The movement actors that have been most engaged in the policy processes described in this chapter are those that do not reject but instead embrace state power as an essential tool in creating change and in holding municipalities accountable for providing public goods. Through persistent advocacy, gardeners have won concrete concessions in all three municipalities. Still, the results of these engagements have led me to question how urban agriculturalists have accepted a limited politics of the possible dominated by perceptions of neoliberal urbanism. This chapter explores how municipalities and activists have changed the legal and political landscape for gardeners over the last five years. Since the 1970s, urban spaces in industrial nations have undergone radical transformation through processes of neoliberalization. In the United States, the phase of “roll-back neoliberalism” beginning in the 1970s saw a loose coalition of actors engaged in the neoliberal project of dismantling social programs and defunding the welfare state . More recently, “the processes of roll-out neoliberalization” created new modes of governance that both empower the market asauthority and assert the power of the state in differing ways. While neoliberalization processes have been heterogeneous in their development, embedded in specific historical and regulatory contexts, and produced geographically uneven results, critical scholars have noted the strategic role that cities have played in neoliberalization . In what the authors termed “the urbanization of neoliberalism”, cities have become both the targets and the experimental terrains of neoliberal policies such as place-marketing, enterprise zones, urban development corporations,greenhouse ABS snap clamp market-oriented restructuring projects, public-private partnerships, entrepreneurial project promotion, and new strategies for social control .
Creative destruction and the urban built environment are highlighted as key components to neoliberal processes. Surplus value is no longer primarily generated through industrial production as described by Marx in Capital, but by spatial production instead . Financial and government institutions promote the rational use of space through land markets . When landowners constantly strive to put land to its “best and highest use” in order to obtain the highest rents, they impact how land will be used and determine future capital and labor investment. Because this work is speculative, their decisions can force allocations that might not otherwise occur . In this sense, the circulation of capital in rent coordinates the organization of land use that produces surplus value and accumulation. Individual investment decisions, in addition to furthering the process of surplus value extraction, can lead to urban disorganization. In the long run, “strategies to commodify urban space often faildismally, producing devalorized, crisis riven urban and regional landscapes in which labor and capital cannot be combined productively to satisfy social needs” . It is in these spaces, in vacant lots, reclaimed brown fields, and liminal spaces along roadsides and abandoned buildings that urban agriculture has frequently thrived. But in the Bay Area, gardening is thriving in both devalorized landscapes, such as the flat land of West Oakland, and the competitive land markets of places like downtown San Francisco. Gardening has become a key tool in entrepreneurial and cost-saving policies that encourage urban development throughout the uneven economic geographies of the region in both devalorized landscapes and highly competitive land markets.San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose each have actively grown possibilities for urban agriculture in their municipal policy and programming over the last five years. Each city, situated in its own economic and social history, has taken its own path.
While there is much commonality between their stories, I observe significant differences, much of which is due to each city’s relationship to a primary driver of economic and social change – the Silicon Valley tech industry. In the sections that follow, I describe and analyze the municipal changes in zoning codes, community garden and parks programming, general plans, and municipal funding for gardening initiatives, as they are situated in the demographic and political economic realities of each municipality. The new wave of tech industries is less capital intensive both in cost and physical capital, which has meant more start-ups are able to seek out small commercial spaces in San Francisco and other regional cities with socially dense, creative centers . To continue attracting large companies of the new tech wave in a region with competing municipalities with much lower tax rates, San Francisco in 2011 passed a exemption on its 1.5 percent payroll tax to entice companies to move into a set of very specific buildings in Mid-Market. This tax break, nicknamed the “Twitter tax break”, will be phased out by 2018 due to the passage of the 2012 Prop. E. Using the rationale that taxing payroll de-incentivizes job creation, Prop E replaces the payroll tax and over a 5 year-period creates a gross receipts tax, taxing total business revenue depending on industry . Still, the region continues to attract venture capital-backed high tech industry at a higher rate then any other location in the world, with more than $13.5 billion invested in 2011 alone . Bridging tech and real estate development, commercial real estate technology startup firms based in the region brought in $74 million of capital investment between 2012- 2014 . The Silicon Valley is the national leader in these investments and with New York Represents 36% of real estate technology startups worldwide. San Francisco’s popularity for tech development and real estate has contributed to the recent housing crisis and resistance to further development.
In this context of high rents and struggles over availability of urban space, gardeners and the City of San Francisco have developed forms of urban agriculture that are compatible with the prioritization of land for real estate development both in the practical allocation of particular lands and in the cultivating an entrepreneurial, creative image of urban gardening. Since former Mayor Newsom’s Executive Directive on Healthy and Sustainable Food in San Francisco was announced in July 2009, the city has made major changes impacting urban gardeners. These changes have included making a prominent place for urban agriculture in the San Francisco General Plan, developing a municipal Urban Agriculture Program, updating zoning codes, and becoming the first California city to implement AB 551, legislation which allows landowners to pay lower property taxes by agreeing to use land for urban farming for at least five years. All of these initiatives have been championed by various actors in the urban gardening communities of the city, in particular the San Francisco Urban Agriculture Alliance . After Newsom’s directive, which committed the city to providing land for increased production of healthy food, various advocates of urban agriculture joined together to form the SFUAA in late 2009 . The executive directive created the San Francisco Food Policy Council , which was tasked with ensuring the goals of the directive were implemented into law. The SFFPC, formed in September 2010 and led by Project Manager Paula Jones, played a significant role in the development of the SFUAA. Suzi Palladino, SFFPC member, former staff member at the Garden for the Environment, and founding member of the SFUAA, described the genesis of the alliance, “San Francisco’s urban agriculture community has long existed as an energetic, but uncoordinated,snap clamps ABS pvc pipe clip network of grass-roots organizations… Catalyzed by Mayor Gavin Newsom’s Executive Directive on Healthy and Sustainable Food and the work of the San Francisco Food Policy Council, the urban agriculture sector has come together to form the SFUAA, whose members include practitioners and stakeholders working in the sector” . At the request of the SFFPC, SFUAA formed a Policy Working Group to review the goals of the directive and provide recommendations for on goal implementation including increasing the use of public lands for gardens, making resources like compost available to gardeners through distribution centers, and establishing a city entity to coordinate public support of gardening . In December 2010 with the continued advocacy from the SFUAA Policy Working Group and the efforts of members like Eli Zigas, Caitlin Galloway and Brooke Budner of Little City Gardens, Newsom and the San Francisco Planning Department announced a proposed change to planning code. Proponents of the code change said this change would allow for the growth of urban gardening throughout more of the city. The zoning proposal eliminated the need to apply for a Conditional Use Permit to be able to sell produce from urban gardens . In addition it permitted the operation of small scale urban farm, market gardens, or community and home gardens for personal consumption, donation or commercial purposes, allowed in all zoning districts and regulating the sale of urban garden produce . The new zoning language distinguished between three types of urban agriculture: community agriculture, any garden or urban farm on less than one acre used primarily for the production of food or crops for sale, and large scale urban agriculture for parcels over one acre in size .
On April 20, 2011 the Urban Agriculture Ordinance 66-11 was signed into law after the Board of Supervisors unanimously voted in favor of it. Surrounded by freshly harvested produce, Mayor Edwin Lee signed the ordinance at Little City Garden’s urban farm and celebrated a victory for gardeners and the city with the SFUAA . The ordinance quickly gained national attention as one of the most comprehensive pieces of recent legislation on urban agriculture . Supervisor David Chui who co-sponsored the law stated, “This bill puts San Francisco on the map as a national leader in urban agriculture, and is a tangible example of how government can create more sustainable communities.”. Community activists in both Oakland and San Jose drew inspiration or at least political momentum from this decision. During the process of the zoning code changes, the Recreation and Open Space Element of the General Plan was also being edited to include strong support for urban gardens . The General Plan had last been updated in 1986, when SLUG had successfully advocated for increased support of community gardens in the plan . In Policy 2.12, the 1986 General Plan advocated for the expansion of community gardening opportunities throughout the city, with the goal of developing one hundred community gardens by 1996 through partnerships with SLUG and other organizations. When ROSE was adopted in April of 2014, it included several objectives highlighting the importance of urban agriculture. Policy 1.8 most directly supported urban agriculture with the following objective, “to support urban agriculture and local food security through development of policies and programs that encourage food production throughout San Francisco” . Furthermore, the policy described how urban agriculture should be expanded on both public and private land with the support of the city. As elaborated in the policy, this would include providing public land including but not limited to public housing land, providing support to organizations engaged in urban agriculture, incentivizing the creation of gardens on private land, and permitting distribution mechanisms for produce on public land. Policies 1.1, 3.1, and 5.3 encourage the use of open space from medians to larger parks to develop community gardens. Policy 5.3 explicitly directs City departments to look for opportunities to expand green space on both public and private property, encouraging the development of temporary use agreements with property owners who may be interested in building in the near future. The plan cites the Street Parks Program as an innovative approach to increasing resident management and engagement in public space. The Program is a partnership between the Department of Public Works and the San Francisco Parks Alliance to encourage neighborhood groups to create community-managed gardens for three or more years on public right of ways owned by DPW . Most gardens in the program thus far have been ornamental, but whether ornamental or vegetable gardens, Realtor Ron Wong noted street parks increase the curb appeal of neighborhoods and can boost property values . In San Francisco, the appeal of these programs is apparent for a municipality that is trying to cut maintenance costs and gain additional value from property taxes when properties change ownership. Overall community gardening and urban agriculture maintain a significant presence in the new ROSE seen in the policy objectives above, the inclusion of community gardens as one of the defining types of ‘recreation and open space’ use, and the use of a Tenderloin People’s Garden photograph in the plan. SFUAA’s work was essential in making these changes to the ROSE possible. Another consequence of the 2010 recommendations of the SFUAA was that in July 2012 San Francisco Supervisors approved legislation, which added to the Administrative Code.