Homelessness, welfare reform, and soil erosion--solved! L.A.'s Urban Farm and Orchard to the rescue.

By Stephen Zacks
April 2001







Above: Al Renner (second from top) is the director of the four-acre Urban Farm and Garden near downtown Los Angeles. Photography by Jill Smith.

When politicians dig into their store of quotable sound bites about ending welfare, they don't usually offer up urban subsistence farming as an obvious solution. But just north of L.A.'s Chinatown, alongside the 110 freeway, a program called the Urban Farm and Orchard is beginning to capture the imagination of the city's political establishment. On a four-acre hill donated by the City of Los Angeles, 21 inhabitants of a homeless encampment called the Dome Village are working alongside residents of a local drug-rehabilitation center to plant and harvest crops of peas, broccoli, fava beans, carrots, potatoes, and beets to be sold at a neighborhood farmers' market.

The Urban Farm and Orchard, which reaped its first harvest last fall, began one and a half years ago as an experiment funded by the Environmental Protection Agency, community-garden angel Bette Midler, and members of the local community. "The project got started out of a community garden that I helped found," says project director Al Renner. "When we asked the city for three-quarters of an acre, they ended up giving us nearly five. So we had land that we didn't know what to do with."

When he discovered that the EPA was offering grants to help control soil erosion, Renner had the idea of building terraces on the hillside. "I wanted to stop the water from running down and destroying our garden, and it turned into this work program that stops erosion, produces food, employs homeless and recovering people, and is a benefit for the whole neighborhood." Today the Urban Farm consists of 22 terraces with more than 5,000 square feet already in production and an orchard of fig, pomegranate, citrus, peach, apple, and cherry trees currently being planted.

Although earnings have been minimal so far, the response from the workers has been overwhelmingly positive. And politicians are beginning to take note of the way the farm is transforming both the hillside and the concept of welfare-to-work. "The political stature of our project is growing on a daily basis," Renner says. "The county supervisors are starting to think about incorporating gardening into their homeless programs. Pretty soon everyone in L.A. will see it, because our orchard is going to extend right up over one of the major freeways as the tunnel goes underneath it."


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