A blog about societal, cultural, and civilizational collapse, and how to stave it off or survive it. Named after the legendary character "Crazy Eddie" in Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's "The Mote in God's Eye." Expect news and views about culture, politics, economics, technology, and science fiction.
In Student sustainability video festival 6: Urban farming, I concluded with the latest news on Hantz Farms. It turns out that one of my students last semester used a Hantz Farms promotional video as part of their presentation. Here it is.
Hantz Farms, the biggest proposed urban farm ever, is setting out to reinvigorate Detroit's blight filled neighborhoods and stimulate its economy. Supported by Hantz Group, this farm is what Detroit's dwindling population so desperately needs.
As a promo, it looks very effective. Is it all what it seems to be? I don't know, but I have my reasons to be skeptical. I'll keep them to myself for now. Until then, check out the comments to the video and to the Free Press article I included in yesterday's entry. You can see how polarizing Hantz Farms has become.
It's the end of the semester, which means it's grading time. It also means posts light on text and analysis until the grades are posted. Time for another entry featuring the videos my students have used in their presentations this year.
See the full episode at http://video.pbs.org/video/2214315175. Meet the ordinary people who bring food production back to basics in this clip from AMERICA REVEALED "Food Machine."
I told the student who used this that he had just played the next video that I will add to my lectures. It hits all the themes involving urban agriculture that I include in my class--local food, use of empty land, improving local diets, helping the local economy, and connecting people to their food. It even repeats a pair of images that I show my students to make a point about how empty Detroit has become, the St. Cyril neighborhood 70 years ago and now. Actually, St. Cyril is even emptier now than in the modern photo. That always gets my students.
More than a mere land sale, the Detroit City Council's 5-4 vote Tuesday to sell about 1,500 lots to the Hantz Woodlands project keeps alive the idea that Detroit will serve as a worldwide center of urban innovation for postindustrial cities.
In recent years, hundreds of artists, architects, academics, filmmakers, urban planners and students have flocked to Detroit to see urban innovation at work. The Hantz proposal, billed as the world's largest experiment in urban agriculture, was a big part of that global interest, receiving worldwide publicity.
The Hantz Woodlands project is a plan to buy about 1,500 city-owned parcels, or around 140 acres of land, for about $520,000 and plant hardwood trees on them as a beautification project. The parcels are almost all vacant lots; Hantz has committed to demolishing at least 50 blighted buildings that remain. Proposed almost four years ago as Hantz Farms, the project now will have a chance to demonstrate whether large-scale blight removal and reforestation will help Detroit's recovery.
Councilman Ken Cockrel Jr., a "yes" vote on the deal, said urban agriculture isn't a silver bullet to fix Detroit's problems, but that it is an important component of redevelopment.
"A 'no' vote would have sent the message to the world that Detroit isn't really serious about urban agriculture," Cockrel said.
I guess that means that Detroit is officially serious about urban agriculture. That's good news and I don't need Professor Farnsworth to announce it.
The Detroit City Planning Commission approved the city’s new urban agriculture zoning ordinance Thursday evening. The action takes the city closer to officially recognizing the city’s multitude of community gardens and encouraging new and larger urban farms. ... Roughly four years in the making, the ordinance is expected to pass council easily, just as the commission approved it unanimously.
Kunstler should like this. At least one city is trying to transition to a future where more people are involved in growing food, which is what he predicts. On the other hand, Detroit should be careful. As I've written before and am now telling my students, the solutions we develop here for our problems will be exported, even the bad ones.
Speaking of which...
The passage of the zoning ordinance does not settle the controversy over whether the City of Detroit should sell large volumes of tax-foreclosed vacant lots to large-scale farming efforts such as the proposed Hantz Farms tree-growing business. City Council is expected to take up the Hantz proposal again Tuesday.
Residents gathered to protest the potential sale of land near Indian Village to a Detroit company
This stikes me to be more about loss of local control than about the actual use of the land as a tree farm. For that, one has to read the comments to an article by Jeff Wattrick of Deadline Detroit and Wonkette, who asks How Is John Hantz Different Than Dan Gilbert?
Really, what’s the difference between Gilbert’s strategy of purchasing downtown office buildings on the cheap and filling them with his employees and John Hantz’s plan to purchase city-owned vacant land for an agricultural venture?
Well, there is one difference. The majority of Gilbert’s purchases have been privately owned, partially occupied buildings that were already generating at least some property tax dollars for the city. Hantz is proposing to purchase barren, city-owned land, thus returning those parcels to the property tax rolls. ... Given the choice between Hantz "grabbing" city-owned land so he can clean it up and develop tax-generating tree farms and the status quo—land as a city-owned liability with its own kind of “urban farm,” the kind that periodically sprouts old tires and discarded bags of Cheeto’s Flaming Hot, I’ll take the Hantz land grab every day of the week and twice on this Tuesday.
The fears of Hantz’s secret plans—he might build a factory!—are akin to 9/11 conspiracy theories and those Maine voter fraud allegations. Perhaps Detroit’s grape-throwing class hasn’t yet heard the news, but we’re living in a post-industrial economy. Rich white people don’t build factories anymore, not in the United States.
Hells bells, if John Hantz wanted to build a factory or condos or whatever, he’d probably just say so. If that were the case, the same people currently questioning his motives would throw him a parade.
The proposed Hantz purchase may raise a legitimate question about why one wealthy entrepreneur’s purchase offer rates so much attention when countless residents and small businesses have trouble purchasing neighborhood vacant lots from the city.
That’s valid, but denying Hantz doesn’t move us closer to a reality where the city—currently Detroit’s largest landholder—sells lots to tax-paying residents and businesses, for community gardens or pocket parks or even the occasional in-fill house, without a hassle.
Arguably, the Hantz sale might set a precedent whereby the city finally loosens its grip on its inventory of vacant and fallow land. Something it desperately needs to do.
At the least, the deal means Detroit will have 143 fewer acres available for illegal dumping.
That's the pro-Hantz view. In the comments, Pro Detroit makes the anti-Hantz case by suggesting that Hantz is after the "Agricultural land tax exemption and Federal farming grants." That at least makes sense to me, even business sense. As for what else he calls Hantz, well, that might just be true, but I'm not going to repeat it here. It also doesn't quite answer Wattrick's question.
As for my take, I think we're seeing the mirror image of the hysteria over Julie Bass. I haven't talked to Julie in a while. Maybe I should ask her what she thinks of this.
To ramp up the automotive industry in Michigan, Henry Ford built the Rouge Plant -- a manufacturing infrastructure that could produce everything needed, from glass to steel, to make cars.
Today, Russ Allen is looking for a way to build a shrimp Rouge Plant -- a pollution-free, recirculating facility that could breed, grow, process and ship a million pounds of shrimp a year.
It's not as far-fetched as it sounds. Allen, who spent 23 years establishing outdoor shrimp farming in Central and South America, has been raising shrimp indoors in Okemos since 1994 at his Seafood Systems research facility.
...
"This could be the start of an entirely new industry for Michigan, a clean industry, with new jobs," he said -- if he can find the $10 million he needs to build a commercial plant.
People talk a lot about Detroit as a center for urban agriculture, but this is the first story I've seen about urban aquaculture here. Honestly, I have to say I find this one to be a complete surprise to me. As for his idea, it will most likely work (he already raises 25,000 pounds of shrimp a year in Okemos), although I wonder how sustainable it really is. Shrimp are tropical and require a lot of heat.
For various reasons, I don't quote AP articles. However, I will link to them if I find them worth reading. This one is, as it describes how factory farms have to abide by water quality standards.
And now, someone worth watching, or keeping an eye on, depending on your perspective.
When Detroit's city council approved the sale of 20 parcels of land to the proposed Hantz Farms project this month, it looked like commercial urban agriculture might be about to start in the city.
But the council imposed restrictions on the sale of the land, which lies behind a warehouse owned by businessman John Hantz at 17403 Mt. Elliott. Hantz Farms, a subsidiary of the larger Hantz Group of financial service firms, cannot grow crops or sell any produce from the site without the city's permission.
Instead, Hantz Farms will beautify the roughly 5 acres of blighted land behind the warehouse with landscaping, either with grass or some small plants, as a demonstration of how it can clean up an abandoned site, said Michael Score, the president of Hantz Farms and a former Michigan State University agricultural extension worker.
Hopefully soon, Score added, the city will allow Hantz Farms to farm the site and others in the city.
Last year, my neighbor showed me a newspaper clipping about Hantz and asked me what I thought about him and his idea. I think the idea has merit, but I'm not sure about him. The article mentioned that he was inspired by the ideas of Ayn Rand. I really don't care for Rand or her followers and think anyone who thinks favorably of her could be real trouble.
There are 99 comments on this article. I suggest you read them; you'll get a good idea of the controversies around this project, and the range of agendas and concerns that people have about urban agriculture.
Here's a video report on Hantz Farms.
There is also a non-profit organization called Urban Farming based in Detroit. I've met its director Taja Sevelle. I don't have the reservations about her outfit that I have with Hantz's. Here's a video report on her.
