Finding the Potential in Vacant Lots
By MICHAEL TORTORELLO
THIS city contains 20,000 vacant lots, more or less. Probably more. Every year, demolition crews knock down another 1,000 houses. And the housing market being what it is, few souls are returning.
A vacant lot may be a lot of things: an eyesore, a dump, a symbol of American industrial decline. But one thing it is not is vacant. When we leave a yard behind, the bulk of the biomass does not follow us in a U-Haul. Put another way, a dandelion is unmoved by foreclosure. It lingers where it pleases.
And so, on a recent Monday morning, Garrett Ormiston, 29, was taking an informal census of the vegetation occupying an otherwise empty yard on East 93rd Street, just a few miles east of downtown Cleveland.
“Right here is kind of a mix of plants that probably existed as people’s landscaping,” said Mr. Ormiston, a naturalist with the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. “This here looks like somebody’s ornamental rose that has just kind of persisted.”
The lot, four-tenths of an acre in size, once comprised four separate parcels. Foreclosure records indicate that in 1991, “the unknown heirs etc. of Willie James Smedley, a k a James Trask, deceased” lost title to part of the lot. (They had fallen behind by $4,155.70 on property taxes.) The Living Hope Baptist Church forfeited a different chunk in 2004.
A concrete pad hinted where the buildings might have stood. If the pair of fawns grazing across the street knew anything more than that, they weren’t saying.
“This is an old alley,” Mr. Ormiston said, pointing to a half-buried strip of asphalt. An empty bag of Chester’s Puffcorn lay next to a heap of old roofing tile and a blue plastic tarp. A roof will typically stop leaking after you tear down the house.
He walked along a row of shrubs beneath a power line. The neighborhood birds, he said, apparently made a habit of perching here and depositing seeds (and fertilizer), as birds will. “Whatever they bring, colonizes,” Mr. Ormiston said. “You can see all of their favorites.” There was raspberry, white mulberry, native “riverside” grape, Canada thistle (“a really rotten invasive,” he said), a staghorn sumac and a stand of exotic Norway maple.
With a chain saw and a Bobcat, a homeowner could clear this brush in an afternoon. But no homeowner would be coming this afternoon, or this month, or this summer. To be realistic, it’s unlikely that anyone will be coming next summer, either.
One abandoned yard is a mess; 20,000 abandoned yards is an ecosystem. At this scale, Cleveland’s vacant land begins to look less like a sign of neglect and more like an ecological experiment spread over some 3,600 acres.
As it happens, a team of local scientists has designated this accidental landscape an Urban Long-Term Research Area — that is, Ultra. And having won a $272,000 exploratory award from the National Science Foundation, the researchers call their project Ultra-Ex. There’s enough turf here for everybody: Ultra-Ex scientists are studying bird and insect populations, watershed systems, soil nematodes and urban farms.
Along with its sci-fi name, Ultra-Ex advances a forward-looking mission: to document the ecological benefits that vacant lots might provide and to redefine the land, from neighborhood blight to community asset.
OF course, Cleveland has no monopoly on vacant land. Tens of thousands of vacancies blot the residential map in major, or once major, Great Lakes cities like Youngstown, Ohio; Flint, Mich., and Buffalo. Some 40,000 parcels are empty in Philadelphia. (New York City does not track the number of vacant lots, according to the Department of City Planning, but 8,902 acres, or 5.8 percent, of the city’s land was vacant in 2010.)
And vacancy creates more vacancy, said Bob Grossmann, 66, the director of Philadelphia Green, a program run by the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, which has pioneered the management of urban vacant land. “There’s a cost to doing nothing,” he said.
Originally, cities like Cleveland and Flint (and their surrounding counties) assembled vacant tax-forfeited parcels into “land banks.” The idea was for these public entities to guide the resale and redevelopment of the land in a strategic fashion.
But with the economy in a coma, private buyers haven’t approached the land banks to draw down deposits, said Joan Nassauer, 59, a professor in the School of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Michigan.
Local governments have been “left holding many, many, many properties that they would rather not own,” she said. “But now they own them, and they’ve got to manage them.”
The plan that the nonprofit Philadelphia Green has implemented in neighborhoods around the city’s core is a kind of “greening and cleaning” regime: in TV terms, an extreme makeover. Here, contractors and work crews remove debris, deposit topsoil, plant grass and build a post-and-rail fence. Afterward, they continue to mow the lot.
The nonprofit now maintains 5,200 lots in Philadelphia, at a cost of approximately $800,000 a year. Another $700,000 will go into “stabilizing” 500 more lots, in city neighborhoods that show promise for future development.
With city coffers low and its land bank overflowing, Cleveland has been executing a less ambitious plan. City workers attempt to mow the grass before it grows taller than eight inches, at a cost of $3.3 million a year.
For places in straits like these, the question may not be what we can do for our vacant lots but what our vacant lots can do for us. Ms. Nassauer encourages cities to think of ways that open land can clean and replenish the watershed, absorb urban heat and carbon dioxide, and create recreational opportunities.
Would the bare lot on the east side of Cleveland seem more valuable if the neighbors knew it supported perhaps 30 or even 50 species of pollinating bees? What if this disorderly habitat bred a rich diversity of predatory spiders, like wolf spiders, orb weavers, crab spiders and jumping spiders? (O.K., best not to advertise the jumping spiders.)
This summer, Mary Gardiner, 34, an assistant professor of entomology at Ohio State, and her graduate researcher, Caitlin Burkman, 23, have been sampling spider populations in pitfall traps.
The spiders “kind of walk along, don’t notice and then fall in,” Ms. Burkman said. Soapy water makes it hard to break the surface tension. Then they drown, she said.
“We use some very sophisticated tools,” Dr. Gardiner added. The trap is “like a keg cup or something.” Some traps they bury in empty lots; others go to urban farms. Dr. Gardiner’s hypothesis is that the less “disturbed” sites (the ungroomed vacancies) may support a broader range of beneficial predatory spiders.
And a tidy lawn would be no place to find the herblike plant that Mr. Ormiston was examining near the ruins of a fencepost.
“This right here is mugwort,” he said. “It’s in the Artemisia family.” Mugwort, which shoots up from buried rhizomes, emits a powerful odor and irritates the skin.
“But what’s funny is, birds actually collect this plant and weave it into their nests,” Mr. Ormiston said. “Its scent repels insects that might bother the nest.”
Before European settlement, some 300 years ago, this area would probably have been a lake plain swamp forest, Mr. Ormiston said. Common trees would have been American elm, shellbark hickory, bur oak, swamp white oak, tupelo and black willow.
We know the original elms won’t be coming back. After decades of blight, the trees have retreated from the forest canopy. The swamps and creeks that radiate from Lake Erie have been drained and trapped in culverts. And the climate is getting hotter, or so rumor has it.
In the meantime, poor compacted soils are a welcome mat for invasive plants like Japanese knotweed and Ailanthus.
Still, their lease on the land is not open-ended. Once the city stops mowing (and no one believes Cleveland can mow forever), “the grasses will grow tall,” Mr. Ormiston said.
“You’ll start to get some wildflowers, things like asters,” he said. “Some shrubs like viburnums and dogwoods. But eventually, you’ll start getting trees pretty early on: things like cottonwoods and sumacs that colonize really quickly, grow quickly and start paving the way for other trees.”
Terry Schwarz, 47, an Ultra-Ex affiliate who directs the Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative at Kent State University, has heard the worst-case scenario for the city.
“Here in Cleveland,” she said, “if you ask people what’s going to happen, they’ll say: ‘Oh, we’re going to keep losing population. And Phoenix and Atlanta are going to take our water.’ But the truth is, Phoenix and Atlanta have their own expiration date. Every city does.”
Demographers say that the United States population may grow by 120 million in the next 40 years, Ms. Schwarz said. At least a few people, she predicts, will want to live in a temperate central location with an abundant supply of fresh water.
“What happens is one of two things,” she said. “Either we reclaim the older industrial cities and repopulate. Or we’re going to be building new cities, probably not too far from here.”
In this schema, vacant lots could be the parkland and home sites of tomorrow, if they’re managed smartly. In Genesee County, Mich., Ms. Nassauer has developed a list of nine lot treatments to suit different land priorities, like watershed protection and neighborhood resettlement.
One Ultra-Ex project being led by the Cleveland Botanical Garden involves planting a vacant lot in the Buckeye neighborhood with low-mow fescue, a slow-growing pasture grass, and establishing a vegetative fence. Down the block is one of six learning farms that the botanical garden runs through its Green Corps program. With three acres under cultivation and 60 teenage workers, the urban farms will grow and sell or give away 15,000 pounds of fresh produce this summer, said the program’s director, Geri Unger.
The Buckeye garden includes raised beds, an herb spiral, a strawberry patch and a hardy kiwi vine snaking up the border fence.
It’s easy to convince the neighbors that an orderly, well-tended spot like this one has a civic value. Loraine Ingram, 74, has lived next door for 30 years. Of the community farm, she said, “I love it.”
Ms. Ingram, a nurse who lost her home health-care job last summer, has a powder blue two-story house with a matching picket fence. While she stood in her driveway, a dog growled savagely from behind a half-boarded-up basement window.
Long before Green Corps moved in, Ms. Ingram recalled, a “Mr. Owens” had lived in the house next door. His grandson would take care of him and look after Ms. Ingram’s son too. After Mr. Owens died, the house sat empty.
Then, “four or five years ago,” she said, “somebody set it to fire. I came home from work one day, and it was burned.”
The garden moved in last spring. “I think it’s nice,” Ms. Ingram said. “I grew up on a farm in Denmark, Tennessee.”
It would be encouraging to believe that urban farms and community gardens could be part of a comprehensive solution. Indeed, the Philadelphia Green program started in the mid-1970s, Mr. Grossmann said, by establishing “a couple of thousand community gardens.”
But at the same time the program was planting green spaces, other lots were falling fallow. “People pass away or move out of the neighborhood,” he said.
Urban farms are labor-intensive, and the initial site cleanup costs can be prohibitive. Ms. Unger, 55, estimates that “maybe there’s 40 to 50 acres under urban farming,” in Cleveland. “Maybe up to 100 acres. If we could get up to 10 percent urban farms” — some 360 acres — “I think we would be doing really great. But that’s not going to solve the urban vacancy problem you see.”
A FALLBACK is to do nothing. A group of four vacant parcels on Union Avenue, known to Ultra-Ex researchers as Control Site 6, offers a snapshot of the status quo.
Mobs of thigh-high weeds (mustard green, chicory, Queen Anne’s lace) were starting to gather in front of a tumbledown garage. The plan, it appeared, was to wait until no one was looking and then overrun the rest of the yard.
“Last year they were definitely mowing it more,” said Dr. Gardiner, the Ohio State entomologist. “A lot of stuff will flower and go to seed if it doesn’t get mowed.”
Vacancy begets vacancy. Weeds beget weeds.
At the end of a sloping remnant of pavement, Mr. Ormiston found a patch of mint interspersed with comfrey.
“I think this plant could very well have been here as part of someone’s garden and gone wild after it was abandoned,” he said.
Alvesta McGriff, 79, a retired hospital worker, remembered a vegetable patch growing in the yard. As the afternoon sun harried pedestrians into the shade, she sat on the porch of the house next door, which she has occupied since 1966. Between the hedge and the front stair lay a single Timberland boot.
A grocer used one of the parcels, selling produce fresh out of the ground, she recounted. A TV repair shop with two apartments filled another part of the lot. It belonged, she said, to a “Mr. John White,” who had rented it out. “But he has passed and gone on,” Ms. McGriff said. And his building with him.
“When I moved in, this neighborhood was beautiful and clean,” she said. If there was an ecological value to the lot next door, she didn’t see it.
“I hate it,” she said. “They don’t keep it up or nothing. It’s in bad shape. This neighborhood has really gone down.”
A man with a straw hat and a brown paper bag — Eddie Thomas, 55 — charged across the street. “When are you going to mow that place?” he yelled, including a few other words for emphasis. The answer, “Not today,” appeared neither to please nor surprise him.
Mr. Thomas lives in Ms. McGriff’s house, and Dr. Gardiner had met him in the yard before. “The first time we came out, he was very nice,” she said. “And every time we come back, he gets progressively more frustrated.” For this, Dr. Gardiner blamed him not at all.
With Ultra-Ex researchers visiting the site every week, “there’s 40 people walking around here, looking in the air, vacuuming the leaves,” she said. ”He’s sick of a lot of people coming up here and doing a lot of things, except the one thing he wants done. Which is to mow the grass.”
Driving away from Site 6 and Cleveland’s east side, you can imagine someone like Mr. Thomas cursing the unmown grass every morning and evening, for years on end. Until one day, he will look over from the porch and the grass will be gone. And a wood will have taken its place.
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