according to this Gristmill piece. If it proved correct, their time ran out in March 2006. They had a guy named Horowitz opposing them for development of the land, on which he apparently had some kind of mortgage (which makes no sense if the city had actually acquired it from his development group under eminent domain, as the Grist piece suggested) or right of first refusal, maybe legal, maybe not -- but the price he paid was definitely a sweetheart deal.

In 2006 Horowitz bulldozed the garden.

That the mayor and city council did this behind closed doors in LA doesn't surprise me; our city council in Lubbock is always doing "executive session" maneuvers to keep the public from finding out how they're handling our business, and it looks like maybe LA's mayor had monetary ties to the company wanting the land for a warehouse.

at Counterpunch, which further infers collusion between the Brentwood developer (!!) and the LA city attorney (surprise, surprise, surprise! NOT ) who, no doubt influenced by the giveaway of land condemned to build "affordable housing" to the Dodgers, as well as the likely backing of Ahnuld and W at higher governmental levels, evidently emboldened the "landowner" to destroy the garden.

f Horowitz and his apologists at the Times have their way, the 350 families who tend plots at the garden, all of who whom live under the poverty line according USDA's guidelines, will have to find a new source of fresh food. Although they've created a "special, almost magical, place," the Times opined, "no magic is so strong that it erases a landowner's right to either his property or its fair value."
rony abounds here like vegetables in a well-tended garden plot. Most of the plot holders are immigrants from Mexico and Central America. A generation of neoliberal policies in Latin America has turned smallholder farming there into an economic disaster, sending legions of displaced farmers north in search of gainful employment. These immigrants-whose hard work for low pay has helped underwrite the U.S. inflation miracle, keeping interest rates low so consumers can, well, consume-find few opportunities to grow their own food here in El Norte. In this case, when they did gain access to kitchen plots, the invisible fist of neoliberalism swooped down again, powered as always by property's inalienable right.

Yet the ironies go deeper than double-displacement-deeper even than plunking a big-box warehouse, groaning with goods manufactured by low-wage workers in China, on top of a food source for low-wage Latino workers in the United States. To understand fully the brazenness of Horowitz's power play-and the feebleness of the Times' response to it-you have to sift through the details of how the developer gained title to the land.

Like most urban community gardens, this one sprang up on land that no one much wanted originally. In the late 1980s, the city seized the land under eminent domain from an investment group led by Horowitz. Horowitz's investment company ended up receiving $4.7 million in compensation. The city's plan: to build an incinerator to generate electricity by burning trash.

Most people don't like to live amid the stench of garbage, so the neighborhood successfully organized to stop that project. By the time of the Rodney King rebellion in 1992, the lot had become trash-strewn and abandoned. The city agreed to allow the Los Angeles Food Bank to invite neighborhood residents to transform it into a community garden. By all accounts, neighborhood residents rallied around the asset, turning it into a vital source of fresh food in an area with few grocery stores.

Here is how Dean Kuipers, whose piece in the LA CityBeat for Jan. 26, 2005 remains the best account of the farm's plight so far, describes it:

"The contrast with community gardens elsewhere in the city is shocking. These aren't tiny weekend projects with a few tomatoes and California poppies. The 330 spaces here are large, 20 X 30 feet, many of them doubled- and tripled-up into larger plots, crammed with a tropical density of native Mesoamerican plants -- full-grown guava trees, avocados, tamarinds, and palms draped in vines bearing huge pumpkins and chayotes, leaf vegetables, corn, seeds like chipilin grown for spice, and rank upon rank of cactus cut for nopales. The families who work these plots are all chosen to receive one because they are impoverished by USDA standards, and use them to augment their household food supply. These are survival gardens."

But the birth of a thriving, productive community garden wasn't the only thing that changed in the area after the King riots. In the 1990s, the city of Los Angeles dropped a cool $2.4 billion to build out the Alameda Corridor, "a modern rail and big-truck super-pipeline from the Port of Los Angeles straight through the warehouses of South L.A. and Vernon," Kuipers writes. And that made the once-depressed warehouse district an important hub for big-box retailers to organize the booming influx of goods from points west, including China. In turn, South Central land suddenly became very valuable.

In his dealings with the city in the 1980s, Horowitz had retained right of first refusal if the city ever decided to sell the land. In 2003, after repeated lawsuits had failed to force the city to resell it to him, he cut an out-of-court deal with city attorney Rockard "Rocky" Delgadillo. The city sold Horowitz back the parcel of land for $5 million. His campaign to bulldoze the garden began soon thereafter.

Here is where the story really gets interesting. In its March 11 2006 editorial, the LA Times averred that "the bottom line is that the courts ruled for Horowitz." But that's not true. Horowitz regained the land in a back-room deal with Delgadillo, not in court.

Sound familiar? You can find more info on Horowitz's assault here.

In conjunction with the local City Council representative, Jan Perry, who supported the warehouse project, Horowitz also proposed reserving a small area of the site for soccer fields. In 2003, the city council, with Perry in the lead, agreed to sell back the property for essentially the same amount the city had paid 17 years before.
Racial Tensions Fuel the Fight

A bitter and protracted struggle took place during the next three years, including a lawsuit filed on a pro bono basis by Hadsell & Stormer, a progressive law firm, on behalf of the farmers. Two young farmer-activists decided the only way to save the farm was through action, including strong attacks through fliers, press releases, and web postings against the developer.

Council member Perry, who is African American, was allied on the issue with a predominantly African-American community development organization that had first opposed the incinerator project because of potential health and environmental impacts. Working closely with Horowitz, they sharply opposed the farmers. The tension between the two groups, with its implied racial overtones (African American against Latino immigrants) and changing community demographics (the large influx of Latino immigrants from Mexico and Central America in an historically African-American neighborhood), complicated the debate. Much of the rhetoric focused on the value of the urban farm versus the assumption of property rights.

Perry told LA Weekly in June that she wanted to see environmentally sound jobs created on the site and a redevelopment project that would pump money back into the neighborhood. She told another L.A. news service that she had always advocated a plan to find alternative locations for the farmers.

Note the lack of specifics in Perry's plan for the farmers, please.

What is delicious about this, in an ironic sense, is the crash of industrial real estate in California that resulted from the economic downturn nationwide Horowitz, please FSM, may yet be stuck with a white elephant as port traffic moves.

Not that that's going to help the poor people of LA -- or Fresno.

I was taking light rail up from the South Bay to downtown. I live in the valley north of LA, and that wasn't a typical mass transit ride for me. I was reading the newspaper when I looked up to see a cornfield by my window. A cornfield in LA! And the cornfield when on and on. It was, like, longer than the Beverly Center even! It was amazing!

I have to see this documentary. Thanks for the heads up on this.

stadiums, why can't community organizations buy condemned land for gardens?

There are tax sales on the courthouse steps at least once a month here. Is it done differently in other states?

i'm so sad right now.

still: the website i linked to above has organizational meetings and a fresh webpage that's updated this month. so clearly, they're are fighting for something.

goddamn walmart. goddamn all the warehouse-to-store-imported-crap-made-by-foreign-slaves building scum of this earth. i hate them all.

Might as well throw some shoes, if only verbally.