Urban farming can cost thousands of dollars to develop. Advocates are trying to change that
This fall, the City Council will vote on proposed amendments to the UDC, including seven related to urban farming that were proposed by the Food Policy Council of San Antonio
By Elena Bruess
San Antonio Express
Mar 27, 2022
When Beth Keel, Cecile Parrish and other urban farmers were planning an urban farm on the East Side of San Antonio, they didn’t plan to encounter five pages of complex development codes and around $170,000 in permitting and platting costs. Just off Commerce Street, near Lincoln Park and the AT&T Center, the 4-acre spot contained housing over two decades ago and had been vacant for years.
In an effort to promote green spaces, Keel, the sustainability manager for the San Antonio Housing Authority, decided to build an urban farm for the community with federal funding she received. The project seemed simple for Keel and Parrish, a San Antonio-based urban farmer. And it seemed exactly what the East Side needed improved access to fresh food, green spaces and community sustainability. Instead, they soon learned that building urban farms or gardens in San Antonio is a cost-prohibitive and complex process for most. Development codes, which are nonspecific and generally meant for housing or commercial development, can put prospective urban farmers through years of infrastructure hurdles and permitting costs before they can begin farming.
For Keel and Parrish, who broke ground at the Garcia St. Urban Farm in 2019, the process consumed all the federal grant money, with most of it spent on infrastructure. Certain educational elements and amenities were cut, and the process took four years. Prompted by the experience, advocates, including Keel and Parrish, are working to change San Antonio a chapter in the municipal code that governs development in the city to streamline urban gardening and farming.
This fall, the City Council will vote on proposed amendments to the UDC, including seven related to urban farming that were proposed by the Food Policy Council of San Antonio. Proponents say the changes, if adopted, would make urban farming and gardening less costly and more efficient throughout the city. “Antonio used to be a huge farming community, but I think as the city built up, they started looking at growth and expansion instead of sustainability with the farmers” Keel said. “Urban gardening like this increases the security in our communities to share food, to trade food and promote accessibility.”
Pursuit of city farming the Garcia St. Urban Farm sells produce such as tomatoes and peppers and flowers, which can provide medicinal benefits and attract pollinators such as butterflies and bees. Volunteers from across San Antonio work with the farm crew and perhaps learn how to make gardens or farms at their homes. The permanent team consists of people from the Housing Authority and Eco Centro, an urban agriculture and green building demonstration center operated by San Antonio College.
Parrish, the urban agriculture coordinator for Eco Centro, is among many who daily tend the farm, which just began to bloom for the season. She and fellow coordinators Torin Metz and Jovanna Lopez have been with Garcia St. Urban Farm since the beginning. And are really hopeful that you can take really difficult, mineral-heavy soil from previous development and turn it into something that can grow a farm, the beginning of a fifth season now, and we have come a long way.
But before the gardening could begin, some of the biggest steps Keel and Parrish had to complete involved platting the property meaning buying and developing vacant land and installing water service. Those elements can cost thousands of dollars. San Antoniodoesn’t address platting and development specific to urban farming. People who want to invest in urban farms must comply with regulations meant for residential, commercial or mixed-use development.
Also, anyone seeking to build a farm or garden on property that has been vacant for more than 12 months must change its land-use designation, which is costly. “We pay the same fees that a developer would, and some of the fees are put in place for environmental impact and other aspects that are specific for developers but aren’t necessary for us,” Parrish said. And choosing property that has been vacant less than a year doesn’t necessarily make the process simpler, as buildings often leave behind toxic residue or chemicals that are not safe for farming.
Choosing a place to farm is much more complex because the products are edible, said Metz, farm coordinator at Garcia St. Urban Farm. “It is not easy to just wait for available land like that to pop up every time in San Antonio,” he said. “It more complicated than that. Also, there are other costs related to the types of buildings that can be built and specific requirements for greenhouses. No building can be big enough to be considered habitable, which means that in some cases it must be permitted as temporary instead of permanent, such as for Garcia St. Urban Farm’s large hoop house.”
The team at the farm spent $250,000 in funding to build the farm, completed in 2019, and realized that most people could not afford to go through what it did. “Even with our funding, it was tight,” Parrish said. “Imagine how it would be for a neighborhood association or a community group. We knew it needed to change.”
Leslie Provence, treasurer of the Food Policy Council of San Antonio, hopes to substantially lower the cost of developing farms or gardens in the city by amending its UDC. She doesn’t want potential urban farmers or gardeners to deal with the same obstacles that Keel and the farmers at Eco Centro did in creating their farm. The Food Policy Council, created in 2010 by the Metropolitan Health District, advocates for a healthy local food system, including accessibility to urban farms and gardens throughout the city.
Urban farming and gardening can improve access to food for lower-income people and communities, such as those who live far from grocery stores or fresh produce. Also, urban agriculture can mitigate flooding, prevent drought, increase canopy cover and create a heat sink for high temperatures in San Antonio. When the UDC was last revised in 2015, amendments crafted by the Food Policy Council added urban farms and residential market gardens as allowable land uses. Provence said the council didn’t add restrictions or definitions beyond that. “We just wanted to acknowledge that the farms can exist,” she said. “Then in 2015, both the Housing Authority and IDEA charter school wanted to start urban farms and ran into all kinds of obstacles and requirements.”
Provence and Keel began working with the city’s Development Services Department on what they sought in urban farming codes. This included adding urban farms and greenhouses under exceptions in the UDC, allowing outdoor storage for urban farms and adding language about urban farming as a sustainable practice as it outlined in the SA Tomorrow Sustainability Plan.
With these additions, communities seeking to start urban farms would pay about $1,500 for a special use permit and a little more for a certificate of determination, which would exempt the proposed property from platting. The total would be about $3,000. “This all comes down to land use,” Metz said. “The only lens for land use right now is for profit, for development. We’re not saying that everyone needs a garden or every community needs a farm. Different areas need different things, including green spaces.”
Provence proposals have passed through the first stage of the UDC amendment process and are heading to the Planning Commission Technical Advisory Committee, which will hear all amendments through June. The City Council is expected to vote on the proposals in October, and those that pass will take effect as soon as November. Provence said that because she and others had worked with Development Services early on, the proposals are in the language and formatting they need to be in. The team is hopeful the amendments will pass. “We need all the urban growing that we can have in terms of home gardens, community gardens, urban farms and any other way that we can produce food in or near a city for food security and resilience,” Provence said.
