Daily News | Philly’s community gardens say this city policy puts them at risk
Viola Street Garden“The strawberries and asparagus will be first up. They come back every year,” Smith said. “Then we plant tomatoes, corn, greens, broccoli, cucumbers, squash. All of that good stuff.”
In the past, the city used restrictive deeds that prevented disposed lots from ever being developed. But in 2020, the Land Bank began requiring the mortgages, which the groups are just now encountering as they apply for dispositions, which can take a year or more to complete. The Viola Street garden applied for a disposition in 2020 and will have to undertake a mortgage.
Many of the gardens are in neighborhoods undergoing development booms that are supercharging values of once nearly worthless lots. The city has proposed a $2.8 million mortgage for the Summer-Winter Community Garden at 33rd and Race Streets, near the Drexel campus, and one of the oldest community gardens in Philly. The garden, along with Viola, is part of a network of gardens under the nonprofit Neighborhood Gardens Trust.
Greenberg said smaller gardens not aligned with a larger nonprofit like hers face “an onerous, complicated accounting situation.” The situation could become perilous to one of those groups if they need a loan because the mortgage shows up as debt on their books. Further, she said Philadelphia has a trash problem, with debris blowing all winter long onto gardens. The gardens do their best to keep up with it, but, like the Viola Street Garden, are adjacent to illegal dumping sites.
“After all these generations we have been doing community gardens, why, all of a sudden, is there a new push for there to be a mortgage agreement on the use of the land?” she asked.
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