En route from the Detroit Free Press’ downtown newsroom to my home on Detroit’s east side, past massive buildings and construction sites, the city fades to brownfields, where swaths of vacant land and lethargic structures long for new life with bated breath.
Sprinkled between occupied homes are vacant ones where drapes that have gone untouched since the 1960s peek through dusty windows. Overgrown ivy digs into the mortar of beautiful brick facades, cloaking Tudor-style dwellings, party stores and produce markets in green beards. I envision the generations of families that lived in those homes or worked in those shops, and the ghosts who have wandered for decades in their absence.
Some of these structures will sit for so long, they’ll meet their fate at the sharp end of an excavator. The opportunity for the land now boundless, those patches of dust become ripe with potential for what any imagination projects onto them.
Many inhabitants envision new residential developments. Others see possibilities for small businesses, schools, theaters or grocery stores. A growing multitude, however, sees potential for farmland — land for cultivating fresh food and fruit orchards, green pastures where chickens graze and lay eggs, a place where busy bees can produce sticky, golden honey.
And the tension between these schools of thought is fraught.
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As Detroit aims to bolster its reputation for pioneering in urban agriculture, it is anchored by African American elders whose ancestral gardening wisdom birthed and sustained the city’s urban gardens, yet challenged by others who question just how agricultural the city should be.
The Black community’s relationship with growing food is colored by exploitive practices, from slavery to sharecropping, tenant farming and peonage, or debt servitude. Black farmers experienced massive land dispossession in the 20th century with continued loss in land ownership in more recent years due, in part, to systemic discriminatory practices. According to the U.S. Agriculture Department’s 2022 Census of Agriculture released earlier this year, Black farmers accounted for just 1.4% of the country’s 3.4 million producers, reflecting a 4% decline from 2017 and an 8% drop in the number of Black-operated farms between 2017 and 2022.
It’s apropos that some, namely Great Migration-era Detroiters and their descendants, have little interest in this once-bustling metropolis morphing into any semblance of the rural South they and their ancestors deliberately left behind.
The agricultural landscape
Today, approximately 2,200 urban gardens sprawl across the city of Detroit. On residential blocks, urban farmers have sown fields of greens into the tapestry of neighborhoods where rows of single-family homes have been demolished. Now, beside many a traditional homeowner grabbing newspaper deliveries from her front porch is a farm owner laying newsprint to remediate lead-ridden soil with organic material.
And in neighborhoods with vast amounts of contiguous green space, agricultural romantics with dreams of country-like living within the big city are taking on ambitious farming and homesteading operations as if in a verdant Michigan farm town.
Behind an ethereal magnolia tree in the Regent Park neighborhood on Detroit’s far east side is a 1-acre homestead blossoming with fruit trees, cucamelons, nasturtiums, Armenian cucumbers and onions. There are animals, too. On this bounty of land roams a farm cat, a large-breed guardian dog, four Muscovies and two Indian runner ducks that splash in a swimming pool near a quaint duck house. The duck-tending operators of the homestead they call the Detroit Hoodstead are Dakarai Carter, Kamaria Gray and a farmhand — their 2-year-old daughter Cozi.
“We started growing this food in an effort to give it away for free to our neighbors, so that they have access to healthy food and a diversified palate,” Gray said.
Having worked in the nonprofit sector, where she once offered cooking lessons to high school students, Gray observed the city’s food security flaws under a microscope. She learned that the quality of produce in the students’ neighborhoods was subpar, and most lacked the access to transportation to shuttle them to places like Whole Foods. When Gray and Carter, Detroit natives, moved into the Detroit Hoodstead in 2020, they experienced a similar issue — the nearest grocery store offered shrink-wrapped, high-priced produce that expired quickly.
“There’s no access to real healthy foods here,” Gray said.
She sees Detroit as a city fit for urban farming because of its land abundance, but also for its makeup as a predominantly Black metropolis.
“This whole idea that Detroit is coming back, that’s weird,” she said — the consensus among native Detroiters: Detroit never left.
“But I think that farming coming back for Black people is really beautiful. With all of these empty lots and abandoned houses … and purposely denied neighborhoods, I think it’s very important for us to take back the land for Black and Indigenous people.”
The city has ramped up its efforts to support Detroit’s agrarian industry. An Urban Agriculture Ordinance was passed in 2013, and would inspire the Animal Keeping Ordinance passed by City Council earlier this month. The ordinance, which will take effect in January, allows Detroiters to legally keep limited numbers of chickens, ducks and bee hives in their own backyards. In 2022, the city launched the Neighborhood Beautification Program, providing funding for organizations looking to execute agricultural projects on up to four vacant lots in their community.
In 2023, Mayor Mike Duggan named the city’s first director of urban agriculture, who would work to improve policies and processes that impact urban farmers. And when Detroit crafted its Land Value Tax Plan, a proposal that would increase taxes on vacant land, special protections were put in place specifically for urban farmers.
When urban ag is not for all
The city’s agricultural roots run deep beneath the clay-laden soil we tread today. Modern-day growers credit those who migrated to Detroit from the South for the rich agricultural traditions that are upheld to this day. Having ancestral wisdom that dates to a dark history of exploitation for farm work, these Black Detroiters helped plant the seeds of the city’s urban agricultural movement with their own backyard gardens.
Kathryn Lynch Underwood, a lifelong Detroiter and retired senior planner for the City Planning Commission, recalls a time when having a backyard garden was a birthright for most Black Detroiters.
“When I was coming up in the ’60s and ’70s, we didn’t think of it as agriculture in Detroit, everybody just had a garden. That’s what you did,” said Underwood, who spearheaded the city’s Urban Agriculture Ordinance back in 2013. “It’s important for everyone to have a sense of the legacy of Black folks doing agriculture in Detroit.”
And yet despite having an integral role in establishing Detroit’s urban agriculture movement, it’s the Great Migration-era Detroiters who fled a rural Jim Crow South for more urban environments who tend to have the most difficulty reconciling the densely populated metropolis they once knew, and the progressively agrarian turn some neighborhoods are beginning to take.
Underwood explained that these new residents relocated to Detroit with the intention of buying into a neighborhood, not just a home, and underscored the stark contrast between tending a backyard garden and transmuting a vacant lot into a full-fledged farm or garden.
“In the ’50s, ’60s and into the ’70s, those neighborhoods were full of houses — there weren’t empty lots or deteriorated housing. So, they bought into a lifestyle and that lifestyle, even though they may have had a garden, it didn’t look like the rural place in which they had come from.”
As neighborhoods disintegrated in an era of abandonment and yearslong vacancy, Underwood said, younger generations saw the potential in urban gardening, while many of those Southern migrants resisted.
“There were people that pushed back because it was like, ‘This isn’t what I bought into when I moved into this neighborhood. It didn’t look like this,’ ” she said, noting that newer residents were not always sensitive to their concerns. Nor the historical context that may have motivated them.
For this demographic, Detroit was once a mirage, an urban escape from an exploitive agricultural lifestyle enshrouded in trauma and grief. A new vision where large stretches of farmland interrupt residential neighborhoods threatens that version of the American dream, and has a dangerous potential to evoke residual trauma.
“When you start talking about gardening and farming, it triggers stuff, because the reason we were brought to America was because of those skills we had,” said Dr. Joy DeGruy, an Atlanta-based psychologist and author of “Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing.”
“It triggers this feeling of oppression and pictures of the cotton fields and elicits the feelings that come with them.”
As a Black homesteader myself, I’ve been met with resistance to farm work in my networks. My own family members have teased that the 13th Amendment freed them from watering my garden beds while I’ve been out of town. Just barely beneath the surface of the joke lurks a slippery truth: For some, freedom has divorced us from the land, and therefore, from the roots of our food system.
According to DeGruy, a natural response to being triggered is emotional shutdown.
“When you’re triggered, you have to sit and unpack that — but that part’s never been done,” she said.
Generational angst
A vista where overgrown shrubs and blight might be replaced with raised beds does not always appeal to other longtime Detroiters, either. Often offspring of Great Migration-era residents, their pride in the city is rooted in its former glory.
There’s a Make Detroit Great Again sentiment among this population, which centers on a collective desire to see vacant land filled with small businesses, educational institutions and affordable homes — not water catchments. There’s a longing to flick on the floodlights at shuttered schools, though their kids are well into adulthood and the small children who once horse-played along their streets have faded into a distant past.
“When you have a city that’s dealing with depopulation and loss of housing stock, their thing is, ‘we want to build this back up.’ Vacancy is not a good thing, but agriculture is not the highest and best use of land,” Underwood said. “People will say, ‘we want a grocery store in our neighborhood,’ and there’s hardly any neighborhood left.”
Angela Peavy, whose parents migrated to Detroit from Mississippi in 1956, gets misty at the nostalgic memory of the version of a Detroit she once knew. Raised since she was 8 years old in the city’s Outer Drive-Hayes neighborhood, Peavy purchased her childhood home in 1975, and has lived there since. Soon, a third generation will move into the home when her daughter and son-in-law purchase the property.
“I get emotional reminiscing about all the things we had,” she said, adding that there were once at least three bowling alleys in the neighborhood.
I also live in Outer Drive-Hayes. For seven years, my home in this neighborhood has been a humble retreat from the gloss and hustle of downtown Detroit.
Evolution here is slow, at a standstill even. The party store whose signage indicates it was once a destination for pizza, beer, wine, lottery tickets, check-cashing and money orders, sold its last items years before my Detroit arrival. Car washes have gone dry, auto body shops have sat empty and I’ve never seen the gates raised on the styling salon that greets me at my Interstate 94 exit. The most notable movement here is the game of musical chairs among tenants who move in and out of homes — many owned by out-of-town landlords — and cars lined up at fast-food joints along Harper Avenue.
It’s difficult to envision the Outer Drive-Hayes that my in-laws invested in more than 30 years ago. The place where my mother-in-law hand-delivered a heartfelt offer letter to the homeowner of her current house in an attempt to land her dream home while pregnant with her second child. Or the place where Peavy recalled neighbors frequenting movie theaters and chain grocery stores and where parents had options for schools to send their children.
The idea that sleepy properties and patches of Detroit Land Bank Authority-owned vacant lots would become urban gardens is antithetical to Peavy’s vision for Detroit.
“I have kind of softened my position, as long as (the farm) is organized and it’s in a larger field,” she said, “but the thought of a farm on a vacant lot in the middle of my block — I still am against that.”
In a perfect world, Peavy believes Detroit would resemble a time when whole families lived in the Outer Drive-Hayes neighborhood, maintained their properties, were able to find work and had access to quality schools, libraries and entertainment in their own communities.
“I would like a sustainable community,” she said. “I want what they’ve got in Sterling Heights right here in my neighborhood, because we used to have it. I want what they’ve got in Grosse Pointe, because we used to have it.”
Instead, Peavy has encountered traces of a more ruralized Detroit. She has been caught off guard by increasing rabbit sightings, an animal species she does not recollect seeing as a youth in Outer Drive-Hayes. She was even more perplexed when she spotted a flock of chickens roaming at the intersection of Outer Drive and Gratiot Avenue a few years ago. “This is getting out of hand,” she said.
The wild, wild Midwest
My earliest glimpse into Detroit’s countryside feel was my introduction to Fanny, the magnificent pheasant who would visit my backyard when I first moved to the city in 2017. A native New Yorker, I didn’t recognize his red face or spotted feathers, his long tail or the loud call he’d sing from atop my garage. A turkey, I thought, and eventually gave him a moniker: my ’hood rooster.
The population decline and subsequent land vacancy has led to a natural rewilding of Detroit. Sprawling fields have become habitats for native plant life and wild animals: beavers, coyotes and various bird species. Growers planting pollinator gardens and trees have contributed their share to urban rewilding, drawing bees and butterflies to the city and adding to its pastoral charm.
For more than a decade, Detroit officials have worked to introduce the Animal Keeping Ordinance that Council approved Nov. 12. This ordinance embraces the presence of livestock and bees through animal husbandry.
Sponsored by Detroit City Council President Pro Tem James Tate, the Animal Keeping Ordinance has legalized the keeping of eight chickens and ducks combined, and four beehives per Detroit household.
“For years, Detroiters have wanted a better opportunity to determine what they do with the land that they pay taxes on,” Tate said. “They also have wanted to ensure that they had a better understanding of the food that they provide to their families.” Tate added that residents have expressed interest in utilizing animal byproducts, such as eggs, honey and even feathers for textiles, noting that animal butchery is only at licensed slaughterhouses — not at residential properties.
Kimani Jeffrey, a member of Detroit’s Planning Commission, said the intention of the ordinance is threefold: “To encourage people to come under a uniform policy of best practices in the vein of trying to protect the health, welfare and safety of the community. To give people a way to do this legally, and to contribute to a more sustainable food system.”
Tate, Jeffrey and an interdepartmental working group of city agencies have preached the gospel of animal husbandry throughout the city, and while they’ve garnered more than 500 letters of support, Tate said the ordinance is challenging for Great Migration-era residents to accept.
“When pressed to go deeper into their objection, it comes down to a philosophical difference,” Tate said of his many interactions with residents opposed to the Animal Keeping Ordinance. “It’s not so much in terms of harm, it’s more philosophical — ‘These animals don’t belong in the city, they belong in the country.’ ”
During public hearings for the Animal Keeping Ordinance, opponents have cited other concerns, such as potential diseases carried by chickens, bee sting allergies, noise nuisance and questions of enforcement by Detroit Animal Control — a perceived inability for the department to have a handle on stray cats and dogs in the city taints many detractors’ trust in regulating livestock.
But that philosophical difference is deafening, and has echoed through Council chambers. “I didn’t move to this neighborhood for farm life,” one woman said at a February hearing. “Not in a residential neighborhood,” said another.
According to Underwood, who helped lay the groundwork for the Animal Keeping Ordinance before her retirement, introducing livestock to the discourse has been polarizing from the start. “There is no middle ground with animals,” she said. “That’s why it was always very important to me that there was a specific rationale behind the policy, other than Chicago or Atlanta had it.”
Underwood said she and her team conducted extensive research to explore how animal husbandry would function specifically in a Detroit context. They turned to institutions such as the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development for guidance on the ideal conditions for both Detroit residents and the animals in question.
“It was about looking at the amount of space that the animals need to be healthy, and also what kind of setbacks we need to try to keep the neighbors happy.”
Changing seasons
The allure of Detroit is in its contrasts. Once the richest city in America, its opulence is astounding. Still-standing 19th-century edifices are stoic in their carved stone, while more humble enclaves dazzle with colorful murals that recite poetry on corroded brick. Gritty urban areas littered with various attractions sit beside idyllic nature escapes.
A city that offers the thrill of an urban lifestyle and the respite of a remote farm town appeals to me, and the potential of a food-sovereign landscape where residents exchange eggs and honey with neighbors instead of cups of sugar gets me giddy. I can’t deny that I’d be proud to live in a Detroit where urban cowboys ride horseback down back roads, or where goats clear land in place of lawn mowers.
I represent a new generation, though. I’m a thirty-something native New Yorker whose utopian vision is for a city not inherently my own, and therefore, I represent the very demographic that Theresa Landrum, president of the Original United Citizens of Southwest Detroit block club and a Detroit resident of more than 40 years, is critical of.
Landrum has been a vocal opponent of Detroit’s Animal Keeping Ordinance, along with a troupe of fellow southwest Detroit residents, namely from the Boynton and Oakwood Heights neighborhoods. Among Landrum’s many concerns about animal husbandry are risk of disease, density in her district — homes are too close together, meaning livestock could interfere with neighbors’ property; lack of transparency — she has criticized the city working group behind the ordinance for leaving a number of residents in the dark on the ordinance, particularly those on the less accessible side of the digital divide; and a skepticism of city officials’ capacity to properly enforce the ordinance.
“We want our neighbors to live in comfort,” she said. “We have to look at how you interfere with your neighbor.”
Landrum worries that the introduction of animals in areas like hers will lead to disputes among neighbors. She’s also skeptical of the outsiders and those with “special-interest” agendas who are “changing the makeup of the city,” their ideas projected onto the neighborhood she has lived in for so long.
“A lot of people did not move up here from the South, or me being born here to parents from the South, to have my quality of life and my peace invaded because somebody got chickens on either side and behind me,” she said, adding her perception that the ordinance is designed in the interest of outsiders. “A lot of people that spoke at the hearings that are for it haven’t been in Detroit 50, 60, 70 years. We’ve been here 60-plus years, and we have no say.”
Tate maintains that he and the team have thoughtfully considered native Detroiters over the decade of working on the ordinance, noting that members of his own family, his mother even, share that philosophical difference.
“The more we talk, I start to understand a little bit more of the why, especially from some of my older relatives who may feel that way,” he said. “And they’re starting to learn a little bit more about the fact that it’s not an ‘others ordinance,’ trying to attract others to the city of Detroit or to appease suburbanites who move to Detroit. This is a Detroit-born-and-bred movement that has been picking up steam over the years.”
Speaking with Peavy, I shared why I’m so enchanted by Detroit and its city-rural feel. And while she understood why a New Yorker might see the charm in Detroit’s slower pace and land abundance, she was tickled at the thought that the agricultural potential could be a draw for an outsider.
“I didn’t think that the thought for people that were coming from other places was, ‘I can farm in Detroit,’ ” she said, incredulously. “What I think Detroit is — is not that. And maybe because I was born and raised here, that’s why there’s pushback from the old guard because we’re like, ‘Hey, this isn’t that! What are you doing?’ I did not know we were viewed that way.”
In it together
Like a game of tug-of-war, some Detroiters aim to push the urban agriculture industry forward, while those on the opposing side are vehemently muscling for a return to the metropolitan way things were.
Gray, of the Detroit Hoodstead, believes the philosophies among both communities share more commonalities than differences.
“I agree that there should be schools and grocery stores and all of these things,” she said. But Gray believes urban agriculture producers are developing some of those amenities through their work. She points to Avalon Village in Highland Park, where Shamayim “Mama Shu” Harris has been recognized for transforming vacant lots into a sustainable neighborhood featuring a community garden, as well as a homework house for children and a marketplace for female entrepreneurs.
She looks to the Detroit People’s Food Co-Op, the city’s first community-owned grocery store in Detroit’s North End neighborhood. The development was founded by the Detroit Black Community Food Sovereignty Network, which also operates D-Town Farm, a 7-acre farm on Detroit’s west side.
“All of these things are important for the health of our race,” she said. “Walking into a co-op with a bunch of Black faces on the walls like that — I can’t explain how it makes me feel, but I’ve never felt like that before in my life.”
Gray sees land ownership as a gateway to the very projects many of the elders hope to see reintroduced.
“The more that we are allowed to reclaim the land and revitalize the ground, the more those things will happen.” The real need, she said, is capital. Something that can be generated through intergenerational collaboration.
Someday, Gray hopes to open a one-room Montessori-style schoolhouse near the Detroit Hoodstead for young Black children. “It’d be hippie-dippie and they’d get to play in the mud, but that takes money and permits. We want that stuff, too. Maybe we should talk to each other and help each other out.”
