Declan McCullagh wrote:
On Sat, May 10, 2003 at 10:32:03PM -0500, Harmon Seaver wrote:
Sounds like a very poorly administered community garden. The only big city gardens I've seen were in Portland, OR, and they were fenced and gated and locked at night. The gardens themselves looked very productive and well tended. As are all the ones I've ever seen
I don't claim that all community gardens are decrepit, of course. If a city chooses to spend enough money on high fences, security guards, and locks on gates, they can pull it off.
It depends a lot on the size of the city, of course. For most smaller cities, none of that is needed. In the smaller cities around here, for example (50K-100K) the gardens are on the outskirts and there are no fences, etc. And the fees *should* be adequate to cover any admin costs. The Oshkosh community garden, for instance, is located on the grounds of the county work-farm, the plowing (which isn't needed, and, in fact, is counter-productive) and other minimal maintenance is done by prisoners.
The gardener-activists have every incentive to lobby for that because of the standard public choice reasons: distributed costs and centralized benefits -- hundreds of thousands or millions of people have their taxes raised by perhaps a dollar, even though only a few dozen or a few hundred at most people benefit from the garden.
I think as Tyler has pointed out in NYC, it is the local people who do this themselves, it's not the gov't.
And when that happens, because the small number of gardeners are getting the garden plot at below market cost, they do have an incentive to take advantage of it. Getting the government involved interferes with the price signals that a market approach would have. Because it's not their money, governments tend to funnel money into politically-connected friends -- the fence-building contractor will turn out to be the mayor's brother-in-law's son.
Yes, but it doesn't have to be this way.
Once the garden is established, though, the municipality does not have the same incentive to take care of it as a private property owner does. The same with my muddy, dirt soccer field that's become an illegal dog run (I can see three dogs there right now). Also, as the political supporters of the garden move out of the city or retire from activism, or their friends in government move on to cushy private sector jobs, the garden tends to receive fewer resources. Politicians prefer to campaign on bold platforms like "creating more community gardens" as opposed to "maintaining status quo."
At the very least, it's reasonable to weigh the costs against the benefits of community gardens. Where I grew up, my family had an acre of land, more than enough for a garden, but for whatever reason one year we used a community garden that was set up by a local large manufacturing company on its own land. Worked out well, and was a nice gesture.
Yes, there are many ways these can be set up, there's no reason it has to cost tax monies. OTOH, public parks and gardens are one of the few things that gov't does that is worthwhile, along with libraries and museums. -- Harmon Seaver CyberShamanix http://www.cybershamanix.com