{"id":1457,"date":"2020-10-27T08:26:19","date_gmt":"2020-10-27T13:26:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/envs110-198-498\/?p=1457"},"modified":"2020-10-27T08:26:19","modified_gmt":"2020-10-27T13:26:19","slug":"without-a-right-to-garden-law-it-may-be-illegal-to-grow-your-own-food","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/envs110-198-498\/2020\/10\/27\/without-a-right-to-garden-law-it-may-be-illegal-to-grow-your-own-food\/","title":{"rendered":"Without a \u2018Right to Garden\u2019 Law, It May Be Illegal to Grow Your Own Food"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

City ordinances that require a well-manicured lawn and ban most kinds of gardening + \u00a0bitchy neighbors + probably some racial crap = you can’t grow your own food in your own yard. My solution: don’t live in places that have such laws.<\/p>\n

Nicole and Dan Virgil, who live in Elmhurst, a suburb of Chicago, are dedicated vegetable gardeners.<\/p>\n

A few weeks after their hoop house went up, Nicole found a violation notice from the city taped to it. \u201cI thought it had to be some kind of misunderstanding, that it couldn\u2019t possibly be serious,\u201d recalls Nicole. She had assumed that the hoop house, a lightweight temporary structure akin to a tent, wouldn\u2019t be subject to city regulations.<\/p>\n

After several discussions with city officials, 16 public meetings over two years, a lawsuit filed by the Virgils, and a subsequent appeal, the city remained unmoved, siding with the neighbor who had filed the original complaint.<\/strong> The Virgils found themselves stuck in a catch-22 of having an unpermitted temporary structure while having no way to get a permit for a temporary structure. Facing a daily fine, they took down their hoop house.<\/p>\n

\"Inside<\/p>\n

Inside the Virgil\u2019s hoop house.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Why would a backyard hoop house be so contentious? The Virgils are among many home gardeners around the country who have triggered a city or county ordinance that restricts edible gardening.<\/strong> It\u2019s fairly common for local governments to have a broadly written landscape ordinance, which may not explicitly prohibit vegetable gardening but requires grass or similar vegetation and calls for plants within a certain height.<\/p>\n

The neatly manicured yard<\/a> has long been a status symbol;<\/strong> lawns first appeared in the 1700s on European estates, whose owners could afford to have high-maintenance living carpets. And the suburbs have historically differentiated themselves from \u201cag land.\u201d \u201cA lot of rural land was developed into suburban municipalities, and the zoning code was changed to prohibit agricultural uses\u2014people didn\u2019t want a pig farm to move in,\u201d says Laura Calvert, the former executive director of Chicago-based nonprofit Advocates for Urban Agriculture<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Given the context, it\u2019s easy to see how the neighbors might look down on home gardening as a form of subsistence farming. \u201cPeople think that it\u2019s beneath them,\u201d says Nicole, who documented her struggle in a recent op-ed for the Chicago Tribune<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

The goal of these ordinances, whether they\u2019re about landscaping or temporary structures, is to maintain property values. (The racist practice of redlining, which kept African Americans out of the suburbs<\/a>, was rationalized in the same way.) However, the perception that growing vegetables will drive down home values is \u201cnot rooted in any evidence,\u201d as Calvert points out.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

City ordinances that require a well-manicured lawn and ban most kinds of gardening + \u00a0bitchy neighbors + probably some racial crap = you can’t grow your own food in your own yard. My solution: don’t live in places that have Continue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":138,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environmental-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/envs110-198-498\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/envs110-198-498\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/envs110-198-498\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/envs110-198-498\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/138"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/envs110-198-498\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1457"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/envs110-198-498\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1457\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1459,"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/envs110-198-498\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1457\/revisions\/1459"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/envs110-198-498\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/envs110-198-498\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.owu.edu\/envs110-198-498\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}