Key to the City, page 13
Henry Keney might have smiled on the idea. Within a year, Virgo had inspired sufficient excitement and confidence that the city leased him an underutilized plot of land at the edge of Keney. He turned it into a productive urban farm with two large, enclosed greenhouses, an aquaponics facility, a woodworking shed, and a composting station, along with goats, chickens, and bees. As the farm grew, the new zoning code easily accommodated everything Virgo wanted to do—and he’s done a lot. On this campus, the Sustainability Project produces bountiful harvests of vegetables, fruits, and flowers, which are sold at farmers’ markets and to Hartford Public Schools or given away free to the community. From other parts of Keney, the Sustainability Project taps maple trees for syrup, which it bottles and sells along with honey, and the project salvages tree debris to make furniture and decorative items, which Virgo trains local youths to create.
Nearly everyone who works on the farm is a young person living in the surrounding Northeast neighborhood, whose residents, almost all Black, are coping with some of the toughest economic conditions and worst health outcomes anywhere in the country. As Virgo has told me, for many of those who come to work, the farm is a place of nourishment for both body and soul, and he works with them to appreciate the benefits of healthy eating and living. Along with direct employment opportunities, the Sustainability Project has distributed hundreds of home garden kits annually to neighbors, given away hundreds of rain barrels through a partnership with the local water utility, held gardening classes on-site, and held cooking classes on a mobile bus. It has also partnered with four public schools to build food gardens the students can enjoy. All these interventions promote a stronger and more resilient food system, and greater access to healthy food for residents in the heart of a neighborhood who need that access most.
People like Herb Virgo—with a green thumb and a heart of gold—have more important things to do than deal with zoning bureaucracy. I relish that Hartford laid out clear rules that supported every phase of his work on-site—and all of his off-site activities too. There are others like him, in many cities around the country. Zoning has to get out of their way.
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While Boston and Hartford have reimagined their zoning codes to spur small-scale food production, most cities continue to make it difficult for residents and businesses to grow their own food. Rural communities, which tend to revolve around farming and raising livestock, have the opposite problem: many decline to use zoning to regulate agricultural activities at all, or do so only minimally, allowing them to take place nearly everywhere. An increasingly lively debate questions the extent to which zoning should regulate one particular activity: concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs. A bulwark of industrial agriculture, these facilities have proliferated across rural America and currently produce 50 percent of the animals our nation uses for food. CAFOs pack large numbers of animals into cramped and often unsanitary quarters, preparing them for slaughter or for milking at an industrial scale. In regulations relevant to CAFO’s environmental impacts, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency defines a CAFO to include, at a minimum, 1,000 head of beef cattle, 700 dairy cattle, 10,000 sheep, 2,500 large swine or 10,000 smaller swine, 125,000 chickens used for food (“broiler chickens”) or 82,000 egg-laying hens, or 55,000 turkeys. Family farms these are not.
From both a land use and an environmental perspective, the most significant challenge presented by CAFOs is handling the waste from so many densely confined animals. Operators often allow waste to fall through floor slats into an underground storage area, to be washed into lagoons, or even to accumulate on the ground outdoors. This manure contains not only phosphorous and nitrogen naturally common in manure, but also hormones, E. coli, salmonella, and antibiotic-resistant bacteria. It can leach into soils and run off into waterways, contaminating the drinking supply and hurting plant and animal life. CAFO manure has polluted waterways including the Chesapeake Bay, the Gulf of Mexico, Lake Erie, and the Hudson River, among other waterways, causing toxic algal blooms and killing fish and shellfish, sometimes in mass quantities.
CAFOs also release odors and particulate matter, and do so through various means. Industrial blowers intended to circulate air within barns end up spewing feathers and feces into the open air. Breezes carry smells and particles from the top of open manure pits and lagoons. Farms that spread large quantities of thick, fermented manure on neighboring fields distribute fecal matter across wider tracts of land. These releases cause an array of health problems for employees and neighbors, including headaches, respiratory ailments, and heart disease.
Despite these negative impacts, all fifty state legislatures have adopted “right-to-farm” laws that shield most CAFO activities from lawsuits based on claims that they effect a nuisance. This lax treatment may be no surprise given the amount of money CAFOs generate, and the powerful and well-funded lobbying groups working for them at the state level. Indeed, some states have changed their zoning rules to support further proliferation of CAFOs. In the most extreme example, Iowa modified its zoning statute in the late 1990s to prevent county governments from adopting zoning laws that would limit CAFOs—and CAFOs there have grown fivefold from 789 in 1990 to 4,200 in 2022. Wisconsin’s legislature in 2004 empowered a new state board to create and administer uniform rules for livestock facility siting and expansion. The resulting law prohibits local governments from disapproving livestock facilities, including CAFOs, in areas zoned for agricultural uses. For a few years, some local governments still tried to use zoning to limit the impact of CAFOs. When the small town of Magnolia approved a large CAFO called Larson Acres, the operator objected to conditions the town imposed (reasonable ones, like crop rotation and soil testing), and six years of litigation ensued. The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled in favor of the CAFO, confirming that the state’s siting law preempted local decision-making and authorizing the state board to reverse conditions imposed by local zoning officials. Today, Larson Acres has expanded to 2,800 milking cows—four for every person living in Magnolia—and Wisconsin, which in 1995 had just six CAFOs, now has 337.
In the great majority of states, local governments can still use zoning to tame CAFOs. They can limit the number of animals kept on a property, ban the practice of spreading manure, or require odor management technology. Zoning can impose a dispersion requirement that prohibits CAFOs from clustering or from locating near rivers and lakes, and can require structures to be more suitably (and humanely) constructed. The zoning permit process can be amended to slow down reviews to ensure that a community can fully understand the consequences of a CAFO. Public hearings, for example, could require applicants to answer questions about their proposals. Requiring applicants to submit an environmental impact statement could help a community identify and mitigate a proposal’s worst externalities. Finally, zoning boards can also review and incorporate scientific studies that show the effects of CAFOs on health, air, groundwater, rivers and streams, and property values. These studies can help justify the board’s denial or conditional approval—useful if a disgruntled applicant challenges its decision.
Despite the potential that zoning codes have to help, few rural communities explicitly address CAFOs in their codes and thus end up treating them the same, permissive way they treat traditional family farms. So the number of CAFOs continues to grow—topping 21,500 as of 2022—swallowing up smaller and more sustainably managed farms in the process. Their combined and increasing impact makes them one of the biggest land use problems facing rural America.
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That night in 2018 as I attended the Farm Aid concert in Hartford, Chris Stapleton closed his set with what may be his most food-related song, his R&B-influenced cover of “Tennessee Whiskey.” (The reference to strawberry wine definitely counts as agricultural.) Turns out musicians George Jones and David Allan Coe sang the same song at the very first Farm Aid in 1985. Point is, Farm Aid has gone on so long that the setlists are being recycled—with Willie Nelson still on stage, in his nineties.
However enjoyable the music, it’s unfortunate that the concert—as an environmental fundraising and consciousness-raising vehicle—remains as necessary as it was almost forty years ago. That’s partly because the goalposts keep moving on federal and state action, given the strong hold of CAFO proponents over Congress and our statehouses. Farm Aid’s efforts would be boosted if we could seed small growers through zoning’s fertile ground. In our cities, loosening zoning rules à la Boston and Hartford can promote the local food production that’s best for the environment, for growers, and for members of the community. Across our countryside, tightening zoning rules, including instituting procedural requirements and outright bans, can help us suppress toxic, large-scale animal farms and industrial growing practices that hurt our land, our animals, and us. Zoning is a constant push and pull between the urban and rural, the small-scale and large, the humane and the abusive, the sustaining and the toxic. Getting it right can improve the equity, access, sustainability, and security of our food system—which, along with housing and transportation, is key to our survival.
The issue of zoning and food production raises again the question adapted from Robert Schuller at the end of the last chapter: who do we want to be? It’s a crucial question not only for us as individuals—humans in bodies that need to live and eat healthily—but collectively, as a nation situated in a living, breathing ecosystem of soil and water, plants and animals. Zoning requires the constant weighing of costs and benefits, and nowhere more than vis-à-vis a food production system that has evolved to maximize efficiency and drive down costs by every last penny—and that has done so by hiding the real environmental, medical, and economic costs. We may go down in history as the generation that kicked these ever-more-colossal costs down the road for future generations to deal with. That can’t be who we really want to be.
Part III
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DESIGNING
FOR DELIGHT
8
The Force of Nature
At noon on August 22, 1856, not far from the State Capitol in Hartford, the Colt Armory Band played a woeful dirge before a large crowd that included “Chief Justices and Reverend Doctors intermixed with sturdy laborers,” according to the Hartford Daily Courant. Hours later, at sundown, the bells of the city tolled a requiem, and in the following days, newspapers from New York to London covered the fateful loss—not of a great man, but of a monarch: the Charter Oak, thirty-three feet around and perhaps eight hundred years old, felled during a violent storm.
The Charter Oak holds an exalted place in Connecticut’s history. Its name refers to a royal deed that King Charles II granted to the colony in 1662, acknowledging the rights to self-governance established in a constitution written twenty-three years earlier. Connecticut, the Constitution State, claims this constitution as the first in history ever to be written by “the people” themselves. Legend holds that in 1687, a prominent Connecticut resident hid the royal charter in the cavity of the Charter Oak, shielding it from the soldiers of the new king, William III, who demanded that it be relinquished. The tree went on to become a cherished symbol of Connecticut, the subject of books, museum exhibits, a monument, poems, songs, and paintings—including one that I frequently visit at the Wadsworth Atheneum (the country’s oldest art museum, located in downtown Hartford) and another, by Frederic Church, that I traveled to the Hudson Valley to see. Carved from the felled tree itself were intricate pieces of furniture, including a cradle made for the Colts—also exhibited at the Wadsworth—and a chair on display at Church’s Hudson Valley estate. In 1935, the adoration became official, as the U.S. Mint issued a half-dollar commemorating Connecticut’s three hundredth anniversary with the Charter Oak on the back, followed by a state quarter of similar design in 1999.
My desk in Hartford overlooks the Scion of the Charter Oak, a first-generation descendant that occupies a prominent place in Bushnell Park, the country’s oldest publicly funded park. “My” oak was planted over a hundred and fifty years ago. Since then, significant investments have gone toward pruning, fertilizing, and protecting it from disease. It’s a virtually perfect specimen, full and beautifully formed, and it has brought me great joy and calm as the seasons change around it while I work and write. My vista owes its preservation to the tree’s historic significance, its association with patriotism and self-determination. The Scion must endure.
From a zoning perspective, Hartford uses many tools to ensure that its trees do, in fact, endure. The city needs all the healthy trees it can get, as like many urbanized areas, it has lost much of its canopy to development, neglect, disease, and pests—and over the years, hasn’t planted enough trees to replace that canopy. To restore some of the look and feel of a city shaded by trees, the zoning code starts by trying to prevent the loss of the city’s largest and most significant trees—those with a diameter of thirteen inches or more. To achieve this goal, it prohibits the removal of those trees unless they are dying or pose a danger to human safety, health, and welfare. It also tries to prevent damage to all trees, regardless of size. Construction crews, for example, must protect trees and not build trenches through, or even expose, root systems. To grow the next grove of Charter Oaks, our code requires tree planting on each residential and commercial lot, and continuous canopy coverage along downtown streets. These planting requirements are flexible, allowing applicants who cannot plant enough trees on-site to work with the city forester to plant trees elsewhere. We developed these provisions with the city’s Tree Commission, a body that—much like the Food Policy Commission—brought its expertise to bear during our zoning overhaul, ensuring that nature got its due. The commissioners made an important point, one I hadn’t quite grasped: that romanticizing trees, as countless poets and painters have done—or even as we’ve done with the Charter Oak—risks focusing too much on their beauty, while overlooking their brawn.
The unromantic view allows us to think in terms of their function. Trees flex their muscle in contributing what ecologists call “ecosystem services,” or benefits provided to us through natural phenomena by nature itself. As one ecosystem service, trees clean our air through natural processes that capture carbon and convert it to oxygen. They also cool the city, reducing the urban heat-island effect, as well as the energy costs of alleviating it, by providing shade during hot summers. They soak up stormwater and reduce erosion through their roots and branches. While it’s impossible to assign a precise dollar amount, our city forester posited that Hartford’s trees annually generate nearly $5.5 million in benefits, including the capture of nearly 600 billion gallons of stormwater and savings of nearly 5 million kilowatt-hours in energy. Oh, and trees also improve property values by up to 20 percent and drive up retail sales when they’re planted in commercial areas.
In short, trees are the gift that keeps on giving, and the bigger and older the tree, the greater its gifts. Similarly, meadows, coastal ecosystems, and wetlands offer a visual respite from our overbuilt environment while providing ecosystem services in the form of habitat creation, flood management, biodiversity, and cross-pollination. Rainforests recharge underground aquifers and yield wood, material for clothing and household tools, and medicines. Deserts add to biodiversity; provide fuel, minerals, medicine, and even (through sand) building materials; and preserve archaeological artifacts and sites. So while nature is a landscape—one that Frederic Church and the other nineteenth-century Hudson River School painters exhibited at the Wadsworth so luminously celebrated—it is also a habitat regulator, not only our delighter, but our provider.
For all its wonky technicalities, a zoning code can be a powerful tool to protect this natural environment that does so much for us—culturally, spiritually, and physically. Unfortunately, most zoning codes have often done the opposite, enabling and even requiring us to build our cities in unattractive and environmentally destructive ways. Codes push development outward into forests, farmland, and other wildlife habitat. They facilitate the overuse of water, to the detriment of ecosystems we need to thrive. And they have codified all sorts of backward ideas about the landscaping (including trees) that we must incorporate into new development. For too long, we have let this problem slide, but that has to change. We must rewrite our codes to build more beautiful and more resilient places. Zoning can reposition nature as a vital form of infrastructure necessary to our health, well-being, and survival.
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In 1932, the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright first wrote about his vision of Broadacre City, a suburban utopia where every home would sit on an acre of land and highways would connect residents to their jobs. In many ways, Wright’s vision was the antithesis of good urbanism, separating uses and forcing occupants to rely on cars. But it fell within the intellectual tradition of the “garden city,” an idealized suburb surrounded by farms and fields, far from industrialized areas. Wright spent the rest of his life advancing this idea, articulating every detail of Broadacre City, from proposed school enrollments to bans on roadside billboards. While his exact vision never materialized, it captured, or perhaps reflected, the American imagination: homes as little islands in green-lawn seas.
