Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution (27 page)

The initial reaction was suspicion and alarm at a potential landgrab, especially among those who had been working in the city's food-security community. “Huge alarms, like sirens going off,” was how Carr said the news of the Hantz Farms project was greeted by many in Detroit's food-security networks. The concerns were that this farm would happen at the expense of the city and that there was no stated intention to share the wealth that might be created with the city residents. Most
importantly, Hantz was accused of taking advantage of the desperate situation in the city.

Let's not forget, John Hantz is a white multimillionaire in a city where 82 percent of the population is African American. Fortune often follows racial lines in Detroit, a city with chronic unemployment that sits at around 33 percent and social problems heaped upon poverty issues like crime, drugs, and lawlessness. But Detroit's biggest problem is too much land and too few people. The municipal government has a budgetary deficit of $300 million. The population is in a steady decline, with thousands of people leaving every month—an average of sixty-five people per day, according to 2011 statistics.
¹⁷

U
RBAN
F
ARMING
S
UMMIT:
T
HE
B
USINESS OF
U
RBAN
A
GRICULTURE

John Hantz, self-made millionaire and one of the few successful businesspeople who still live in the city of Detroit, has a different vision. In April of 2010, Hantz spoke publicly and personally about his urban farm idea as part of the panel discussion “Urban Farming Summit: The Business of Urban Agriculture” at the University of Michigan-Dearborn.
¹⁸
He wanted to explain his rationale behind the idea for the private farm, knowing that his critics would be in the audience, many of whom were openly suspicious of his motives for creating a huge private urban farm. Many hoped that Detroit would adopt a more cooperative, socialist model of common land ownership and common profit sharing. The city government was going to own large parts of the city by foreclosure anyway, and the idea of urban-farming cooperatives leasing cheap land from the city—a model based on Cuba's successful urban organic farming program—had also been put forth as a way forward toward urban revitalization.

For twenty years, Hantz has driven from his house in Indian Village
(a cluster of around 350 century-old homes on Detroit's east side surrounded by urban decay) to his office in Southfield (a clean, orderly, pleasant-looking suburb of Detroit). “Every year I tell myself ‘It's going to get better,’ and every year it doesn't,” Hantz told the crowd of business people, academics, community activists, and citizens in Detroit's nonprofit sector who came out to hear from the person behind this radical and controversial plan for Detroit's revitalization: the world's largest urban farm.
¹⁹

One day in 2008, Hantz explained, on his usual drive through derelict residential and commercial major streets, his optimism turned to pessimism. He realized that nothing was going to happen and that Detroit would just continue its long slide into decay and ruin. Someone needs to do
something
, he realized, not wanting to accept the dire scenario. “And then I got that hated, dreadful feeling, that that someone might be me,” Hantz said, sending a chuckle throughout the room, breaking the tension somewhat. The fact that he didn't know what the solution was, however, bothered him.

He thought about what the city needed to bring people back, to get them to invest again in Detroit, especially given the well-documented negatives that hang over the city's image. “We have a crime issue. We have a school issue. And we have a [tax-base] issue.” How exactly do you attract people to invest their money and lives in a city that is still spiraling downward?

Hantz looked at the problem as he would any other investment situation. How do you remedy the root problem in Detroit—that land no longer has any value? What would be a positive solution to this problem that would enhance land values and create opportunities, and that people would actually want to live around? What would make the land valuable enough again to attract people and businesses back to Detroit?

In the business world, Hantz explained, value is created through scarcity. Land had to be taken out of circulation—a lot of land, he figured—to create scarcity. Otherwise no one would invest in Detroit
because the value of land would just keep dropping. “If I was in Chicago, and I saw an open lot next door to me that went up for sale, I'd move to buy it,” Hantz used as an example. “Because three other people might also want it. In the city [of Detroit], if a lot becomes open, you wait. Because next year it might be cheaper,” Hantz said.

But Hantz knew that his critics were saying that the city shouldn't jump at the first offer of a deep-pocketed businessperson looking for cheap land, fearing it was an out-and-out landgrab. Many groups had expressed the idea that the large amount of available land is Detroit's biggest asset—that perhaps it's the city's only remaining asset.

“There's a difference between green space and vacant land,” Hantz said, preempting the inevitable argument on this subject. “Green space is a planned process that you elect to do as citizens to improve quality of life. Vacant land is a train wreck. It destroys value. It destroys communities when it doesn't have a purpose.” And, Hantz argued, it is a fact that vacant land's truly destructive side is that it consumes the city's resources.

Hantz put forward the fact that a vacant parcel of land in a city has a carrying cost of about $12,000 over a five-year period. Detroit has those two hundred thousand vacant parcels (most through foreclosure) scattered around the city, draining money, requiring labor to maintain, and using city services like police and fire protection. (Executive of planning for the City of Detroit, Al Fields, who was also on the discussion panel, confirmed that this figure was accurate. He then added that it is a cost that in many cases prevents the city from carrying out its duty to provide those essential services because of lack of funds.) “And we wonder why we have a $300 million deficit,” Hantz rebuked. By Hantz's calculation, all this vacant land—seen by some as an asset for the city—comes with a $3 billion carry cost over five years. What would you do with an “asset” like that? Hantz questioned. “You'd pawn it off on somebody. As quickly as possible!”

So that “dreadful feeling of not knowing what to do” gave way to a revelation. A large-scale farm, right in the city, would begin to take large
amounts of land out of circulation “in a positive way.” Productive land that is taken care of and maintained might be something that people would want to live around, as opposed to homes left to crumble or burn at the whim of the rampant arson attacks that take down many vacant homes. (Demolishing a home in Detroit costs over double what the city could recoup by selling it. This explains why so many foreclosed and abandoned homes are left to crumble or to be burned to the ground by arsonists.) Detroit, Hantz reminded the group, has over thirty thousand acres of vacant land, and he noted that Detroiters “act like we have five.” Hantz decided it was worth a shot. He committed $30 million of his personal money toward an experiment in what it might actually take for a place like Detroit to turn the corner: Hantz Farms.

Perhaps the term
farm
was a bit problematic, as was the initial ambitious scope of buying up seventy acres all at once. Some imagined tractors, combines, and large industrially farmed monocrops. Others were trying to work out how a traditional mixed farm, writ-large, perhaps with livestock and all, would look in an urban environment. Hantz, on the other hand, with no farming background, looked at the “farm” concept in a new light.

Hantz Farms would incorporate hardwood forests, Christmas trees, and even morel mushroom fields. It would reuse old commercial structures to experiment with indoor, year-round growing systems. It would basically throw the proverbial kitchen sink at the farm, because no one knew what the right mix was going to be. And Hantz wasn't wed to one idea or another. In fact, he wasn't even dead set on the farm itself. It was just a means to an end, to bring value back to land in Detroit, to get people investing in building communities again, and to make Detroit a city where Hantz didn't have to live next to vacant lots.

“I would trade in Hantz Farms tomorrow if all that I could get from you was to agree that we need to homestead all the acreage.” Hantz feels that a Detroit Homestead Act would be a much better solution than his farm because it would establish the same outcome, taking all that land
out of circulation and therefore making land valuable once again. And there would be tens of thousands of entrepreneurs coming up with ways to make their land valuable, not just one in charge of a lot of land. “Either way, I don't have a lot next to me that's vacant!”
²⁰

Hantz then quoted statistics from the Homestead Act, the federal program in the United States that put 270,000 acres, 10 percent of the US land base, into agricultural use under the ownership of two million citizens between 1862 and 1934. It's a concept that has experienced a revival in certain dwindling towns and rural communities where land will be given to individuals willing to homestead it.

(Beatrice, Nebraska, has enacted its recent Homestead Act of 2010.
²¹
People can apply for land by downloading the online application. If the application is approved, the regulations state that a nine-hundred-square-foot (minimum) home must be built on the land, in which the owner must live for a minimum of three years in order to secure title to the land. The fee for the Homestead title is simply the cost to file the paperwork and cover land transfer costs. Dayton, Ohio, and Grafton, Illinois, have also jumped on the recent Homestead Act revival wagon.)

For-profit agriculture would also be a major employer, Hantz argued. Carlton Flakes, a social worker who manages an urban-agriculture training program for ex-offenders transitioning back into society had already spoken to the need for jobs as one of the panelists. “I keep hearing about the thirty thousand vacant acres. I've got thirty thousand ex-offenders, most of whom need viable employment. We have a workforce that's underutilized, and believe it or not, willing and anxious to be productive and to work.”
²²

Near the end of the one-and-a-half-hour discussion, the question that clearly was on the minds of many in the audience was finally raised. Many of the people wanted to know: Isn't this just a landgrab?

“It is definitely a landgrab,” Hantz shot back. “You can't farm without land.” He then explained his belief that he'll do a better job, faster and with better efficiencies, if at the end of the day he's improving
his
land value, if
there's something in it for
him.
That's how capitalism works. And the only way to get people like him to take the risks involved is if there's a reward. “We've already proven that capital is a major part of our problem,” continued Hantz. “And capital gets tired of being insulted, just like nonprofit gets tired of being insulted.” Opportunity for profit simply has to be a part of the equation if people are going to invest.

“You could do every idea I've heard today, ten times over, right now,” stressed Hantz. He pleaded that this was Detroit's time to take some risks, to learn, to make mistakes and improve from those mistakes. “We're not in a perfect situation right now,” he concluded. If entrepreneurial spirit is allowed to flourish and isn't hampered as it currently is in Detroit, Hantz sees a day when the city is the “go-to place for urban agriculture systems,” a type of global showroom for every conceivable scenario that any community around the globe might want to implement. Entrepreneurs and governments would come to Detroit, tap into the expertise, look at the models, and buy the technology developed in Detroit.

M
IKE
S
CORE,
P
RESIDENT OF
H
ANTZ
F
ARMS

My cab driver didn't have much trouble finding the headquarters of Hantz Farms, a modest one-story brick building. Occupied buildings stand out like a sore thumb in southeast Detroit, especially along Mount Elliot Street, which had obviously been home to a thriving commercial strip of businesses at some point in the past. Now, yellow bags announcing foreclosure notices are stapled to most doors where buildings are still standing. The cab driver refused to let me out, even though we found the building and it looked occupied. “No, this is a bad part of town,” he warned, despite the street being devoid of people or other cars. He insisted that I phone and ask someone to meet me at the cab, or at least at the door.

Mike Score, president of Hantz Farms, came to greet me, looking
every bit the farmer, with his cowboy boots under dark pants, suspenders over the work shirt, and a neatly trimmed beard. He could pass for an Amish farmer given the right hat. But instead, he's a city kid. “I was born in a house two miles from here,” Score told me as a fire crackled away in his office fireplace on the bitter February 2011 day when I visited.
²³

Score spent his early childhood in southeast Detroit, his adolescence and teen years in a nearby suburb, and only came to agriculture because he hated his business major in the university and switched into a degree in crop and soil science after just one semester. His alma mater, Michigan State University, hired him fresh after graduating, and Score started working as an agriculture extension agent—basically a consultant who helped farmers tweak their businesses for efficiencies and profitability.

Score built his career by helping fledgling food and agriculture companies write business plans to scale up, change course, and generally shift with the winds of agriculture. When John Hantz approached the University of Michigan to find a person to write a three-year business plan for an urban farm, Score was the consultant they suggested.

It was a dream assignment, Score confided. He'd already been fantasizing about bringing agriculture back into Detroit. It took him a mere three days to submit his detailed plans and financial projections.