40 Acres And A Mule Redux

The picture at right, by artist Bryan Christie, from a story in Fortune magazine, I plucked from an internet site called Treehugger.com, depicts a vision of urban farming in the city of Detroit. For the last several years, ever since the automobile industry began to implode, scores of entrepreneurs, urban planners, envirogeeks, and any other category of scallywag you can think of, has been trying to determine a suitable and sustainable future for the Motor City.  Farming, it turns out, just might be the answer.

Today, Detroit is an extremely large vestige of its former self.  For a city that once boasted 2 million inhabitants, less than half of that remains, spread across 139 square miles.  It's footprint is larger than San Francisco, Boston, and Manhattan combined.  Unfortunately almost 30% of it, or about 40 square miles, is absolutely vacant.  Barren.  Bereft of anything that generates income, pays taxes, or contributes much of anything in making Detroit a desirable place to live.  The unemployment rate is nearly 30%, although everyone including the new mayor, Dave Bing, believes it's really closer to 50%.   48 buildings in  downtown sit empty.  The average price of a home is $15,000.  No major brand grocery store exists to serve the cities' residents.  Hard to imagine then, given those statistics and what passes for adequate resources, that Detroit can ever be anything like the "arsenal of democracy" it once was.

Yet Detroit could very well return to its roots as an agricultural center.  A hundred years ago, before Henry Ford, large narrow farms grew inward from the river maintained by German, Polish, and French-Canadian immigrants.  Although those tracts of land were replaced by large automobile manufacturing plants and their supportive industries last century, today over 900 urban gardens have begun to repurpose that land once again for agricultural use.   Although many of these gardens are community-based and no bigger than a quarter of an acre, larger enterprises, like Hantz Farms, are gobbling up vast swaths of blight at $3,000 per acre.  John Hantz, who made his fortune in financing, wants to invest $30 million in an agricultural makeover for Detroit.  "This is like buying a penthouse in New York in 1940," he says.  "No one should be able to afford to do this ever again."

I hope, for the future of Detroit, that Hantz Farms is successful and that entrepreneurs like Mr. Hantz continue to dream up ways of making Michigan profitable once again and providing much needed jobs for the people in Detroit.  I also recognize the irony of hundreds of thousands of African Americans, whose ancestors fled the cotton fields of the Deep South, for Henry Fords' five dollars a day wages over a century ago, contemplating the prospects of providing for their families through farming once again.  And for that they can thank the excesses of labor unions, liberal urban policies, and corrupt politicians who've run roughshod over their community for decades.