Cannabis Grow

Our verification efforts, confined to 47 delivery businesses serving 4 diverse block groups, found that only half actually delivered to designated locations. Cao et al. show value in combining listings from multiple crowd sourced platforms plus official license listings to increase sensitivity and specificity, but the address search function appears unique to Weedmaps: official license listings and other websites do not indicate the region to which each retailer delivers. Duplicative listings were also more common for delivery retailers than for brick-and-mortar outlets. Listings of delivery services may therefore require special de-duplication procedures. Retailers reporting to deliver statewide—and those operating exclusively through websites, apps, or text messaging—may require additional verification. Further, missingness must be assessed: although Weedmaps’ name recognition means that businesses are strongly incentivized to list themselves, some delivery businesses may not register on Weedmaps, and reported availability of home delivery should be compared to that from individual companies offering home delivery . The challenges for measuring cannabis delivery are also conceptual. Standard methods assume that availability is fixed in space and time, drain trays for plants based only on physical proximity between residential addresses and brick-and-mortar outlets. Yet we found that home delivery varies dynamically as a function of staffing levels, order sizes, time of day, competition, and demand.

Researchers will therefore need to adopt standard definitions sensitive to this variation in availability, along with differences in price between the two sources. In the absence of fixed geographic delivery zones, researchers must think carefully about how to operationalize cannabis availability in light of home delivery by revising existing conceptual models . Different conceptualizations of cannabis availability for brick-and-mortar versus delivery may also have differing implications for cannabis use and related harms. Whether such differences exist and why should be evaluated. In future research, consumer surveys of cannabis purchasing patterns should be used to quantify variation in home delivery utilization and to validate Weedmaps data. Such surveys, although costly, should also examine the implications of home delivery for enforcement of public health regulations. As a proprietary business, Weedmaps could change its data on delivery services at any time. Researchers should therefore encourage state regulatory agencies to monitor the geographic footprint of cannabis delivery businesses by incorporating defined delivery zones as a component of licensing. Other states permitting home delivery do so only with restrictions such as these. Monitoring the scale of the cannabis home delivery is warranted because more states are legalizing cannabis. Growing availability of cannabis through home delivery could translate into increases in cannabis-related benefits and harms. Methodological work to measure home delivery also has implications for other commercial substances, including alcohol and tobacco, for which home delivery is also increasingly common, understudied, and challenged by measurement.

Generalizabilty of this study may be limited because the scale of home delivery in California is unique. Thus, varying contexts must also be evaluated, as the accuracy of our method may vary by social context and cannabis market characteristics.Humboldt County has been an epicenter of cannabis cultivation for decades, and an element of social division has characterized the region: the “back-to-the-landers” versus the born-and-raised locals, the “hippies” versus the “rednecks,” and the pot growers versus the loggers and ranchers . However, as cannabis cultivation has been decriminalized in California, the social dynamics around cannabis have become more complex. Over the last 20 years, new growers from different parts of California, the United States and even outside the United States have moved to Humboldt County and surrounding areas to grow cannabis — a so-called green rush of growers hoping to strike it rich . Growers have come from a host of countries beyond the United States, including Bulgaria, Russia, Mexico and nations in Southeast Asia . Some work independently while others work together in operations that may qualify as more organized. For many Humboldt County residents — “mom-and-pop” cannabis growers and more traditional agricultural producers alike — the near-exponential growth of the industry has been a shock, and it has unleashed numerous social, economic and environmental concerns.This situation is not unique to Humboldt — cannabis cultivation has increased rapidly throughout rural California . California voters, when they legalized cannabis for adult recreational use in 2018, created conditions for competition among agricultural interests and changes in rural social dynamics.

Indeed, because new cannabis farming is often conducted near traditional ranching and timber-producing lands , the potential for conflict — or collaboration — between traditional land uses and cannabis production has grown. But little research documents the effects of cannabis production on traditional agricultural producers, and therefore we know little about such producers’ adaptation to change. Understanding this dynamic is important for local governments as they develop land use policies to govern when, where and how much cannabis production is permissible . Cannabis production’s effects on neighbors is an important point for local government officials to consider as they develop and adopt new policies to encourage the transition of black-market cannabis operations into compliant operations. The effects of cannabis production on neighbors is also important to consider while formulating policies to mitigate unintended consequences — such as unwanted odors and nighttime lights — which can exacerbate land use and social conflicts. For example, should cannabis be allowed on lands zoned for timber production or prime agriculture? Should cannabis production be allowed in cities and in unincorporated towns? What areas are compatible or incompatible with cannabis? Increased cannabis production can directly or indirectly affect traditional agriculture and timber producers. Over the last decade, cannabis cultivation has expanded rapidly in rural communities, with many cannabis farmers having moved only recently to the areas where they grow . These new arrivals are sometimes described as green rush growers. Conflicts can arise if new growers, who are often unaware of community norms, don’t manage workers appropriately, control dogs, close gates, help maintain shared roads — or if, in other ways, they complicate operations for traditional agricultural producers. Likewise, even cannabis producers who have been in business for many years — including some whose families have grown cannabis for two generations — may hold different views of rural life than do traditional agriculture and timber producers . In addition, while cannabis is now legal in California, many cannabis farmers still grow outside the regulated system, and some traditional agricultural producers may retain the sense that illegal activity is negatively affecting their community. In recent years, the environmental impacts of cannabis cultivation have been a matter of increasing focus in California, and traditional agricultural producers and other community members have voiced concerns about water diversions , pollution from chemical fertilizers , the impacts of pesticides on wildlife , light pollution and forest fragmentation . Concerns have also arisen regarding negative impacts on local livestock producers and challenges for public land managers attempting to control trespass growing operations . At the same time, 4 x 8 grow tray cannabis cultivation can contribute to community well-being in a variety of ways. It can bring economic gains to rural areas where the timber, livestock and fisheries industries have experienced declines. For example, cannabis cultivation can provide new business opportunities to traditional agricultural producers in the form of heavy equipment work, firewood sales, trucking, forest management or construction services. In addition, cannabis production may help buffer population declines such as those experienced in many of California’s rural areas over the last 20 years; in particular, rural schools may benefit from the enrollment of cannabis growers’ children. More broadly, cannabis farmers can bring new energy to rural communities through engagement at schools, volunteer fire departments and other points of gathering. Traditional growers’ perceptions of cannabis farmers can vary based on several factors, including the scale at which cannabis farmers operate. Scales of operation have expanded greatly over the last 20 years. Some cannabis farmers produce a few plants for personal use, others augment their incomes by growing moderate amounts of cannabis and still others grow on an industrial scale, with multiple operations on numerous parcels. One might expect traditional agricultural producers to regard these different varieties of cannabis growers differently. But large landowners are themselves not homogenous — for example, some are absentees.

In this research we hypothesized that absentee landowners would have different experiences and perceptions of the cannabis industry than do traditional producers who live on their land. Humboldt County and many communities around California are currently setting ordinances to manage legal cannabis production. But as they do so, little is known about the potential interaction of cannabis with traditional agriculture and timber producers and whether these industries are compatible. Information about the effects of cannabis production on traditional agricultural producers may be helpful to policy makers because traditional producers are often important contributors to rural economies and stewards of public trust resources such as wildlife and clean water. We conducted this research with the goal of determining how larger landowners — who, in Humboldt County, are generally timber or beef producers — experience and perceive cannabis production. We surveyed by mail all landowners in Humboldt County who own at least 500 acres . We asked a series of questions about landowner experiences with the cannabis industry and how the industry directly affected landowners’ economic well-being, community, property and personal safety. We also asked how, in their view, the cannabis industry influences the community and the environment. We asked landowners to provide their views on grower demographics and on changes in their communities over time. In addition, we compared the experiences and perceptions of absentee and non-absentee landowners.Humboldt County has long been among the leading cannabis-producing regions in the United States . Located on the North Coast of California, Humboldt County is characterized by steep terrain and a Mediterranean climate; a climatic gradient runs from the cooler and wetter coastline to the drier and warmer in lands . Humboldt County’s agricultural and timber industries are significant in scale, with agricultural production amounting to $326 million in 2016 and timber production amounting to $70 million in the same year — although the timber numbers are down from a decade ago. These agricultural production numbers do not include cannabis production revenues, but recent estimates put cannabis production in the larger Humboldt, Trinity and Mendocino region, known as the “Emerald Triangle,” at $5 billion annually . Humboldt County is home to numerous species of concern — including threatened and endangered salmonids, spotted owls, marbled murrelets, fishers and so on — that are protected under the U.S. Endangered Species Act . Cannabis cultivation occurs within these species’ habitat areas, including in locations near and adjacent to old-growth redwood and Douglas fir forests.The intent of the survey was to understand how cannabis production in Humboldt County was affecting traditional agricultural producers, and therefore we focused only on landowners with enough property to derive a large percentage of their income from agriculture and timber activities. We identified landowners with at least 500 acres by combining land use and tax roll data. In total, 211 landowners fit this description. Landowners were mailed a paper survey, along with a stamped, pre-addressed envelope in which to return it, in January 2018. After 3 weeks, follow-up postcards were sent to landowners who had not returned their surveys. In total, 71 landowners responded to the survey . Of these, two landowners reported owning less than 500 acres and one landowner did not confirm meeting this minimum standard; we did not include these three surveys in our analysis. All survey responses were anonymous.Surveys were organized into three sections. One portion of the survey asked landowners about their direct experiences with the cannabis industry, asking them to agree or disagree with 22 statements that corresponded to four themes: how the cannabis industry has affected the economics of their operations ; how cannabis has impacted their local community ; how cannabis has affected their properties and how cannabis has affected their safety . The surveys asked landowners to respond to each statement using a five-point Likert scale, with responses ranging from strong disagreement to strong agreement . Respondents could also respond “NA” to statements that did not apply to them. Additionally, respondents were given space at the end of each subsection to provide comments or examples. In another section of the survey, we tested respondents’ perceptions of cannabis by asking them how they felt about certain cannabis-related issues and whether cannabis cultivation has had positive or negative impacts on their communities, specifying that their responses should not necessarily be based on their personal experiences.

The study’s strength is that it provides a novel and timely snapshot of practices that may influence cannabis consumption in a rapidly evolving context. Surveillance of cannabis websites can complement and help to explain findings of the behavioral studies reporting increased cannabis use. This aspect of cannabis marketing may be more agile and difficult to capture with traditional marketing surveillance; the COVID-19 announcements appeared soon after lockdowns. By October 2021, all of these announcements had disappeared from all but one of the dispensary websites . This study captured a unique transient marketing activity, suggesting that during future societal events or stressors that might impact cannabis consumption, rapid surveillance of cannabis dispensary websites is warranted. The study has several limitations: it has a small sample size, this cross-sectional analysis of dispensary websites does not represent other types of cannabis websites or places without legal cannabis, and it addresses only dispensary COVID-19 announcements, not consumer behavior. This study adds perspectives on new COVID-19 related content to prior analyses of cannabis advertising, which also found retailers positioning themselves as healthcare providers. While we did not find explicit claims that cannabis could treat COVID-19, some announcements suggested ways to use cannabis to avoid infection, 4×4 grow tray or suggested cannabis products to use if experiencing anxiety; these implicit connections between cannabis and health are consistent with prior studies finding cannabis dispensary health benefit claims. 

This analysis was limited only to the COVID-19 announcements; a subsequent analysis of the full website content found that anxiety was the most common mental health claim, present on 80% of websites in this sample. This limited analysis of the COVID-19 announcements from a single time point early in the pandemic likely underestimates the potential influence dispensary marketing could have on cannabis consumption. While COVID-19 announcements had largely disappeared from dispensary websites by October 2021, an informal review of the dispensary websites included in this analysis in October 2021 found that one featured a blog post on the topic, “Can marijuana cure coronavirus?” and several websites featured blog posts about using cannabis for anxiety, a topic indirectly relevant to the stress of the ongoing pandemic. While this study does not address consumer behavior, another study found in states where cannabis is legally sold, people with mood or anxiety disorders were more likely to use cannabis to self medicate. The marketing tactics we observed to maintain cannabis availability and align with health authorities might contribute to increased cannabis use, particularly since other studies show stress and decreased access to medical services19 were associated with the pandemic.This study demonstrates that cannabis dispensary websites are a timely source of data on industry responses to rapidly changing events and public health policies that may impact cannabis consumption.

The study identified two tactics in the COVID-19 announcements preserved which might contribute to increased cannabis consumption: preserving ready access to cannabis as an essential service, and reinforcing perceptions of cannabis as a medicine and dispensaries as health services. While use of online ordering and delivery services has been documented in prior analyses of cannabis websites15 we found these services became nearly universal after stay-at-home orders. The increase in home delivery of cannabis and other intoxicants that accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic may persist, posing new challenges for surveillance research. Future studies should address the impact of cannabis marketing and messaging on consumer cannabis consumption and health-care seeking behavior during stressful events.The ancient hexactinellid sponges are associated with the Ediacaran Period, and they are one of the basal metazoans . Despite great interest in the group, the natural history of the Hexactinellida is poorly known, and the life history is largely derived from inferences. The Antarctic hexactinellid fauna is well described; however, they are generally found at depths greater than 30 m, making it very difficult to study them in situ. Thus, life history patterns of recruitment, growth and reproduction are poorly understood for most hexactinellid sponges, although they have been thought to be very slow in comparison to the more common demosponges. Much of this characterization of low recruitment and growth rates of Antarctic sponges is based on early research at McMurdo Sound. Three species of hexactinellid sponges comprise the bulk of the benthic biomass: the relatively small Rossella antarctica is very common, reproduces by budding and exhibited growth during the study, while the massive, volcano-shaped hexactinellids, Anoxycalyx joubini and Rossella nuda/racovitzae, had no recruitment or growth.

Anoxycalyx joubini is the largest and most conspicuous sponge in the Antarctic and although it has been observed as much as 2 m in height , it has never been observed to settle or grow which has led to estimates of extreme longevity. Here we present observations of remarkable episodic recruitment and growth and apparently high mortality of the hexactinellid, A. joubini, in McMurdo Sound, Antarctica. These observations call into question the validity of previously held generalizations, at least for this conspicuous species.The observations of recruitment and growth occurred on artificial, experimental structures located on each side of McMurdo Sound . The area around McMurdo Station is normally influenced by southerly currents bringing phytoplankton from a region north of Ross Island, which is often dominated by a large and productive polyna. Slow northerly currents sourced beneath the Barrier Ice bathe the Explorers Cove region of New Harbor. The currents at Explorers Cove advect very different and minimal plankton because the water mass has circulated under the Ross Ice Shelf. With the exception of a wooden gangplank dropped from a ship in 1960, all structures were purposefully placed in the 1960s and early 1970s. The gangplank is at a depth of 25–30 m located just north of Hut Point, McMurdo Station . During the 1970s, the gangplank and the surrounding area were subject to massive settlement of the demosponge, Homaxinella balfourensis; however, essentially all of these sponges were removed by anchor ice in the mid-1980s. Various cages in the vicinity of McMurdo Station were placed in 1967. Settling surfaces either supported off the substratum by iron and wood posts or suspended beneath floats as much as 30 m off the bottom were established along the Hut Point Peninsula from Cape Armitage to Cape Evans in 1974. Various types of settling substrates composed of PVC plates and pipes were suspended in the water column by floats at Explorers Cove in 1974–75. These floaters, or settling structures suspended by floats up to 20 m above the floor were at bottom depths of 24– 43 m . In addition, greenhouse racking platforms placed in the 1970s for experiments also served as habitat for recruitment and growth of sponges. This paper is based on regular observations from 1967 at Ross Island sites and from 1974 at Explorers Cove through the end of 1989. The Ross Island sites were re-visited in 1998, and all sites were re-visited in 2004. In 2004, photographs were taken of A. joubini that had settled on the gangplank and on Explorers Cove structures. Detailed sponge photographs were obtained in 2010 and one site was revisited and photographed in 2012. While the specific sites discussed in this paper were not visited between 1989 and 2004, no recruitment of the very conspicuous A. joubini was observed in the late 1990s on Ross Island. Therefore it is reasonable to assume that during the extensive diving by Kathy Conlan and others in that period, there would have been observations of some new sponges, had there been a strong recruitment event much prior to 1998.There was no sponge colonization on the gangplank in the 1960s, but in 1974–1978 there was virtually no anchor ice formation, facilitating heavy recruitment and settlement of the demosponge, H. balfourensis over the entire area.

Anchorice returned in the 1980s removing H. balfourensis, and by 1989 the gangplank was clean of sponges . From 1967 through 1989, there were no hexactinellid sponges on the gangplank, but sometime between 1989 and 2004, A. joubini settled and grew there. In 2010, 19 A. joubini were photographed on the gangplank, which together had an estimated mean biomass of 30 kg, with the largest sponge weighing over 76 kg . While several new A. joubini were observed on the bottom in the vicinity of McMurdo Station, only one other A. joubini had settled on an old predator exclusion cage at Cape Armitage . This sponge was observed to have grown almost 30% when the site was revisited in 2012, only two years later, demonstrating the potential of fast growth rates relative to the 1967 through 1989 period when no growth was observed. In Explorers Cove, no sponges were observed on settling surfaces from 1974 until 1989 when a few H. balfourensis were found on some floating surfaces and racks. In addition, one large floater that had been suspended about 15 m above the bottom in 1975 was observed to have two small hexactinellids, possibly A. joubini in 1989. In 2004 A. joubini were found on nearly all artificial substrates and by 2010, the racks and floats at Explorers Cove included individual sponges over 40 kg . It is important to note that the Explorers Cove data are underestimates of total sponges that have recruited to the floater and rack structures, because very large sponges observed in 2004 had fallen off their substrata by 2010. Massive sponges unbalanced and tipped one floater, dumping the sponges sometime before 2010 and several other floaters had simply sunk from the weight of the sponges. In all cases, piles of A. joubini spicules were found on the bottom where the sponges had landed. In addition, some of the very large sponges observed on racks had become large enough to push other sponges off the structure, again reducing the total estimate of recruited individuals and biomass to the structures over this time period . We do not know how many of these sponges either fell off their structures or sank their floater, nor do we know how they died; however, in a few cases sponges apparently were dislodged recently and appeared still alive but were infested with the amphipod, Seba antarctica and being consumed by Acodontaster conspicuous. While the exact cause of death is uncertain, it is clear that essentially all of them die after landing on the bottom. Even with many of the large sponges lost before we could measure them, the estimated mean sponge weight of A. joubini found on the floaters was over 13 kg and nearly 18 kg on the rack . We observed a high mortality of A. joubini. Nearly every sponge that fell from artificial substrates to the bottom after 2004 was deadn 2010– the exceptions were 2–3 sponges that were mostly dead and two sponges estimated to be 8 kg and 17 kg that had recently sunk a float. Moreover, all seven A. joubini observed in the 60 m basin area at Cape Armitage during 1967–68 were dead by 1977. We marked 35 large A. joubini at Cape Armitage, Hut Point and Explorers Cove in 1974 and 6 of these were dead by 1977 and none were alive in 2010. In addition, between 1974 and 1975 approximately 30 transect lines were laid at depths ranging from 20 to 60 m at Cape Armitage, Hut Point and Explorers Cove to follow long-term changes. When possible, transects were started near the large, conspicuous A. joubini to facilitate relocation. In total, transects included 15 large A. joubini at Cape Armitage and 10 at Explorers Cove, and none of these sponges were found alive in 2010. We do not know the ages of any of these sponges nor do we know precisely when they died, but all 67 of them died over 43 years. Finally, photographs taken in 2012 of the big sponges on the gangplank revealed that several appear to be dying, possibly from infestations of the amphipod S. antarctica, suggesting a much more rapid turnover of A. joubini than previously assumed. We have observed platelet ice formation on A. joubini at Cape Armitage and Hut Point in waters less then 33 m and anchor ice has been observed to kill sponge tissue of H. balfourensis, so it might also kill patches of A. joubini tissue.Anoxycalyx joubini is one of the dominant, structure-forming species in the McMurdo Sound region of Antarctica. Here we report a highly episodic, massive and Sound-wide recruitment event and subsequent growth spurt, which occurred mainly on artificial structures.

The trend held for all of the major components of the particle phase as well, including PG, VG, and nicotine. Clearly, PG is easier to aerosolize than VG. This is due to the differences in chemical structure, and correspondingly, viscosity, vapor pressure, and boiling point. VG has one more OH group than PG, which results in stronger hydrogen bond intermolecular forces in the e-liquidsolution. The order of magnitude higher viscosity of VG at room temperature, requires more energy for vaporizing the solution. Moreover, the coil temperatures in Table 3.2 already surpass the boiling point of PG but are below the boiling point of VG . This is consistent with the high aerosol production when pure PG was used, and the high PG fraction in the gas phase The difference in total aerosol mass when vaping pure PG versus pure VG e-liquids at 375 °F suggests that PG was lost from the e-liquid at 8 times the rate of VG. This observation was corroborated in the mixed e-liquid using the gaseous CIMS and particle filter GC-MS data for PG and VG. The combined analytical uncertainties from CIMS and CG-MS are larger than for the pure gravimetric analysis, but also suggested a significant acceleration of PG loss compared to VG by a factor of ~9. Figure 3.7 shows representative carbonyl compounds and nicotine emitted from vaping e-liquid with different PG:VG ratios. Generally, grow trays carbonyl and nicotine concentrations decrease as the VG percentage increases in the mixture; although the hydroxycarbonyls do not decrease as dramatically as the simple carbonyls. This is likely due to the lower total aerosol and particle mass production overall as VG content increases in the e-liquid .

A notable exception is acrolein , which is the only compound whose formation increased with increasing VG, even as total aerosol mass decreased. Thus, for the 100% VG e-liquid, acrolein was one of the most concentrated carbonyls inhaled, and its relative production exceeded that of formaldehyde. The enhancement of acrolein between 30:70 and 0:100Mechanistic differences were more apparent when carbonyl formation was normalized by the total aerosol mass . The normalized trends reverse the absolute trends for some compounds, such as hydroxyacetone . Although hydroxyacetone can be generated from both PG and VG , the increase in relative aerosol fraction of hydroxyacetone with higher VG percentage in the e-liquid suggests that it is more efficiently formed from VG through the dehydration mechanism. This is consistent with the previous discussion that the heat-induced pathway is much more favorable for VG at the vaping temperatures we tested, and supports the exponential temperature dependence of hydroxyacetone . Likewise, formaldehyde emissions were inversely proportional to VG content , but increased slightly when normalized by aerosol mass . Formaldehyde can originate from both PG and VG and from either thermal or radical pathways. The data suggest that it is formed at similar efficiencies from both precursors, perhaps slightly favoring VG, which is consistent with more pathways available from VG . The relative production trends clearly showed that PG decomposition was responsible for all of the propionaldehyde and most of the acetaldehyde , while VG decomposition was responsible for all of the dihydroxyacetone and nearly all of the acrolein .

The VG source of acrolein is well-studied, and is leveraged in the conversionof biomass to fuels. Although acrolein can be formed by PG, it is a secondary product of a minor compound that is formed by the primary alkyl radical intermediate instead of secondary , which limits the importance of the PG source. The isomeric lactaldehyde and 1- hydroxypropanal likely had opposite trends that overlapped since they are solely formed by PG and VG, respectively . Given the higher formation of the sum of lactaldehyde and 1-hydroxypropanal with increased VG percentage , it appears that the formation of 1-hydroxypropanal from VG dominates over lactaldehyde formation from PG. These data support the exponential temperature trends of the lactaldehyde/1-hydroxypropanal pair, given that 1-hydroxypropanal is formed via heat-induced dehydration from VG. So far, most of the data are consistent with PG/VG mechanisms from the literature as shown in Scheme 3.1. However, notable deviations may exist for acetaldehyde and acetone. Acetaldehyde is thought to be a coproduct of formaldehyde in the VG dehydration,80 which would elevate it to be a major VG product, yet it appeared to be formed almost exclusively from PG . From PG, there was a suggested acetaldehyde source via radical reaction, instead of heat-induced dehydration. Thus, there was no reason to expect such a large abundance, or an exponential temperature curve . These observations, together with the fact that propionaldehyde . Acetone is known to be formed by PG; however, the data suggest that it can be formed by both PG and VG at roughly equal efficiencies. The temperature results also suggest a radical mechanism is dominant for acetone formation. Combined with the relative production trends, it would suggest that a radical formation mechanism from VG is missing from Scheme 3.1.

We are not aware of any proposed mechanism in the literature stemming from VG, especially one that is radical-initiated. The nicotine percentage in the particle phase at the same vaping temperature fluctuated with different PG:VG ratios . The nicotine concentration range observed in the particle phase is comparable to that in the original e-liquid . These results are consistent with those of Baassrir et al. and the trials organized by the Cooperation Centre for Scientific Research Relative to Tobacco .A 3-mg/mL concentration of nicotine in the e-liquid translated to 1.2 – 3.4 mg/mL nicotine in the particle phase, with the lowest nicotine percentage for the 50:50 mixture and increasing in both directions . More research is needed to understand the robustness of, and underlying reasons for, this trend and whether it is conserved with different nicotine content in the e-liquid. Approximately 0.3 mg/mL nicotine was observed in the total aerosol compared to 3 mg/mL used in eliquid.Figure 3.9 shows that the mass of the particles and representative carbonyl compounds generally increased with puff duration, as expected. Given the simultaneous increase in both particle mass and carbonyl mass with puff duration at the same flow rate, which would increase the puff volume, the carbonyl mass yield as normalized by aerosol mass would more or less be invariable. Both linear and non-linear fits would have yielded acceptable correlation coefficients within the studied range of only three data points. As puff durations in realistic use cases are unlikely to exceed this range, we did not test further. The relative increase between carbonyl compounds were roughly the same, within uncertainty. These results agree with Son et al., who found that increases in puff duration will increase the formation of carbonyl compounds, OH radicals, and nicotine.Most of the aerosol mass ended up in the gas phase , i.e., not captured on the hydrophilic PTFE filter, regardless of the temperature or PG:VG ratio tested . It is challenging to understand how the carbon mass from the e-liquid loss was distributed in the gas phase because there is noconventional analytical technique to quantify PG and VG in the gas phase due to the semivolatile nature of these compounds. The results from CIMS , pruning cannabis demonstrated that the majority of the gas phase was PG and VG instead of unknown compounds that are not well-measured by targeted techniques. This is consistent with findings that CO and CO2 are not abundant e-cigarette emissions. The CIMS spectra also showed that PG and VG were orders of magnitude larger in concentration than hydroxycarbonyls, a result that is consistent with the carbonyl-DNPH analysis. For the 30:70 PG:VG condition at 375 °F coil temperature, the sum of PG and VG obtained by CIMS in the gas phase accounted for the missing mass that was not captured by the particle filter within uncertainty . As discussed in Section 3.2.4, CIMS may overestimate semivolatile distribution in the gas phase due to evaporation during the sample dilution . However, it is clear from the CIMS spectra that the gas phase was dominated by mainly PG . GC-MS analysis of filters also showed that PG and VG were dominant components in the particle phase, with nicotine making up much less than 1%. In the 30:70 sample , approximately three-fourths of the particulate fraction was VG and three-fourths of the gaseous fraction was PG. The particle-phase composition roughly mirrored the e-liquid composition . The particle phase content of nicotine at 2.2 mg/mL was also similar to the eliquid composition. Our particle-phase results are consistent with other accounts that PG, VG, water and nicotine are the main components of e-cigarette droplets, and that nicotine is a small fraction of the total aerosol and only found in the particle phase . Thermal degradation products of nicotine have been reported in other works, but were not found in the present study even though the GC-MS method we used can detect nicotine products.It can be assumed that regular e-cigarette users intake a median of 200 puffs per day. This translates to an exposure dose of approximately 4.5 g PG/day and 0.8 g VG/day through inhalation of e-cigarette aerosols produced from vaping 30:70 PG:VG e-liquid at a coil temperature of 375 °F for a duration of 3 seconds. Although the PG exposure is fairly high compared to other aerosol components, animal and human studies demonstrate that PG has low toxicity even at relatively high doses. Mild sensory and respiratory irritation effects may result at concentrations of > 871 mg/m3 for particle plus gas phase PG, which translates to ~ 17.5 g/day exposure assuming 20 m3 air intake per day for a 70 kg adult. 

VG has similarly weak irritation effects, which is supported by the German occupational exposure limit of 200 mg glycerin/m3 to protect against sensory irritation effects in the workplace. In contrast, the thermal degradation products, such as carbonyls, are a concern for potential risk of acute and chronic adverse human health effects despite their low absolute concentration in our study . Carbonyls may be further enhanced in flavored e-liquid, and may approach or exceed unhealthy doses for toxicological exposure with or without additional flavors. Formaldehyde, acetaldehyde, and acrolein are classified as known or probable human carcinogens. The more abundant hydroxycarbonyls in e-cigarette aerosols, such as hydroxyacetone, do not have available toxicology data. Carbonyls are also found in combustible cigarettes, so it is informative to discuss carbonyl exposure risk compared to combustible cigarettes and normalized to nicotine, as e-cigarette users have been reported to self-titrate for nicotine intake. At a VG content of 100% in the e-liquid, exposure to VG products such as hydroxyacetone, 1-hydroxypropanal, and acrolein become increasing important. At 100% VG, the acrolein/nicotine ratio range increased by a factor of 20 compared to the 30:70 e-liquid at the same coil temperature range of 315 – 510 °F , which exceeds the acrolein/nicotine ratio in combustible cigarettes under some temperature conditions. A Chronic Reference Exposure Levels value of 0.35 μg/m3 was set by the California Office of Health Hazard Assessment for acrolein. If this is multiplied by 20 m3 inhaled volume of per day for a 70 kg adult, then a threshold of 7 μg/day may be considered safe for chronic exposure. However, at 100% VG, the acrolein e-cigarette exposure that is equivalent to replacing only 1 cigarette/day exceeds chREL threshold at all tested temperatures. Given the lower aerosol and nicotine production at high VG ratios in the e-liquid , users may increase temperatures, puff duration, or puff frequencies to achieve higher aerosolization rates, which will significantly increase carbonyl exposure.Although e-liquids with 100% VG can be readily found commercially, they also may be formed during the dynamic vaping process. Our data suggest, because the total e-liquid mass loss from PG was 8 times that of VG , the e-liquid will be more enriched in VG as vaping continues. This will shift the e-cigarette aerosol composition toward VG and its degradation products, particularly acrolein, as VG enrichment occurs. Likewise, total aerosol mass and total nicotine will decrease during the lifespan of the e-liquid. We can build a simple model to predict the e-liquid mass remaining when 100% enrichment occurs. The model assumes that, as the PG and VG ratio changes during vaping, the total amount of e-liquid lost also changes in accordance with the total aerosol data =16.92e. Thus, for an 8:1 aerosolization ratio for PG:VG, and for a 30:70 ratio PG:VG mixture, it can be estimated that approximately 30-40% of e-liquid mass will be consumed by the time the e-liquid reaches 100% VG .

Gas chromatography and liquid chromatography coupled with different detectors including mass spectrometry, UV-Vis, and others are usually applied for the characterization of components in e-cigarette aerosol. Besides chromatography, nuclear magnetic resonance has also been applied to the characterization of e-cigarette thermal degradation products. Jensen et al.74 have published a library of 1H NMR spectra for many thermal degradation products in ecigarette aerosol that are derived from PG and VG. These technologies are also applied for thecharacterization of including volatile organic compounds , carbonyls , nicotine and tobacco specific nitrosamines , polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons , heavy metals , and flavoring compounds. VOCs are normally detected by GC-FID, GC-MS and related instruments. Lee et al.99 detected VOCs including ethanol, acetonitrile, isopropyl alcohol, benzene and toluene using the GC method from National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health that employ evacuated canisters lined with fused silica for sample collection. Carbonyl compounds are usually derivatized by 2,4 – dinitrophenylhydrazine in solution or on silica gel cartridges impregnated by 2,4 – DNPH, followed by analysis on HPLC-UV or HPLC-MS. Nicotine, TSNAs, and PAHs are usually captured on filter pads and analyzed by GC-MS. Trace metals are usually captured on quartz filters and analyzed by ICP-MS. The e-cigarette aerosol includes a liquid-like particle phase and a gas phase. Most e-cigarette emissions are semivolatile, pots for cannabis plants which can partition to both the gas and particle phases depending on different environmental conditions and chemical properties .

Pankow et al. predicted that the phase distribution of various components in ecigarette aerosol are related to the mass concentration of particles , the composition of particles, the vapor pressure of the chemical, and the ambient temperature. For example, formaldehyde can be found mainly in the gas phase even at the highest level of total particular level of e-cigarette aerosol, while formaldehyde hemiacetals partition into the particle phase, even at the lowest total particulate matter levels.Although simple thermal degradation products such as formaldehyde, acetaldehyde, and acrolein are commonly quantified in the literature, the reported levels of specific components significantly vary in different publications. This might due to the diversity and complexity of ecigarette products, as devices from different brands and design generations vary in power settings, coil type and puff topography . Another potential reason is that there is no standard sampling and analytical methods for the target analytes in e-cigarettes aerosols. For example, Eddingsaas et al. found that the use of limited collection methods will not identify all aerosol components. This suggests a more comprehensive approach, using a combination of techniques, is needed for the collection of e-cigarette aerosols. Moreover, thousands of e-liquid formulations with different PG:VG ratios and different flavoring compounds introduce further challenges to a unified understanding of the e-cigarette chemistry in the literature. This suggests a need to isolate key e-liquid ingredients to study their fundamental chemistry, instead of sampling from commercial e-liquid blends that are proprietary in composition, in order to have a more predictive understanding of thermal degradation in e-cigarette vessels.

Since its introduction to the United States in 2007, the electronic cigarette market has expanded significantly. The prevalence of e-cigarette use was 3.2% for adults and 7.6% for young adults in 2018. The prevalence of e-cigarette use among high school students increased from 1.5% in 2011 to 27.5% in 2019, eclipsing conventional cigarettes among youth. With the growing population of e-cigarette users, the evidence that e-cigarette use is related to higher frequency of cigarette smoking, and the lack of historical governmental regulation, there is a significant need to fill existing data gaps on chemistry, toxicology, and clinical/behavioral patterns to inform on e-cigarette consumer safety and risk. E-cigarettes have been suggested as a reduced harm alternative to traditional tobacco-based products due to the reduced presence of well-studied toxicants formed during tobacco combustion. However, the use of e-cigarette may have its own risk, such as electronic cigarette or vaping-associated lung injury , respiratory function impairment, inhalation of carcinogenic carbonyls, and changes in gene expression. Furthermore, as e-cigarette emissions are not completely inhaled, there is potential for bystander or secondary exposure to non-users from the exhaled aerosol to the environment. Recent works have provided insights into how e-cigarette components and emissions affect indoor air quality and exposure pathways. Yet to date, there remain majorgaps in our knowledge of a complete chemical profile generated from the vaping process, as well as detailed mechanisms producing those chemicals. Moreover, the astonishing variety of ecigarette products and innumerable flavors available on the market, combined with the fast pace of product alterations due to the steady increase in e-cigarette popularity, present significant challenges in e-cigarette research and the estimation of user risk. The thermal degradation of propylene glycol and vegetable glycerin , the primary components of e-liquid, can generate complex chemical products through a series of reactions. Laino et al. showed that the thermal degradation of VG can form formaldehyde, acetaldehyde, acrolein by dehydration via the formation of glycidol, while PG can generate propionaldehyde and acetone via the intermediate formation of propylene oxide.Diaz et al. suggested PG could also participate in a heat-induced radical-mediated degradation pathway, initiated by O2 insertion to C-H bonds to generate the OH radical that further propagate the radical chain, forming at least five degradation products.

The radical-mediated pathway of VG has also been proposed by other researchers, and at least seven thermal degradation products have been observed in the process. Some degradation products can react further to form simple carbonyls, and accretion reactions between carbon-centered radicals or stable products can further complicate the chemistry of e-cigarette aerosols.The fragmentation of aliphatic alcohols tend to produce compounds that have a carbonyl moeity; However, since PG and VG are polyols, their degradation will also result in carbonyls functionalized with hydroxyl groups in addition to the simple types. Organic acid formation may also occur to an extent, possibly as a carbonyl oxidation process. Some thermal degradation products have well-documented toxicity to humans , while others have suspected toxicity . In addition to thermal degradation products, hundreds of flavoring ingredients may be added to e-liquids and vaporized in e-cigarette aerosol, which can potentially lead to adverse health impacts. Jensen et al. identified the largest variety of thermal degradation products to date from aerosolized e-liquid using Nuclear Magnetic Resonance ; however, the data are not quantitative in that work. Since most compounds in e-cigarettes have a carbonyl moiety, quantification is conventionally done by derivatizing with 2,4-dinitrophenylhydrazine to produce hydrazone adducts , followed by analysis with liquid-chromatography or gas chromatography using authentic carbonyl-DNPH standards for calibration of chromatographic peak areas. Even so, authentic carbonyl-DNPH standards are not available for many complex products. Synthesis of carbonyl-DNPH standards may be done; however, the process to synthesize, purify, indoor cannabis grow system and purity-check is laborious, requires specialty equipment, and requires reasonable syntheticchemistry skills. Synthesis of DNPH hydrazones of multi-carbonyls require additional purification steps to isolate the mono- and multi-hydrazones. In addition, some carbonyls are not commercially available as starting material, requiring their own separate synthesis. Thus, an approach to quantify without chemical standards is an attractive alternative. Furthermore, spectroscopic chromatography methods that rely on retention time and UV-visible absorbance spectra may be limited by co-elution or indistinctive spectra, even when utilizing authentic chemical standards. The coupling between chromatography and high-resolution mass spectrometry is a powerful tool for chemical identification, as it removes the co-elution limitation by enabling molecular formula assignments from exact mass. The goals of this work are twofold: use high mass resolving power coupled to chromatography to better identify DNPH hydrazones of functionalized and simple carbonyls and acids, and develop a method to quantify e-cigarette chemical products for which analytical standard are unavailable.First-generation disposable e-cigarettes from blu® , a popular e-cigarette brand,144 with “Classic Tobacco” e-liquid cartridges were used for this study. The blu® e-cigarettes are comprised of a rechargeable battery with a capacity of 140 mAh, an atomizer with coil resistance of 3.5 ohm, and a disposable, non-refillable e-liquid cartridge with proprietary ingredients. Batteries were charged after every 20 min of usage and the e-liquid cartridge was replaced after 400 puffs. A TE-2B smoking machine was used to generate e-cigarette aerosol for the analysis. The apparatus puffed two e-cigarettes, in alternating turns, at a frequency of 8 puffs/min for a 2 second puff duration. The average flow rate was 2.3 L/min and the puff volume was 77 mL, quantified by a primary flow calibrator . Ecigarette aerosol samples were collected through 2,4-dinitrophenylhydrazine cartridges for carbonyls/acids and 47 mm Polytetrafluoroethylene filters for nicotine. Atotal of 200 puffs were collected for each analysis, which is within the linear dynamic range of the analysis . The emission profile was stable, within the uncertainty of the analysis, for the first and second 200-puff collection of each cartridge. After collection, DNPH cartridges were extracted with 2 mL acetonitrile into 1.5 mL auto-sampler vials . Consecutive extractions of DNPH cartridges for 40-, 80-, and 200-puff samples confirmed that >97% of both DNPH and its hydrazones were extracted after the first 2 mL volume.

The samples were diluted using LC-MS acetonitrile to the desired concentrations for directinfusion HRMS and MSn analyses . Extracts were used for HPLC-HRMS analyses without dilution. All samples were promptly analyzed after preparation; sample collection and analyses were performed in triplicate.Diluted carbonyl-DNPH extracts were analyzed for molecular composition using a linear-trapquadrupole Orbitrap mass spectrometer at a mass resolving power of ~ 60,000 m/Δm at m/z 400. The extracts were directly infused into a capillary nano-electrospray ion source and the spectra taken in the negative ion mode. An external mass calibration was performed using the ESI-L tuning mix immediately prior to the MS analysis, such that the mass accuracy was adjusted to be approximately 1 ppm for standard compounds. Insights into molecular structure were obtained using collision induced dissociation multistage tandem mass spectrometry in the LTQ-Orbitrap. CID energy was tuned for each mass, such that the precursor ion has 10 – 20% normalized abundance. Thermo Xcalibur software was used for data processing.DNPH hydrazones were quantified by HPLC coupled to the same LTQ-Orbitrap in 2.2 with an electrospray ionization source, operating in the negative ion mode at a mass range of m/z 150 – 500 to cover the mass range of carbonyl-DNPH and dicarbonyl-2 adducts observed in this work. Separation by HPLC was performed using a C18 column end-capped with dimethyln-octadecyl silane and a mobile phase of LC-MS grade water with 0.1% formic acid and acetonitrile . The analytes were eluted over the course of 37 minutes at 0.27 mL/min with the following gradient program: 40% B , 50% B , 60% B , 100% B , 40% B . After separation by chromatography, single ion chromatography for the accurate m/z of DNPH adducts that were identified by the methods in 2.2.2 was used for quantification. A carbonyl-DNPH standard solution , comprised of 13 carbonyl-DNPH analytes was used to obtain the concentration standard curves for calculating the concentration of formaldehyde, acetaldehyde, acetone, acrolein and propionaldehyde in e-cigarette aerosol . From application of the standard curves and propagating the remaining errors of the analysis , the ±1σ uncertainty for calibrated compounds is 10%-20%. The concentration of the remaining carbonyls and organicacids are calculated by their SIC peak areas and the calculated sensitivities to the ESI negative ion mode in 2.2.4. The concentration of nicotine was also measured by the same method using the positive ion mode.The chemical structures of the DNPH hydrazones affect their deprotonation efficiency in the ESI negative ion mode, and thus, their calibration sensitivity in HPLC-HRMS. The Gibbs free energy change of the deprotonation reaction of carbonyl-DNPH compounds that occurs in the ESI negative ion mode was calculated by Gaussian 09 in both the gas phase and solution phase. The structural geometry optimization and frequency calculation was performed by density functional theory using the M06-2X functional and 6-31g+ basisset, which has been recommended for the study of main-group thermochemistry in recent years. 145-147 First, the ΔGd values for the 13 carbonyl-DNPH compounds in the analytical standard mixture were calculated to obtain a relationship to their measured ESI sensitivities. The relationship between the ΔGd and ESI sensitivities was then extended to calculate the relative theoretical ESI sensitivities for the DNPH hydrazones for which commercial standards are not available. Calculated sensitivities were then used to estimate the concentrations of carbonyl-DNPH hydrazones in e-cigarette aerosol extractions with the method described in 2.2.3.

The relationships between racial composition and garden proximity remain relatively unchanged with interaction terms added to the Philadelphia model: an increase in the share of Black or Hispanic residents predicts that the nearest garden would be closer, while the share of Asian and Pacific Islander residents is not significantly associated with garden proximity. The interaction between percent Black and year also has a significant and positive coefficient, suggesting that like housing costs, the relationship is gradually disappearing over time. The model estimates that in 1980, a 1% increase in the share of Black residents would be associated with a decrease of about 19 meters to the nearest garden, all other factors being equal. However, every additional year would see the predicted distance to the nearest garden increase by about 0.3 meters for every 1% increase in the share of Black residents. Taken together, these coefficients suggest that the greater proximity of gardens to neighborhoods with more Black residents will disappear after about 65 years, or around 2044. The model cannot determine whether this change in the relationship results from more garden attrition in Black neighborhoods than other neighborhoods, or from the proportion of Black residents decreasing in neighborhoods in which gardens have more durability , cannabis equipment but either scenario seems plausible given the shift in organizational priorities at the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society.

With little grant funding to help maintain existing gardens, many of the projects that were developed through Philadelphia Green did decline over time. At the same time, the Neighborhood Gardens Trust has begun to target its garden preservation efforts at rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods where gardens appear to be the most threatened; however, preserving the gardens does not prevent the demographic change and possible displacement that are associated with gentrification. Results for Seattle provide a contrasting example of what can happen when garden preservation becomes the rule rather than the exception, and when organizational priorities shift over time toward developing gardens closer to people who ostensibly need them more. As in Philadelphia, with interaction terms added to the Seattle model, a higher poverty rate is associated with the nearest P-Patch being further away . However, unlike Philadelphia, the interaction term is also significant, and it moves in the opposite direction. That is, for every passing year, a 1% increase in the poverty rate is associated with a decrease of about 0.7 meters to the nearest P-Patch, with all other factors being equal. Taken together, these coefficients suggest that Seattle’s gardens were originally distributed further away from high-poverty neighborhoods and closer to low-poverty ones, but the relationship reversed after about 22 years, and from 2002 onwards gardens are increasingly likely to be found closer to high-poverty neighborhoods than low-poverty ones. As explained in chapter 3, the leaders of the P-Patch program in the 1990s were responsive to the public concern that the gardens were a private use of public space and to city officials’ appreciation for evidence showing how the gardens benefitted low-income and other marginalized residents. The program leaders undertook a concerted effort to expand the program in neighborhoods with greater socioeconomic need, an effort which gained traction especially after the 2000 Pro-Parks Levy infused the program with $2 million.

This effort included working with the Seattle Housing Authority to build gardens in low-income housing developments specifically for use by their residents. The changing organizational priorities in the 1990s and influx of resources in 2000 would logically explain why the interaction model shows gardens’ proximity to poor neighborhoods equalizing around 2002 and growing gradually closer since then. The interaction model’s results suggest that P-Patch gardens have become more accessible to poor neighborhoods over time, but also that they have become less accessible to immigrants. Similar to the pattern observed with percent Black residents in Philadelphia, the coefficient for percent foreign born in Seattle is negative and significant while the coefficient for interaction between year and percent foreign born is positive and significant—in fact, it is the largest coefficient of any interaction term across the three models, suggesting a relatively fast pace of change. The model estimates that in 1980, the nearest garden would be about 60 meters closer for every 1% increase in the immigrant population, with all other factors held constant. With every additional year, a 1% increase in the immigrant population relative to otherwise identical tracts would predict 1.4 meters further to the nearest garden, suggesting that after about 42 years the percent foreign born in a tract will have no impact on garden proximity, and ultimately after 2022 gardens will be further away from communities with higher shares of immigrants. As in Philadelphia, the gradual attenuation of garden accessibility for immigrants in Seattle may be linked to gentrification, as higher housing costs push vulnerable groups further from the more desirable areas, but this explanation cannot be verified from the model alone. What the model can tell us is the relationship between housing costs and garden locations in Seattle, as well as how this relationship changed over time. The coefficient for housing costs is significant and positive, suggesting that gardens were originally built further from high-demand real estate. With the coefficient for interaction between year and housing costs being negative, this relationship appears to be gradually weakening over time. Chapter 3 describes the widespread garden preservation that P-Patch advocates accomplished with the passage of Initiative 42, which offers a plausible explanation for why this pattern would be seen in Seattle: gardens were initially built where more land was available, and most of them have not been removed as property values in the surrounding neighborhoods have increased.

Spatial analysis indicates that the citywide programs in Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Seattle have generally developed gardens closer to marginalized communities than to more privileged ones. That said, significant historical trends and a few deviations from the overall pattern are important to note, especially given their apparent relation to organizational decisions and political-economic factors described in previous chapters. First, while the models suggest that community gardens in all three cities have generally been closer to neighborhoods with more Black and Hispanic residents, their accessibility for Asian and Pacific Islander residents and for immigrants is not as consistent. On the one hand, vertical grow shelf studies of urban food access indicate that Black and Hispanic communities are the ones most impacted by lack of healthy, affordable food options , so if organizations are prioritizing the food-security benefits of urban agriculture, then building access for Black and Hispanic residents more than for Asian and Pacific Islander populations may genuinely reflect understandings of local need and equitable use of the organizations’ resources. On the other hand, food insecurity is just as acute in some Asian American and immigrant communities, and there is a chance these communities are being overlooked. Furthermore, food access isn’t the only benefit that community gardens bring; the organizations in this study have also emphasized social, cultural, and economic benefits of urban agriculture. Advocates for Seattle’s P-Patch program were the most explicit in touting the ability of gardens to build community among diverse people and to provide cultural continuity for immigrants from agrarian backgrounds. Perhaps because of this recognition, Seattle’s gardens have been the most accessible to immigrants according to the spatial error models. However, the P-Patches’ proximity to immigrants is eroding over time. In Milwaukee, gardens appear to be further away from communities with higher foreign-born populations, and in Philadelphia the relationship does not register as significant in the spatial error models. According to my interviews and review of organizational documents, in all three cities, immigrants—and in particular Southeast Asian immigrants—have been heavily involved in building gardens and organizing the labor required to keep them going. Yet it appears that immigrant gardeners may have to travel further than others to reach their sites, and they may lose access altogether if they or their garden is displaced when a neighborhood gentrifies. Qualitative researchers have drawn attention to some ways that immigrant gardeners may be undervalued by urban agriculture organizations and media accounts . My research suggests that this oversight may influence organizational priorities in development and preservation efforts, extending inequity to the physical siting of gardens. When community garden organizations do identify the benefits they want their spaces to provide and identify neighborhoods to prioritize in receiving those benefits, they can achieve desired outcomes over time. One example is the expansion of Seattle’s P-Patch network through the 1990s and 2000s, which was undertaken with conscious attention to increasing garden access for the city’s low-income residents. The spatial error model with interaction terms shows that initially, P-Patches were less accessible for communities with higher poverty rates, but this relationship flipped over time such that communities with higher poverty rates are now likely to be closer to the nearest garden than otherwise similar communities with lower poverty rates. Philadelphia Green provides another example of how programs can achieve clear outcomes by prioritizing a certain benefit that they want urban agriculture to provide in their city. In this case, the benefit has been economic.

As explained in Chapter 2, Pennsylvania Horticultural Society secured grant funding for its Philadelphia Green program to undertake concentrated neighborhood greening initiatives in the 1980s and 1990s; these initiatives included tracking how the greening affected the target neighborhoods, which helped the Society to make a broader case for public investment in their greening services. Scholarship based on the greening initiatives and organizational publications from the time highlight how the program’s community gardens and greening intervention improved neighborhood attractiveness and increased local property values. One organizational brochure includes a map showing, for different neighborhoods, the percentage of vacant lots involved in the program which had subsequently been sold and developed. Building and preserving green space for the benefit of disadvantaged neighborhoods was not the goal, and it has not been the primary outcome. Compared to Milwaukee and Seattle, Philadelphia has seen the highest rate of garden attrition, so a longitudinal analysis based on the distribution of existing gardens at given points in time misses some of the story. Still, even by examining the spatial error models and maps of garden locations over time, we can see distributional outcomes that are likely related to Philadelphia Green’s prioritization of economic benefits and limited efforts toward long-term garden preservation. The program’s gardens tended to be developed in neighborhoods with higher housing costs and lower poverty rates, but this relationship with housing costs has gradually diminished over time. Maps of garden locations in successive decades show that gardens have disappeared in neighborhoods where housing costs have increased and poverty rates have decreased. This pattern reflects the program’s overall weak commitment to maintaining gardens for the long term, allowing market forces to displace gardens from more desirable areas. Meanwhile, garden proximity to neighborhoods with a higher share of Black residents has decreased over time, which suggests that either gardens are disappearing at higher rates in neighborhoods with more Black residents, or that as neighborhoods themselves are changing through gentrification, those that keep their gardens are nevertheless seeing decreases in the proportion of Black residents. The pattern of garden distributions over time in Milwaukee demonstrates an outcome likely to result from program management without the resources or a clear strategy to direct garden development toward specific communities. The model with interaction terms did not yield any significant interactions with year, suggesting that garden distributions over time have not moved toward or away from communities with any of the characteristics analyzed . Instead, the static model shows that the nearest garden is likely to be closer to neighborhoods with higher poverty rates, higher percentages of Black, Hispanic, and/or Asian and Pacific Islander residents, and lower percentages of immigrants. Given what we know about the potential benefits of urban gardens and the communities most in need of those benefits, the distribution of Milwaukee’s gardens seems to produce equitable outcomes other than the lower proximity to neighborhoods with more immigrants. However, the historical analysis in preceding chapters demonstrates the ongoing vulnerability of most gardens in Milwaukee to potential removal in the face of development pressure. In other words, the gardens are close to the populations where they are needed because that is where land is available and development pressure is low; the process of displacement and disappointment that unfolded in Philadelphia is likely to be repeated in Milwaukee if and when market conditions change.

While the LBA was constituted of entities more closely associated with the typical centers of power in growth coalitions, the breadth of constituencies sharing a common goal in this effort highlights how widely shared urban growth goals tend to be, despite the uneven share in returns on growth . The LBA and the CTBVL worked toward the same goal of establishing a land bank that would consolidate the city’s vacant property holdings and streamline its disposition process. According to development professionals interviewed who were active in each of the groups, the LBA emphasized insider strategies to advocate for the land bank in private meetings with elected officials, while the CTBVL used an outsider strategy by mobilizing large numbers of people to pressure key decision makers—in this case the members of city council who would put forth and vote on the Land Bank bill. Characteristic of their respective organizational orientations, PHS participated in the LBA while Soil Generation participated in the CTBVL. The Public Interest Law Center’s Garden Justice Legal Initiative was a member of both coalitions. While the interests of their member organizations were slightly different, both coalitions framed the need for a land bank in essentially the same way, amplifying a narrative that PHS had been constructing for decades. As PHS contracted to green vacant lots throughout the city in the 1990s, they developed and helped disseminate arguments for the city to invest more in urban greening. They collaborated with local researchers and the Pew Charitable Trusts to produce Urban Vacant Land: Issues and Recommendations, 4×8 grow table with wheels a 1995 report that highlighted their successes in greening vacant lots and also stressed the need for city agencies to “simplify and depoliticize the acquisition process by establishing public policy that supports the transfer of city-owned vacant land into community or private ownership” .

Reiterating these findings, PHS’s 2000 Managing Vacant Land report advocated for the creation of an “Office of Vacant Land Management” within the Redevelopment Authority , and the 2002 Reclaiming Vacant Lots report was published as a technical manual for anyone looking to repurpose vacant lots that highlighted the work that PHS had already accomplished in collaboration with community groups across the city . Through these reports and other communications at the time, PHS framed the city’s vacant lots as public problems that could become assets if community groups and developers faced fewer barriers to access and ownership. Similarly, in 2010, one of PHS’s collaborators in the Land Bank Alliance, the Philadelphia Association of Community Development Corporations, commissioned a report that found the city was spending $20 million a year to maintain vacant lots, while losing $2 million annually in uncollected property taxes as the blighted lots dragged down overall property values by an estimated $3.6 billion. Prominent voices from both the housing and greening constituencies highlighted the same issues, framing vacant lots as an economic drag that could be lifted through government reorganization. Both of the land bank coalitions argued that with 40,000 vacant lots around the city, some could be preserved as gardens and open spaces while others could be developed into housing at various price points. The abundance of vacant property made possible a shared vision among groups who might otherwise have been competitors, but who instead were all in agreement that the city’s process for land disposition was too slow and uncoordinated. The details of who would acquire what land did not need to be worked out until the Land Bank bill was passed.

With the widely representative coalitions calling for change and a relatively large constituency mobilized, the Land Bank bill made it into the public discourse and onto the legislative agenda. Newspaper coverage was largely supportive, although skeptical of a provision in the bill that would codify the tradition of council manic prerogative . Articles and editorials frequently cited the $20 million annual maintenance figure, which worked to underscore the economic inefficiency of letting so much land go unused and the liability this land had become for the city government. In October 2013, when the Land Bank bill got its hearing in the Committee on Public Property and Public Works, attendance overflowed. Compared to Milwaukee and Philadelphia, Seattle has had both political and economic conditions more favorable to community garden development and preservation. The economy and the revenue-generating tools available in Seattle created opportunities for the city to fund desired public investments, including gardens. With the city’s tech sector thriving, Seattle has been a “winner” in the global competition for urban growth for the last 30 years. In this time, public investments in community gardens, greenspace and other neighborhood amenities have redoubled Seattle’s appeal to the “creative class” . The favorable political economy in recent decades has helped solidify the status of community gardens as a legitimized, permanent feature of the urban landscape. That said, the popularity and security of Seattle’s gardens do not ensure that they are providing the potential benefits most needed by the city’s marginalized residents. If the city were facing the kinds of budget crises that Milwaukee and Philadelphia currently confront, open space improvements might not win approval from voters or City Council when tax revenue was direly needed for basic services such as police and schools. Seattle’s city budget contracted in 2000 with the bursting of the dot-com bubble, and again in 2008-2010 during the Great Recession. Otherwise, since the early 1990s, the city budget has increased fairly steadily.

The growing technology sector has served as a stronger economic base than more traditional industrial manufacturing during this period, in which outsourcing has led to significant economic impacts in cities like Milwaukee and Philadelphia as described above. Seattle faced population loss between 1960 and 1980, including a steep economic downturn during the “Boeing Bust” when the city’s major manufacturer shed thousands of jobs. However, Seattle began to grow again as the information technology sector expanded, with major companies like Microsoft and Amazon headquartered in the area. The city’s population grew 4.5% from 1980 to 1990, then 9% from 1990 to 2000 , 8% from 2000 to 2010, and a whopping 21% between 2010 and 2020. Economic conditions in Seattle differ significantly from the other case-cities: the poverty rate is 11% , and the median household income of $92,263 is greater than that of Milwaukee and Philadelphia combined. A stronger economy and reasonably comfortable city budget have made allocating public resources to community gardens easier in Seattle than in Milwaukee or Philadelphia. The P-Patch Program is administered by the City, as explained in chapter 2, grow tray stand and public resources have undergirded its entire existence. Seattle has supported gardens as part of its budget since 1973, at first agreeing to pay $950 to cover the property taxes of Rainie Picardo so that his land could continue serving neighbors as a community gardening space. City Council then expanded the program to 10 other sites around the city and took over administration . For the P-Patch program’s first two decades, the city budget allocated roughly $15,000-50,000 to the program for 1-2 staff positions, plowing costs, and money for tools and materials. In 1983—in part due to contracting federal support for local governments that affected all of the cities in this study—a municipal budget crunch forced cuts in the P-Patch program that led to the first notable site vacancies in the program’s ten-year history. With two part-time staff working far more than the hours they were paid for, and significant volunteer contributions to make up the difference, the program survived and continued to add new sites through the late 1980s. When the city was facing budget cutbacks again in 1992, gardeners organized a letter-writing campaign and visited council members to advocate for fully funding the program. Successful in this effort, they received a $50,000 budget increase for 1993. For the next 14 years, as Seattle’s economy and city budget saw gradual but nearly uninterrupted growth, the P-Patch program garnered increases in staff and funding that enabled them to administer more and more sites. During this period, the program more than doubled in size—from 30 gardens and 2 staff positions in 1993, to almost 70 gardens and 7 staff in 2007. Although the city froze the program staff size during the Great Recession, funding from open space tax levies continued to facilitate expansion in the number of gardens. As of 2021, there are nearly 90 P-Patches reaching across every neighborhood in Seattle. The program is well known and popular, in part because of its expanse and its stable administrative capacity; these features result from the substantial public resources that the City of Seattle has been able to dedicate to the program over the last 40 years. In addition to the annual budget allocation that supports P-Patch administration, the garden program has been able to expand because of funding from tax levies. Seattle and King County give citizens official decision-making powers in regard to certain tax policies. Washington state allows cities and counties to raise revenue through taxes of different types; many such tax increases require voter approval with turnout requirements and at least 60% support at the ballot. Seattle voters typically see at least one tax levy question on their ballots every year, either for the City of Seattle or for King County. Not all of these measures receive the necessary 60% support, but since 2000 voters have approved several tax levies related to parks and open space improvements at both the city and county levels. These measures have raised hundreds of millions of dollars for parks and open space, including at least $4 million specifically for the acquisition and improvement of P-Patches. Such an infusion of cash into citywide community gardening efforts has only been possible because a) the P-Patch program is a public entity; b) county and city governments in Washington state have the ability to raise revenue with tax levies; and c) the citizens of Seattle and King County are willing to pay higher taxes in order to improve and secure open spaces. The levy funds have been used for the City to acquire land for P-Patches in high-demand parts of the city and, importantly, levy funds have also been used to enhance existing P-Patches with features such as picnic tables, gazebos, or benches designed to make the sites more inviting for the general public. As discussed in chapter 3, the P-Patch gardeners and program administrators undertook a concerted effort to design community gardens so that they are accessible, usable and therefore valued by the general public. This effort ramped up in 1998, shortly before the first of the munificent open space bonds was approved in 2000, putting P-Patch advocates in a perfect position to apply the flush funding in a way that would yield visible returns for the public at-large. Seeing the benefits of improved P-Patch gardens likely made voters more amenable to approving the next open space tax levy that came before them—a positive feedback loop made possible by the particular political-economic conditions in Seattle.The City of Seattle was willing to dedicate resources to the P-Patch community gardens in part because of the stable city budget and revenue from tax levies, and in part because of how local garden advocates have framed the value of urban agriculture. In addition to legitimizing urban agriculture as a community-building tool and source of food for those in need, leaders of the P-Patch nonprofit built a narrative around the value of community gardens as an amenity that would keep Seattle neighborhoods green and livable as the city took on more residents. Building off of existing ideas about what made Seattle special, such as its environmental amenities and pleasant neighborhoods, the P-Patch advocates constructed an effective framing for the value of community gardens in contributing to Seattle’s place-legacy . As the city grew and neighborhoods densified, community garden advocates argued that the P-Patch program should also grow as a way to maintain residents’ quality of life . Essentially, garden advocates used a framing that would appeal to the growth coalition: exchange value could continue to increase along with concession of a relatively small amount of the city’s land preserved for use value. Seattle’s garden advocates had constructed this sophisticated narrative by the mid- 1990s, and in the early 2000s Richard Florida outlined a theory of “creative cities” that essentially describes the alignment of certain kinds of use value with exchange value.

In framing garden loss as a lack of community control, Soil Generation links the struggle to preserve urban agriculture to broader concerns that are reflected in local civic conventions, and also highlights the legacies of colonialism and racism that have displaced and oppressed Black and Brown people, immigrants, and indigenous communities in Philadelphia and beyond going back centuries. With this critical perspective, Soil Generation called for changes in the distribution of power—not only changes in the city’s land use policy, but also in the relationships that cohered among local community groups and large nonprofit organizations. As of 2021, this effort is ongoing. Soil Generation has been integral in bringing the voices of urban growers directly to public officials, remaining active in advocating for more garden preservation in the Land Bank’s biennial strategic plans and organizing a public hearing with City Council dedicated to urban agriculture in 2016. At that hearing, impressed with the diversity of testimonials—both the demographics of the speakers and the reasons they expressed for valuing urban agriculture—council members committed to pay more attention to the issue. The current process underway to formalize urban agriculture planning in the city is the product of Soil Generation’s efforts to re-legitimize urban agriculture through a rights- and justice-based framing, and the dynamics of this process are illustrative of how Soil Generation’s outsider status and social movement strategies have pushed the city to go further in revising land use policy than city officials would have through insider advocacy efforts alone.

In 2019, the city hired Ash Richards, a city planner with strong ties to Soil Generation, for the new position of Director of Urban Agriculture in the Parks and Recreation Department. Later that year, vertical grow the city began a notably bottom-up process to develop an urban agriculture plan. Soil Generation, along with design firm Interface Studio LLC, won a competitive Request for Proposal process to aid in the public meetings and plan development . The first public meeting was held in December 2019, and the next was held up by the onset of the pandemic. The second, virtual public meeting began in February 2021, delayed in part because of time taken to bring Soil Generation and Interface Studios together for “facilitation, education and healing” . Here, Soil Generation’s leader seeks to emphasize the organization’s legitimacy as “the community experts” with genuine relationships and knowledge of the needs of urban growers and people of color . Soil Generation’s framing around racial power dynamics speaks to the historically rooted resentment building in the civic conventions of residents of color in the city, and this framing is helping to mobilize a broader shift in the culture of decision-making across the city. According to my interviewees, Soil Generation and its allies have initiative similar conversations in groups such as the Philadelphia Food Policy Advisory Council and the Philadelphia Area Cooperative Alliance. In comparison to Milwaukee and Seattle, Philadelphia’s civic conventions have included more cynicism about government and less expectation that city officials will be responsive to the desires of ordinary citizens. While these civic conventions have limited the opportunities for gardeners across the city to gain public resources or legitimacy for their sites, they have also created an opening for social movement mobilization to challenge a dynamic that has left much of the public dissatisfied. Soil Generation has sought organizational legitimacy as a representative of community interests—not as a service provider, but as an organizer of the social movement seeking policy and cultural change on behalf of the city’s Black and Brown growers.

The urban agriculture movement that Soil Generation is leading in Philadelphia is framing the problem of garden loss in terms of structural inequalities and unexamined cultures of control that have done more than just displace gardens. Their efforts are thus an important and energized node within a broader movement to evolve the city’s politics, policies, and culture to become more equitable and responsive to the needs of poor residents and people of color. Soil Generation’s framing around equity and community control of land use represents a potentially powerful augmentation in the legitimacy of urban agriculture from the narrative that PHS developed regarding urban agriculture’s potential role in neighborhood economic development, providing a stronger rationale for the long-term preservation of community gardens threatened by changing economic conditions. Overall, relative to the efforts at garden preservation in Milwaukee and Seattle, the social movement Soil Generation has built likely holds the greatest potential for achieving structural change beyond garden preservation.Compared to Milwaukee and Philadelphia, Seattle’s civic conventions hold the highest expectation of citizens’ participation in the political process. Long-held values for bottom-up rather than top-down governance have supported the establishment of a dense infrastructure for civic participation. Yet even with all of the participatory infrastructure they have achieved, Seattle residents remain distrustful of elites, and ideas about the need for active political engagement are still widely shared. The city’s political opportunity structure has offered numerous opportunities for residents to assert their interest in community gardens and to draw public resources for administration, site improvements, and even land acquisition; at the same time, the city’s discursive opportunity structure has enabled social movement mobilization through a framing of the need to safeguard public interests from potential government abuse.

Seattle’s civic conventions around challenging elite control through political engagement have deep roots in the city’s history . More recently, the 1999 Battle in Seattle—mass protests against the meeting of the World Trade Organization that brought together labor unions, environmentalists, and other civil society groups—made international news and soured the public on the mayor at the time due to his heavy-handed response. Seattle residents have organized resistance to more local political concerns in the 1960s and again in the 1980s, with campaigns to change the municipal government’s direction and increase its accountability. The officials elected under these campaigns were integral in creating and supporting the P-Patch Program, providing public funding and land for an activity that residents wanted to enjoy. Civic conventions in Seattle include ideas about organizing to challenge elites in order to assert resident interests, and also about neighborhood-level governance. The public is used to local initiatives and expects that residents in a particular neighborhood will be able to participate in decisions about their community . These conventions have formalized into civic infrastructure such as a large, active network of neighborhood associations; district councils that represent hyper-local interests in conversation with the city; and a Department of Neighborhoods that is tasked specifically with responding to resident interests. As described on its website, the Department of Neighborhoods exists to “provide resources and opportunities for community members to build strong communities and improve their quality of life. Through our programs and services, we meet people where they are and help neighbors develop a stronger sense of place, build closer ties, rolling grow table and engage with their community and city government” . The City of Seattle Department of Neighborhoods oversees a Neighborhood Matching Fund, similar to Milwaukee’s CIP grants, that awards public resources to proposals that engage the community in making improvements that residents desire. Civic conventions in Seattle dictating an active, ongoing role for the public to participate in governance have contributed to the creation of robust infrastructure for asserting and actualizing resident interests. Both the ideas and infrastructure in Seattle’s civic conventions have benefitted the PPatch community gardens and advocates’ efforts to preserve them. With a multi-million-dollar annual budget, the Neighborhood Matching Fund has proven invaluable for building, improving, and legitimizing the city’s community gardens . The infrastructure of neighborhood associations and district councils was tapped in the 1990s both to legitimize residents’ desire to save a threatened garden and to mobilize the public around Initiative 42, a policy that effectively makes permanent all of the gardens on public land . Ideas about challenging elite control and respecting neighborhoods no doubt helped galvanize the public to support Initiative 42, which garnered almost 24,000 signatures in a matter of months. The flow of resident input in governance through structured channels, such as from neighborhood associations to district councils to the Department of Neighborhoods or from residents participating in the formalized neighborhood planning process of the 1990s, has made clear the widespread appreciation for P-Patch community gardens and legitimized their continued presence. Overall, Seattle has very strong civic conventions supporting citizens’ role in governance, creating numerous opportunities for garden advocates to both provide input directly to city officials and mobilize the public when more pressure was needed.Comparing against Milwaukee and Philadelphia, data from interviews and documents demonstrate the prominence of participatory civic conventions in Seattle. Codes for neighborhood association, citizen advisory committee, bottom-up governance, citizen voice, elected official accountability, neighborhood planning, and public hearing were all the most frequent in Seattle documents and interviews out of the three cities I investigated.

Civic ideas and infrastructure have supported public engagement in governance decisions related to PPatches and also the assertion of how much use-value residents get from the gardens. Furthermore, as the P-Patch Program expanded over time, encompassing more land and requiring more public resources for administration, the infrastructure created by Seattle’s civic conventions facilitated feedback that helped program leaders and garden advocates adjust their operations in accordance with the wider public interest and thereby insulate the program from any challenges to its legitimacy. Aligning gardening sites, activities, and communication with widespread values and concerns ensured that the P-Patch program remained popular and continued to receive public resources over time. Since the program’s inception, P-Patch leaders had invited city officials to “harvest banquets” and other opportunities for positive press. In the 1990s, leaders of the nonprofit supporting the P-Patches encouraged gardeners to significantly increase their contact with the city’s elected officials beyond the annual meeting. They did so in order to defend the program’s budget from cutbacks in 1991, secure a resolution expressing support for P-Patches as a land use in 1992, resist the removal of two threatened gardens in 1995 and 1996, and achieve the passage of Initiative 42 as an ordinance in 1997 . As the P-Patch program grew and increasingly formalized its operations, P-Patchers articulated the benefits of their program in terms of broadly shared values, taking advantage of another discursive opportunity structure that Seattle’s culture presented. Many gardeners made donations to food banks, and in the 1980s the program administrators began tracking contributions. When one of the program’s most active volunteers Wendy McClure organized a produce collection and delivery system called Lettuce Link, the reported food bank donations gradually increased. In editions of the P-Patch Post newsletter from the 1990s, gardeners were asked to measure and report the total pounds of produce they donated if they weren’t giving through Lettuce Link. The regular column for requesting help and equipment also noted the need for produce scales to ensure that donations could be weighed and tracked. In these ways the gardeners’ food donation activities were rationalized over time, and along with publicized events like the Day of Giving that began in 1994, the quantified donations helped build legitimacy for the P-Patch program as one channeling civic action to help low-income people. In addition to their food bank donations, P-Patch administrators and volunteers demonstrated their program’s commitment to low-income Seattleites by tracking how many low-income participants the program had, and by working with residents of the city’s public housing to build gardens specifically for them. Especially once the program hit political turbulence in the mid-1990s, when gardeners mobilized the public in a somewhat confrontational strategy to preserve threatened gardens, city officials scrutinized the extent to which the P-Patch Program was serving a truly public purpose. The program’s leadership and its most vocal advocates were homogenously white and middle- or upper-middle class, so opponents of the program may have wished to paint it as a giveaway to already-privileged people. However, surveys of the gardeners in the mid-1990s showed a diverse constituency, with higher percentages of renters, low- and moderate-income people, and people of color than the city’s overall demographics. The program’s demonstrated diversity, and the addition of an initiative specifically benefitting immigrant gardeners in public housing, served to align the program with the value of multiculturalism important to many Seattle voters at the time. In order to ensure that the gardens continued to serve the public equally, officials in the Department of Neighborhoods worked with the program’s advocates to prioritize building new gardens in underserved areas of the city . Over time, this has meant that the distribution of P-Patches across the city is genuinely more equitable in terms of access for low-income residents.

Soil Generation was formed in conscious opposition to the PHS modus operandi that had long been the public face of urban agricultural activities in Philadelphia. Seeking its legitimacy from Black and Brown growers and community members, Soil Generation has worked to put forth a narrative that gives more voice to growers of color, who have long made up the majority of the city’s community gardeners and urban farmers. They have also taken a more critical approach to the city’s land use policy, working to reframe political struggles around urban agriculture in terms of equity and community control rather than economic development and revitalization. In Philadelphia, more than in Milwaukee or Seattle, stark contrasts are evident in the way urban agriculture is framed by different organizations , which points to Soil Generation’s efforts to re-legitimize urban agriculture in a way that proves more resilient in the face of development pressure. Codes for social cohesion and fairness, justice, equity were not applied at all to PHS documents; they were only applied in the Philadelphia case when brought up by gardeners testifying at public hearings or by Soil Generation as they advocated for policies such as the Land Bank . PHS did sometimes emphasize social benefits that community gardens offered; however, these social benefits tended more toward characteristics that city officials and elite philanthropic funders would appreciate, such as skill acquisition , self-reliance , flood table and a sense of pride in one’s neighborhood . While these social benefits are undoubtedly important, they are less reflective of what gardeners themselves have found valuable about the city’s community gardens.

In Philadelphia’s urban agriculture movement today, PHS looms large because of its long history, its citywide reach, and its well-funded public relations; nevertheless, the organization is seen as problematic by a portion of the city’s gardeners because it is more representative of white, professionalized, and upper-class conceptions of urban agriculture than those of the majority of Philadelphia’s urban growers. As PHS adapted its Philadelphia Green program over time in pursuit of available funding, the organization increasingly legitimized urban agriculture for its blight-removal and neighborhood revitalization potential, a framing which has resonated well with city officials and the wider public and which has shaped the big policy victories that urban agriculture advocates have achieved. PHS’s emphasis on greening as a tool for neighborhood redevelopment has also brought the negative effects of gentrification to the forefront of the public conversation around urban agriculture. PHS is not leading the charge to preserve gardens or counteract the negative effects of gentrification, but their activities have indirectly influenced organizing and mobilization in the city . Of all the organizations in the three case-cities, Soil Generation is arguably doing the most to challenge the logic of the growth machine and assert the interests of marginalized residents in its efforts to mobilize a social movement and secure permanent gardens.In Seattle, community gardens have gained a notable degree of site security because of social movement activities in the 1990s; while the garden advocates achieved virtual permanence for many of the city’s gardens, they did so in part by appealing to growth machine logic in framing the value of gardens .

The case of Seattle’s P-Patch Program, and the volunteer-led nonprofit advocacy organization that arose alongside it, demonstrates the clearest example of how an organization was able to pivot from community-based service provision to movement organizing , while largely maintaining its own legitimacy and augmenting the legitimacy of urban agriculture with a more compelling narrative about its potential benefits. The Seattle P-Patch Program was founded in 1973, when the City of Seattle stepped in to pay the property taxes of Rainie Picardo , who had been allowing neighborhood residents to garden individual plots on his former truck farm. The $950 expense from the city’s general fund was legally justified as support for residents’ recreation, and Council members advocating for the move also argued that it was a unique opportunity to help needy families feed themselves during an economic downturn. In 1974, due to the program’s huge success, the Picardo Patch was joined by ten additional community garden sites in different neighborhoods; since then, the P-Patch Program has continued its expansion to now include nearly 90 gardens citywide. At first, the program was administered by the Department of Human Resources because of its goal of feeding people. In 1997, the program was moved to the Department of Neighborhoods with the recognition that one of its primary effects was to build community among residents who wouldn’t otherwise know each other. In the Department of Neighborhoods, the P-Patch Program thrived under the leadership of department director Jim Diers. With a background in Alinsky-style organizing, Diers took to heart the department’s mission to act on residents’ ideas rather than imposing initiatives from the top down.

With Diers leading the Department of Neighborhoods, new gardens were added in many neighborhoods where residents wanted them, and existing gardens made improvements that increased their appeal for the non-gardening public. Diers provided steady leadership that saw the program grow and become more popular, but the framing to legitimize urban agriculture in Seattle had been established in earlier decades through the organizing efforts of volunteers leading the P-Patch nonprofit. Only a few years after the city government established the P-Patch Program, gardeners organized a nonprofit that has continued to operate alongside the program and fulfills functions that the public entity cannot take on. Originally named the P-Patch Advisory Council and now called GROW Northwest, the P-Patch nonprofit has had a different structure and has undertaken different initiatives over the years. Some of its primary, long-running activities have been advocating for favorable municipal policy, fundraising, paying plot rental fees for low-income gardeners, purchasing and holding title to gardens that were formerly privately owned, purchasing liability insurance for the gardens, serving as the fiscal sponsor for individual garden fundraisers, and facilitating communication among gardeners . The P-Patch nonprofit has effectively coordinated gardener activities and talking points, helping to streamline the program’s operations, maximize its impact, and legitimize PPatches in the eyes of the wider public. Evidence from interviews and issues of the P-Patch Post newsletter makes clear that over the program’s history, gardeners consciously organized their efforts and built the legitimacy for urban agriculture around the food production and community building aspects of the P-Patches. In the late 1980s, dedicated P-Patch volunteer Wendy McClure started an initiative called Lettuce Link that systematized food bank donations by coordinating a schedule of drivers from different gardens and providing information about the closest food banks for different sites. Over time, Lettuce Link installed storage bins, scales, and tracking lists at many of the gardens in order to facilitate measurement and annual reporting of the program’s donations to food banks. Gardeners I interviewed in 2016 would readily emphasize that the program had donated over 40,000 pounds of fresh, organic produce to local food banks the previous year. These interviewees understood that reporting a specific amount of food donated helps to make the gardens’ public benefit clear for city officials and any potential skeptics. As a result of Lettuce Link and the gardeners’ efforts to demonstrate the extent of their food bank donations, P-Patches were incorporated into the city’s strategic planning for food security, hydroponics flood table first undertaken in the mid-2000s. The P-Patch Program director was included on the Interdepartmental Team developing the city’s Food Action Plan, a group which also included at least one P-Patch gardener among the city employees involved. In order to increase food security and local food production, the Seattle Food Action Plan makes recommendations under Strategy 1, “Prioritize food production as a use of land,” and Strategy 2, “Develop and support programs to produce food on City-owned land,” that specifically advise implementing policies to support and expand the P-Patch program . The process of gardeners systematizing their activities, and then gaining additional recognition and legitimacy through the city’s actions, is characteristic of the interplay between city staff and the P-Patch nonprofit over the history of the P-Patch Program. The case of Seattle suggests that an organizational structure of a city gardening agency supported by a gardener-led nonprofit is a stable and effective model for developing, maintaining, and defending urban agriculture. Through a similar process, P-Patch participants gradually amplified the community building benefits of community gardens. In all three cities, the benefit of increased social cohesion among diverse people is widely understood by gardeners and urban agriculture advocates . However, in Seattle this social benefit was more clearly documented, and mobilized more in framing the legitimacy of urban agriculture as a land use, than it was in either Milwaukee or Philadelphia.

As will be described more in Chapter 3, the process for documenting community-building in Seattle’s gardens was first evident in the PPatch Post, which ran a series of statements called “I Love My P-Patch Because…” from 1989-1993. These gardener testimonials offered many reasons to value the P-Patches that span almost the full “panacea narrative” attesting to urban agriculture’s wide range of potential benefits, but among these testimonials the community-building power of P-Patches is the most commonly noted benefit, with comments such as “I like my neighbors too: There’s always someone nice to talk to when I go to the garden” . In 1995-1997, when P-Patch advocates were pressuring the city to preserve a threatened P-Patch, and then appealing to the public to pass an initiative preventing the city from repurposing its garden sites, they emphasized how the gardens brought different kinds of people together and contributed to the neighborhood character of Seattle . In a 1998 edition of the P-Patch Post, the president of the P-Patch nonprofit explained the feedback advocates had received about how much the community-building potential of gardens mattered to decision makers and the public. Analysis of P-Patch documents shows that from the late 1990s onward, codes for diversity and design for community were much more frequent than they had been in the 1970s and 1980s. The latter code reflects interplay with city program staff who began to discourage fencing in the gardens, and the wider Department of Neighborhoods staff, who approved numerous grant applications from individual gardens seeking to add publicly accessible community-building features, such as picnic tables and benches, in garden improvement projects. Over time, the work of both the P-Patch Program and the P-Patch nonprofit have contributed to the longevity, popularity and security of community gardens in Seattle. Through the early 1980s when the city faced budget cuts, funding for the P-Patch Program shrank dramatically, and higher plot fees combined with reduced services caused foreboding rates of attrition . During these lean years, the program survived with two part time staff, Barbara Donnette and Barbara Heitsch, who according to interviewees familiar with the program’s early history and the P-Patch Post from that time, worked well beyond the hours they were being paid for. Moreover, the P-Patch nonprofit has relied solely on volunteer labor for its entire history. Almost every P-Patch Post newsletter contains a long list of acknowledgements for donations, tasks completed, and group initiatives fulfilled; indeed, the production of the P-Patch Post itself has been accomplished almost entirely through volunteer labor . The P-Patch nonprofit has been led by a series of extremely dedicated volunteer presidents, board and committee members, and the P-Patch Post attests to the organization’s ceaseless effort to recruit and train new leadership from among the program’s gardeners. Reviewing the program’s history through its newsletters reveals a remarkable level of dedication on the part of many gardeners, and even some non-gardeners, whose combined efforts have built, maintained, enhanced, and defended Seattle’s P-Patch community gardens for almost 50 years. The contributions of these volunteers should not go underappreciated, for the program would never have achieved such reach and longevity without them; however, making such a prodigious time commitment is not possible for everyone. Relying on volunteers and people who can accept low salaries to run an organization means that its leaders are likely to be relatively privileged. Indeed, for much of the P-Patch Program’s history, the leadership demographics have been far whiter than that of program participants overall . The PPatch Program has counted significant numbers of Southeast Asian refugee families among its gardeners since the mid-1980s, and surveys in the 1990s showed that the program’s demographics were more racially diverse than the city overall. However, program staff and nonprofit leadership alike were virtually all-white until the mid-2000s.

With less money being distributed from the federal and state governments to city agencies, local governments have had to scramble to find alternative funding sources. Public-private partnerships are often formed in this context, but their viability as a replacement for the aid offered by the prior welfare-state remains in question . In this newfound and neoliberal context, local nonprofit organizations often have greater control of resources than local elected officials . However, community organizations may not operate as defenders of “use-value” as the urban growth machine model suggests. Instead, community-based organizations may operate largely in the interest of their own survival and growth—even if they appear to organize local residents politically. To this end, community-based organizations that partner with local government may craft their clientele as a reliable constituency and trade votes for government service contracts . Alternatively, they may deploy technologies of participation that stall resident opposition rather than addressing it . Thus, in the neoliberal era, community organizations cannot be viewed simply as representatives of civic and therefore local resident interests; it is important to look more closely, investigating how such organizations engage in local politics—especially as it relates to whether and how they cultivate civic participation among their members. Urban agriculture organizations are no exception; community gardens in particular require the coordination of many individuals, whose participation may or may not extend into civic action.

Lyson has developed the concept of “civic agriculture” to describe the strengthening of local food systems, rolling flood tables and at the same time community social ties, through operations such as farmers markets, community supported agriculture, and community gardens. Participants in these projects tend to be more involved in politics and their communities than the general population . Food-based organizations with a justice orientation can act as places of learning in which participants gain civic skills and critical perspectives . Civic agriculture initiatives build conscientious alternatives to the corporate-dominated industrial food system , and community gardens can further orient participants to challenging development models that exploit their neighborhoods . However, Passidomo cautions that more research is needed to understand how and when such projects promote greater civic participation in disinvested communities specifically. This focus is especially important in light of the finding that many urban agriculture projects actually work to support existing socio-economic structures and the neoliberalization of cities: by promoting a neoliberal ideology of individual responsibility , bolstering narratives used to justify reduced city services , filling in gaps left by the roll-back of the social safety net , or helping to brand a city as “green” and “sustainable” in the global competition to attract tourists and wealthy residents . Simply put, some urban agriculture projects organize participants to challenge and change prevailing socio-economic structures, and others do not. Attending to these distinctions is important because community-based organizations can in fact do a great deal to increase civic participation among their members and clientele.

Community-based organizations can use civic participation as a resource in their efforts to survive and succeed, both as a source of legitimacy and as a base of power from which to seek funding, contracts, or favorable policies . The outcomes of successful civic participation may benefit the organization, the individuals involved, or both. As urban agriculture organizations must establish legitimacy for their unconventional spaces, attract resources needed to maintain the sites, and win favorable land use policies, they may come to view the civic participation of their gardeners as a valuable resource. Many community gardens are located in low-income neighborhoods, and like other CBOs that provide services in these neighborhoods, they may stabilize their own operation by teaching neighborhood residents skills to interface better with bureaucracies. For instance, Marwell describes how some housing cooperatives teach low-income residents to manage meetings and interface with the city as well as the private sector, such as by paying taxes and collectively managing their utilities. In this way the organization’s overhead is reduced, some of the residents learn valuable skills, and the organization simultaneously builds its legitimacy as a site where residents learn such skills. Other CBOs promote democratic participation among their members by teaching them to flex collective power and engage directly with funders and decision-makers. This democratic participation may be conceptualized narrowly for the organization’s specific purposes, or it may be developed more broadly as a “public-goods politics” that seeks to educate voters on defining problems and demanding new, more community-based solutions if the current system isn’t working for them .

In other words, there are multiple logics through which community-based organizations like gardening programs can promote “civic engagement” among their constituents, and researchers should be careful to assess the nature of political participation at work rather than treating it as a flat, present-or-absent feature . Regardless of their strategies for engaging members, attracting resources, and building legitimacy, civil-society groups such as garden programs and other CBOs must navigate a challenging organizational environment. While many of these organizations have expanded in size and scope under roll-back/roll-out neoliberalization, funding for the work of social service provision is still limited and the competition for it is strong. For organizations based in low income communities, tension may develop between maintaining legitimacy in the local community and building a professionalized reputation with funders and policy-makers . In a local political environment unresponsive to grassroots community pressure, organizations are unlikely to engage in efforts at civic participation at all . Furthermore, receiving funding from government sources may lead nonprofits to moderate their advocacy tactics, engaging in more insider and less outsider strategies [though see also Fyall and McGuire 2015]. Thus, a study of community gardening programs should examine the extent to which garden organizations hew to the priorities of funders versus gardeners themselves, and analysis should also pay close attention to the tactics chosen for engaging with city leaders. The same dynamics have been identified for social movement organizations at various scales, which have been found to survive and succeed in their goals by navigating shifting political opportunities while continuing to mobilize resources from their environment . Especially for movements of the poor, the choice to formalize an organization may bring greater access to resources, but it can also constrain protest tactics . Systems that control power and resources largely function to conserve the existing institutional arrangements that afford them this control , in part through the influence they exert directly on policy making, and in part through their role in resource allocation . Ultimately, flood and drain tray any organization working to shift the balance of resources and power in society—such as revising land use policy in a way that limits development—must navigate the constraints of an organizational environment in which better-resourced and more powerful entities will resist such change.In spite of the inertia imposed by powerful forces in the organizational environment, social relations do change over time, and social movement organizations are influential to this process. As it relates to urban gardens, community groups have organized to challenge the urban growth machine, bring equity to the food system, or counter other processes they perceive as harmful to them through activism and social movements. Sidney Tarrow defines a social movement as contentious action by a group of less powerful people who use “dense social networks and effective connective structures and draw on legitimate, action-oriented cultural frames” to maintain their collective action toward desired ends even as they come up against more-powerful opponents. This definition serves to distinguish social movements from elite political manipulations and from less confrontational forms of organized civic participation—all of which are forms of action that occur in the varied landscape of urban agriculture and the organizations that promote it. In studying the effectiveness and long-term viability of social movements, theorists have identified several important analytical dimensions. Political and discursive opportunity structures, resource mobilization, and framing interact in both the emergence and development of social movements . Conceptualizing the socio-political environments in which movements must operate, “political opportunity structures” describe the legal and institutional infrastructure that enables or constrains various forms of political action , while “discursive opportunity structures” refer to cultural understandings of what is reasonable and legitimate, forming the context in which social movement claims and actions will be received by the wider public . Social movements are more likely to succeed when they can take advantage of favorable opportunity structures, but they also need to draw in sufficient resources to maintain their functioning such as material support, legitimacy, information, leadership, and active participation from movement supporters . One critical strategy for a movement to attract supporters, elicit active participation, and sway decision-makers to support their agenda is through strategic framing. “Framing” refers to the negotiation of meaning and the deployment of collective action frames that work to persuade a greater share of the public and/or decision-makers that the social movement’s goals should be met .

While opportunity structures are largely exogenous conditions that structure movement possibilities, social movement leaders and participants can significantly influence resource mobilization and framing processes through their choice of actions. Research has shown that the success and survival of both CBOs and social movement organizations is partially contingent upon the organizational environment in which they operate, and that an organization’s ability to attract resources from its environment – including both material resources and legitimacy – has a significant influence on outcomes . The quality and decisions of leadership also matter for harnessing the opportunities and resources that exist in the organization’s environment. Legitimacy is a critical resource for all types of organizations, not just those that are part of social movements. Initially, organizations seek legitimacy to gain credibility with their target audience and organizations in their environment; to do so, they need to establish a clear meaning for their activities . Legitimacy that builds credibility is necessary for organizations to gain passive support for their existence, and organizational scholars argue that a conceptually distinct aspect of legitimacy is that which affords continuity as organizations work to motivate “affirmative commitments” from at least some people— employees, customers, grantors, and others who keep the organization functional . Thus, motivating action that will sustain the organization requires not just gaining but maintaining legitimacy—processes requiring different strategies that must be tailored to the organizational environment . For urban agriculture organizations, both gaining and maintaining legitimacy present challenges. Since the act of growing food in cities has fallen outside many people’s expectations, gardening organizations have needed to engage in public-facing efforts to make their activities legible and legitimate. Once they have credibility, urban agriculture organizations must employ additional legitimation strategies to ensure continuity, as gardens require consistent labor to maintain to keep up their legitimized appearance as a garden rather than a weed patch. Critically, building and maintaining legitimacy is a process “dependent on a history of events” , which decreases the possibility for organizations to change their own practices and narratives of meaning without risking a loss of legitimacy. While organizational scholars have articulated the challenges involved in gaining and maintaining legitimacy, as well as in challenging and responding to challenges of legitimacy, little research investigates what happens when changes in external conditions necessitate new forms of legitimacy to maintain existing activities and operations. For urban agriculture organizations, this is especially relevant when real estate conditions change and gardens that have been legitimized as temporary spaces are threatened with development. If organizations seek to overcome elite interest in repurposing the land, they face the challenge of reshaping themselves from community-based organizations providing services into social movement organizations staking new claims and demanding change in a policy or paradigm. While both CBOs and SMOs have been defined and widely discussed in the literature, little research exists that explores the extent to which their activities overlap. Minkoff develops the concept of “hybrid organizational forms,” but does so specifically in the context of identity-based organizations born of social movements that adapted to an increasingly partisan environment. The concept has not been applied or analyzed for organizations with other origins, such as those that begin as service organizations and take up social movement work later on. Similarly, Sampson et al. urge the use of a social movements lens to analyze civic participation, describing an increase in “blended social action” that combines protest with civic action. While this research finds that collective action events tend to occur more often in neighborhoods with a higher density of nonprofit organizations, the authors do not examine the role of organizations in mobilizing blended social action.

In advocating for urban agriculture as a long-term land use, garden organizations participate in the ongoing renegotiation of both ideas of urban nature and the material ecological conditions in cities, which distribute the benefits and burdens unevenly among different social groups . Advocacy for urban agriculture is also similar to other efforts underway to transform urban life, such as calls for community policing, which attempt to relocate resources and decision-making for critical urban systems in potentially radical ways. In general, studying the distinct challenges that community-based service organizations face when they hybridize to take up social movement work is important because social movements are often the best way to overcome elite opposition and accomplish substantive transformation of any collective feature of social life. In order to better understand the strategies grass root activists and urban agriculture advocates use to secure long-term land access, I conducted a comparative historical analysis of three U.S. cities. In Milwaukee, Philadelphia and Seattle, well-established multi-site gardening organizations have engaged with city officials to win policies that secure land for community gardens. The strategies used to legitimize urban agriculture, the configurations of the programs themselves, and the wider political-economic context of each city vary significantly. Through a qualitative analysis of 55 interviews with key informants and archival material from each city , I show the relationships between legitimation strategies, dry rack cannabis program configurations and political-economic context as well as their impacts on local discourse and policy related to urban agriculture.

Employing spatial regression analysis to assess the spread of each program’s gardens across their respective cities, I also demonstrate the ways that movement strategies and organizational aspects of the community garden programs have impacted the outcomes achieved and populations served by each organization over time. For the remainder of this introduction, I provide background about each of the three cities, their major gardening programs, and the local policy victories that have helped to secure more land for urban agriculture, followed by a brief outline of the chapters in this dissertation. My research is a comparative historical analysis of the characteristics, preservation strategies, and outcomes achieved by community gardening programs in Seattle, Milwaukee and Philadelphia. All are large US cities , and all have been cited as exemplars for their thriving urban agriculture activities . The cities are also similar in that community gardeners in each locale have experienced at least one major development challenge and responded with political engagement that resulted in favorable policy changes. Further, all three cities have passed urban planning frameworks that incorporate urban agriculture. In each city, I gathered documents from the early 1970s to the present—decades in which community gardening has undergone several surges in both local and nationwide interest and attention—but my qualitative analysis focuses on specific periods during which gardeners overcame development threats and those in which gardens were written into the cities’ urban planning frameworks. Whereas much of the existing literature on urban agriculture is based on individual case studies of a single garden or program, my project builds new insights through comparative analysis.

Examining the historical process of land use contestation in multiple cities in which urban agriculture has come to be seen as a legitimate long-term land use, I show that the process of securing land for urban agriculture varies considerably from case to case, yet some key similarities are evident—namely the perceived need for garden advocates to build an economic argument for the value of urban agriculture. While advocates in all three cities have been relatively successful in their efforts, I show that the different political and economic conditions in which land use contestation has unfolded and the strategies used to build urban agriculture’s legitimacy are related to important differences in the outcomes achieved . I selected Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Seattle for comparison because these cities are diverse in geographic region, political and economic features, degree of site permanence achieved by garden advocates, and the characteristics of each city’s main urban agriculture organizations. The data I collected were then used to illuminate the strategies that garden advocates and organizations used during the process of developing and defending urban agricultural sites, the evolving public discourse around urban agriculture in each city, the internal considerations important to each organization as they built gardens and sought to defend them, and the historical development of gardens affiliated with each program. The following sections provide a brief history of each city’s main community gardening programs, the political and economic conditions in which they have operated, and the policy victories they achieved.Like many cities in the US, Milwaukee has faced economic challenges from the 1960s onward related to globalization and the loss of manufacturing jobs. The challenge has been particularly acute in Rustbelt cities such as Milwaukee, which lost over 100,000 residents between 1960 and 1980—a decline of almost 15%.

The city won federal funding to support urban gardening in 1978, and the resulting Shoots n Roots program expanded upon earlier cityled efforts with a focus on making use of vacant lots to mitigate the growing urban blight that had become a visible symptom of the city’s economic decline . The city permitted Shoots n Roots gardens on a year-by-year basis, wanting to ensure that the lots remained available for redevelopment; many sites were only part of the program for a few years. Shoots n Roots was ultimately housed in the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee County Extension, and like other public entities, the Shoots n Roots program was not positioned to engage in contentious politics, which precluded pressing the city for long-term land access. The program gradually came to focus on large, county-owned parcels outside of the city limits as its federal funding was reduced over time. Consequently, while the Extension still supports community gardening activity in and around the city of Milwaukee, this program is no longer the primary administrator for urban gardens in the city. Milwaukee’s primary community gardening program, Milwaukee Urban Gardens , was founded in 2000 by local residents who had lost their gardens to development following aperiod of relatively stable and gradually improving economic conditions in the 1990s. Originally created to purchase community garden sites and advocate for long-term garden and greenspace preservation, in 2013 the program merged with an environmental programming organization, Groundwork Milwaukee, and now serves as a single point-of-contact for anyone in the city looking to get involved with a garden or start a new one. Through the MUG program, renamed Milwaukee Grows in 2017, the city grants leases of generally 1-3 years for use of its vacant lots for community gardens. Groundwork Milwaukee also provides liability insurance, roll bench educational programming, and a paid youth work force to help residents build and maintain gardens. While the City of Milwaukee does not guarantee that its land will remain permanently available for the roughly 100 MUG community gardens, it has agreed to sell a few lots for urban agriculture projects in the years following the 2008 financial crisis. Furthermore, with an electoral mandate for progressive and environmental policies in the 2010s, the city government became actively involved in developing the local food system through the HOME GR/OWN program. Created by Mayor Tom Barrett in 2013, this initiative seeks to streamline the legal process for residents and groups wanting to build gardens, commercial farms, or new parks on city-owned vacant land. The city partners with a wide range of local organizations to carry out sustainability and economic development projects through this initiative. However, the HOME GR/OWN program could come to an end at the whim of a subsequent administration. Perhaps because the city has been so supportive and not inclined to sell off any of the garden sites, MUG and Groundwork Milwaukee have not been actively advocating for a more permanent legal basis for their gardens in recent years. While the city’s political climate is fairly liberal and recent green initiatives have been popular with the public, local economic conditions remain challenging; the city retains control of vacant parcels in case opportunities arise to generate tax revenue and employment on most of the land that is currently permitted for MUG’s gardens. To build a more comprehensive and historical understanding of urban agriculture in Milwaukee, I interviewed 18 key informants with firsthand knowledge of activities in the city’s main community garden organizations and those who were directly involved in forming and implementing city policy related to urban agriculture. I gathered archival documents from MUG and Groundwork Milwaukee, the City of Milwaukee, and other organizations that interviewees identified as having contributed to the local popularity of urban agriculture. I also built a historical database of relevant articles from the city’s two main daily newspapers, the Milwaukee Journal and the Milwaukee Sentinel .

Combining data from these sources, I gained an up-close perspective on the process of contesting urban agriculture’s value as a land use in Milwaukee, and I developed a unique dataset of Shoots n Roots and MUG-affiliated gardens in order to map their locations over time. The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society was already nearly 150 years old when it began its community gardening program, Philadelphia Green, in 1974. Originally centered around the appreciation of ornamental plants and landscape design, PHS grew into “a more holistic understanding of plants as a tool for urban transformation” when it took on the role of greening Philadelphia in the 1970s. At this time, similar to both Milwaukee and Seattle, Philadelphia’s population was shrinking and the economy was under strain from high unemployment and inflation. Over time, the Philadelphia Green program evolved to offer a range of greening services, and PHS played a role in shaping the larger policy debate around vacant land in Philadelphia. Today, the organization contracts with the City of Philadelphia to maintain parks, greenbelts, and museum grounds, in addition to supporting many of the city’s community gardens. For decades, these functions coexisted as part of the Philadelphia Green program; PHS has recently rebranded the work as a range of initiatives including City Harvest , Neighborhood Gardens Trust , Civic Landscapes , and LandCare . The program’s urban agriculture network includes 140 current community gardens and urban farms across Philadelphia. The City of Philadelphia has long supported PHS’s greening work on vacant lots, but over decades of collaboration the community gardens were generally viewed as a temporary land use. Philadelphia’s population hit its lowest between the mid-1990s and the mid-2000s, yet this period was also one in which many gardens were lost. Between 1996 and 2008, more than half of the city’s gardens were lost to parcel development or other changing conditions . PHS was involved in some land preservation efforts, but the organization did not pursue a blanket policy to preserve community gardens. As the discouraging trend of garden loss became apparent, and especially when a 2012 zoning amendment threatened the security of 20% of the remaining gardens, the city faced growing pressure to support and preserve its community gardens. Advocates from organizations including PHS, the Garden Justice Legal Initiative, and others sought changes to the city’s land disposition system, which at the time considered lots with gardens to be “vacant,” in order to improve the flow of information between gardeners and the city. They succeeded in halting the zoning amendment and then secured passage of the Philadelphia Land Bank Act in 2013. In the process of streamlining vacant lot disposition to spur economic development, the Land Bank must give gardeners priority to acquire their sites rather than listing these sites as vacant and available for developers. Today, PHS has a mostly indirect role in advocating for garden preservation. Its close affiliate Neighborhood Gardens Trust maintains a voice in policy debates while raising money to purchase and save gardens facing development threats as the city undergoes a period of rapid gentrification. In the last decade, in a context of gentrification and displacement heavily affecting low income residents and communities of color, other organizations—most notably Soil Generation, a Black-and Brown-led coalition of growers—have taken the lead in the citywide efforts to organize and advocate for garden preservation and land use policy. Soil Generation and allied groups continue to press the city for more socially just land dispensation through the Land Bank and for broader responsiveness to resident priorities regarding urban agriculture and other community-oriented land uses.