Human Flower Project

Thursday, July 06, 2006

Whose Domain? South Central Farm

Ten people are arrested as dozers plow under South L.A.‘s disputed urban garden.

In former days, with seed, at Los Angeles’s urban garden

Photo: Jonathan McIntosh

After years of land-grabbing, bushels of vegetables, community organizing and, most recently, celebrities in the trees, bulldozers are wiping out the 14-acre South Central Farm in Los Angeles. Demolition began yesterday despite heavy protest. By this morning, ten people had been arrested.

“‘What was once a beautiful set of gardens … will now be a pile of rubble,’ said Dan Stormer, an attorney for the farmers.

This excellent story from L.A. City Beat gives a history of the urban garden, 350 plots worked rent-free by local families since 1992.

So which side are you on? Tomato plants or parking lots? Filling new warehouses or feeding the poor? Actually, it’s not quite so simple.

“The land has been tied up in litigation since the 1980s, when the city used its power of eminent domain to buy it from developer Ralph Horowitz to build a trash incinerator. The incinerator was never built, and after the 1992 riots,” after the beating of Rodney King, “the city loaned the land to the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank to create a community garden.”

We’ve criticized eminent domain when it threatened to squash a local flower shop. So what about the rights of this landowner, Ralph Horowitz, who’s been demonized by the hipoisie?

“In 1994, the property was sold to the Harbor Department as part of the process of acquiring land for the Alameda Corridor rail project. Horowitz sued over that sale, and the city eventually agreed to sell the 14 acres back to him for $5 million. As support for maintaining the farm grew, Horowitz offered to sell the property for $16 million. But when activists were unable to come up with the money and continued to press him to abandon the property, he changed his mind.”

Protesters and bulldozers

South Central Farm

July 5, 2006

Photo: Ric Francis, for AP

A number of activists interviewed by L.A. City Beat make the case that the garden, worth saving as a source of food and flowers, is perhaps more valuable still as a proving ground for emerging leaders from the neighborhood. Some would say the garden has become a university for organic intellectuals of the Mesoamerican community.

Horowitz argues that he’s been paying $30,000 monthly mortgage, plus taxes, on the property since he bought it back from the city in 2003. He also maintains that the farm isn’t actually a “public” facility but dominated by a powerful few. Gardeners were evicted three weeks ago and we understand that a judge will rule next week on possible sale of the land.

For now, private ownership has the upper hand and wields it, in the name of “market forces,” against community and green.