South Central Farm Under Siege

[th!nkstyle]

I dont understand how even right wing nuts could do this. Unless of course they had a lot and lot of money to gain from it:



The police have closed on South Central Farm, the largest community garden in the USA. The farms were planted after the Rodney King uprising, when the land was given to the neighborhood, and it has been reclaimed and cultivated by 350 families. The city reneged on its promise and sold the land to a developer, who has now moved on it with bulldozers and a riot squad.

The South Central Farm is currently under attack. An early morning raid began this 5-hour long eviction that is still in process. Trees are being cut down, bulldozers are leveling the families? food, hundreds of protesters are on site rallying with tears in their eyes as the nation?s largest urban farm is destroyed before them. The LAPD is on tactical alert as fire ladders and cherry pickers are being brought in to remove the tree-sitters. The 350 families created this oasis 14 years ago in the wake of the 1992 uprising when this land was offered to the community by the then Mayor as a form of mitigation.


source:

click here (http://www.southcentralfarmers.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=160&Itemid=2)

[Purple-Silver Fox]

Perfectly predictable. Why should you let people grow their own garden and enjoy the social and health benefits, if you can let them pay for food, entertainment and medicine?

[kuranes]

Bastards.

[th!nkstyle]

Update:

June 14: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/5078404.stm

[kuranes]

If they told them from the git-go that it was temporary, that would be different.

[Architectonic]

The whole situation sounds a bit... dodgy..



A Patch of Green (http://www.laweekly.com/general/a-considerable-town/re-germinated/9340/) (18/03/2004)

On the last Sunday in February, I drove down to Alameda and 41st streets, to the community garden tended by low-income residents on 14 acres of land in the heart of an industrial zone. This was to be the last day of the garden’s life; the land had been rented from the city since 1992 by the Los Angeles Food Bank on behalf of local farmers for a dollar a year, while the city and other agencies tried from time to time to do something else with it.

From the get-go, the community garden was supposed to be temporary — two years was the original estimated life span. The Los Angeles City Harbor bought the land in 1994, but never used it, allowing the nopales cacti, the guava and the papaya trees to mature; the lean-to arbors to acquire a sense of permanence; the gardeners to feel ever more connected not only to their individual patches of earth and the food they produced (not to mention the grocery money they saved), but also to the garden as a community. A decade and some is a long time to till ground. And the garden, the third largest in all of Los Angeles, now represents a living dream to the green community and idealists everywhere. The day before my visit, Dennis Kucinich stopped by and declared that the garden was an example of what should be done in cities all over the United States. Kucinich is right, of course — dead right — but on that day his lovely values seemed to have as much chance of triumphing as his bid for the presidency. For the garden sits on prime industrial real estate, and if there is one thing that it does not do, it does not make anybody (or any municipality) rich. Thus, the acreage was eventually sold to developer Ralph Horowitz, who, despite organized protests, intends to replace the garden with warehouses and soccer fields and ordered the gardeners out. Although, of course, the story is more complicated than that.

I entered the garden through a side gate and wended my way down narrow, perpendicular paths between fenced-in, padlocked plots. With spring still a few weeks away, many of the gardens were fallow. Even so, thick green mounds of cilantro scented the air; cabbages glowed blue-gray in tidy rows; green papayas hung off small trees like swollen, pendulous breasts. I had expected to see people carrying off perennial plants and the last of their winter harvests; instead, only a handful of gardeners were in their plots, while over at the main entrance, a band was playing and various people were selling tacos, tamales, grilled corn. This was a celebration. The gardeners sued and won a temporary restraining order against Horowitz, the city of Los Angeles and others — until this week. The judge seemed to be motivated by a lack of due process: When the city decided to sell the land, the gardeners were never informed or offered a chance to buy it — conceivably, with the help of various civic organizations, they might have pulled off a sale, especially considering the price Horowitz was given in a closed-door deal, a price that seems unduly sweet for 14 acres of prime development property. Then again, the story is more complicated than that.

My writing pad and pen attracted a garden organizer, a well-spoken, fedora-wearing young man who gave his name as Tezozomoc. He led me through the acres to the plot his father once farmed, pointing out along the way traditional fruits and vegetables and medicinal plants that the mostly low-income, Latino gardeners have cultivated: chipalin, chayote squash, guajes (a tree bean), huantxontle (whose seedy flowers taste like cauliflower), the anise-like oja de santissima. Banana leaves clattered around us in the breeze. Tezo knew his facts by heart: 347 families eat from these gardens, which provide a form of family and community recreation in a district with the lowest amount of open space in the city. “There’s no drinking here, no vandalism, no graffiti; for over 12 years the gardeners haven’t taken a single penny from the city,” Tezo declared. “We pay our for own water, portable toilets and dumpsters.” Then, he told me the long, complicated, at times murky, story of the land.

Back in 1986, the city purchased the land from developer Ralph Horowitz (yes, the same Ralph Horowitz who just bought it), effecting that long-ago sale through eminent domain in order to build the massive LANCER trash incinerator and recycling plant. Environmental justice activists protested, and the incinerator idea was abandoned. With the help of the Los Angeles Food Bank, which sits across the street from the garden, local gardeners cleared the rubble of old buildings off the property and began working the land in 1992. Meanwhile, Horowitz protested the 1994 sale to the Port Authority, claiming he had right of first refusal in the event of any sale. He took his objection to court several times, only to be told he had no legal claim. Nevertheless (and this is where the murkiness comes in), at some point — at a time difficult to ascertain, since, said Tezo, “it was never disclosed to people like myself” — Horowitz repurchased the land from the city for only a few hundred thousand dollars more than he sold it for in 1986. In short order, the Food Bank was told that the farmers would have to vacate the premises to make way for warehouses and soccer fields. Throughout this transaction, the farmers, the people using the land, received no notice that anything was afoot.

Since the sale, the farmers have marched, attended City Council meetings, and now sued Horowitz. Their action has energized the community, as has the support of public figures like Kucinich, actor James Cromwell (the farmer in Babe), and chef Nancy Silverton, co-owner of Campanile and founder of the La Brea Bakery.

Al Renner of the Los Angeles Community Garden Council allows that Horowitz (who is responsible for both the Home Depot on Figueroa and the creation of the Los Angeles River Center at the site of the old Lawry’s California Center) isn’t “so bad, as developers go.” He’s been encouraging everyone to keep planting. And just this week his optimism has been rewarded. On Tuesday, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge David Yaffe granted a preliminary injunction halting the transfer of the land to Horowitz. It’s not a permanent win for the gardeners, but, this time, as the gardener’s attorney Dan Stormer told the press, “it won’t be a backroom deal. It will be something the public gets to scrutinize and my clients get to participate [in].” Meanwhile, the farmers can stay on their land.

Back on that last Sunday in February, as Tezo and I stood in his sunny plot by a fuzzy tobacco plant, we watched a man reach through the fence of a neighboring plot and pull out several handfuls of greens. Tezo yelled at him in Spanish, “Don’t steal! Don’t steal!”

The man looked up at us, shrugged, and said, “Do you know where there’s any epazote?”

—Michelle Huneven

[Dom]

If they told them from the git-go that it was temporary, that would be different.

Surely there comes a point where the benefits should have been plain obvious?

This makes me mad, even if it was temporary, 14 years of farming makes people attached to the land, it's like enclosure all over again. In Britian after 14 years they'd have gained legal rights to use the land in the form of easements. Even if originally temporary for two years, the fact it continued for so much longer after that would have granted them legal rights.

Oh well that's capitalism for you, why leave something liek that, making people lives easier adn happier when you can bulldoze it and make more money for yourself??

God I hate capitalism!

[Architectonic]

I feel there is more to this that we don't know.
Blaming it on something vague like capitalism, just makes you look ignorant.

[Dom]

I feel there is more to this that we don't know.
Blaming it on something vague like capitalism, just makes you look ignorant.

I don't mind looking ignorant, especially when I am, no I do not know all the details, but it seems very typical money grabbing attitude.

[PlayerOfGames]

I think this is a great example of the case for enlightened self interest. Do you want to unleash the sentiment in the community that destorying the garden does? Do you want thousands of people (many more than just those directly farming the garden) to think "Well, guess there's no way to win playing fair."

If you're really trying to create the world in which you want to live, no. The cost of the land is much higher than simply its price in dollars.

[sbw]

I feel there is more to this that we don't know.
Blaming it on something vague like capitalism, just makes you look ignorant.

thats the catchall scapegoat around here, innit?

Scott

[Architectonic]

thats the catchall scapegoat around here, innit?

Scott

That and blaming everything on the government. :ph34r:

[libertarianjim]

What's unfair here? The owner wants to build on his land. Do these people have legal leases with him? No.

And improvements to the land will increase it's value, meaning the government can collect more taxes. The new buildings will need employees, who will likely be from the community, so they can make money and improve their lives.

My God, the whining about this pisses me off.

[sbw]

What's unfair here? The owner wants to build on his land. Do these people have legal leases with him? No.

And improvements to the land will increase it's value, meaning the government can collect more taxes. The new buildings will need employees, who will likely be from the community, so they can make money and improve their lives.

My God, the whining about this pisses me off.

the farmers are SUING the guy who OWNS THE LAND...this is hilarious...

moridin, are stupidass people to blame, or property rights?

Scott

[Architectonic]

moridin, are stupidass people to blame, or property rights?


Did you read about how the property was obtained?

[eyebyte_atWork]

Consistent with US history.

WE came from Europe - made friends - then proceeded to take their land, made them outlaws, killed and villified them - and justified our point of view.

Seems to me that token gifts are just that - so we can feel better about ourselves until we change our mind.

This case is no different.

What will happend next? Take away voting rights for blacks and women?

If they wanted to secure the land - they would have been better off privatizing it - simple as that - but then again there was that WACO incident. It was private land - and the feds still aspired to take it away (yeah - those people were crazy and all that - but they did own that land outright). There seems to be no way to be able to keep what one has earned.

Life sux.

EDIT: ex-wife is sueing for more money - I am bitter.

[Dom]

thats the catchall scapegoat around here, innit?

Scott

If the cap fits.....


the farmers are SUING the guy who OWNS THE LAND...this is hilarious...

moridin, are stupidass people to blame, or property rights?

Scott

No Stupidass people are not to blame, and neither are property rights (though I'd like to understand a moral justification for the onwership of land, all land having once been held in common and then stolen by the lucky, wealthy, plucky etc).

Here we have a situation where some people did a good thing with some land. They did it, to improve the lives of some people. To mitigate the feelings that a people group are discriminated against and live as a second class of people.

The problem comes from it not having been done right, it was done half assed. It is effective a huge botch job. The onwers of the land had no intention of doing this 'good deed' for too long, what they wanted was to eventually make as much money off the land as they can, if they hand it over to the community for a few years, to pacify it first, then fine, but ultimately it would be taken back for it's original plan.

I think it's wrong, not because someone doesn't have the right to use their land for what they want (and as I said over here they would have a harder time doing this) but because it was a good thing that improved teh environment, the lives of the people in the community and it's a shame it was done as a half arsed stop gap rather than properly.



EDIT: ex-wife is sueing for more money - I am bitter.

I thought once the divorce was settled that that was it? No come back? Feel for you man!

[Purple-Silver Fox]

Hey libertarians, those people were helping themselves by raising food, providing their own entertainment and their own healthy hobby.. all without state intervention. You should love it.
But you don't. Probably because it's building community.

[eyebyte_atWork]

I thought once the divorce was settled that that was it? No come back? Feel for you man!

WHen kids are involved - its not over until the kids are over 18 - mine is 11 - 7 more years to go.

[Dom]

WHen kids are involved - its not over until the kids are over 18 - mine is 11 - 7 more years to go.

Ahhhh I should have remembered! Yours is a good kid though?

Believe it or not, over here it can continue beyond 18 if the kid goes conintues in full time education!

And remember they can't take what you haven't got....bury your cash in the back garden!

[eyebyte_atWork]

Ahhhh I should have remembered! Yours is a good kid though?


Great kid.



Believe it or not, over here it can continue beyond 18 if the kid goes conintues in full time education!

Thanks for the reminder - I will not be required to - but most likely will anyway.




And remember they can't take what you haven't got....bury your cash in the back garden!

All my cash is heavily documented - and is mostly gone before getting to me.

I should get into organized crime or something.

[libertarianjim]

Hey libertarians, those people were helping themselves by raising food, providing their own entertainment and their own healthy hobby.. all without state intervention. You should love it.
But you don't. Probably because it's building community.

They were helping themselves WITH SOMEONE ELSE'S RESOURCES. That someone else has the right to do as he sees fit. If they want to do that on their own land, or on someone's land who agrees to it (I'm looking at you, Daryl Hannah, how about putting your property where your mouth is), more power to them.

[Purple-Silver Fox]

It was public property. The city council should not have sold back the land to Horowitz, if they wanted to keep their promises.
Horowitz, from his side, offered to sell the land (at market price). When a foundation appeared that did want to buy it at his price, he refused.

[libertarianjim]

It was public property. The city council should not have sold back the land to Horowitz, if they wanted to keep their promises.

Then the voters should take it out on the city council in the next election. But the deal is done and the land is his again.


Horowitz, from his side, offered to sell the land (at market price). When a foundation appeared that did want to buy it at his price, he refused.

He did offer to sell. Every statement I've seen indicated that they couldn't meet his price. Then, they started protesting outside his home and calling him a memeber of the "Jew Mafia." At that point he decided he wasn't going to sell for any price. I can't say I blame him.