Detroit’s Hantz Farms is beginning to look like a land grab after all
What was portrayed as the nation’s largest urban farm experiment is beginning to look more like the stage of a mass real estate sale.
By Steve Neavling
Detroit Metro Times
Sep 20, 2021
Excerpt:
Hantz also never followed through on a pledge to create plenty of new jobs with “reasonable salaries and benefits.” In May 2014, more than 1,000 people helped plant oak trees on 20 acres, but only a handful were compensated employees. Almost everyone was an unpaid volunteer.
To Hantz’s credit, his team has demolished dozens of homes and cleaned up a largely abandoned area that was littered with trash, tires, furniture, rotting homes, dead trees and discarded boats.
At the time, Mayor Dave Bing said the goal was to remove blight.
“The sale will result in the elimination of blight — debris, illegal dumping, and vacant structures — on a large parcel of east side property,” Bing said in 2012.
Since 2014, at least 26,000 trees have also been planted. Some of the trees are thriving, and others are not.
