RE: info on numbers of community gardens

J* N* H*

Ah, the age-old question.  How many of us are there?

I think you are safe in your statement about the emergence of gardens,
although "thousands" is probably the right indicator of scale.  Although
national statistics might indicate a trend (if such statistics exist), we
see quite a bit of local variation.

Here in Hartford there were 22 community gardens in 1980 and there are 20
now.  Total acreage has probably increased a bit.  During that 20-year
period, though, we have lost about a dozen gardens.  The gains were not
replacements.  Most of them happened in one neighborhood where there was a
surge of interest a few years ago.

Down the road in New Haven, they have experienced a burst of garden
development due to a small grants program developed by the community
foundation with support from the New Haven Land Trust and Yale's Urban
Resource Initiative.  Very exciting.

Then there are places like New York where they elect the wrong guy mayor and
all of a sudden gardens are sprouting bulldozers instead of tomatoes.
Seattle has had some challenges as well.

Good luck pulling it together.

Jack Hale

-----Original Message-----
From:	community_garden-admin@mallorn.com
[community_garden-admin@mallorn.com] On Behalf Of Hilda Kurtz
Sent:	Friday, November 10, 2000 1:33 PM
To:	community_garden@mallorn.com
Subject:	[cg] info on numbers of community gardens

Hi - I wasn't able to send an email from within the wwb browser, so I'm
sending it from my regular email program.  Hope it arrives ok.

I'm working on a paper about communtiy gardens - whle I focus on
gardens in Minneapolis, I want to show the growth in number of
community gardnes in Minneapolis as part of a national trend.  Can you
tell me where to find data to support the contention that recent
decades have seen the emergence of hundred of community gardens in
urban vacant lots across the US?
Has anyone done a survey or a count of community gardens across the country?
Any national, regional or urban level data would be very helpful.

Thank you very much for any and all help.

Hilda Kurtz
University of Georgia
Department of Geography
204 GGS Building
Athens, GA 30602-2502

Tel: 706 542 2329
Fax: 706 542 2388
Email: hkurtz@arches.uga.edu

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