My commute takes me past two different park districts garden plots (the kind where they rent garden space to people), and yesterdays trip in took me past a lady who had pedaled up on bicycle with rear panniers. She looked ready, willing and able to handle life while walking lightly on the earth.

Out here in L.A. they let people grow food on garden plots like this. Its actually pretty cool. But when folks become self sufficient in growing food and have the ability to feed themselves the city takes it away from them and builds overpriced track housing, warehouses, e.t.c. in its place. It happened in Compton not to long ago.
Sustainability my arse.

i assume you're talking about the south central farm.

I plan to come grow my food in your back yard and then get the government to prevent you from ever throwing me out. Sustain on your own dime.

City people are funny.

Actually i'd let you grow the food. Granted i'd probably be eating some of what you grow.
Who's dime do you think was paying for this stuff? It wasn't the governments nor the dude who owned the property.

+1. people should have access to sustenance based on how rich they are, not how much work they do. it's what made feudalism great.

I have a garden in my backyard. I grow onions, carrots, turnips, radishes, squash, cucumbers, broccoli, peas, tomatoes, and various herbs. But I have no illusions about "sustainability". I'm not raising any cows or growing wheat, barley or oats. This whole idea that sustainability somehow means self-reliance or doing things in a less efficient small scale way is a chimera.

Wrong.

The gardeners were allowed to use the land at first because there was no loss to the owner. Then when he decided to use the land for his original purpose, the gardeners seemed to decide that they were now ENTITLED to stay without the owner's permission. All that the protesters did was to ensure that no land owner will ever do anything nice like this for others for fear that they will be demonized and abused by the very people that they tried to be kind to. The rightful landowner has lost millions of dollars because of the fiasco. And because his name is Horowitz, many of those kind and gentle community "farmers" have threatened his family and smeared him with antisemetic racial slurs.

Good job.

I don't know about this particular case, but I believe in some situations and jurisdiction they could be, and the owner could no longer be the owner. It's a matter of law in some places that if you essentially leave land vacant and someone else occupies or makes use of it, they may be able to acquire the land through adverse possession. You'd have to look at the local law, though.

Yup, this is the party line that was given to the public. The racial slurs came from both directions. This kind of crap doesn't happen by chance because fiasco's like these are created on a day to day basis and used against the public as propaganda and guides a certain agenda. Do you actually believe a big city land owner is really nice enough to let someone grow gardens on their plot of land without getting anything in return? HA! Yea right.

we could all speculate about the south central farm or we could read some facts:

https://articles.latimes.com/2005/oct...al/me-garden31

short version: horowitz was paid $4.8 million for it in the eighties and sued the city for the right to buy the land back. the city then, without consulting or informing the farmers, sold the land back to horowitz for $5mil so he could kick the farmers off and build a... warehouse or whatever.

yup. horowitz is a real hero. a man with the vision to realize that what la really needs more of is grey industrial buildings instead of urban farms. he could have just kept the money, but decided not to.

I never said that Horowitz was a hero... I just said that he has the right to keep what is his.

Further analysis of the story:

Horowitz only agreed to sell the land to the city because they threatened to use eminent domain to take it away from him to build a city project anyways. So he sold it to them... with clauses in the contract that if the city didn't use it the way that they said, then he had buy-back rights.

Well... the city canceled their project, and Horowitz filed for his repurchase rights. While the fight was going on in court, the gardeners stayed. Even after he was allowed to buy back his land, he allowed the gardens to stay while he arranged his development/sales plans. He could've booted them at any time.

When he finally settled his affairs and was ready to sell the land... BINGO! That's when the gardeners decided that THEIR use was better and more admirable than his and that they would do as they pleased... no matter if they owned the property or not.

Sustainabilty wasn't the best choice of a title for the thread, but it was the last one there before I clicked on the submit button. "Cool site on the way in to work today that made me glad to see someone else doing more than one thing at a time to make things better" just seemed a little too long for a title - and took longer to type than to happen.