This addendum called for the establishment of an Urban Agriculture Program to coordinate public efforts to encourage and develop urban gardens . The legislation also updated city goals for urban agriculture to facilitate incentive programs and resource distribution to urban gardens . In April 2013, the City Administrator’s Office initiated a task force to gather information from the Recreation and Park Department, SFUAA, and SPUR’s Food Policy Committee . The resultant report recommended establishing the Urban Agriculture Program housed within the Recreation and Park Department . After Supervisor Chui and the Recreation and Park Department co-hosted an open house in May 2013 to present and gather feedback on the City Administrator’s recommendation, the Board of Supervisors passed legislation and funded the creation of the Urban Agriculture Program in July 2013. On January 1, 2014, Hannah Shulman, a former CASFS apprentice and coordinator of the SFUAA, was hired as the full-time program coordinator with a one-year contract,greenhouse snap clamps with the expectation of future funding . SFUAA members celebrated the creation of the Shulman’s position and the institutional imprint the position could make in the long term.
Since January 2014, Shulman has worked with other City Departments, such as the Department of the Environment’s Urban Forestry and Agriculture Coordinator and other agencies, to coordinate an urban agriculture working group whose goal is to figure out the commonalities between urban garden efforts of different offices and to make City policy more cohesive and strategic . Thus far, the land inventory has not been made public, potentially due to differing information contained in different lists agencies have developed. To accomplish the goals of increasing access to material support for urban gardeners, the Program has opened their first resource center in Golden Gate Community Garden where during each summer month, gardeners can obtain free mulch, compost, and soil . Yet, the commitment to Shulman’s position and the program has been an inexpensive one as compared to the overall municipal budget. Several other City efforts have increased support and visibility of urban gardening with more significant financial support. This included support for many garden projects through Community Challenge Grants, which in 2010 alone offered nearly $300,000 to twelve garden projects and one farmers market . It also included the development of gardens on agency land at the airport, libraries, public housing, and La Honda Hospital and the expansion of gardening projects within the San Francisco Public Utilities Commissions .
In 2011 the PUC initiated an Urban Agriculture Pilot program to actively engage PUC land in urban gardening . Prior to 2011, the PUC had already offered land for urban agriculture and food movement projects including Garden for the Environment, the Garden Project, and the Sunol Ag Park. The Pilot program intends to extend PUC’s engagement and commitment to “harvesting public land to promote environmental, social and economic equity in our communities”. The PUC owns or operates approximately 66,000 acres of land in the Bay Region and watersheds that provide water for Bay municipalities. According to Yolanda Manzone, “fundamentally with that land ownership comes with both a responsibility to have, you know, maintain good environmental stewardship but, we think, also a great opportunity to grow actively and provide secondary opportunities on our land for community purposes like growing food, whether it’s a community garden footprint or more of an actual farm footprint.” . She goes on to describe that gardens are good uses for PUC land that may have pipes or tunnels underground, where playgrounds or permanent structures aren’t possible, and parcels that are oddly shaped or small enough that they would likely never be developed, which means the PUC is not forfeiting potential profit from rent nor needing to ask gardeners for rent to offset costs. In addition to piloting three new projects in San Francisco over the next five years, the PUC has developed a simple application process for any residents interested in using PUC land .
These projects, while receiving more municipal financial support, depict the city’s commitment to using public land for gardening when it is not viable for other development.Since the 2009 directive, The City of San Francisco has increased the opportunities and visibility of urban agriculture to the City’s benefit. As San Francisco continues to get local and national press for their support for urban agriculture, the multiple benefits of gardens to the City or personal careers have not been lost on officials such as Supervisor David Chui . Gardening advocates at the SFUAA and SPUR are also aware of the potential benefits to building their political capital with supporters in the city.On October 6th 2014, SFUAA along with CUESA, the Marin Food Bank, and Roots of Change, hosted California’s first food-focused political debate between the two candidates for a San Francisco seat in the State Assembly, San Francisco supervisors David Chiu and David Campos, a race that Chiu went on to win . San Francisco has developed new zoning and city policy, which encourages the development of urban gardens and commercial urban agriculture. City officials have enthusiastically supported gardening as a part of the continued growth of the city’s economy, as evidenced by San Francisco being the first California city to enact AB 551. Projects like the Growing Home Garden, Hayes Valley Farm, and AB 551 have encouraged gardens as temporary community improvement projects that can align well with developers or the City’s real estate development priorities. Through visible partnerships between city officials and projects such as Little City Farms, San Francisco is able to draw on the appeal of creative sustainable food businesses. Allowing for the sale of garden produce and urban gardening throughout the city promotes the image of San Francisco as an environmentally focused, creative hotbed of entrepreneurial activity. At the same time city officials have committed public space not suitable for residential or commercial development to urban gardening, sometimes with financial support from the city and sometimes by encouraging citizen public space management. The City has developed an active and supportive relationship with the SFUAA, which has played a key role in the relatively smooth and quick implementation of their initial goals.
As a community, Oakland has in many ways been at the forefront of the new wave of urban agriculture projects focused on food justice with projects like People’s Grocery, City Slicker Farms, and Acta Non Verba. And yet, unlike San Francisco, the City has had only a tentative relationship to this movement. Urban gardening has thrived throughout East and West Oakland in communities where food insecurity, poverty, and histories of racism deeply affect residents. Oakland has had a majority non-white, predominately African American, population for decades since African American migration began during WWII with Oakland’s industrial and maritime expansions. The city has been the home to iconic anti-racist struggles including the Black Panther Party and significant organizing in the Chicano movement. Today’s food justice activists place institutional racism at the forefront of their work. Yet Oakland is also experiencing rapid gentrification,snap clamps for greenhouse losing about a quarter of the African American population between 2000 and 2010 largely in part due to lack of affordable housing . Neighborhoods like North Oakland are attracting residents priced out of San Francisco and new tech industry employees. The complex struggles over gentrification and its relationship to social movement gardeners are discussed in Chapter 4 and relevant here to a municipality both actively trying to attract investment and serve its current population. In contrast to San Francisco, Oakland city officials are suspect that enthusiastic municipal support for urban agriculture will aide with these goals. In September of 2014, after a five-year advocacy process, the city revised its zoning regulations to better support gardening. In addition, while it had embraced public-private partnerships to allow garden projects to use parkland, little progress had been made on codifying these partnerships into programs or long-term agreements, such as the proposals from the Edible Parks Task Force. The City has taken the position that they are responsible for promoting the well being of all residents and that while gardeners are residents they are only a minority whose interests may be in tension with other community members and interests. In June 2005, the office of former Oakland Mayor and now Governor, Jerry Brown, initiated a study of the Oakland food system. The study, A Food Systems Assessment for Oakland, CA: Towards a Sustainable Food Plan, was conducted by two masters students in the UC Berkeley Department of City and Regional Planning . It provided a baseline analysis in which the authors advocated the passage of a city council resolution authorizing “the Mayor’s Office of Sustainability to develop an Oakland Food Policy and Plan for thirty percent local area food production,” . In December 2006 the City Council allocated funding for the creation of the Oakland Food Policy Council in support of the primary recommendation of the report to establish a Food Policy Council and Plan . In May 2008, after a competitive RFP process through the City Department of Human Services, Food First Institute for Food and Development Policy was contracted by the city to be the incubating agency for the Oakland Food Policy Council . In fall 2009 the OFPC met for the first time with twenty-one volunteer members selected through an application process.
In 2009, using the Public Health Law and Policy’s work on North American urban agriculture , OFPC members developed a set of recommendations outlining land use definitions for urban agriculture, providing guidance on where it could be practiced and the purpose of agricultural production . Similar to in San Francisco and occurring at about the same time, Oakland advocates wanted to make zoning policy more friendly to urban agriculture. The first objective of the recommendation was to eliminate the need to obtain Conditional Use Permits for small scale, neighborhood urban agriculture. Municipal code allowed for “Agricultural and Extractive Activities”, which included crop and animal raising and plant nurseries, throughout most of the city with a CUP, but excluded the industrially zoned flat lands where many urban agriculture projects had arisen. In addition to addressing the restricted geographic range of the previous code, OFPC proposed changes to the expensive and time consuming process needed to obtain a CUP – approximately $3000 and up to twelve months . Gardeners and advocates expressed strong opposition to city policy that required residents to pay to be able to grow and eat their own food. McClintock described these changes, “While we felt that a CUP made sense for large-scale commercial urban farms—the type of urban agriculture that still existed in Oakland in 1932 and 1965 when the use definition was written and last updated—the requirement no longer seemed appropriate for the community gardens and small-scale market gardens that typify urban agriculture in Oakland today… Updating these use definitions and zoning to better reflect contemporary forms of urban agriculture therefore seemed a low hanging fruit on which to focus during our first year. Furthermore, these changes seemed to also be fundamental to protecting and expanding urban agriculture.” . In their recommendations, OFPC advocated for the permitted use of “urban agriculture – civic” and “urban agriculture – residential” in all zoning districts without permit, and the use of “urban agriculture – commercial” in commercial and industrial zones without permit and “urban agriculture – commercial” with CUP in residential areas . Commercial urban agriculture was differentiated as for the primary purpose of food production for sale. In addition to zoning code definitions, the OFPC recommended operating standards including standards for hours of operation, fencing and on-site structures, accessibility, and ecological practices . The OFPC first introduced these recommendations to the city in 2009 during a period when the City was updating residential and commercial zoning regulations. Unfortunately for advocates the agency leading the updating work, the Community and Economic Development Agency , had already concluded the majority of their work and were unwilling to include the recommendations at that time. During a public comment period, the Deputy Planning Director stated “that there was not time, staff, or money available to include such changes into the current Zoning Update” . The OFPC continued their advocacy throughout the next year lobbying CEDA, Planning, and City Council representatives.