Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Farming in the City

Back in the 1960's, people starting exiting the the core of Detroit, Michigan due to suburbanization and "White Flight". This left a devastated city core.


Well it appears that some Investors are looking to convert all this underused land in the middle of the city into a large scale commercial farm. According to the LA Times:
Cottonwood trees grow through the collapsed roofs of homes stripped clean for scrap metal. Wild grasses carpet the rusty shells of empty factories, now home to pheasants and wild turkeys.

This green veil is proof of how far this city has fallen from its industrial heyday and, to a small group of investors, a clear sign. Detroit, they say, needs to get back to what it was before Henry Ford moved to town: farmland.

"There's so much land available and it's begging to be used," said Michael Score, president of the Hantz Farms, which is buying up abandoned sections of the city's 139-square-mile landscape and plans to transform them into a large-scale commercial farm enterprise.

"Farming is how Detroit started," Score said, "and farming is how Detroit can be saved."

1 comment:

Ouranosaurus said...

The Economist also did an interesting story about Detroit's decay. A lot of artists have been painting abandoned homes, and there are already small-scale farms created by residents.