New Detroit Farm Plan Taking Root

Farming, coming to an urban block near you.  Well at least quite possibly in Detroit.  With Detroit facing an ongoing financial crisis, local businessman John Hantz  has proposed converting vacant private and city-owned property into the world's largest for-profit urban farm on Detroit's East Side.

According to this WSJ article, Hantz had planned on converting as much as 10,000 acres of land but instead has started out with 200 acres.

Full WSJ story here

• Large-scale farming in Detroit still faces a number of legal, political and logistical challenges, including concerns about soil quality, the price of the land and the impact on neighbors. The land sale also needs formal approval from the mayor and the city council. This summer, a city commission plans public hearings on a zoning ordinance that would permit for-profit farming. That process will force Detroiters to confront awkward questions about their city's development prospects. Among them: Is the abundance of vacant land an asset or a liability?
• Detroit has more than 200,000 vacant parcels—almost half of them residential plots—that generate no significant tax revenue and would cost more to maintain than the city can afford. Finding new uses for this land has become one of the most pressing challenges for a city that lost a quarter of its population in the past decade.
• Mr. Hantz proposes to ease that burden by buying about 2,300 parcels and planting oak trees, then maybe fruit orchards and hydroponic vegetables. The hardwoods could be harvested and sold within a decade to customers looking for young trees, according to Hantz Farms.
• Hantz Farms officials acknowledge their self-funded venture would create few new jobs in the short term, and only modest revenue for Detroit. Hantz is offering only $300 a parcel, one-tenth of what city officials wanted. It has agreed to clear the land and demolish as many as 200 structures—at an estimated cost of more than $2 million, offset in part by tax credits and state assistance—before beginning to pay roughly $60,000 a year in taxes on the land.
• Hantz Farms recently bought about three acres on a mostly deserted block and cleared away a mountain of debris, including 430 tires. In their place, Hantz crews planted hundreds of bur oak saplings as a demonstration project. "It's a pleasure to look at," says Ruth Moucha, 80, one of the few residents left on the block. "It feels like it's a circle, coming back to what it once was."