From left, Sarah Buranskas, of Stanton Heights, holds her 22-month-old daughter, Antonia, as Emily Wiggins, of Manchester, hands her a fresh-picked raspberry at the Food for the Soul Community Farm, Thursday, Oct. 17, 2024, in Manchester. (Photo by Stephanie Strasburg/PublicSource)
A local community organization’s plan to build housing would uproot a vegetable garden in the heart of a food desert, raising questions of best use.
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A community garden providing fresh vegetables in the food desert of Manchester faces removal as the City of Pittsburgh and its redevelopment agency favor a plan to build housing on the site instead.
The city and the Urban Redevelopment Authority have so far refused to renew the lease of the Food for the Soul Community Farm, which spans six vacant lots along Fulton Street, in a dispute demonstrating that land can attract competing interests even amid plenty of abandoned and neglected properties.
Food for the Soul is run by Ebony Evans and a few other gardeners who have helped to turn empty plots of government land into a miniature farm where residents can help cultivate plants or swing by to pick seasonal vegetables. The garden breaks away from more traditional community garden models like one in the nearby Mexican War Streets, where visitors are invited to “stroll and sniff” but not to pick.
The garden sits on the corner of Fulton and Juniata streets across from a basketball court. Wood chips mark paths along the garden between raised beds filled with tomatoes, Swiss chard and other vegetables in season. Bordering the plot are several vacant lots and farther down the block are boarded houses. Evans said the garden grows food for anyone in the area and volunteers tend to the plants.
For years, the garden’s place in the neighborhood seemed secure through the Adopt-a-Lot program of the Urban Redevelopment Authority [URA] and the City of Pittsburgh. But this year Evans said she was informed by the city that the garden’s lease would not be renewed, giving it an expiration date of July 2025.
In the garden’s place, the Manchester Citizens Corporation [MCC] plans an affordable housing project. LaShawn Burton-Faulk, who runs the organization, said there are other places for the community garden, and the housing development is more urgently needed.
“It is a challenge to see a community and its complexities, while ensuring that equity, inclusion and justice are the first lens. Housing options for the vulnerable are not options, but necessity! As it relates to land we must be stewards of highest and best uses,” Burton-Faulk wrote in an email response to PublicSource’s request for an interview.
The nonprofit MCC is not a registered community organization, so it lacks an official role in the development process, and it does not list public meetings on its website.
But members of the public are getting involved through an online petition with nearly 900 signatories calling for the city and Pittsburgh Land Bank to protect the garden.
Brenda Simpson, a garden volunteer and Manchester resident, said that if the decision was made for the benefit of the community, then its members should have been given a chance to voice their opinions.
“How do you evict us? And how do you move us?” Simpson said.
The lack of public MCC meetings means that, other than Burton-Faulk, “nobody else has any input,” Simpson added. “We’re doing good over there and we’ll continue to keep doing it until they cut locks on the fence or whatever.”
Fertile ground for housing
Unlike most major American cities, Pittsburgh’s housing infrastructure has room to absorb population increases as a result of a steep exodus that followed the decline of the steel industry. Yet in places like Manchester, competing interests can still fight over land use. Burton-Faulk is often a referee in such disputes, due to her positions as chair of the City Planning Commission and member of the Zoning Board of Adjustment.
Burton-Faulk said that Manchester “is an ideal location for families in need of housing support and wrap-around services with front door transit access.”
She said that the Food for the Soul Community Garden is on a site that was slated, more than 10 years ago, for a new, affordable residential building within the 86-unit Manchester Commons housing system run by the Housing Authority City of Pittsburgh. Burton-Faulk said plans to create housing for people making 30% of the area median income or less were halted by COVID-19, but are ready to move forward again.
Now the MCC and URA are working to finish the 31-unit Columbus Square housing development within a tomato’s throw of the garden.
“With Columbus Square directly across the street and the Manchester Chateau neighborhood comprehensive plan calling out a need to provide a 1:1 ratio of affordable and market rate both rental and for sale [housing units], this site remaining affordable is critical,” Burton-Faulk wrote.
Simpson said she heard about the affordable housing plan, but believes there are better options.
“There are houses in Manchester falling down, dilapidated, that you can renovate,” she said. “And then you have empty lots all over Manchester so why would you take this lot that feeds the community and put a house on it? You have so many options.”
Tiny, creeping flags
The garden grows across several parcels of land owned by the URA and the City of Pittsburgh, requiring both organizations to approve any plans for the area.
Evans said she reached out to the city in 2020 to revive a garden space that used to exist on the same site. She learned about the city’s Adopt-a-Lot program, which allows residents to manage vacant land, and filed the necessary paperwork for the lot she now farms. She said she signed a year lease with the city and URA.
Evans and fellow gardeners entered a Grow Pittsburgh program, getting support and supplies to get the garden started.
“All the well wishes were given to us as long as we continued to do what we were doing,” Evans said.
Going into the second year, 2022, Food for the Soul entered a three-year lease that expires next year. Evans thought the gardeners would be able to sign a five- or 10-year lease next year.
“The goal was never to purchase the lot. There was no reason to. We were doing what we needed to do and it was serving the community,” she said.
Then Evans began seeing tiny flags going up around the garden over the last year.
“I didn’t think twice about it,” Evans said, noting that the flags looked like those used by utility companies to mark underground infrastructure.
“Now I noticed the grass was getting cut down around the garden. Something was going on,” Evans said. “It was great at first — we thought someone was taking care of the surrounding area.”
The flags began creeping toward the back of the farm, leading Evans to make inquiries with the city.
Evans eventually learned that the garden had been chosen for a housing development, and reached out for help to Grow Pittsburgh, the Allegheny Land Trust and the Pittsburgh Land Bank. All of them, she said, were ultimately unable to support the garden’s efforts to preserve the green space.
Evans kept hearing about Burton-Faulk and MCC and wondered, “Why would they want to build houses here? Who is this? I wanted to meet this person. … I wanted to meet them and explain what we were doing.”
Evans said she never got that meeting with Burton-Faulk despite several attempts that led to cancellations.
“It was heartbreaking. It was surprising. It was everything,” she said.
Last week Joanna Demming, the executive director of the Pittsburgh Food Policy Council, wrote to Mayor Ed Gainey, urging city authorities to preserve the garden and help the gardeners attain ownership of the site. The council is a network of organizations advocating for the spread and growth of urban agriculture. Demming urged structural changes to city programs “so that issues like this do not arise in the future” and to move away from “the narrow definition of ‘highest and best use’.”
‘How do you move a farm?’
Burton-Faulk wrote that the MCC offered the garden’s leadership three alternative locations within the neighborhood.
Evans and others with the garden said they never received such offers. “Show the email, show the paper trail of the offer and the refusal,” she challenged. “This is horrible that she keeps repeating this. That makes me look like I’m lying to the community.”
Burton-Faulk did not respond to an inquiry about the purported offers. Approached before a Planning Commission meeting, Burton-Faulk said she did not want to get into a back-and-forth debate over the garden.
“How do you move a farm? How do you move a garden?” Simpson asked, rhetorically.
City Council President Daniel Lavelle, who represents Manchester, said through a spokesperson that the garden’s lease was always “temporary until the development plans were ready to proceed.” The spokesperson echoed the contention that the city and MCC offered alternatives, saying that two were on Nixon Street, at the northern tip of Manchester.
“Councilman Lavelle is fully supportive of community gardens and believes they need not be mutually exclusive with the very real need for housing in Manchester,” the spokesperson continued. The garden lease was never intended to go beyond mid-2025, according to Lavelle’s office.
Lavelle’s office also noted that the Pittsburgh Land Bank confirmed the sale of a parcel on Chartiers Avenue in Crafton Heights to Evans’ organization, Farmer Girl Eb, to transform a vacant lot into a fresh food retail space, and that the URA will be providing an Avenues of Hope grant in the amount of $200,000 toward those efforts.
Evans responded by noting that the Chartiers Avenue project is in West End, not Manchester.
URA spokesperson Dana Bohince wrote in an email that the garden’s tenure on its lots was “on a month-to-month basis. Our conditions for hosting the garden have not changed.”
The spokesperson added that the agency has improved its urban agriculture program through the formal launch of its Farm-a-Lot Program this year.
Bohince wrote that the URA “wants to reach a collective resolution” with all involved in the contested Manchester land.
Mayoral spokesperson Olga George struck a similar note, saying the administration is “committed to supporting efforts to preserve and expand both the availability for fresh food and affordable housing in Manchester” and plans to work with all parties “to find solutions that hold space for both.”
Multiple garden disputes
Evans’ efforts to build support for the garden eventually led her to another gardener, Lisa Freeman, once embroiled in adversarial encounters of her own with Burton-Faulk and MCC.
Freeman’s book, “We Don’t Want a F*cking Farm on Our Street,” recounts a confrontation over garden space in Manchester between Freeman and Burton-Faulk. Freeman attributes the title of the book to Burton-Faulk, saying it referred to Freeman’s work to turn an abandoned warehouse at 1426 Juniata St. into a garden. The site is now a Black-owned business, Freeman Family Farm & Greenhouse.
“I didn’t want their conflict to get confused with my stuff but ironically she was dealing with many of the same issues I was regarding MCC,” Evans said.
Ultimately, Evans said she was informed by the Adopt-a-Lot staff that the garden’s lease is on a ticking clock.
Simpson said people from all over the neighborhood have used the garden, including residents of the shelters at the Light of Life Rescue Mission and the Salvation Army Harbor Light Center.
“They would come, harvest, clean up and take food,” Simpson said. “It’s a farm that does more than farming and growing stuff. It’s an outreach for these people.”
Eric Jankiewicz is PublicSource’s economic development reporter and can be reached at ericj@publicsource.org or on Twitter @ericjankiewicz.
This story was fact-checked by Amber Frantz.
This article first appeared on PublicSource and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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