Growing a Sustainable City?: The Question of Urban Agriculture by Christina D. Rosan & Hamil Pearsall

Author:Christina D. Rosan & Hamil Pearsall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Published: 2017-01-15T00:44:12.338000+00:00

Accessing Water and the Stormwater Exemption Fee for Gardens

Urban agriculture activists expected there would be a natural synergy between the goals of the Philadelphia Water Department’s Green City, Clean Waters plan and promoting urban agriculture across the city. Despite PWD’s early leadership in urban agriculture, this has not yet been the case. In fact, access to water continues to strongly impede the development of more urban farms and gardens across the city. The prohibitive cost of water hookups prevents many urban farms and gardens from having direct access to water. The PWD has posted a guide on its website explaining how gardeners and farmers can access water for their gardens and farms. However, it reads like a legal and engineering manual, and the hookups are cost prohibitive for many farmers and volunteer gardeners who do this as a hobby, whose gardens are non-profits, and who in most cases are not breaking even selling their produce. The PWD acknowledges the challenges facing urban growers who want access to water and who may not be able to pay hookup fees or cover the city’s stormwater fees. The factsheet states that the PWD needs to work with the PHS and gardeners to identify ways to grant water access. Also, the city offers a no-interest HELP loan called the Urban Garden and Farm Loan to approved gardeners to help them pay for water hookups.90 This is a step towards making water more accessible for urban growers, who still, however, are required to make significant long-term investments to access water (often on land to which they have no formal rights). Since most gardens and farms operate on shoestring budgets and rely on volunteers, the barrier to formally accessing water is still there, and this has left many gardeners and farmers relying on collecting rainwater, borrowing water from neighbouring houses, and using fire hydrants.

A critical tension between community gardeners and the PWD was the stormwater fees charged on urban gardens. The PWD adopted those fees in Green City, Clean Waters to encourage landowners to install green infrastructure on their property in place of impervious surfaces. The gardeners felt they were being treated unfairly because even though they were effectively providing green infrastructure through their gardening efforts, the PWD considered the land to be impervious and charged them the same fee that a parking lot would pay. In June 2016, gardeners testified to City Council in support of Bill 160523, sponsored by Councillor Quiñones-Sánchez; the bill would provide a stormwater fee exemption for community gardens, in recognition that keeping the land open for gardens would provide valuable ecological services and act as green infrastructure – the exact goal the PWD was trying to achieve through Green City, Clean Waters.91 In sponsoring the bill, Quiñones-Sánchez argued that there was a synergy between urban agriculture and stormwater management: “Exempting gardens from stormwater fees is a no-brainer because they naturally absorb stormwater run-off that would otherwise burden our sewer system. Furthermore, developing community gardens is critical to our strategy to repurpose vacant and blighted land into green spaces that our neighbors can share.

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