of this land may be vacant for a LONG time. new home construction is down, for example, and many of these vacant tracts are in neighborhoods where people with the money to afford a new house simply don’t want to live. The slummy, ramshackle houses may have been torn down, but if neglected, these newly green lots will go back to blight, strewn with trash and bringing neighborhood property values even further down.
I propose that these lots be leased, sold, or donated to CDCs that promote community agriculture, and what’s more that the lots be planted with crops that can benefit our local economy. Specifically, take a few empty city blocks, test and improve the soil, and plant hops. And if the CDCs don’t want the land, see if our local brewers do.
As has been widely reported, the price of beer is going up steeply because of a global hops shortage: there have been droughts in Europe and New Zealand, while in the US an enormous warehous fire destroyed most of our stock. Worse, because of gluts in the 1990s, many farmers have stopped planting this vital ingredient for beer because the price dropped so much. Now, many of those same farms are growing corn for ethanol. Meanwhile, the skyrocketing cost of fuel makes shipping hops all the more expensive.
Philadelphia has two production breweries in city limits, the Philadelphia Brewing Company and Yards brewing. Yuengling is nearby, in Pottstown, as is Victory Brewing Company in Downingtown. We have several microbreweries and brewpubs including Nodding Head, Dock Street, and the Manayunk Brewery. All of them would stand to reduce their costs if hops were widely available in Philadelphia. In fact, the Philly Brewing Company is already growing hops in their courtyard, but the space isn’t enough to produce what they need all year.
Hops are easy to grow, and once established, the plant is a hardy perennial. Mine are in their first year, and one is already taller than the trellis I’ve put up. They need a lot of water and sun, something Philadelphia has in abundance, and don’t need a lot of space. A bine (relatred to a vine), hops grow nearly vertical. This bine is nearly as tall as a telephone pole.
You can plant them along side buildings, or train them up a line:
Another effective method involves hanging lines from a central pole, creating a teepee of hops. In short, Philadelphia is nearly a perfect urban milieu for hops cultivation. In addition, the plant attracts honeybees, a species that needs all the love it can get at this point.
By planting hops in our vacant lots, Philadelphia can support and build its local economy, support sustainable agriculture, strengthen communities, help our struggling small businesses save money, and bring jobs, volunteers, and beautification to blighted neighborhoods (someone’s gotta water, deal with pests, and harvest the buds).
It takes 3 years to get a full bumper crop from a hops plant, so the results won’t be immediate. However, once established and with enough lots, Philadelphia’s breweries could probably declare independence from hops grown on the other side of the world and become completely self-sufficient in that area of the brewing process.
July 18th, 2008 at 5:58 pm
I couldn’t agree more… although a nice diversity of crops might be good.
July 18th, 2008 at 8:45 pm
Is there an open farmers market in Philly? Maybe some of the local merchants would be interested in a co-op. Sort of like a community garden. Our town has one, small, but not too bad. The members all tend to the garden and the produce is sold at the city farmers market. You may be onto something.