Hate That Vacant Lot in Your Neighborhood? Turn It Into Something Great

Perhaps you’ve seen an abandoned lot in your neighborhood or wondered who owns it or what your city or town is doing with the unused land it controls. Well, others who have felt the same way are doing something about it. Over the last decade, interest in community-led initiatives to turn neglected space into a shared resource—for housing, for growing food, for recreation—has ballooned. But it’s never quite as simple as taking donated equipment and throwing up a raised bed in a vacant plot. "It was blood, sweat, and tears," says Alexis Foote, who spent the last decade working toward community control of waterfront property in New York City. Dwell spoke to Foote, along with Queen Frye of the R. Roots Garden in Minneapolis and Darren Cotton of The Tool Library in Buffalo, New York, about how they’re transforming spaces in their neighborhoods into collective assets and asked them to share any advice they have for people hoping to start a similar project themselves. "You gotta bring your community with you," says Foote, "and you gotta fight, fight, fight."

ReAL Edgemere Community Land Trust, New York City

Alexis Foote says it was seeing vacant lots in the middle of a homelessness crisis in New York City that motivated her to get involved with creating and maintaining a community land trust (a nonprofit organization that develops land for community use) in her neighborhood. As a teenager, Foote bounced around the foster-care system in and around Harlem, and spent five years without a home herself. In helping to develop a land trust in an area where vacant land is snapped up by real estate developers and turned into luxury housing, she says, "I’m fighting generational homelessness for my kids."

Foote lives in Far Rockaway, Queens, more than an hour’s subway ride from Manhattan. The area was devastated in 2012 by Hurricane Sandy, which washed away homes and caused $65 billion in damages across the region. But whereas other parts of the Rockaways redeveloped their decimated waterfronts into parks and new housing relatively quickly, parts of Far Rockaway, like Edgemere, lagged behind.

A massive chunk of the empty land in the neighborhood belonged to the City of New York. But Foote says she initiated the process by speaking to others in her area about the blocks of abandoned lots: "I started reaching out to church leaders and government officials," she says. "Like, listen—What are your plans for these lots? There’s nothing out there."

Along with Zakhia Grant, Foote founded a board that would later become known as the ReAL Edgemere Community Land Trust. In 2021, New York City opened applications for plans to develop other lots in the community, and Foote and Grant filed one. The duo engaged a handful of urban design and legal organizations to refine their proposal. It was accepted by the city as part of a community land trust initiative, and the organization, which is in the process of being registered as a formal nonprofit, will use city funding to turn 119 empty lots in the Rockaways into 130 affordable housing units and commercial space for local businesses—along with open space in floodplains to prevent a repeat of previous disasters.

"This is not a corporate America structure, and it’s gonna run very differently."

—Alexis Foote, ReAL Edgemere Community Land Trust

For Foote, the work of community development is important, but she’s also thrilled to have wrestled the empty lots from speculators and other extractive real estate forces: Anyone doing work like this should be resilient and persistent, she says, "because they’re gonna have big people with big pockets trying to shut them out."

Tips for getting involved in a land trust

1. Foote’s number one lesson is to be relentless: "You gotta believe that what’s happening is in the best interest of your community," she says, and be prepared to hassle your elected officials to secure the best results.
2. Find organizations doing land trust—or land trust–adjacent—work and engage them. In New York City, for instance, Foote, Grant, and other board members worked with Hester Street, an urban planning and design and development nonprofit, to assist with their land use application.
3. Think carefully about whom the community land trust will actually serve and work to solicit their input. Without a clearly defined objective and neighborhood buy-in, funding and approval for a land trust project can be difficult to secure.

The Tool Library, Buffalo, New York

April marks the start of the busiest season for The Tool Library, says Darren Cotton, who began his lending experiment more than a decade ago. In the spring the storefront is packed with people borrowing pressure washers and hedge trimmers to work in their community gardens or just spend a little time fixing up their yards. "Our goal is really accessibility and affordability," says Cotton, "by removing barriers for people who are trying to fix up a home or start a garden."

In 2011, Cotton was a broke student living in a dilapidated apartment with peeling, moldy wallpaper. His landlord seemed particularly disinclined to make repairs. Rather than spend money he didn’t really have to fix up his place, Cotton and a partner decided to try sharing tools across the neighborhood. The pair applied for a start-up grant from the City of Buffalo, New York, obtained a cheap lease, and bought a few hundred dollars’ worth of tools. A lot of the housing stock in Buffalo has similar issues, says Cotton: layers of old carpet over hardwood, moldy bathrooms. So The Tool Library started with the question "What are the tools we need to transform what were at one point very beautiful spaces that over years of neglect and contemporary updates have just been erased?"

Thirteen years and a few rounds of fundraising later, the organization now has just under 1,500 active members and 4,843 DIY home and garden tools to lend out. For a yearly fee starting at $30, members can take home a table saw or tiller for one week at a time. The library also offers an array of less obvious items like a food dehydrator and car jacks. If you were to add up the cost of all the tools that have been borrowed since the library opened, says Cotton, it has saved residents of Buffalo and the surrounding areas $2.5 million over the years.

"How do we bring these tools out into the community and build these spaces that are for everyone?"

—Darren Cotton, The Tool Library

But the library also facilitates broader community pursuits and provides resources for the maintenance of public space. Every month, volunteer staff hold repair events to help residents fix their broken items. And twice a year, the library partners with community organizations to maintain shared spaces like gardens and trails. This year, near its new and larger space down the street from the original location, The Tool Library is planning to transform small parks with flowers and vegetable gardens. "Tool libraries—and libraries of things—are really on the forefront of building a different economy," says Cotton. "We’re really trying to create an economy where people have access to the resources they need."

Tips for starting a tool library

1. Plan before you start, advises Cotton, who says he could have avoided some mistakes early on if he hadn’t launched the process blind. "Get a sense of what kinds of workshops you want to see. Get a sense of how people would use the tool library in your own community," he says.
2. Look into national and state-level resources for so-called libraries of things. Cotton says he’s in regular contact with other tool libraries to advocate for similar projects and help others get off the ground.
3. Not every tool library needs a huge space or fundraising drive: Consider whether you have access to a space in an existing community garden, for instance, and canvass neighbors and businesses that might be willing to donate old tools.

R. Roots Garden, Minneapolis

Queen Frye, the cofounder of the R. Roots Garden in North Minneapolis, considers herself a "generational urban farmer." Her grandmother kept a plot in the community garden behind the Dorchester, Massachusetts, housing projects where she spent some of her childhood, and her mother continued growing food when the family moved to Minnesota. "I’ve never worked in a rural setting," says Frye. "It’s always been within the city."

In 2019, Frye was just looking for space to host her writing group, and she thought it might be nice to spend some time outdoors. A nearby lot owned by someone she knew had been sitting vacant for 15 years. The owner agreed to let her use it, just to "see how things go." But then, as much of the city closed during the early days of the Covid pandemic, Frye built up a garden with the help of neighbors of volunteers who found themselves with a little extra time on their hands.

"Sometimes I joke with people and say you can taste the Northside in those greens."

—Queen Frye, R. Roots Garden

"Our first two seasons went by and people were like, ‘Wow, we love what you’re doing,’ " says Frye. " ‘Can you use our lot?’ " The local neighborhood association offered land it controlled; a boxing gym nearby asked if the garden could use a disheveled lot it owned. By 2022, R. Roots Garden was harvesting vegetables and herbs from four lots in the area. Though the garden has downsized a bit since then, Frye says the central location produces, at a minimum, some 700 pounds of vegetables and herbs every season. Collard greens are a favorite, she says, and the garden grows several varieties.

Some of the produce goes to a market in the neighborhood; much of it is sold off the lot on a pay-what-you-can sliding scale. Many plants are donated. Frye says over the years she’s formed relationships with businesses willing to give away seedlings or supplies, and the funds R. Roots brings in each season go toward the garden’s continued operation. "There’s no real access to fresh produce like we have" in most of the neighborhood, she says, and the project is as much about keeping North Minneapolis healthy as it is about building fluency with urban farming.

"We just try to reuse what we have— what’s right there on the land."

—Queen Frye, R. Roots Garden

Next, Frye hopes to build a garden supply center. There just aren’t many resources for gardeners in North Minneapolis, she says, and she hates that her neighbors have to drive across town to go to Home Depot for their plants and supplies. "This is another way of keeping those dollars in the community."

Tips for starting an urban farm

1. "If I were starting today, a USDA Service Center would be my first contact," says Frye: The agency provides guidance on how to start and maintain agricultural initiatives, often through local chapters. She also recommends researching city-or state-level resources for urban gardeners.
2. Look for opportunities to recycle or repurpose materials to bring down costs. Frye says she makes mulch out of twigs that fall on the lots and saves seeds at the end of the season.
3. Some cities, like Minneapolis, have programs to help gardeners secure land for cheap. But Frye also says it’s important to think creatively about how to start a plot. Neighborhood associations often have ideas on where to site gardens, she says, and it’s always possible to start a community garden in the backyard of a neighbor or friend.

Top photo by David Steinberg

—

Head back to the May/June 2024 issue homepage