In the summer of 2023, farmers and gardeners in Philadelphia had good reason to be optimistic.
The City had just published its first urban agriculture plan, called “Growing from the Root,” which offered a 10-year road map for building a thriving local food system and securing land for farmers and gardeners. And in June of that year the City took what appeared to be a major step toward those goals, buying back more than $1 million in tax liens from a private bank to clear the way for 91 plots to be transferred to community gardens that have bloomed on once-vacant land the gardens’ stewards don’t legally own. With private liens in place, those properties could have been sold to the highest bidder at any time; now, the City could acquire them via the Philadelphia Land Bank and give gardeners the permanent access they sought.
But the first year of Mayor Cherelle Parker’s administration has demonstrated that despite some recent progress, significant obstacles still stand between urban agriculture advocates and the flourishing community of gardens, farms and green spaces they envision. In that time, none of the parcels involved in the lien buyback has been acquired by the City and handed over to gardeners, meaning they remain susceptible to the development pressure that threatens everyone operating on land they don’t own. And, following City Council’s approval of the 76ers’ proposal to build a $1.3 billion arena at the edge of Chinatown — a move Parker backed — community gardeners were reminded that profitable endeavors often win out in the battle over land use. (In January the 76ers’ management withdrew from the Market East arena agreement.)
To Michael Moran, a board member at Kensington’s Cesar Andreú Iglesias Community Garden, the arena vote sent a clear message in the fight for land security: “With some of these policies, things can change like the wind,” he says. Watching the arena be foisted upon a community that fought hard to oppose it, he couldn’t help but sense a connection to the way urban agriculture has been treated. Iglesias is among the community gardens with parcels included in the lien buyback, and its stewards are left to wonder whether developers eager to build on the valuable land will ultimately carry the day.
“If that happened over there,” Moran says, “what could happen over here?”
As Moran points out, without land, nothing else matters for gardeners invested in expanding Philadelphia’s agricultural footprint and delivering more food to their communities. “It’s what we grow from,” he says. And although there have been some policy changes that suggest a brighter future for land security, urban agriculture advocates express continued frustration with the state of affairs. Their ire is largely directed at the Land Bank, which was created in 2013 to put Philadelphia’s vacant lots to productive use but has been plagued by backlogs and bureaucracy. Although the 59 parcels requested by gardens comprise nearly 10% of approved applications for land disposition, not one of them was transferred into the gardeners’ possession during the 2024 fiscal year.
The Land Bank currently doesn’t function for gardeners or gardens.”
— Kendra Brooks, Philadelphia City Councilmember
“The Land Bank currently doesn’t function for gardeners or gardens,” says Councilmember Kendra Brooks, who has pushed for the growth and protection of urban agriculture since taking office five years ago.
With so many changes in city government, including the new administration, says Brooks, “we have to bring people up to speed about this work.” Gardens and their supporters have had their hands full protecting land — including parcels involved in the lien buyback — from private development. In the meantime, the transfer of land has slowed to a crawl. From 2015 to 2019, Neighborhood Gardens Trust acquired 44 parcels at 13 gardens from City agencies, but since 2020 the organization hasn’t acquired a single one, Brooks says.
“To me, if someone has tilled the soil and worked on it for 20-plus years, it should belong to them. That’s what the law says,” she adds. “But we created a system that doesn’t respect the law when it comes to average citizens.”
(State law used to require a garden group to maintain a vacant property for 21 years before seeking legal ownership, but legislation passed in 2024 now requires just 10 years of occupation, including five as a garden.)
Parker ran on a promise to build a “cleaner, greener Philadelphia,” and Brooks says she is hoping the mayor keeps that commitment to “make sure we have access to green spaces in the city for years to come.”
Planting the Seeds
Concerns about land security threaten to overshadow the steps the City has taken toward delivering on the promises set forth in the urban agriculture plan. That document included 89 specific recommendations to be addressed in the coming decade, encompassing not just land security but also the production, distribution and consumption of food; waste reduction and recovery; and support for farmers and gardeners themselves. To date, the City has moved forward on a dozen of those goals, putting it ahead of schedule in carrying out the plan, according to Ash Richards, director of Farm Philly, the City’s urban agriculture program within Parks & Recreation.
Among those initiatives already underway is an effort to expand the city’s selection of farmers markets. Recognizing that community members needed help starting and maintaining markets, the City secured a $500,000 grant to form a farmers market advisory group, which developed an operators’ manual with “down-to-earth” guidance that will soon be published, Richards says. A citywide campaign to promote markets on billboards and beyond is aimed at increasing awareness and building up the local food economy, and one of Richards’ goals for 2025 is to increase the use of SNAP and Philly Food Bucks at farmers markets, expanding equity and access to healthy foods along the way.
Farm Philly also created what Richards calls a “front door” for the program — a web page with guidance and an application translated into six languages — through which it leases parkland to gardeners. In the past year, three new gardens have started on parkland, including one at the Hatfield House in Strawberry Mansion. Although Parks & Recreation has no capacity to convey land ownership, it can make space for new gardens and orchards to spring up — and Richards wants to see four built every year on leased parkland.
In its effort to support gardeners of all stripes, the City is preparing for a summer launch of the Agriculture Resource Center, one of the first capital projects to come out of the urban agriculture plan. Based in Fairmount Park, it will offer a tool lending library, as well as a site for community events, workshops and programs that can bring more gardeners and farmers into the fold.
[The Agriculture Resource Center] is going to be a gift to land stewards in Philadelphia who have been doing so much labor, taking care of the land.”
— Ash Richards, Farm Philly
“That project is going to be a gift to land stewards in Philadelphia who have been doing so much labor, taking care of the land for generations,” Richards says.
The City has also been laying the foundation for sharing another gift with gardeners to support their growing: compost. It ran a pilot last year to deliver compost and mulch from the organic recycling center to sites that aren’t part of the park system and will expand that program this year, ensuring greater equity — and soil health — for gardeners without vehicles.
Improving the city’s agricultural output has become an even greater priority since the pandemic underscored the risk of relying on a global food system and inflation made it harder for more people to afford the foods they need, Richards says. That message was made clear last May, when Brooks organized a City Council hearing on urban agriculture — the first since 2016. At that hearing, Brooks and others urged the City to invest more in urban agriculture, including the Philadelphia Food Justice Initiative, a program run by the Department of Public Health and the Reinvestment Fund that aims to support communities in growing, selling and eating healthy food.
In its most recent request for proposals, the initiative received 79 applications worth more than $6 million but could only fund nine projects for a total of about $550,000. Richards points to Pittsburgh’s recent $3 million investment in a food justice fund as a model for Philadelphia to meet demand.
At that May hearing, as well as at an October hearing focused on the Land Bank, the conversation often returned to the issue of land security. Even as Farm Philly works to accomplish the goals of the urban agriculture plan, Richards knows it will only be effective if farmers and gardeners can count on ongoing land access.
“The seeds, the tools, the compost, the waste reduction — all of that stuff becomes moot if you’re not going to preserve the land,” Richards says. “We’re investing a lot in supporting this community, but if we don’t preserve the land, our work is moot. Farm Philly is completely invested in this. We need more investment from other stakeholders.”
Reckoning with Land Insecurity
In 2022, the Neighborhood Land Power Project learned that the once-vacant land occupied by Memorial Garden, one of the green spaces it stewards in West Philadelphia, had been sold by the Land Bank to developers looking to build new housing. The garden, situated on 54th Street south of Girard Avenue and established to remember those lost to gun violence, was at the center of a fight familiar to many community gardeners. The organization managed to protect six of the 14 lots from development, but the process showed Rebecca Fruehwald, its interim executive director, that it would take a more collective effort to keep the same thing from happening over and over again to gardens across the city.
“How do we reckon with the fact that green space — space for gardening and building climate resilience — is not currently being prioritized through the City’s policies, and how do we build action and voice and power that can have that become a priority?” Fruehwald asks.
The answer, in part, was the formation of the Philadelphia Land Justice Coalition, a new assemblage of more than 30 organizations invested in urban agriculture and community land management. The coalition, which includes the Neighborhood Land Power Project, Neighborhood Gardens Trust, Iglesias Gardens, Kensington Corridor Trust and Urban Creators, came together in response to the Land Bank asking community gardens to agree to a 30-year self-amortizing mortgage, which counts as a liability on balance sheets and opens the door to default, including if land isn’t kept sufficiently tidy. Through the coalition’s efforts, the Land Bank agreed to both modify its loans to eliminate the burden they placed on nonprofits and offer a 30-day notice for gardens to address any appearance issues that might otherwise lead to their land being taken away.
Since the loan issues were resolved in October, Neighborhood Gardens Trust executive director and Land Bank board member Jenny Greenberg says she has seen positive signs that land dispositions are in progress, and she’s optimistic that “a number of gardens” will go to settlement this year.
City Council also passed an ordinance in May reaffirming the Land Bank’s ability to act as sole bidder in buying tax-delinquent land at sheriff sales — a key step in delivering the land affected by the lien buyback to the gardens that use it. Coupled with the resolution of the loan dispute, it signals that policy change is possible, offering hope for many gardens that have long operated without certainty about their own future. Still, urban agriculture advocates are wary of placing their trust in city government, given the tension between their work and the profit potential of developing their land. As Moran of Iglesias Gardens says, the arena vote was “a soul-searching type of moment.”
Farm Philly has increased its community presence, Fruehwald says, expanding its offerings of workshops and technical support for growers. And the composting program is an example of the type of initiative that can make a genuine difference in the daily operation of a farm or garden. But, at the end of the day, the conversation around urban agriculture will always return to land security, where the Parker administration still has something to prove.
“They have shown an interest and a willingness to talk to us, which is encouraging, but a lot of it depends on what actions are actually taken,” Fruehwald says. “And that remains to be seen.”
This special section is a part of Every Voice, Every Vote, a collaborative project managed by The Lenfest Institute for Journalism. The William Penn Foundation provides lead support for Every Voice, Every Vote in 2024 and 2025 with additional funding from The Lenfest Institute for Journalism, Comcast NBC Universal, The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Henry L. Kimelman Family Foundation, Judy and Peter Leone, Arctos Foundation, Wyncote Foundation, 25th Century Foundation, Dolfinger-McMahon Foundation, and Philadelphia Health Partnership. To learn more about the project and view a full list of supporters, visit 
