From Dump to Farm to Battleground
Bushwick gardners fight eviction from a one-vacant lot that’s become very valuable property
By Congcong Daphne Zhang
When Spike Appel came to the Bushwick City Farm and met the love of his life Mariel Acosta in 2011, he never imagined that one day their farm would be gone.
For almost seven years, the farm offered the community free eggs, fruit and vegetables. On most of the weekends, neighbors come for birthday parties and barbecues. Spike and Mariel held their wedding at the farm 2015. Spike says he watched children roaming through the garden, playing on water slides in the summer, and building a gazebo. He taught them to plant fruit and vegetables and raise fowl as if it were their backyard. Spike and Mariel were married on the farm in 2015.
Spike and Mariel, who had a baby this year, had come to feel ownership of the once-abandoned lot on the corner of Stockton and Lewis streets that they along with other volunteer farmers had transformed from an eyesore to a farm.
But that garden-turned-farm, and the lot it sat in, was never really theirs. It was owned by a landlord who was happy to let them work his 9,900 square foot lot for which he charged them $1 a month in rent — which the volunteers admit they never paid. That is, until Bushwick became a destination, and the value of that land, which once sold for $1,000, skyrocketed to $650,000.
“What rights do they have to this land? What did they pay for this land?” said the owner’s attorney, Bruce Barnes. “They are holdovers.”
And now they have to leave. But not without a fight.
Before the garden, before the transformation of Bushwick, before the current battle, the city acquired the lot when its owner foreclosed on its mortgage. In 1981 the city sold the lot at auction for $1,000 to Francisco Camacho who in 1990 sold it to the Jehovah’s Witness Delmonico Congregation, a nearby Spanish church. The church sold it in 2004 to its current owner, Roshdesh Faramarz, for $80,000. Faramarz, in turn, sold it on the same day to a company called Toxo and Arrow Property LLC, of which he is a part owner and which was set up three days before the transaction, and whose address corresponds with a mailbox number in Queens.
“This area is really hot for development,” said Keith Carr, a community engagement manager for City Harvest in Brooklyn, “so any vacant space, people are snatching up and trying to build. Four community gardens closed down in the area last year.”
That is not Spike’s concern.
“Everything has been already developed here,” he said one afternoon while squeezing fresh tomatoes into his newborn baby’s mouth. “You can’t pick it up and move it somewhere else. I don’t have another seven years to wait for the fruit trees to grow.”
Without a lease, and with an eviction order, the volunteers know they need help. “We have never asked for any help,” said Laurel Leckert, a long time volunteer. “Finally we are asking help from the city.”
But that is proving difficult. The local community board thinks the volunteers are being unrealistic in hoping the city will step in. The board itself will not get involved because the land is private property, said Beryl Nycak, assistant district manager for community board 3, which oversees the lot.
The volunteers are fighting more than an eviction notice; they are battling seismic changes in a neighborhood once considered poor and dangerous. The city’s Housing Preservation and Development department stopped issuing permits for vacant lots as gardens two years ago, says Nycak. Even those lots approved for use as gardens cannot be kept going unless they are considered too small to be developed. The garden, however, is large enough to accommodate a building, or even two.
“The board isn’t giving any support to any community gardens any more because that order was sent out from HPD,” said Nycak of the city agency.
Beginning in August, the volunteers started writing letters and gathering signatures for a petition. They appealed to City Council member Robert E. Cornegy and the Borough President Eric Adams for help. And they got a lawyer, Paula Segal.
“We are trying to motivate the city project to be directed towards the acquisition of the property for a permanent park space,” said Segal, who works at the Urban Justice Center, a non-profit which provides legal assistance to the city’s “most vulnerable residents.” Having successfully advocated for the transformation of a community garden into a state park in Prospect Park, Segal was the founder of 596 Acres, a non-profit organization that supports urban green spaces.
The volunteers had hoped the city would buy the land. Adams’ office replied in an email saying that while they are aware of the eviction notice, the city could not commit to buying the lot since the current budget allocation process was not complete.
But Segal believes that if the city wants to buy the lot, it may be in the owner’s interest to sell since he will get no less than market value for the property.
“That should look pretty attractive to him,” she said, “because he does not need to spend all the work to build a condominium and sell the units in order to make a lot of money.”
She added that if the owner does not want to sell, the city can use its power of eminent domain to force a sale.
But, says Kegan Sheehan, communication director for Cornegy, “that to me just seems a little bit naïve. I don’t think it would set a good precedent if the city came in and just started collecting vacant lots from people because they can. It just seems like one side is suddenly deciding that they want more protection of their right to use this land when in the first place technically they had no legal claim to the land.” Sheehan stressed that this reflected his own view.
Still, Segal is undaunted. “This is a massive organizing project. We are trying to motivate the city to save the thing that the community created that is so important for the neighborhood,” she said. “It’s a long and tough process and we are making tiny little steps.”
Barnes, however, sees the situation differently: “It’s like when you had a friend move into your apartment, renovated the kitchen, made everything prettier than you want. And when it’s time to move, he is comfortable there. He doesn’t want to move.”
“That tells you everything about someone who tries to do something nice and now they’re pushing back every which way. Good luck to them.”
For their part, the volunteers believe now is not the right time to negotiate with the owner, because they do not have anything to offer him. Jason Reis, the lead volunteer, is waiting for the city to agree to support the farm so he can put officials in contact with the owner.
The volunteers are also considering applying for 501(C3) tax-exempt status so they can solicit donations. But preparing and processing an application would take months. They hope that they can bring some private funding to the table while persuading the city to buy it.
“It’s always been a struggle for community people to gain control of vacant land, whether it’s city owned or whether it’s privately owned. This general trend has intensified,” said Thomas Agoti, an urban planning professor at Hunter College, and author of a book on grassroots community organizing, New York for Sale.
“The city is always very reluctant to use eminent domain,” he added. “It’s a long process and takes a lot of resources. The best option is negotiation and pressure. If the owner gets the idea that he is going to face continuous pressure along the way, he may get scared and want to get rid of the land.”
The owner has declined repeated requests for comment.
His attorney, Barnes, says the owner wants the lot empty so he can take soil samples for future development. It is not clear whether he wants to develop it himself or sell it to a developer.
But since terminating the lease in August, the owner has not taken any action to evict the volunteers or put a lock on the farm. His silence has made volunteers and the community more anxious.
“Whatever the owner does he will do in a lawful manner,” Barnes said. “He is not going to take the law into his own hands.”
On a crisp sunny afternoon in early October, the volunteers were sitting in the gazebo built by kids from nearby schools, enjoying roasted corn and veggie sausages while discussing the progress on their effort to save the farm. People were assigned different roles: going to community board meetings, calling city council members and the borough president as well as reaching out to private donors. They were giving tours of the farm and training new volunteers.
Sitting on a wooden bench amid fruit trees, Laurel Leckert watched children nibbling fresh figs and shooting hoops while sunflowers waved in the background. “They are so creative. This is my highlight, just seeing the kids playing and enjoying it here,” she said. “Can you imagine if they actually want to take this away?”
Residents in the nearby public housing units say the farm offers safety and protection to their children.
“We live in a dangerous area and there is always a shooting around here,” said Perla Polanco, 13, who has been coming to the farm since February. “It will make me feel sad and mad because I will have nowhere to go.”
The farm sits in the 81st Police Precinct in which over the past year there were 1,547 reported crimes, including six murders and 19 rapes. The farm is directly across from the Sumner Houses, a housing project where two men were shot just over a year ago.
Diego Campos, 15, who has been coming to the farm since he was 8, does not believe that the farm will be closed down. “If the owner can come here and see how nice it is,” he said, ”he will change his mind.”
The owner did visit, in July, when the volunteers say he came to warn them of the pending eviction.
Barnes says the owner has not always been pleased with how the farm operated — even though the volunteers say their presence kept the lot from becoming a dumping ground. The owner, Barnes says, was upset when he learned that in addition to gardening, the volunteers were also raising chickens, ducks and, one turkey, named Petunia.
“It was never meant to be a farm,” Barnes said. “It was supposed to be a garden.”
There were also concerns about making the farm into a play area — especially, Barnes says, because of potential liability issues. “They made it an amusement park out of it,” he said. ”They’d put swings in there and fire pits and live animals and way beyond what’s called for in the lease.”
But the volunteers say that they have put years of labor into the land, making it an attractive destination, and the owner has benefitted from fewer environmental fines while watching the land value rise.
Mary Rocco, an urban studies professor at Barnard College, says this is the price neighborhoods pay as a result of change in a booming real estate market.
“Communities are losing their sense of autonomy and control,” she said. “How much control do they have if they don’t even have ownership? Once that space has a potential value that someone wants to utilize, then they lose that control.
“This is representative of struggles in changing neighborhoods all across the city. It’s not just Bushwick. It’s not just this community garden.”
Follow Daphne Zhang @daphnewelkin5
