Well, Penn Horticultural Society finally sent out the results to the contestants in the City Gardens Contest, and our lovely side garden garnered… *drum roll* Honorable Mention.  I was hoping for more, but at least it gets us free entry to the 2010 Flower Show next year for the award ceremony.  Next time around, we may even own the lots our garden sits on!

Last night, I attended the Urban Sustainability Forum’s discussion on vacant land re-use along with Becky and our friend Kevin.  It’s a sad day when we find ourselves taking advice from Flint, Michigan on how to deal with our problems.  Of course, I kid—we don’t have a monopoly on good ideas (in fact, we seem to have more than our fair share of asinine ones…) and as long as we intelligently scale the ideas up (Flint has less than 1/10 our population), it’s worth looking at.  The main pieces of the Flint plan were: make the foreclosure process predictable and easier for cities to initiate, create a public entity to do the redevelopment, putting profits from the sale of high-value vacant land into keeping the lower-value properties maintained (instead of speculators’ pockets), and planning redevelopment projects where they have the most impact on the surrounding property values.

I did get up to ask whether Philly would be looking to create any programs to deal with vacant land under the GreenWorks program—it seems like we could benefit from bringing back some variation on the old NTI sidelot program aimed towards getting lots back into the hands of people who have a vested interest in maintaining them.  I was disappointed to hear that, as of right now, the city doesn’t see how this could be beneficial.  I really need to get clarification from the RDA, because her answer—that vacant land in the hands of private owners doesn’t benefit the community—didn’t make much sense.  Given that Dan Kildee, the guy from Michigan, had just gotten done telling us that having vacant land maintained and blight-free is probably the best thing that cities can hope for.  Given that most of these lots, if not fenced up, fill up with trash, provide cover for drug sales and petty crime, and bring down property values of the entire neighborhood.  Given that the city desperately needs money right now and would benefit from unloading some of these plots of land, even at slightly less than market value.

Makes sense to me, I guess…