Article - Plowing Over: Can Urban Farming Save Detroit and Other Declining Cities?

[DetroitPlanner]

Royce. Its less expensive to provide housing where infastructure currently exists than building new infastructure. Sewers and water are all interconnected. Farms will need irrigation and all the old ways of getting water to the site were removed when it became developed. I supose you could get rid of many pipes or just leave them fallow, but you have to be darned sure that development is never going to happen again or that the pipes don't service any housing left in the area. Like it or not, even if we convert say 50 percent of a nieghborhood to urban farming there will still be need to access 50 percent of the remaining homes as well as the farms themselves.

Even in places with large population loses like Brightmoor you would be hard pressed to assemble pieces of land large enough to construct resevoirs and farms. There are too many homes still scattered about. You would need to move those people and to engineer resevoirs would be very costly. The city is broke how do you propose funding that?

The loss of population does not directly correlate with the loss of houses. Even places that built houses in the last 10 years have lost population due to reduction in family sizes. It may not seem like much to go from 3.1 to 2.8 residents per home, but it means that more houses are needed to keep the same level of population.

I like the idea of working with public-private partnerships to infil with greenhouses. If they can do that down by Ruthven and Leamington we should be able to do that here.