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.